Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans
maartenboudry.be
maartenboudry.be
Selfish reasons to want more humans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497686 - Feb 2024 (214 comments)
My people are living sparsely (but overurbanized) and have not enough children.
Totally not obliged to welcome them in, though with modern political world structure will have no choice. We basically invite the invasion of sea people, II.
People often think that HN insists on using the original title but that's only half of the rule: ""Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - note that word 'unless'.
Croatia has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people to other EU countries that offer higher salaries, or to Zagreb if they can't find a job in Denmark or Germany.
Japan has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people from smaller cities and towns to Tokyo.
The end result is that small towns are, quite literally, dying. Small cities are emptying out. Rural regions are beginning to resemble retirement estates, complete with hobby farms.
The "solution" is immigration -- if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese, or a Lebanese man will become accepted as Croatian. I don't think that's going to happen in either place. In Croatia, I know a bunch of Chicagoans of Croatian descent who moved "back to the homeland." Nobody in Croatia accepts them as "real Croatians." They're going to be part of some expat community for life. It's going to be even worse with culturally distinct foreigners. And it's going to lead to trouble. If there's an elegant way to manage this, I'm not aware of it.
This is never going to happen going from the firsthand accounts I have heard from non-ethnically Japanese people who are by all accounts Japanese. As in born and raised in Japan, Japanese as first language, Japanese culture, norms etc. Japanese society is simply too racist or xenophobic at its core. If you don’t look ethnically Japanese you’ll never be accepted as Japanese. And that’s even if you are white and even if your partly ethnically Japanese. If you have dark skin you at in for an even tougher time, and any hint of it going back several generations will label you as “the outsider”.
It might not seem like it from the outside because the racism isn’t as outspoken in media as in the US, but imagine spending your entire childhood living with everyone you ever come across acting like you don’t belong to the only country and nationality you have ever known simply because your fathers father was Scottish, it’s rough and a hell on its own.
The most famous example is probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Akiyama
This guy is a fourth-generation Korean-Japanese athlete, but was still never considered Japanese by the Japanese fanbase, he was frequently booed and heckled, and he went on to compete under the S.Korean flag. And this guy's father and grandfather were born in Japan, and he looks ethnically indistinguishable from the Japanese.
It's pure fantasy that second-generation Indonesians or Filipinos are going to integrate into Japanese society. It's going to be extremely painful, if it's attempted.
Visit Japan now and there are more and more Americans, Australian, Indian and Chinese working, buying property and setting up businesses there.
I'm not really celebrating any of this, I just don't see how an old and tired population can continue to put so much energy into xenophobia when literally one of the only things between them and China are the US military having a base on Okinawa.
I still think China will have a much larger army and navy than Japan. They have 10x the population and probably a similar decline in their populating expected.
Typically, first generation immigrants rarely fully assimilate (unless immigrating very young of course), it's their kids that will.
Obviously people are not fungible otherwise every country would look the same. If Croatians or Japanese want to preserve their culture, they will have to make their own babies, there is no way around it.
My loose understanding is that modern humanity is a pyramid scheme where we always need more young workers to support fewer retirees - not enough people.
Meanwhile we're consuming resources faster than they can be replenished [1] - too many people.
Without data to back this up, I suspect India, China and Africa are going to start consuming more resources (behaving more like the US) faster than the US (and the rest of the west) is going to cut back consumption, even accounting for shrinking birthrates.
So on balance, I'm still more worried about the 'too many people' case.
[1] https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/newsroom/country-over...
As a parent in the USA I also don’t buy the argument that it is all education and birth control driving these changes. Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children. And for others climate anxiety makes them question the future.
If we don't turn tide on our fight against climate change dramatically and like, yesterday, there is absolutely no chance my kids will be thinking about having kids. The world will just be a wreck by that point.
Want to fix the birth rate? Make people economically and physically more secure.
I can't speak for your friends. But I think that when someone says "can't afford" what they really mean is "I'd rather spend that money on something else".
