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Comment by tiahura | Hacker News Reader

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This is a super messed up view point. Eugenics by horrible disease?

In any case lower childhood mortality actually reduces birth rates. So your goal of less people will be met through a moral and ethical action of creating medicines rather than purposely not.

Also, it should be considered that one of the causes for decreased gdp in a region is disease burden. I don't know anyone with malaria, but from what I have read, it is not conducive to extreme productivity. The global north may get a taste of this with long covid. I don't know how it would be studied given the lack of a reliable diagnosis, but I suspect quiet quitting amongst other post pandemic attitude shifts is related to mild cases of this fatigue. We just seemingly all care less about things, which is maybe good for gdh, but not for gdp.

> In any case lower childhood mortality actually reduces birth rates.

The confounders are way too strong to conclude this. Too many things correlate together.

The (strong) correlation has been shown again and again over many different populations, geographical areas and historical data, so this is in no way a controversial conclusion.

Well, it's correlated, but generally household income is considered to be more causal for both reduced mortality and reduced fertility.

And the confounders of wealth, contraception and women's education are just going to be ignored are they?

> Aren’t there unintended consequences to raising the reproduction rate of a population that is already incapable of effectively supporting itself?

He sounds like he's just one step short of picking up a gun and start shooting the undesirables.

There are very very strong historical precedents indicating that a decrease in childhood mortality leads to a decline in birth rates. You should google this.

"The child survival hypothesis states that if child mortality is reduced, then eventually fertility reduction follows, with the net effect of lower growth of population. In populations living under low socioeconomic conditions, other factors have also been observed. The question arises whether fertility reduction could be influenced by family planning. Bangladesh data have demonstrated that if not a single child died in a family then the average total fertility rate (TFR) was 2.6 children; when 1 child died the number was 4.7 children; 2 child deaths meant 6.2 children; and more than 3 child deaths boosted the TFR to 8.3 children."[0]

0 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1670537/

I think there are too many extreme exceptions to this correlation for it to be anything but a correlation. For just one among many, look to any of the countless religious groups within developed countries. These range from Muslims who continue have children at a healthy rate, to the Haredi in Israel who are popping out 6 kids per woman on average. Even Africa's blushing there.

The obvious and logical explanation, which fits seemingly all data, is simply culture. An obvious one is extreme consumerism. Extreme consumerism is going to drive big economies which makes healthcare widely available, driving down infant mortality. At the same time it's also going to drive people to spend their lives trying to earn money instead of raising families, driving down fertility.

Without culture playing a largely dominant role it would also have been much harder for countries to artificially manipulate their fertility rates, as Iran and South Korea both did - and later came to severely regret. I'm leaving China out of the examples as they took more of a legal than cultural approach to try to change their fertility rates.

You have examples of cultures with high birth rates but you aren't telling me whether those birthrates increase or decrease with better healthcare/reduced mortality rates.

Technically, that's also an unintended consequence.

Certainly an observation optimism can cling to, but the mechanisms of evolution suggest that eventually most humans will have some form of immunity to this effect (we pass on more than genes)

Honest question: What do you mean by that?

Considering the last 220 years and all the evolution that we had in medicine, global trade, and socio-economics (to name a few), on average, it's better to be born in South America today than to be a European king or queen 150 years ago.

The whole point of my argument is that everyone can have a chance in the world.

[1] - https://vizzlo.com/gallery/time-series-graph/example/global-...

Imagine I had a little dial I could move, and it would somehow magically change the population of an area. What would you think of me if I took the only remaining area in the world that still struggles to feed their population, and started cranking it up? At the same time imagine I took that same dial, and start sending it lower and lower in the richest and most bountiful places that could afford to support vastly larger populations?

What would you think of me?

There is a fantastic book after Hans Rosling called factfulness. You should read it. It explains a lot of misunderstandings on poverty.

A very cruel and poorly informed comment imho. Poverty is not a crime.

Verbatim quote from Scrooge telling off the charity workers.

Many villages were "supporting themselves" just fine before western terrorists took over their land.

Mass starvation and malnutrition was extremely common all around the world before the industrial revolution.

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