Hacker News Reader

Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

> Looking at the graphs, however, we should go back to covid society, well, without all the dying.

With the dying you save the environment way faster. "We should go back to covid society" just means let's all be ascetic monks. There's too many people in the world. We don't need more wetlands or this or that, we just need to understand that a population that grows without limits always destroys itself, that's all.

What's the point of a planet with billions of people if their lives suck and they have to stay home using their CO2 quotas? Much better to have less people living normally.

View on HN

Since I rarely get to talk to Malthusians: Do you have a preferred approach for population reduction?

Tangential point: You severely underestimate the impact of scale and specialization on our standard of living. There is no way we could the same variety of nice things at 500million people

> Do you have a preferred approach for population reduction?

Streaming TV and Education.

Educating women, in particular, is strongly correlated with population reduction across the globe.

Two generations of that and the world could be stabilising a billion and half below where we are today.

It's happening already, I'd just not create incentive programs to boost birthrates. I don't like to take a very heavy handed way to "control" society, think it's better to just let some things happen the way they happen, because if I'm wrong at least I didn't go full on. But the most developed / educated countries are already going down fast except for immigration. Once the countries immigrants come from rise to the same economic levels, I would predict their birth rates would also go down.

To your tangential point: I think technological development will allow less and less people needed on the supply chain to sustain the same quality of life for society. I think this is clear from history and it only goes in one direction.

I'm aware there's people that defend more extreme views like boosting abortions or other dystopian measures. I don't believe in any of those, I think everyone should have the right to reproduce if they feel like it, I'd just rather it be an informed decision, but I wouldn't add any control measures for fear of abusive mis-use by the government later on.

We'd need a human beings cap in millions to have a lavish lifestyle with managable consequences to environment. And probably in low hundrends. And even then if everybody lived like a king we'd be fucked.

I'd also say that more asceticism would produce a healthier society. Current western consumerist society isn't healthy for anybody. Neither the planet, nor humans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com