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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

At the end, the author says:

> In fact, the greatest threat to long-term economic growth might be the slowdown in population growth. Without more brains to push technology forward, progress might stall.

It should be noted that the vast majority of human brains do not today get the opportunity to work with ideas or push technology forward. Many people don’t even get enough to eat or drink.

We have a loooong way to go on the basics of organizing human society before we need to worry about the intellectual constraint of total population size.

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My pessimistic and perhaps over-simplistic view is that growth is largely enabled by modern-day's squeezing of every last drop of people's disposable income. As the population becomes poorer in general (due to lack of breakthroughs in fundamental science and productivity, growing and aging population, widening inequality, etc.), the growth may eventually slowdown.

I think that’s wrong:

The fraction of humanity in poverty has dropped as our population has grown — because those larger, more capable nations have more means to feed themselves and greater wealth to care for the poor.

A stall in population growth or a population decline runs a serious risk that our standards of living regress and those conditions worsen.

We need to maintain our growth to impact the issues you care about:

More people -> More wealth -> Less hunger

Poverty alone doesn't mean getting your brains to do brain stuff.

Most devs don't live in poverty, but most devs also aren't doing innovative work. They spend their limited intellectual stamina trying to make the boss richer, not modeling out a cancer detection algorithm.

But even working on a simple CRUD app can push an industry forward. There is so much more incremental progress to be made, which pushes the economy upwards, than just the “big name” hot ideas (like cancer).

There are still so many low hanging fruit that even simple technology can improve

Yes, a lot of "simple CRUD apps" can push an industry forward. A lot of simple stuff can also devolve into downright predatory practices which, despite making money, are anything but progress in the grander scheme of things. There's also the argument tons of "simple CRUD apps" exist because of a focus on the short term, rather than the long term. Or they exist to fill a "perceived hole" which is really just bureaucracy being bureaucracy.

To name a different example, management has absolutely exploded. It's arguable whether this explosion has freed up brains more, or instead sucked up brain power. Meanwhile, most management jobs do pay well, to the point it's hard to consider a manager living in poverty. Personally, I believe we could easily slash management in half, permanently destroying those jobs and the accompanied bureaucracy to free up the brains, but that would result in those individuals having to compete for different jobs, maybe even less desirable jobs which put them back into poverty.

Regardless, the point is poverty and freeing up brains for innovation aren't necessarily correlated or even causal. They can even be negatively correlated. Solving poverty isn't the only requirement to free up brains, if that is a societal goal. That's all.

This is what so many techie people don't get. The end user doesn't give a FUCK if you're 100% memory safe or you use a RESTful API or your app is HIJINX(TM) COMPLIANT or whatever. They want a button they can click which fixes their problem. If you give them that, then they win, so you win.

99% of the actual, serious, important problems right now are really really simple and have really dumb simple solutions. Not always the exactly optimal solution but there's one there that will do 90% of what anyone cares about, which we can do right now, but haven't yet.

Presumably they make their boss richer by providing value to someone paying their boss. Sure, some industries are probably parasitic or primarily extractive but the whole main idea of capitalism is than it can drive improvements for consumers, and for the people of a lot of countries this has largely panned out?

Most devs...spend their limited intellectual stamina trying to make the boss richer

I think it's great that devs have a choice. They can work at a company and have a relatively steady paycheck with benefits or they can make more and go off on their own and assume more risk.

Devil's advocate: You're begging the question that "making the boss richer" doesn't also equal "doing innovative work".

This is optimistic. Consider the fact that the physical limits on growth cannot be moved or surpassed no matter the amount of brain power thrown at it.

For example. The speed of light. How much brain power do you need to surpass that speed? Many limits are actual limits and if you think anything can be achieved just by surpassing it with technology, then I think you're not looking at the problem realistically.

If you look at the amount of progress for the last 3 decades we are literally in the same place. Still driving cars and riding trains. The only area with massive progress is IT, but every other technology (including IT itself) looks like it's hitting some sort of hump in the curve. This is despite the increasing normalization of IQ scores across the world. On average, A person with 100 IQ today would have a higher IQ then the past.

Something like fusion which is the biggest technology changer I see on the horizon still requires targeted a huge amount of government effort and resources to achieve. Such ventures are less likely to arrive purely out of the commercial sphere.

I think the limiting factor is traditionally considered the lack of new productive (physical) labor, not necessarily lack of new brains.

Automation shifts productive labor to intellectual labor. A century ago value productive labor was probable 99%+ physical labor, but it's probably now much less.

You don't have to wait until the entire world has this opportunity before ringing the alarm. If population growth is going down in the areas where the ideas are worked on, namely the developed world, which it is, we should still worry.

No we shouldn’t, because “the developed world” is not a fixed thing. We can make the entire world developed.

But who'll work the sweatshops then?

Nobody. Who ever said sweatshops were a necessary part of a functioning economy?

If only we could have developed some machine that are good at doing repetitive work. One can only dream. /S

But yeah, I get your point. The fact that we still rely on sweatshop imports proves there's something wrong with our society.

I agree with you. But development doesn't happen overnight and it's the people who control the ideas and technology that have the power to develop the rest of the world. And if that population growth is in decline at the same time it's needed to push development forward, isn't that cause for concern?

It’s not a cause for concern. The rate of population growth in highly developed areas can be turned up or down simply by admitting or denying immigrants.

