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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

    More ambitious projects need a certain critical mass of resources behind them. Ancient Egyptian civilization built a large irrigation system to make the best use of the Nile floodwaters for agriculture, a feat that would not have been possible to a small tribe or chiefdom.

This doesn't mean people, we're no longer bound by labour intensive solutions.

I live in a single state with a tiny population that mines and ships 16x more raw iron ore, almost a billion tonnes per annum, than peak annual iron ore mining in the entire USofA ever. We also mine a millions of tonnes of other resources. This is entirely down to bigger machines, smarter technology, and factors that don't require more people.

The arguments presented here for even more people on the globe are sketchy at best, no weight at all is given to the downsides of truly challenging levels of resource extraction currently at play to meet the high consumption demands of a small proportion of the large population we already have on the planet.

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The 2 most prominent proponents of this idea happen to have the resources (money) that will allow them to avoid most of the downsides a larger population would create. Great for them bad for me. There are plenty enough geniuses in existence today. They cannot be utilized because they live in shitty conditions created by the too large population we already have. As others have pointed out consideration of of negative effects are totally absent.

Will technology allow us to sustain larger populations - likely but at what cost.

> They cannot be utilized because they live in shitty conditions created by the too large population we already have.

Or they just live in a shitty place under some autocratic/dictator/religious rule. I'm not sure that has much to do with the population size.

Don't you think those bad leaders would've had a harder time coming into power if there had been less contention over resources?

If it's clear that there's plenty to go around you can just abandon a bad leader. If not, then maybe tolerating them is a necessary evil (because they control the food).

We have an abundance of resources, and ship things like food and medicine all over the world. But because of shitty leaders access is the issue. So the only way to address the issue is to get more resources sourced locally.

> If it's clear that there's plenty to go around you can just abandon a bad leader.

If only it were that easy.

> the only way to address the issue is to get more resources sourced locally.

I don't know about "only", but I agree that that's the best move: Fewer labyrinthine dependencies, more providing directly for yourself and your neighbors.

But isn't the difficulty of that proposition a direct function of population density? If "locally" means 1000 people on 100 acres, that's a lot different than if "locally" means 10000 people on 10 acres.

---

To put it differently, premises:

1. The planet can sustain 100M of us

2. The planet cannot sustain 100B of us

3. There is uncertainty about whether the planet can sustain 8B of us

Conclusion:

The safer direction for our population to go is down.

>Don't you think those bad leaders would've had a harder time coming into power if there had been less contention over resources?

No. For most of human history we've been lead by shitty autocratic leaders. Now, when there's too little to go around we're more apt to go to war and/or have population migrations which is a different subject.

How about providing concrete methods for reducing population? Exactly how do you propose to reduce population and who should be forced to not have children first? Should we assume that you will lead by example?

The global population is projected to go down to 6 billion by the end of the century, without any coercion or policy changes.

This drives people like the author of the article mad, because they think we should do something to prevent that.

> The global population is projected to go down to 6 billion by the end of the century

Source? I thought it was expected to stabilize around 10B or so

Source UN Population to 2300

https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...

Now the issue is both OP and you are taking one of the trend lines rather than looking at the projection spread. Ops seems slightly off as the UN numbers are showing 10B max and 7.4B min.

You're looking at the graph that ends in 2050.

Estimates for 2100 (from Fig. 6)

================================

- High: 14.0B

- Med: 9.1B

- Low: 5.5B

> The global population is projected to go down to 6 billion by the end of the century, without any coercion or policy changes.

I agree. So where is the problem? Replacement is a problem in many parts of the world on the other hand.

Alternative 1: we achieve 6 billion in 2300 because we cannot sustain 7 billion

Alternative 2: we achieve 5 billion in 2300 because we chose to

The quality of life in alternative 2 is higher because we're not right up against constraints that limit us. People feel more secure because there's less contention over resources, they're more likely to take risks like trying new ways of doing things, etc. There's a greater potential for discovery.

So the problem is that if we let nature force us into Alternative 1, we're in for a worse time than we otherwise would be.

Rich countries have sub-replacement rates of fertility already.

All we have to do is embrace it.

Rich people voluntarily have fewer kids. Spread the wealth, reduce the population pressure.

Not rich people, but people in consumerist societies.

Consumerism as a way of life is hostile to having children. Consumerism construes all of life, and the purpose of life, as consumption and in hedonistic terms. It means that sexual intercourse and sexual relationships are perversely construed in terms of consumption. A sign of this is the 20th century normalization of contraception, where the intrinsically procreative end of sexual intercourse is intentionally and explicitly blocked and frustrated in order to center pleasure (the irony of hedonism is that it actually makes sex less enjoyable, as pleasure sought for its own sake undermines itself, but I digress). In a healthy sexual relationship, children are a welcome result of sexual union. In a consumerist relationship, they are an impediment to hedonistic consumerist indulgence, so much so that abortion is sought when contraception fails. Even the notion of lifelong marriage stands in the way of the consumerist juggernaut, as commitment to one's spouse means denying yourself countless, admittedly shallow and selfish sexual encounters. Consumerism is an agent of social and individual decay.

