Kim Stanley Robinson: a declining world population could be a good thing

Perhaps I should remind you of a day, that comes once a year, called "Earth Overshoot Day". It is the day, when we used up more resources than the planet regenerates. The tendency for that day's date is come earlier each year.

The current population is not even sustainable. Half it and then perhaps it will be sustainable, if capped. Ecological damage will probably increase in the future, as swathes of people from developing countries will want to have the same living standards, that the first world countries experienced for decades. If you combine that with 11 billion people, it will be a disaster.

How many of those 11 billion will thrive, tho?

11 billion people living in the same way we are living in the first world would be impossible.

But we're not bacteria. Humans are capable of ingenuity. More people means more invention.

Further, this video paints a vivid collapse. I believe we would instead see a gradual decline. Maybe we're seeing that today?

Image people born almost 300 years ago were still in power. Social change would likely be a lot slower. The society happy with slavery could still be the dominant property holders. Death, since it allows for more rapid adaptation, may be life's greatest invention. Too little of it could be crippling to a population.

Our species-optimal lifespan now might be quite different than the one picked by evolution. It could be much greater, or it could be lower. But twiddling with that dial carries a lot of risk.

It would solve the declining birth rate for one. With a 300 year lifespan you can afford to put your career on hold for 20 years while you have children. My belief is that an extended lifespan would force people to consider their impact on the world more, at our current span most people clock out well before the consequences kick in. If you stick around for a few centuries the results of your actions become much more evident. Maybe we’d all slow down a bit and enjoy life knowing that our mortality was delayed.

These elderly will eventually pass. This temporary increase in drag on economic productivity (“the pig in the Python”) is what you sign up for when your population can’t grow forever. The world has never been wealthier; we can afford a bit more elderly care costs for a window of time.

Everyone likes to spend on a credit card, no one likes it when the statement comes and you have to pay.

It's worse than that. Not only will social security be more difficult to fund, but private retirement savings will also be more difficult. Saving for retirement is much easier with a fast-growing economy in which you can get high rates of return. With a slower-growing, or even flat, economy, stocks and other investments should appreciate more slowly, too. (There are fewer good investment opportunities when the size of the pie is fixed.)

And how long can we keep this infinite growth of people going? That's clearly not sustainable either

Social security tax phaseout is currently ~$140k per year. It's fairly absurd that the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos of the world pay roughly the same amount into Social Security as an average programmer.

There is a much better way to have more geniuses: Increased access to education worldwide. 10% of adults worldwide still can't read (probably around 500M people), and 60% did not go further than secondary education.

This has the big advantage of not just increasing the raw number of "geniuses" but also the ratio of geniuses.

Not sure if this is a serious statement.

More people most of all means more people who can and necessarily will break things, which are very hard to repair. Like climate stuff. The chance of having some super geniuses, that we would otherwise have missed out on, who then repair a broken climate is ... vanishingly small.

In the same vein: more idiots that screw up everything.

Conversely fewer people means fewer problems to solve...

We have emission targets to return to year 2000 or year 1980s levels.

We can have similar targets for pops: 1900s or 1960s, before we had fast doublings of populations, obviously through natural reduction rather than forced.

We don’t need more geniuses. We need take power away from psychopaths who run the world.

I really question your fractional population 'genius' model.

The economy is there to the benefit of the people in it, not the other way around. An ever-increasing number of people on this fixed sized planet is simply unsustainable.

If we can live with less people who are happier, what's not to like?

Not for the constant growth oriented economy.

It certainly seems like it would be a good thing for the economy, if you define "the economy" as how well all the humans are doing, as opposed to just absolute GDP and how wealthy the wealthy are.

I'm sure Malcolm Gladwell would have an opinion too, but neither matter since it is outside the area of expertise of both.