The ecosystem we exist in / that sustains us surely has a carrying capacity.
Social security relies of the young bearing the burden of the old. Don't even get me started on the intangible energy of having little kids around. Not everyone wants kids, but most people like being a cool uncle/aunt.
> What's the "right" value for TFR?
Difficult problems exist in Grays. But even the most fervent believers on either side agree that the 'right number' is likely between and 1.5-2.5. With western TFR plummeting under 1.5, we can safely say the the call for 'more kids' is effectively a call for a slower decline in population; not 'more kids'.
> carrying capacity
Yep, that ecosystem is called the economy and the carry capacity is a lower bound, not an upper bound. Too few young people is the death knell of a civilization.
Also, population explosion is presently led by Africa in rates, and South Asia in sheer numbers. A few dozen more/less westerners (who're we kidding? mostly white people) isn't going to change the numbers by much.
The social, cultural and economic implications of an older population are very likely to be profound. A rapid demographic 'crunch' is not a good idea. One example is that nobody is quite sure how to keep funding socialised healthcare and support aged care in the face of a transition to an increasingly elderly and infirm population who don't earn income. We will see it playing it out initially between countries with older demographics (Italy, Japan) and younger demographics (India, African nations, even the USA is relatively young).
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
[2] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/1...
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
Subsaharan Africa was completely bypassed by the Green Revolution and largely lacks access to basic infrastructure like eg consistent electricity (outside portable fuel powered generators) on the typical small, family, partly subsistence based farm.
It’s not a solved problem with all the geographical and political issues, but it’s quite literally the world’s last frontier for trade.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02522-6
Population growth fell much faster than expected in many places such as Singapore and Iran. Today in Africa people have mobile phones and hence much better access to information on things like birth control.
That Nature article shows that the population expected at 2100 has a realistic range from about 9 Bn to 11 Bn. That difference comes from slightly different assumptions about the change in birth rates in Africa and other places.
From the article :
"In 2014, a group at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna produced its own forecast. It said that world population is most likely to peak at 9.4 billion around 2070 and will fall to 9 billion by the end of the century. The group’s numbers rose slightly in a 2018 report3 that projected a peak of about 9.8 billion around 2080; a subsequent update has population cresting at a little under 9.7 billion around 2070."
I think you're deriding my use of "Carrying capacity" as an archaic concept, but your retort is that we're "creating ecosystems."
But, every organism within an ecosystem "creates" it just by existing as part of it, so I'm assuming you mean "heavily modifying it to suit our species' need for insatiable growth."
Taking this from that perspective, the 20th century agricultural explosion (that you link to ) is a prime example of how we've hijacked systems far beyond their natural limits, to largely deleterious effect.
That wikipedia article even enumerates some of these: biodiversity loss, GHG emissions, etc. There are many examples elsewhere [0].
Sure, there's a lot more food, and that's good for population health and well-being. But that "good" assumes that we've decided that large, consistent growth rates are "good."
[0]:https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=imp...
Worrying about the ideal balance of births : deaths, today, is like worrying about ballast in a sinking ship. Insatiable growth doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t for some time, we’re squarely in flattening the curve territory with the fun twist that discharges take 18 years to raise.
As an aside: Would it be possible to favourite a reply? I have only figured out how to do that with submissions.
Conversely, depopulation on an otherwise healthy planet is a trivially solvable problem. Our species IS entirely capable of reproducing (even though the secret to doing so may have fallen into obscurity in certain incel segments of society).
Not Civil, Mechanical, or other engineers.
Also venture capital has no interest in fighting 1000's environmental lawsuits and 10,000's of pointless regulations designed to stop any construction or development that would improve CA
> Not Civil, Mechanical, or other engineers.
What on earth makes you think that? All sorts of hardware is designed and developed here. It has the largest aerospace sector of any state. A lot of automotive design is done in the LA basin for the auto majors.
And that’s just off the top of my head. I’m in SV and even up here though we lost most of the defense manufacturing (e.g. tanks and ships) though a lot remains further south, when I need parts machined there are still plenty of local machine shops etc. I’ve brought in welders from the Central Valley when local ones were too busy.
>> A lot of automotive design is done in the LA basin for the auto majors.
Source...
>when I need parts machined there are still plenty of local machine shops etc.