Furthermore, children cost money. The money you could spend on consumption, on that new Mercedes, may need to go toward the good of a child, which, according to a consumerist calculus, is lost. And how can you keep up with the Jones' when the measure of wealth aren't children, but more stuff? The poor may have had more children in consumerist societies, because various luxuries are out of their reach anyway, so the dilemma doesn't manifest as much. Also, the fish tends to rot from the head down, so it takes a while for the habits of those further up the economic ladder to trickle down.

Of course, not everyone must have children, but healthy societies do tend to have many. If it were simply the case of the former, we would not see the hostility we see toward the latter.

though I heard the data on this is starting to shift

I think it has been demonstrated multiple times in various places that empowerment of women and access to birth control ultimately stabilizes population growth. [1] There is no need to have a program or have governments decide who and how. People naturally do it on their own given the means.

[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_...

There are a lot of ways to contribute to society without contributing a person, but many parts of our culture consider these ways to be somehow secondary. If we can change this, we can reduce our population without forbidding anyone from having children.

For starters, I think we should increase tax benefits for people who don't have dependents and who are participating in research, or teaching, or nurshing, or ... create a list of activities which we want to see more of but that the market does not prioritize. Let's celebrate, and empower, individuals who take the time they would be spending on their own kids, and instead spend it on solving society's problems.

This would increase the likelihood that somebody without children has the kind of impact which makes them a role model for existing children. This will help erode the idea that people who chose not to have children are somehow defective and will decrease the likelihood that a person decides to have kids.

Why should anyone be forced not to have kids? We could all have one and the population would halve in a generation.

I have three children, not unusual for my culture. My community's gardener has 14 children, low for his culture but he's still young. He's only on his second wife and he just passed 40 years old.

Are you going to tell him that he needs to change his culture? Arguably he could have a lot to say about our culture spewing out hydrocarbons being damaging to the planet, which would be justified far before we criticise his reproduction.

>Are you going to tell him that he needs to change his culture

If you're going to life a modern lifestyle, yes 100%. Modern human lifestyles are hyper energy/resource intensive. The reason people had 14 kids back when is 1. most of the kids died, and 2, the kids were work resources. If 1 and 2 no longer hold, then yea, change.

I would bet the reason was women did not have an option to say no to having 14 kids.

Although, in this supposed gardener’s culture, one guy had multiple wives, and that is obviously not a dynamic that leads to a steady, peaceful society based on all the prevailing customs around the world.

I've spoken to a few Bedouin women, though less than men. I've never heard any say that they are unhappy with the quantity of children they raise. That's their culture, why would they be unhappy?

One thing that I've heard them say they are unhappy about are the marrying of additional wives. One particular conversation was with two wives of the same man. The older wife said that she did not want her husband to marry, but over time she began to like the younger wife. In the particular case of the gardener, his first wife told him to marry because the first two children were born unhealthy.

I'd say about half the Bedouins I speak to have multiple wives.

> That's their culture, why would they be unhappy?

Because you have no reason to assume they would tell you the truth, or that they are not lying even to themselves. Actions speak louder than words, and 99% of women who attain financial and physical security choose to not have 14, or even 4 kids.

Quite patronizing of women.

As recently as the generation that was born before WWII, even the Boomers, were born into relatively large families. The idea that they hated having so many children would have been foreign to them. On the contrary, it gave them meaning. Family and community life was vibrant. Now, things are desolate. We live in a culture of death.

I am not patronizing anyone. I am just presenting statistics, and the possibilities for why they are what they are. By far, most (almost all) women who have access to financial independence, physical security, and access to contraception CHOOSE to have 0, 1, 2, or maybe 3 kids.

No one tells them they cannot have 8 or 14 kids. But after having seen what a woman goes through during pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and child rearing, I would easily say that I would also choose 0, 1, 2, or 3 kids. Certainly not double digits.

You should know that any attempt to change that culture would have the international community screaming genocide.

See here:

  > Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

Giving women the opportunity to be self sufficient is not intending to prevent births.

Yes, he should change his culture. We should too. Why is it taboo to tell people that their cultural values are wrong?

I have no problem telling someone their culture is wrong. In this case, it is ours that is wrong.

If you ever find the answer then let me know.

> Arguably he could have a lot to say about our culture spewing out hydrocarbons being damaging to the planet […]

Good?

> There are plenty enough geniuses in existence today. They cannot be utilized because they live in shitty conditions created by the too large population we already have

I’m pretty sure that the shitty conditions are not caused by a too large population of humans more broadly. If society took the wealth of a few billionaires and distributed it to the most impoverished I think a lot of our overpopulation woes would vanish overnight. Things like tuberculosis medicine costing hundreds of dollars isn’t a population problem.

