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Comment by bheadmaster | Hacker News Reader

Degrowth necessarily implies population control - you can't reduce sum consumption if population keeps growing, as there is a lower bound on the amount of consumption a single person can live off. And population control necessarily implies government control of reproduction, which sets a precedent for controlling other aspects of people's lives.

I am not sympathetic towards the degrowth movement, since the "solutions" they provide create more problems than they solve. Killing all humans would also solve the climate problem, but it doesn't make it a good decision.

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My god, two incredible leaps in such a short post!

You drive a 3-ton SUV, burn coal for electricity, and produce literal mountains of plastic crap in China which get shipped around the world. Don't worry pal, there's plenty to cut back before you need to roll out the forced sterelisation.

Second, the population of the developed world is already declining. The population of the world is on track to plateau in the coming decades. Your caricature is just silly.

I'm not your pal, buddy.

> Your caricature is just silly.

Funny, I feel the same way about yours.

Sure, everyone in the world is driving SUVs, flying private jets, and building nuclear reactors in their backyard. Let's stop people from consuming - force everyone to be vegan and eat the bugs! People consuming are the problem - not the military-industrial complex spending enormous amounts of energy on things that have nothing to do with consumption and spends an order of magnitude more energy than all human consumption combined!

Ahaha, good old "if you don't drive a gas guzzler you're a vegan poof". Auto marketing departments are really worth their salt.

>building nuclear reactors in their backyard

If only!

> Ahaha, good old "if you don't drive a gas guzzler you're a vegan poof". Auto marketing departments are really worth their salt.

Yeah, good old "ignore the argument and insult the argumenter" ad hominem style of arguing - very useful for fueling your self-righteousness and "I'm right, you're wrong" style of thinking.

Good pointless talk! Hope to have one again soon.

It's obvious that there is plenty of unsustainable activity going on today; I've given three concrete examples. This is reality: it is simply not long term sustainable to go on living with such waste as we do even today, let alone if everybody consumed like an American (many × over the world average, depending on if you look at energy, emissions, resources). So it's obvious that we both can and need to become more efficient: reduce waste, use more renewable energy, build lasting products instead of single-use, etc.

Your answer to this is "the only way to reduce resource use is population culling, the global elite wants to enact reproductive control" x))

But one thing we agree with, this conversation is utterly pointless!

> there is a lower bound on the amount of consumption a single person can live off.

That may be true, but that bound is clearly a lot lower than many people currently operate at. The has about twice the inflation adjusted per-capita GDP that it had 40 years ago, and about 5 times the current world average. https://www.statista.com/statistics/996758/rea-gdp-growth-un...

Aren't all populations worldwide currently dropping in their reproduction rate already, without government intervention? Nearly all western countries are already way below the maintenance rate of 2.1 already.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#the-global-decline...

Is there a fundamental reason for it, or is it just the way it is right now?

Because the world is kind of shit right now, and that could be the reason people don't procreate - I, personally, don't want to bring children into the world the way it is right now and the way it is going. The way I see it, as soon as the quality of life grows, people will continue procreating the way they did so far for decades.

It's dropping since the 1950s, so not a fluke. Major reasons are probably improvements in living conditions (yes, in comparison to the 50s), the invention and widespread use of contraception and social security (which removes the need for kids to support you in old age).

> It's dropping since the 1950s

So has quality of life, so it might have something to do with it.

The quality of life has dropped since the 50s? Definitely not im Germany or Europe in general. On what metrics has it dropped?

> Because the world is kind of shit right now, and that could be the reason people don't procreate

It's actually the opposite. As people become better off, they have fewer children, because the near certainty that those children will survive.

In developed and egalitarian countries, women frequently delay having children until it is too late. Particularly the very educated.

> without government intervention

There’s a lot of tangential government intervention. E.g. no enough daycare funding while pushing moms-back-at-work campaigns. Birth-control hormones ending up in waste water which goes back full circle yet government doing nothing about such pollution.

Degrowth doesn't imply that.

You imply that population will increase indefinitely (max peak expected at 12 billion actually) or that degrowth needs to happen forever.

Further you imply population development increases if degrowth is applies.

Also, slippery slope argument.

> You imply that population will increase indefinitely

You imply that it won't.

I don't see a fundamental reason why humans would stop at 8 billion - yeah, currently, (my hypothesis is that) the world is kind of shit, so people stopped procreating due to stress. However, there's no reason to think that people won't procreate once the world becomes a better place to live.

> or that degrowth needs to happen forever

Assuming population keeps growing (which I see no fundamental reason to doubt will happen eventually), degrowth needs to happen forever in order to keep the consumption from growing - basic math:

    total consumption = number of people * avg. consumption per person

To keep total consumption constant, avg. consumption per person needs to decrease proportionally to the increase of the number of people.

> Also, slippery slope argument.

Not a real counter-argument.

> You imply that it won't.

How? Though, I am certain that it won't grow indefinitely on earth.

> I don't see a fundamental reason why humans would stop at 8 billion

It can stop at 9 billion and still not grow indefinitely. Currently a peak of 11 billion and no more than 12 billion is estimated. As said. Because of increased living standards.

> To keep total consumption constant, avg. consumption per person needs to decrease proportionally to the increase of the number of people.

It better to decrease proportionally with a coefficient smaller than 1 and bigger than 0 than decrease consumption not at all.

> Not a real counter-argument.

Yes, it is, because it implies a logical fallacy.

>> You imply that population will increase indefinitely

> You imply that it won't.

> I don't see a fundamental reason why humans would stop at 8 billion

This is not a guess based on how we subjectively feel about the world, but the current UN estimate, based on a lot of data.

"By 2100, the global fertility rate is expected to dip to 1.9 births per woman", so below the replacement rate, which is slightly above 2.0.

https://www.livescience.com/65732-world-population-will-stop...

https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world...

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-popu...

> you can't reduce sum consumption if population keeps growing, as there is a lower bound on the amount of consumption a single person can live off

And yet people in rich countries consume many times more resources than people in the "global south". The USA's 200M citizens consume more overall than India's 1100M, for one of the extreme examples. So there is quite a bit of room for degrowth in the global north without requiring depopulation.

> Degrowth necessarily implies population control

As it happens, people in many countries are pretty fine with the idea of having less kids, without the need for population control.

> Killing all humans would also solve the climate problem, but it doesn't make it a good decision.

The problem is going to solve itself with or without us. When people talk about solving climate change, they actually mean making it so we can still be around after that.

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