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Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

Also, why would we want to overpopulate? The whole premise is wrong. We need to weigh less on the environment, and currently farmers are receding in France, and it’s the first profession for suicide; All tells us that the next generation will be full-urban, which is an extremely bad thing.

Of course, empires with more dense populations have more ability to dominate others, at least thanks to the variety of skills and the sheer mass of the population. There’s a reason why politicians work to increase population: It increases levied taxes. The system wouldn’t be balanced with stable population.

But even if we equate population with domination, is dominating the world what we want?

As for the “but they’ll pay your retirements!” argument, well, retirement-by-next-generation-paying is a pyramid scheme and the elderly should have thought of it before they set it up.

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If you want to weigh less on the environment, you want to go urban: it's far more efficient to live in shared housing (apartments), commute by public transport, etc.

The person you replied to was arguing for a smaller total population - for humans in aggregate to weigh less on the environment even if individuals weigh more.

> why would we want to overpopulate?

Half the reason we got out of the Malthusian trap is that we finally got enough people that specialisation and economies of scale start to pay off.

Wanting to reduce the global population is like saying you want to eliminate economies of scale, which would make life harder for those who remain, not easier.

Economies of scale can happen with a billion people just as well as with 8 billion.

The food production grew because of the invention of synthetic fertilizer, not because the more people we have, the cheaper the food can be.

By "just as well" do you mean "still happen some" or "still happen at least as much"? Because the former seems clearly true while there are many counterexamples to the latter (ex: anything with zero marginal cost).

I mean enough to sustain the population, and with a surplus.

Our current economy is a pyramid scheme on a gigantic scale and dependent on an ever growing population. Since we live on a planet with a finite amount of resources we know infinite growth isn’t sustainable. If we don’t intervene at some point the whole system will inevitably collapse. The longer we wait, the more difficult it will be. Unfortunately we live in a gerontocracy where our leaders don’t care about what happens in the future since they’ll be dead in a few years anyway.

Economic growth can mean accomplishing more with the same resources. Very frequently, it does. Very frequently, it doesn't.

You are begging the question. It is far from settled that we “got out” of the trap. Did we buy ourselves some time with the “Green Revolution”, yes. But it’s clear we have exceeded the environment’s waste absorption capacities in local ecosystems (see nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in streams, lakes, and rivers), regionally (see estuarine dead zones where local nutrient pollution collects), as well as globally (chiefly greenhouse gases).

There's also just quality of life. My life would be significantly worse if 100 million extra people lived in my state. I wouldn't care very much about escaping the Malthusian trap if it meant I had to live in a sprawl of constant density. Broadly speaking, higher and higher density does lead to an overall worse quality of life, which is something of a repugnant conclusion.

>Also, why would we want to overpopulate?

Because population is key for the level of influence a country can have. A high population doesn't guarantee it, but a low population will likely sideline the country when important topics come up.

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