People always look for the one size fits all solutions and or reasons for problems. There are multiple reasons for shitty conditions just as there are multiple reasons for homelessness. That is why these problems seem so intractable IMHO. I seriously doubt cramming another billion or so people onto the planet is going to improve those conditions. At least I have not read a convincing argument for it.

I think people totally underestimate how the current 9 Billion inhabitants of this planet are depleting our oceans of living things and how large a percentage of those inhabitants depend upon the ocean for food. Sounds like one of those externalities Economist only account for after the fact. Ooops - To bad for you starving children in (put your starving country here).

> If society took the wealth of a few billionaires and distributed it to the most impoverished I think a lot of our overpopulation woes would vanish overnight.

Maybe, maybe not. Most of impoverished people I know are impoverished because they continue to act irresponsibly with money. Just giving them money without education, handholding and a lot of coaching about how to spend money will mean that money will be distrobuted back away into society and eventually the rich will return to being rich. Of course not everyone is like that, but I'd say 80%. By just redistributing wealth, after 5 years we would reduce amount of poor people by 20%. That's why it's so hard to fight poorness. They require a lot more than just money.

And where are those mining machines that allow this to occur manufactured? How about all the components of the mining machines? The locomotives that take all that iron ore to port? The port infrastructure? The ships that transport the ore to its overseas customers?

WA and its mining wealth and efficiency wouldn't exist without a global market for both its supply and demand.

Look at all the people involved in machine manufacture, transport, mining, etc. for sure.

The point being made is that more and more tonnes of raw material are being shipped to smelters per person than ever before.

Automation is still advancing so this will only increase, automation is also advancing in processing and production - we no longer need vast numbers of people to produce a billion tonnes of steel, and the number currently required is still falling.

No the automation would not increase if population would fall, because there would be less demand for iron ore. Your machines would rust away and the knowledge to make them would get lost. We are not living in Star trek utopia where with a push of a button a machine makes whatever you want. Less people means less specialization, less creativity and less activity.

Even if the population suddenly stabilised overnight mining automation would continue to increase in order to meet the rising per capita demand from global population.

It's already rising to meet the transition from fossil fuel energy to other sources.

We are living in a world where 60+ year olds like myself increased per capita throughput in exploration, extraction, processing and production. Much of this creative activity that sees results today came from a time 40 years ago when there were far fewer people than today.

None of what you said would be possible with a dwindling population. We do not live in a Star trek utopia where at press of a button every wish is synthesized by a machine. More people can simply get more done.

There is a good reason why most of the stuff, new discoveries and technologies come from big countries and not from small ones.

Even rich countries per capita with small population size do not build huge infrastructure projects, do not send stuff and people in space, do not have sophisticated armies,...

All of this was put in motion with a population much smaller than todays.

The bulk of it was achieved with a population smaller than todays.

The ongoing work being planned doesn't require the population to grow, there is demand enough from a growing proportion wanting a greater standard of living and a world making a massive transition in base energy.

>> All of this was put in motion with a population much smaller than todays.

Your logic is circular. Because we can go all the way back to first few humans ever to exist and say they put it into motion, therefore a small group of couple of hundred of people is enough. Or go into other direction and dream what new wonders the next 40 years would bring with the rising population.

>> The ongoing work being planned doesn't require the population to grow, there is demand enough from a growing proportion wanting a greater standard of living and a world making a massive transition in base energy.

It doesn't have to grow, but we are not talking about growing we are talking about shrinking.

There's no logic involved in stating observed fact.

Your comments, however, seem to be locked into a single world view based on the assumed neccesity for unlimited growth.

This is blinkered, to say the least .. you might care to look at any of the many alternative thoughts on this matter,

eg: https://www.amazon.com.au/Small-Beautiful-Economics-People-M...

from waaaaay back in the 1970s.

We are not talking about shrinking back to zero, I am talking about world population finding a sustainable balnce, say five or seven billion by 2300 or so.

> The point being made is that more and more tonnes of raw material are being shipped to smelters per person than ever before.

your argument fails to prove that for above mentioned fault in how you count the people involved.

Mineral | mining resource databases are a decent start:

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

You can access annual reports and technical reports on pretty much all the major mine sites about the globe, capital investments, plant sizes, work forces, etc.

then expand outwards mapping supply chain networks, etc. You know, the usual legwork.

It’s possible that the machines are operating on a type of population arbitrage principle.

E.g. with much smaller markets, many small components will be uneconomical to build and will not be available to the complex machinery required to mine at scale. Therefore, they will break down and be replaced by much less efficient but easier to maintain equipment thus decreasing quality of life for everyone in a negative feedback loop.

(I’m a proponent of this belief, and expect it to apply to the semiconductor industry as well, esp. as SK/APEC engineers start to retire en masse.)

