In human population, we should be aiming for quality, not quantity. Quality also means diversity.
If higher quantity unavoidably brings a higher proportion of human suffering, then we have no other choice but to promote quality over quantity. I fear for the future of our species. Our evolutionary instinct to multiply combined with the tech we've created is now bringing this planet to the brink.
Everyone wants to exist. But I would rather exist in a positive way, than exist at all.
Without getting into a long spiel, human intelligence appears to actually be extremely limited, compared to a theoretical perfect intelligence, and any explicit actions we may take to enforce "quality over quantity" could end up doing more "harm" than "good" as soon as 1 "move" beyond the furthest move that we're capable of calculating.
IMO, there is no "saving" humankind. We're all doomed in some way. Life is just a way of postponing death.
Yes, in a way. But with mindfulness, one can choose different thoughts to attach to that innate survival feeling of wanting to exist and multiply. Instead of, 'We need to always multiply / population control is evil', make it, 'We need to create a better world for our species and those around us'.
> IMO, there is no "saving" humankind. We're all doomed in some way. Life is just a way of postponing death.
Also agreed. I've read the big AI books like Nick Bostrom's and Max Tegmark's. Given their monumental knowledge, the sentiments around population control are not so much about saving so much as managing. More importantly, it's about saving the possibility of AI and superior forms of evolution to arise in the future, which are far more significant than current Homo sapiens.
One way to put this into practice is to choose to adopt a child as your own, instead of producing yet another one. I may do this in my life.
No really - trends are real, this is science, and we use them to actually estimate the future, in much the same way we try to do so with climate and other things.
"It will be positive for the environment"
Possibly not true. Low-birth Westerners are already the #1 emitters of Co2 by a margin, so it's not so linear.
" population declines. one thing is for certain though. it will be a positive for the environment. at some point the ponzi scheme, "
Most GDP growth does not come from resource utilisation.
So there are definitly some upsides to less people, but it's also a tremendous risk. Never before in history has this happened naturally, and it's happening fast. This is a 'really big, kind of scary' issue that we have to contend with, and as your points illustrate, there are definitely many facets let alone the social one's.
There is tremendous risk in covering the planet with ourselves and our waste, though; imho the more relevant risk, especially since we're pretty much locked into the pattern now.
If you look at it from much longer term perspective, it's scary because it's happening extremely fast (1 generation) within nations that have reached a certain level of material prosperity and stability.
It's also 'scary' because it's never happened before.
'100 years' when we will really see the effects more globally, is not a 'long time', it's a 'quite a short time'.
We only ever knew 'one natural direction' and though it's exploded since the industrial revolution, it was at least, in normal times, 'up' to the extent the system could support it.
So yes, it's not 'scary' right now, and as you point out, Mother Earth could use a break from all of us. But thinking about the next 'few hundred' years, it's spooky.
The 'inflection point' you're really looking for is the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
But at least in that capacity - we know what happened: we harnessed energy and could provide for the material wellbeing of huge numbers of people, which can have it's downsides, but it's not all bad. Better 'more' than risking plunging towards nothing.
The 'downward plunge' is happening for somewhat unknown reasons, and it's fast, and we don't know when it's going to stop.
If you put on the afterburners on an airplane, and it goes up faster than expected, that makes sense. But if the airplanes starts falling out of the sky for no reason ... scary.
People who don't want to have a bunch of kids, don't. Does it have to be more complicated than that? Unless everyone makes this decision (which seems unlikely to me although that could just be because I have ten nieces and nephews) it's basically a self-correcting "problem". People who don't reproduce are replaced in the next generation by the offspring of people who do reproduce.
Humans have endured and are generally resilient to population fluctuations. We and our industrial societies are not resilient to e.g., significant departure from the Holocene equilibrium[0].
That is one of the most egregious example of not controlling for confounding factors i can think of.
People with high carbon emissions are in the group having less children. It doesnt follow they would emit less CO2 if they happened to have children.
Except that it does. Literally from the article, they state "women entering the workforce, education jobs etc" - which increases income, and this is 100% correlated to increased consumption of all forms. It's consistent everywhere.
FYI this is the de-facto neoliberal plan (not being conspiratorial here). It's more directly apparent in China's ambitions i.e. Belt and Road: "The stated objectives are "to construct a unified large market and make full use of both international and domestic markets" [1], but it's not like it's their 'new' idea.
The objective of the wealthier nations is to get the remaining 4 Billion people driving cars, eating Cheetos, wearing H&M (fast fashion, ie 'disposable') and living in IKEA (i.e. trendy, but generally low-quality furniture, that can be replaced every several years).
This is effectively 'the plan'.
Hopefully, a declining population will lead to an oversupply of housing. Existing homeowners will do their damnedest to prop up prices by any means possible, but it can't last forever. Housing prices will crash sooner or later. It will probably happen in each country long before a its population has halved.
Cost of housing is currently a huge factor in declining fertility in many countries. Who has time to raise kids when they have to work two jobs just to pay rent? But once it becomes more affordable to raise a family, fertility trends are likely to reverse until it a new balance is reached.
This is just one of the many factors that might come into play over the next 80 years that popular predictions about 2100 tend to glance over.
If you want a house in Ireland for example, then the country-side is dirt cheap, but if you want one in Dublin or Cork then be prepared to pay through the nose. The situation seems similar in most countries.
I'm not sure what a solution for this will be, but I'm not sure if population decline will be a major contributor.
In quite a few cities you already see quite a lot of housing just left derelict even though there's a housing shortage.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a larger part of the then-old people will want to keep living in the city, as that's where they've been living their entire lives (which differs a bit from today's old population).
I don't know ... it's really hard to predict these things. It could very well be the case that you're right, but personally I wouldn't really bet on population decline significantly reducing the pressure on the housing situation. It seems more of an economical/policy issue to me than a population issue.
It won't without policy controls, otherwise, housing units will be redeveloped into other uses (including smaller numbers of larger units designed and managed in a way to foster single-family occupancy per unit.)
> Cost of housing is currently a huge factor in declining fertility.
[citation needed]
It certainly would improve our chances and reduce the rate at which conditions diverge from the baseline we've experienced for the last ~10,000 years, but it's important to recognize that we would not see meaningful total population reduction until at least 2100 even if the birth rate continued to drop dramatically and disasters claimed several billion lives[0]. There is too much inertia.