There are plenty of machine shops in my town, I would not proclaim my town to be a mecca of engineering.
> I’ve brought in welders from the Central Valley when local ones were too busy.
Ok, and?
It feeds that large patch of green/farms/food entirely surrounded by sand, and drains north into the inland sea created by the first botched attempt at diverting in the 1900s.
That’s arguably the least important part of the state that isn’t desert (anymore), and a small scale version of what we’ve done to the Central Valley.
The much derided (sometimes rightly so tho’) subject of Evolutionary Psychology will probably have a couple of books worth to support that.
We are literally unable to do that. The only thing we know how to do is burn more fossil fuels which has nothing to do with human effort.
Anecdotally, the vast majority of people I've met - from all walks of life and religious/political leanings - will answer this question with an unthinking "yes, of course that's bad".
I've been curious lately why this is. From the standpoint of Christianity, isn't the end goal rapture followed by total extinction anyway? From the standpoint of agnosticism/atheism, wouldn't an extinction mean the end of human suffering?
Why are we as a species so afraid of not being able to sustain ourselves through a constant churning of new births? Is it just our monkey brain ultimately calling the shots?
Or rather, if you choose to replace your monkey brain value system with some better value system, such choice can be made only under your monkey brain value system. Value-system-yet-to-be-adopted is not your value system yet (entire question is about whether it should be your value system) and can't be the basis of your choice. (Yes, humans often make mistakes here, but that's because humans are vulnerable to circular reasoning, not because circular reasoning is valid.)
Why even give birth to humans that are most likely not wanted in this world?
I think most people can achieve happiness in their situation, even under bad conditions, if they have a sound mind. Those elites might have a better shot at accidental happiness, but being upset over that will do nothing good for your own state of mind, so why let it bring you down? You can't change how the world works.
Happiness comes from within, and from meaningful social connections.
Probably somewhere between 1.8 and 2.2. Rapid increases or declines in population create economic disruptions. Even if you favor a less (or more!) populated world, it's better for us to get there slowly.
Currently growing population seems to still be an economically net-positive thing as we still need people in order to do new and bigger things. I think though that soon it will become net-negative as average person's total lifetime productivity will be losing to automation and you don't need 20+ years to start the robot up and 20+ years to take care about that robot once it got worn out. In that situation we'd better have less people yet more educated, trained etc. in order to be productive beyond what is replaceable by more and more automation.
If you have the opinion that there are insufficient resources in the world to live the lifestyle you want for yourself or those you care about, you may think a lower fertility rate is more “right”. And if you think your tribe is in a competition for resources with all the other tribes, then you may want a higher fertility rate for your tribe and a lower one for the others.
That said, I'm of the opinion that we'll never really need to have any tough conversations about birth rates because they've fallen so drastically across the board. It seems that it will be enough to universally encourage higher birth rates in every nation for the foreseeable future (with the expected outcome being that most will still struggle to hit 2.1).
Incentivizing a woman to have a baby is extremely expensive, and I do not think any country has come up with an offer so attractive such that it causes birth rates to go up.
Which brings up 2 questions: how much does a society have to offer women, and would that society continue to be competitive on a global playing field relative to other countries that might go a different way, such as restricting women’s rights and getting birth rates up by removing women’s agency.
The USA just did this.
Only if you're the sort of person who cares about such things. I don't see any moral imperative to make sure any particular ethnicity or culture continues.
Before someone calls me the usual assortment of bad things, please take a moment to consider (1) the difference between treating existing people well and making new people, and (2) that I mean this literally and not in the "all the cultures besides the US should go away" sense, and would still take this position even in the blatantly racist "but that means you'd be a minority" situation you're about to try to catch me with.
Of course the term minority/majority is relative to the scope you're talking about, too. The "majority" of Americans are global minorities.
Mask off moment there.
> Are some groups "allowed" this, and not others?
So no, my position is that no groups are "allowed" this.
Another way I can express this, that may be more clear, is that a culture isn't a thing on its own. It's a description of the way its members live. Those members may be very attached to that way of life, and it is immoral to take it from them (see (1) above), but the question of whether new people start living in that way is morally neutral.
The global optimum matters (IMO) more than an assumption of “whatever we have is just right”