> no weight at all is given to the downsides of truly challenging levels of resource extraction currently at play to meet the high consumption demands of a small proportion of the large population we already have on the planet.

Those arguments are addressed in the second paragraph:

> Historically, as we run out of a resource (whale oil, elephant tusks, seabird guano), we transition to a new technology based on a more abundant resource—and there are basically no major examples of catastrophic resource shortages in the industrial age. The carrying capacity of the planet is not fixed, but a function of technology; and side effects such as pollution or climate change are just more problems to be solved. As long as we can keep coming up with new ideas, growth can continue.

Not addressed well or at depth.

The current pressures global populations face due to water access and increased insulation in the atmosphere are not ones that can be magically waved away by technology in short order as population increases and increases the scale of those issues.

Of course there are other challenges, but those two suffice for now.

> The current pressures global populations face due to water access

Nearly unlimited water access only requires cheaper energy (desalination and condensers).

There are links to three pages where he goes into depth.

Cures both the water crisis and climate crisis while also allowing unlimited population growth with increased consumption expectations across the planet?

Riiiiight.

Why not? Both water shortage and greenhouse gas emissions are because of our lacking energy technology. Get better energy tech and we solve both.

Go modern nuclear.

This depends what you mean by 'solutions'. Burning resources of the planet is not a solution, it's a delay tactic that is only buying you time. Nuclear has it's own host of problems, even the modern ones.

The problems of nuclear are dramatically overblown, particularly nuclear waste.

In the sense that one might read palms among the vast array of waving hands, yes.

Also no mention of the outlier downsides. More research geniuses also means more psychopaths and rapists. The question is whether one's positives outweigh the other's negatives.

What about a genius-psychopath rapist? (Have to be careful of the grammar there because I want to be clear that I mean a rapist who is also a genius and psychopath, not a genius who targets psychopath rapists).

I kid, but a lot of the top Nazis were geniuses by IQ; I don't know that there's any reason to believe that virtue and genius are correlated, which is only one of the reasons I think this whole conversation is a bit goofy. It honestly feels like yet another weirdo billionaire rationalization for why the line must always go up.

If "more people" was always better then India and Africa should be much richer than Europe.

A lack of people can be an innovation driver: "hiring people is too expensive, so we have to automate everything", i.e. innovation is a must for survival.

Your reasoning is just historically uninformed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio.... There are at least a few generations of lag time between a population boom and economic effects, but Europe's former population size (and density) was the key to its current prosperity.

France would likely be more populous and therefore richer than Germany, had it not secularized earlier and thereby reduced its fertility rate. With all of Europe being highly secular and extremely low fertility, it will (sadly) lose much of its prosperity and cultural significance. Negative TFR societies are simply not sustainable - they will by definition collapse unless they aggressively revert the trend.

See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?t...

Industrial revolution was the key to Europe’s current prosperity. Without it, it was going in the direction of mass starvation, because old farming methods weren’t able to sustain the growing population. The increased population would have been a disaster without the industrial revolution.

It’s the reason England crushed China, even though England’s population has always been microscopic in comparison to that of China.

Your first link is for 1900 but that is way too recent to explain why some contries got rich in the industrial revolution.

It also has British Empire as #1, but this includes India. On its own Britain was much smaller.

When you seperate "overseas territories" out, then you are still left with Asia (incl India) as #1

Where did industrial revolution start? In Britain or in India?

On this page you can go back to 1700 and see that Europe was way down the list: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1006557/global-populatio...

So your own method of arguing leads to the opposite result than your conclusion.

Also if people are starving or otherwise suffering, they probably aren't innovating.

We already have plenty of people. We have a lack of people with the means to live comfortably and invent stuff.

Is not necessity the mother of invention?

Then why are a huge portion of people that are attributed with inventing stuff from what would be middle to upper middle class of their times?

At some point you also need resources. A lot of the invention necessity + nothing can lead to already exists.

You can "invent" a lever or pulley out of random objects that you already have. It may make your task easier, but it won't be world changing.

Necessity (read, pending starvation) may lead to a desperate search for Other People's Money to bring a concept to fruition, but it's not quite the same thing.

It's also the mother of war.

Have you noticed how many Indian and Chinese geniuses there are? They are making the whole world better for everyone. Africa needs better education systems and we'll all be able to benefit from the abundance of African geniuses too.

Europe is much more densely populated than Africa.

It's interesting how wildly different numbers are offered for Europe's population density on high profile web sources.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/europe-phy... 188 persons/km2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe 72 p/km2

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-popula... 34 p/km2

I think it has to do with the inclusion/exclusion of Russia. I looked at your source Worldometers, and they included Russia as part of Eastern Europe.

I think that the inclusion/exclusion of Greenland could have a big effect as well.

We are still bound by labor amount, but now it's mostly the intellectual labor.

