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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

So do rats with abundant food in an enclosed environment, it doesn’t end well. https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1962-calhoun.pdf

Which isn’t to say the same rules apply to humans, but it’s also critical to get this right.

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No not that, there's a very strong negative correlation between birth rate and development. The more a society develops, the lower its birth rate. Down to well below replacement rate of 2.1, for instance in the US (1.7), Canada (1.5), Japan (1.42), Finland (1.41). Without immigration those populations would dwindle in just a few generations. [1]

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Connection-between-the-h...

This is not a law of nature, it is history as it unfolded in the twentieth century. We don't know if that'll continue to hold or not.

Yea, but it’s still an open question when or if this stabilizes. A global population of between something like 100 million to 10 billion could sustain an advanced technical society capable of innovation. But, where slowly oscillating between say 1 and 2 billion people would be fine, regular massive population crashes could represent a great filter which generally prevents interstellar civilizations.

And the more a country develops, the more resources they consume per capita. One individual in a developed country consumes orders of magnitude more than one in a less developed country.

> So do rats with abundant food in an enclosed environment, it doesn’t end well

I have a lot of questions about whether that's true of even rats: https://www.gwern.net/Questions#mouse-utopia

Too many differences.

No awareness; No knowledge; No government; No communication; No money; No faith.

I think that most modern countries are doing a reasonable job.

No, they are not. They are not treating the problem as the emergency that it is.

Wasteful consumerism is legal everywhere.

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