Only if you assume that the developed world has some special sauce that requires you being born here to work.

That’s one of many reasons why it’s important to keep on investing in underdeveloped countries. There’s no reason why people there couldn’t contribute in the same ways that people in more developed countries contribute.

And immigration is a good way to help keep the population of developed countries growing. There really isn’t any reason why we can’t tap into the incredible human resources available in the world if we try.

There’s two problems with that argument:

1. “People in developed nations don’t breed due to stress, but meh we can just replace them” is a monstrous way to think.

2. You can’t import people as replacements above a certain rate, because it’s the culture of the developed nation which causes the success — and without maintaining that culture, the benefits cease.

Citation needed for both of your claims, especially the second. What do you mean "it's the culture?" There are democracies everywhere, white people everywhere, protestants everywhere, people speak English everywhere, what is magically special about "the culture" that makes America a powerhouse of innovation?

How do you know it doesn't have a lot to do with having two oceans to protect it, and bunch of things that happened 400 years ago to federalize it and create what amounts to a massive economic union?

How do you know it isn't one of those things where a little bit of growth magnifies over time if not disrupted by war, just as what makes SF special is that a little bit of growth started there, and the concentration of intellectual and financial capital attracted more intellectual and financial capital?

Both of those explanations have nothing to do with a hand-wavey claim of "the culture."

And what do you mean that immigration is "a monstrous suggestion?" It sounds an awful lot like you're equating high rates of immigration with genocide. What on Earth is "monstrous" about immigrants? And why is that monstrous, but gentrification of SF by techies not monstrous?

Really, this comes across as generic nativism.

Pretty sure the "monstrous" part is trying to denounce the idea of "humans are tools, if these peasants won't do what I want, I'll make them compete with peasants from a different country".

I do think discouraging thinking of humans as resources is a good thing, even if this has the potential side-effect of making things more difficult for immigrants.

> I do think discouraging thinking of humans as resources is a good thing

I agree with that. There's a famous rant by a Canadian comic/media personality where he quotes a government slogan "People are our most precious resource" and points out that Canada's approach to "resources" is to clearcut timber and strip-mine minerals.

But we're talking about having enough population to maintain an economy of ideas. If we're talking about "There aren't enough people willing to work as flesh-robots in Amazon's warehouses, or if there are, they refuse to work in those conditions so we need desperate replacements from other countries" there's a whole different conversation to have, and it isn't really about declining populations, it's about things like living wages, labour standards, unionization, and recognition that the end-game is not competing with immigrants, it's competing with automation.

Who is the person you're quoting? I'd like to give it a listen.

Considering Canada's history with Uranium mining I'm surprised that they didn't bring that into the fold as well - it's a delicate subject since a large amount of the costs of unsafe Uranium mining were born out by indigenous peoples, but for how few actual mines there were a lot of people have died from health complications.

I don't recognise the quote, but it sounds like something Rick Mercer would say.

Absolutely one of Rick Mercer’s rants.

We already have enough population to maintain said economy of ideas, it's more about maximizing the population beyond the bare necessity.

Companies have actively been trying to make intellectual and/or creative work streamlined so they can reduce risk factors and swap out the old cog for the new one. They benefit from the increased competition so long as we don't unite against the status quo, which is also why automation is a potential disaster if we don't rethink our ways.

This is not to fight against skilled immigrants making an effort to keep things at peace while carving out their place, no. But we've seen this scenario unfold a few times now with different things, and it turns out companies tend to be the main benefactors at the cost of everyone else already in the market, and quite a few people entering the market. That cost should be transferred to the richest people, not to the working class with less and less breathing room to spare. Both have to be tackled at the same time.

> Pretty sure the "monstrous" part is trying to denounce the idea

An idea which was not present in the comment originally replied to, but OK.

You could say the same for others interpreting it in the most villainous way possible. Since original commenter has yet to respond, maybe giving a different perspective to their comment keeps it from being interpreted as a vote for Aryanism. Until said elaboration.

That second point seems really shakey to me. As someone who has immigrated into a new country I'd highlight that the cost to do so is high enough (as a young person) that I was very careful to choose a country that was in line with my personal priorities.

Can you explain what you specifically mean by culture if it differs from an alignment of personal with social priorities?

1. You think people in developed countries don’t have kids because they’re too stressed? I’d think it more stressful to live in extreme poverty as many do in other parts of the world. I don’t think you’ve done any homework on this one.

2. This has been a popular theory among the far-right and white nationalists lately. But I’d be interested to see any evidence that immigration has a negative effect on society, because it sounds fundamentally racist and wrong to me.

re 2, immigration policy is a complex question, labelling one position as 'fundamentally racist' is probably like labelling the other position as 'commodifying humans as a plantation-owner would'. Either could be true, but neither furthers productive discussion.

If only there was a way to get more people into the developed world without people in the developed world creating new people twenty+ years at a time...

The secret to America's success has always been immigration, whether by violent colonialism, accepting of refugees from persecution or war, or inviting talented people to become citizens.

Not just America. Europe, and other civilisations in the past, always benefited from immigration.

Europe benefited more from emigration (AKA colonization)

And forced emigration, aka “transportation to Australia.”

> The secret to America's success has always been immigration,

Actually, no. Every few decades, American has mostly shut-down immigration for a few decades. The last opening was in 1965.

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