The amount of thinking happening in the world depends on the amount of human brains available, and their level of education and knowledge, in the widest sense. Solving current challenges faster is often only possible by applying a larger amount of thinking to them.

(No, the AI is not yet a game changer here.)

The US, at least, seems to be past peak intellectual labor. Somewhere between 30% - 60% of people with STEM degrees don't work in jobs that need them.[1] Bloomberg has worse numbers for degrees generally.[2] "A quarter of grads over the age of 25 make less than $35,000 a year, with many close to the poverty level."

It's entirely possible that the economic reward for intelligence is decreasing. Up until 1920 or so, what employers wanted was physical robustness and reliability. There was a period when intelligence was prized, probably beginning post-WWII. That may be over.

Amazon's fulfillment operations represent today's corporate ideal - "Machines should think, people should work." They want physical robustness and reliability in their employees. Not original thinking.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/2024/02/09/few-st...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-18/is-colleg...

I disagree with this take. There are so many variables like job availability in area where person wants to live, graduation does not mean one is fit for job, job openings are for experienced positions and openings for recent grads are almost non existent.

If there are only openings for experienced people, as a recent grad you take whatever else you can find. Then people just get stuck in whatever they got as first job because they get experience there and get value.

It also doesn’t say what STEM people end up with - I bet a lot is clerical job and not moving boxes for Amazon or flipping burgers.

A lot of STEM jobs are bullshit. Intellectual grunt work. Most people are fixing other peoples bugs rather than building anything innovative. And a lot of the "innovation" in tech over the last years has been a rehash of ideas from the 60s.

Fixing bugs is useful work. A bias against boring maintenance toward innovation is how you end up with crumbling infrastructure.

Fixing bugs is useful, but if that's all someone does, that usually means the company's development process is bad. The developer of code should be ensuring it's bug-free, along with the rest of their team (i.e. code reviews, unit testing, system testing, etc.), not committing a bunch of crap to master and then expecting others to fix all their bugs.

> Most people are fixing other peoples bugs rather than building anything innovative.

And you need the former to support the latter. That's one of the points of the article.

The world population was 2.5 billion in 1950, which is usually the time people mean with post WW2.

I'd argue that we're not exactly beyond peak intellectual labor, we've just got 8+x as many workers vying for these jobs (for multiple reasons)

And the amount of productive thinking is depending on the fraction of the total sum that goes into zero sum games like advertising and finance. No, I'm not saying that those don't have any utility, they do, but that utility has a clear "good enough" limit and more brains trying to maximise their piece of the pie does not make the pie any bigger.

Advertising aside, finance definitely isn't zero-sum.

> The amount of thinking happening in the world depends on the amount of human brains available, and their level of education and knowledge

It seems to me that most of today's high impact "minds" come from relatively wealthy families compared to the world's average. They come from a small pool of candidates, compared to the vast world population as a whole that don't have the same opportunities. We basically throw away potential geniuses.

If we reduced poverty, corruption and unemployment, and made higher education available for everyone, we would increase that pool by billions of people.

We don't need more people in the world - what we need is to give those that are already here the opportunity to nurture their minds and have a place where they can apply them

Wealthy families mean you are able to take risks with your ideas, while the rest of us need to play it safer if we want to pay our rent.

Is there any possible correlation between high rents and high population?

Possible, but you'd still have to prove it.

After all, buildings and higher density is possible, transit is possible.

Where I live (sao paulo) there are many people on the streets. However, there is housing for all of them. That just lies empty. For speculation and seeking higher rents. For airbnb and skirting renters protection laws.

We don't have too much people, we have capital that is too accumulated at the top and that expects too high returns

Agree up to the last paragraph

In the genius funnel, the article argues to increase intake, you are arguing to enlarge the 'goes to school' step.

Porque no los dos?

The amount of people living in good conditions is also higher than it ever was. In fact the % of people living poverty world wide is decreasing while world population is increasing.

That depends a lot on how you define "good conditions".

My grandparents did not have television or computers, but they (and most people from their village) had a much bigger house and garden than I could ever afford and they were eating much better food than I can find anywhere in a city now, despite having nominally much lower revenues than I have today.

Some of their tastiest fruit cultivars might have completely disappeared, because I have never seen them again in any place, for many decades.

It is true that the percentage of people who are so poor that they fear not having food enough to survive and not having where to sleep has decreased, but the percentage of people who must be content to live in small boxes and be content with low-quality food has increased.

The problem of the space for houses is much less obvious in USA or Canada, which are huge in comparison with their populations, than in most other countries, which have much higher human densities.

> the percentage of people who must be content to live in small boxes and be content with low-quality food has increased.

Doubt it. Regular folks have access to foods like tropical fruits that would have been a complete luxury back then, even for rich people. Also diversity of cuisines; even rural towns have Thai and Indian food now.

