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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

If we are serious about sustainability, the environment, and the 'climate crisis' we need to embrace population decrease at least for a few decades.

To blast us continually about the environment crisis and a 'population crisis' at the same time is contradictory (or bad faith).

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Productivity went through the roof in the last 100 years. We need less workers to achive the same results, but still it seems to be a catastrophy when the workforce is shrinking. Imagine a planet earth with only 1 Billion people but with the same productivity as now with almost 10 Billion. No poverty, no famine, much less pollution. just my 2 cents.

Maybe that is one of the Great Filters of the Fermi paradox.

> Imagine a planet earth with only 1 Billion people but with the same productivity as now with almost 10 Billion. No poverty, no famine, much less pollution. just my 2 cents.

That's what I imagine is possible and would indeed make for a better world overall.

I agree you guys let's kill 7 billion people

The people blasting us about a population crisis are not the same as those decrying the environmental crisis; quite the opposite. Dropping population is bad for the economy, as is giving a crap about the environment.

Also, its like saying the economy will shrink, which may be true, but not necessarily that the per capita economy will shrink. Obviously Japan -- for example -- can function as a nation with a fraction of its current population. Less labor is good for people who sell their labor, but bad for people who buy labor (capital).

GDP per capital will shrink if the proportion of the working population declines.That’s pretty obvious

> people who buy labor

so basically everyone unless you grow your own food etc.?

>> GDP per capital will shrink if the proportion of the working population declines.That’s pretty obvious

Only if productivity / price of labor is constant. Which it isn't over time historically.

There is a big overlap if only because governments complain about both in their official communication to the public.

Regarding the economy, I think we need to shift paradigm from measuring the size of the economy overall, which indeed obviously benefits from ever more people, to focusing on figures per capita. Ultimately the whole point of economic growth is to make people better off individually and we can do that with a decreasing population, in fact perhaps a decreasing population helps achieving that by forcing companies to increase productivity as much as possible instead of relying on abundant and cheap labour.

It is not about the population getting smaller. It is about the population getting smaller at an alarming rate.

Well, if there is a global environmental crisis and the world "is running out of time", surely that's a good thing? Population growth has been happening at an alarming rate...

the problem is not the decline in population itself but rather the aging. If/when the working population will be outnumbered by those who are retired we’ll have serious problems.

Aging is unavoidable sooner or later as population cannot keep growing forever and we don't want to live in Logan's Run, either. So IMHO this is a red herring: we need to face the inevitable and adapt to it in any case.

What if instead of immigration the government decides to raise the orphan children from other countries? That wouldn't harm the culture I hope.

Children need families, not institutions to raise them, so the same incentives would really be needed for this kind of program as any other.

There aren't many such children, and it's complicated to get them in an ethical way.

True. I didn't consider the scale. I was talking in a totally hypothetical sense.

Orphan children already have enough problems, and don't need to be raised in a culture totally foreign to them

Idea I've been rolling over in my head is the west (other places too) are straight jacked by the way that passive capitalists/financiers see the world. When they see demographic shifts which reduce the number of workers, family formation and gasp shrinking population all they are capable of doing is react in horror about what that's going to do to the value of their paper asset hoards.

Population decline -> decline in demand for paper products -> Dunder Mifflin sales down -> DMI market cap go down? ...no No NOOOOOO.

It would be really cool if you took this discourse to Africa, China or India, Mr Malthus.

"The UN forecasts that China’s population will decline from 1.426 billion this year to 1.313 billion by 2050 and below 800 million by 2100"

Yes but not India or Africa. Nigeria is still projected to hit 500mil by mid-century, don't they?

Actually, compared to South Korea, Taiwan, and China, Japanese birthrate is the highest in the region. It's just Japan went earlier than the three of them in subreplacement, so they hit the major pain points earlier in time. But maybe China will hit the subreplacement pains faster than what Japan experienced....

India -> it's already in motion.

> From 1965 to 2009, contraceptive usage has more than tripled (from 13% of married women in 1970 to 48% in 2009) and the fertility rate has more than halved (from 5.7 in 1966 to 2.4 in 2012)

> India's fertility rate has greatly decreased in recent years and is now distinctly below the global rate.

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