Probably average home size is bigger now, too, and they are more comfortable. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true even in Europe and Asia.

This has nothing to do with reality other than the N=1 sample of your grandparents.

How can anyone believe this is beyond me. The entire line of thought is just so utterly clueless.

If you go back 50 years the average person worked a mindless factory job, never traveled very far, never went out to eat. Work your boring/mindless job, come home to your small house and drink yourself to sleep while watching some shitty sitcoms on TV. Or you could go to the bar on the way home from your mindless job. Take your pick.

> It is true that the percentage of people who are so poor that they fear not having food enough to survive and not having where to sleep has decreased, but the percentage of people who must be content to live in small boxes and be content with low-quality food has increased.

Assuming you're right, the utility of the former is much greater than the disutility of the latter.

Re: cultivars. Some have probably died out. Others have probably gotten better. Look at apples; my parents talk about how the only apples they had were red delicious and granny smith. Now we have insane diversity of delicious apples without even having to grow them ourselves.

I traveled through a town in California known for it's apple orchards. There, I ate a 'Hawkeye' apple, which was said to be an ancestor of the 'Red Delicious'.

The 'Hawkeye' isn't my new favorite, but was good enough to appreciate how much it's shameful descendent had dishonored the name of this otherwise respectable apple family.

The Red Delicious was made not for taste, but for durability: it has exceptionally long shelf life, so it's excellent for shipping to far-away places, including overseas, and it doesn't require refrigeration.

Most likely, the ancestor doesn't keep or ship that well.

There's a reason no one who actually likes apples buys Red Delicious these days; they buy one of the better varieties like Gala or Fuji or Honeycrisp or many others. Red Delicious still sell in huge quantities in the US, though, mainly to institutions like schools and hospitals. When the person selecting your meal cares more about cost than taste, you get Red Delicious.

Also, Americans throughout much of the 20th century had very poor culinary tastes. That only started changing in the 1980s, and got much better by the 2000s. So for a long time, Americans were perfectly happy to eat the nasty Red Delicious apples.

This Wikipedia article has some more detail on the history of the cultivar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Delicious

And you can still get Hawkeye. In fact, you can probably look up and find hundreds of heirloom apple types, pick any three at random, and go get them within a few days if they're in season.

Look at the third world for your examples. I do agree that living standards are going down in developed countries in many metrics.

The OP also claims that growth is possible indefinitely.

But somehow, we need more humans to to have critical resources necessary to execute some projects.

The contradiction is lost on the OP author.

Let's steelman for the author at this point. Suppose we are still in the exponential or at least linear phase of returns to scale for human productivity improvement and economic growth, with appreciable runway left on both factors. Does that remove the contradiction, and thus the author's claims are now better supported?

This is true only to some degree, there are always limits to growth. These limits are actually very far away, most of the trouble is caused by the funny rationing/commons depletion system we call capitalism.

The predicted 10-12 billion humans should have more than enough everything. We don't because capital and access are rationed.

We’re at 8 billion people. Obtain 3% annual population growth and continue for 20 years you’re already at 14 billion. 30 years you get to 19 billion. If those numbers don’t seem like they’re within the limits to growth as you see them, keep adding decades and soon you’ll reach a number that probably is. The point here being that the limits may be far away numerically, but at modest growth rates we will hit any conceivable one. We are going to have to adapt to stable or declining population rates at some point, and this seems like a particularly good time to do it.

This is such a weird take because every other system except capitalism did not produce enough resources to let there be 8 bn people, and capitalism did produce them and also made the people vastly richer than the 1 bn there were before.

We're (as in humanity) still trying 'domesticated capitalism' for example in china. There are alternatives to laissez-faire, the current (bad) state of affairs is part of a trend for laissez-faire starting in the 70s.

We do need innovation in tech, and in supply chains, and in products, and for that capitalism is wonderful

We do not need innovation in how to ignore labour laws (uber) renters protections (airbnb). We do not need lower marginal top tax rates, and accumulation in the 1%.

We also need innovation in how to stop runaway capitalist cycles (and, again, I am hoping western democracies will learn from china how to do that before it is too late)

By my reckoning, when 90% of online comments mention "capitalism" they are describing the extractive process of taking worker surplus in the Marxian sense, which rent-seeking effectively is, not the freedom to allocate capital to accomplish value-additive projects, processes, and products.

The prior has a _lot_ of bad outcomes. Check out Nestle's impact to the world.

The latter has a _lot_ of good outcomes, but it easily opens up to the former.

There is literally no contradiction there?

> we're no longer bound by labour intensive solutions.

You're committing the same kind of error as the Malthusians. They assume conditions, technology, and accessible resources are fixed. You assume that the labor to be done is fixed.

By your reasoning, the invention of the dishwasher should have led to a permanent increase of unemployment, putting all the dishwashers out of work. But that didn't happen. Instead, it created an industry, a supply chain, a whole market around the dishwasher. Labor-saving tech creates new forms of labor, but you won't notice that if you assume a fixed state of the world and focus only on the immediate effects of a technology.

"More ambitious projects need a certain critical mass of resources behind them. Ancient Egyptian civilization built a large irrigation system to make the best use of the Nile floodwaters for agriculture, a feat that would not have been possible to a small tribe or chiefdom."

Yes, a small tribe couldn't have enslaved large groups to form the majority of the labor base. Societal advances are easy to achieve if you usurp resources from a marginalized group and force them to work on your projects. I would hope that we have learned that's not the right model to pursue.

Whilst I don't agree with the article, you're ignoring that these epic machines you talk of are the product of a much larger population. These megamachines wouldn't exist, or at least not all the types of machines, if not for us having billions of people on the planet.

Australia lags behind other countries in certain technology, but not in mining technology. There's sufficient expertise in a population of a few million. (Of course, there's a disproportionate amount of mining engineering experts in Perth.)

Because they rely on billions of other people to do other things, so they can specialize in mining.

Australia in general, and my specific mining state in particular, over produces food - again with a small population, again with big industrial scale machines.

The thing about technology is it allows fewer people to achieve far more .. including build and maintain more technology per capita.

>> Australia in general, and my specific mining state in particular, over produces food - again with a small population, again with big industrial scale machines.

Great, and what about everything else on this world you need. Do you also build computers and network equipment to access hacker news? The problem with technology is that it requires specialized knowledge which in turn requires people who specialize in it. There is a good reason why small disconnected communities stay the way they are and do not advance.

The problem is really negative externality and pollution caused by production and consumption. That's really the core issue of our global economy and technological landscape, and probably the greatest constraint that limits us from expanding resource extraction.

Humanity is a civilization that lives on resource consumption of truly tiny amount of energy and materials compared to the whole that's available within this solar system.

There's a long narrow expensive isthmus between the gravity well of Earth and the rest of the solar system.

Colonies elsewhere are a fine idea if the goal is to expand the footprint of humans but there's limited prospect of that moving significant numbers off of the planet or improving the environmental balance here.

These are two almost orthogonal endeavours.

And how did you get to the point to be able produce do much ore? Where did the need, the ingenuity and the technology come from to enable you to this?

>>that don't require more people.

More people does not necessarily mean more laborers. It also means more consumers. Without more consumers we humans would not be incentivized to mine so much. Without the need to mine so much engineers would not have invented more efficient ways to mine. So on and so forth...

>Without more consumers

Eh, this isn't exactly correct. While yes, owning so many pairs of socks is of limited utility to me, in general individual greed is hard to sate.

So yea while another pair of pants won't do me any good, I'll take another house, another trip, another ... whatever. But this starts to shift the resource load to other places. Such as national parks getting flooded out with people. With actual property for things to be built on to become scare. Removal of the natural world to stick in more human development.

I think they're not specifically talking about human labor, though that is a factor. I think they're just acknowledging the fact that all ideas come out of human minds. The more minds, the more ideas, and ideas are almost always solutions to problems.

if you compare those two examples (from ancient egypt and yours) then you also have to count all those people developing, maintaining and providing services for the machinery you use.

That's correct.

It takes a village to raise a child, it takes a small city to support a mine, the food, the tool upkeep, etc.

And the per capita-hour including all the people involved tonnages involved have vastly increased.

It’s either labor or capital (to buy/dev those machines). Frankly, if it’s capital and we haven’t transitioned to something closer to socialism or even communism, it isn’t going to end very well for us workers.

History suggests that communism doesn’t end very well for workers, arguably even less well.

Oh, I don’t think it would work very well now. My point is when capital is so powerful that workers aren’t really needed anymore. Then something drastic has to happen, because at that point capitalism can’t push society forward anymore (given the incentives it works with).

intelligence is a lottery at birth, assuming the education system is good enough at identify talents of all kind. and with the world especially Asian countries better at this, I think we do need more human to maintain the current talents pool.

It is not.

There is a part of genetics, like most things, but if you look at past geniuses, there is a common pattern, wealthy enough families able to afford tutors.

Tutoring is what makes geniuses, not lottery.

No, it certainly does not. Obviously, a higher socioeconomic background means increased resources and dedicated attention to education which certainly helps, but genius, in the true sense of the word needs a good starting foundation, and that probably has a significant genetic component.

Nikola Tesla, Einstein, Ramanujan were all child prodigies without exceptional access to tutors and other educational resources.

If tutoring could produce geniuses (160 IQ) we would have a billion dollar industry around it instead of snake oil companies like Luminosity.

Einstein actually did have a tutor (Max Talmey). Any access to tutors at the time was exceptional, as the majority of families could not afford that.

Einstein was also raised in a family that can not be described as average.

His father had an interest in mathematics and founded 2 electrical engineering companies

His mother was well-educated and worked as a piano player. She made Albert begin violin lessons at the age of five.

It seems to me that Albert Einstein did not grow up under average conditions. His family had some financial issues, but was able to give him a good education.

> His father had an interest in mathematics and founded 2 electrical engineering companies

I am not saying that you are wrong, but this might not be evidence for a 'nurture' hypothesis as opposed to a 'nature' one.

The only reason that tutoring is not more widely used is because it has scaling issues.

You need one very experienced, patient and skilled tutor for each kid. The cost would be unbearable except for the wealthiest families.

And of course, while it will consistently improve the skills and mental abilities of the tutored kid, it won't produce a genius every time, there are many out-of-control factors, including genetics but also related to early life, bacteria and viruses infections can slow/stunt the growth of an immature body, and impact all its functions.

i don't agree with the genetic argument but with your other point.

producing geniuses is not a billion dollar industry because we don't yet even know how to teach to that. but that doesn't mean that we could not improve teaching and peoples potential massively.

china used to have a billion dollar tutoring industry (ok, i don't know if it was a billion, but china is huge so it's possible) until a change of laws shut it down.

but this chinese tutoring industry was not aimed at producing geniuses. instead it was aimed at exploiting parents, extracting their money without providing any real value except putting pressure on the children to perform.

that's why it was shut down.

It was aimed at improving performance on state mandated standardized tests. They were effective, but if everyone did them, the curve was just shifted and no one seemed to benefit in particular (but society is arguably better off if everyone is higher IQ).

that was what they were selling, but apart from the problem of everyone doing it, there were also many shady operations to outright scams that never even intended to provide the value they promised.

It seems fairly obvious that there is a genetic element to intelligence, otherwise animals would be as intelligent as humans.

yes, but this only goes as far as being able to explain the difference between humans and other animals. it doesn't at all explain the differences between different humans because other factors are so strong that so far we have not been able to isolate genetic differences as a factor in human intelligence. even twin studies have been flawed in this regard.

If we had to wager whether there was any genetic component to intelligence differences among humans, I think the safe wager is on “there is some” over “there is none”.

yes, but i'd also wager that it is completely drowned out by other factors. if genetics improve my intelligence by 1% and teaching can improve it by 10% then what's the point?

those genetics will only be a factor among those receiving no teaching at all, or those who receive the maximum teaching possible. but they will hardly factor in in the middle of the bell curve where every genetic advantage by one person can be outdone by another one putting in more effort. the difference then between you and me will be that your genetic advantage will allow you to reach the same result as me with less effort. there is practically no benefit for you. or the advantage is so small that we won't even notice most of the time. if at all.

any model that relies on genetic advantages as a factor only works if we assume that those naturally more intelligent automatically bubble to the top and are not held back by other factors, all which have the potential to nullify any advantages they may have had

I disagree with the last paragraph. If there are four factors that all combine to create an outcome, we don’t ignore factor 1 just because factors 2-4 can nullify any advantage.

My garden grows based on light, CO2, macro nutrients, and water. We don’t say “CO2 is not a factor in plant growth because deficits in water, nutrients, and light can prevent it from showing in overall outcome.”

but that depends on how large the factor actually is. if it were 10% or more, then sure. but the fact that the very existence of a genetic factor is put into question, suggests that the factor, if it exists, is so small that it really is negligible.

another reason why we can ignore a genetic factor is that we can not influence it. or, that trying to influence it carries serious ethical implications.

it is also to small to serve as a tool to predict future performance.

The existence of a genetic component is put into question by some, but by no means all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

producing geniuses is not a billion dollar industry

The concept of producing a specific kind of human being an industry or not is like something out of "A Brave New World".

exactly this.

the potential of humanity is largely underutilized. the reason we need geniuses now is because our current way of teaching is not enabling peoples potential as well as it could. it doesn't even take individual tutoring. better teaching methods such as montessori, project based learning, smaller groups (say a 10 to 1 ratio in class compared to the 50 to 1 ratio i see in china and other countries i have visited) would be a massive increase in the quality of education creating a potential way beyond what a doubling of the number of geniuses could ever achieve.

research is mixed about small class sizes (maybe 1 in 10 as you said, on 1 in 5, would be beneficial but there is very little difference between 1 in 20 and 1 in 50). Not a rebuttal, just adding some info

Lots of people get tutored without becoming geniuses, hence tutoring isn't enough to make geniuses. Also many geniuses didn't have tutoring, they need wealthy enough families to afford public school which used to be a high bar but today most people gets it even if you include poor countries.

> they need wealthy enough families to afford public school

Note that what the UK origin term “public schools” means is not the same as what that means in other countries, which can confuse these discussions in a global forum. (In the US, we’d call that “private school”.)

I could just as well argue that those families have better genetic material and that is why they are wealthy.

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