Some people literally can't afford children. But those in the middle class (or better) in the US certainly can. It would just take money away from other parts of their lifestyle: the home the live in; the car they drive; ability to vacation; newest phone model, etc.
Generally, the more money you make in the US, the fewer kids you have. So, for most, it's hard to argue that they can't "afford" children. They can't afford children while maintaining their same lifestyle. And that will generally always be true (except for the truly rich).
No, what many of us mean is that "We can't afford to give a child the kind of support and resources and opportunities that a responsible parent knows it is their job to provide."
Many of us grew up poor, and saw people around us who didn't make it out. Many of them are still poor bordering on destitute, some are in prison, a couple I know are dead. Until I can *reasonably guarantee* that I'm not putting my kid in that position, I'm not going to have a kid.
that's a lot of subjective terminology delivered as absolute truth. If I disagree with you on the amount of resources, let's say I think it's 10% of what you think, does that make me an irresponsible parent? If I double the resource expenditure for marginal improvement, does that make me more responsible?
Your argument is simply not clearly defined. A lot of people may feel that way, I'd argue if it's not clearly defined they're probably wrong. The kind of support and resources a child needs are nutritious food, decent clothing and a mold and leak free dwelling. Those are the only things that cost money. Then, you have to teach them things and make them play a lot. Don't abuse them. All of those are free, unless you treat your life like a corporation that needs to maximize monetary return, then you'll consider the opportunity cost to talking to your kids. I'd say if that's how you approach it you'll damage your kids no matter how much money you throw at them.
I have kids, they have good clothes, they eat nutritious food, definitely above average on the nutrition front, they live in a dry, clean, comfortable dwelling with me, and they keep themselves entertained. I'd say in total their expenses cost me less than 500 bucks a month. They don't live in a dysfunctional environment, they learn faster than their peers, they are in good health, they're free to pursue their interests and hone their talents and they are well entertained. Kids aren't that expensive. You grew up poor, I grew up poor. My problem wasn't resources, it was the priorities of my parents, and when I look at the world, in almost every circumstance I see the same thing. You'd have to go to Somalia to find real prominent examples of kids being fucked over by lack of resources, in almost every other case it's the priorities of parents.
Half the people in this thread make six figures a year, they can't afford to care for their family on a single income? What kind of lifestyle are they living? I make less than them, but I also work a lot less, and I do just fine.
This is a hell of a view, and seems to me like you're just assuming your family's circumstances are the norm. My single-parent mother always prioritized us first. We still had days where we went to sleep hungry.
However, if parents have a certain lifestyle they want to make possible for their children like: paying for daycare/aftercare so your spouse can keep their career, helping pay for college, having sufficient retirement to not burden them, etc the costs are clearly becoming untenable for middle class families.
I don't know if it is "rational" (for some sense of that word): kids will excel if they are, simply, loved. Sure, going to great schools is nice. But having a supportive home is way more important than those expensive things.
But I went to subsidized Catholic schools through junior high. Then a public high school. Then a "state" university -- where we had "in-state" tuition that was reasonable.
My dad was an auto worker. My mom was a nurse that ended up with a career in administration as I got older. (He was also an alcoholic and may parents divorced -- but that's a longer story.)
We were fine. I did just fine.
That said, I think most people want better for their children; certainly my blue-collar parents cajoled me via all their means to go to school so that I wouldn't be forced into the jobs those with a poor education must subsist on. I will say that I just don't have it in me to put a child through what I was put through; the pressure was more than I was really able to withstand, but fundamentally I agree with their reasoning, especially as someone with some physical disability, careers that require a lot of physicality are closed to me. That said, it's not a cycle I have any desire to perpetuate.
Actually, I guess that is true. I grew up in a blue collar area with pretty bad (or maybe just "average") schools. So I do (erroneously) relate public schools with being bad :)
I certainly would want more for my kids if I had them. But I (and most people) do have more than my parents did.
Are you a baby boomer? Because this is not true for my generation, the millennials[0]
I mostly think generational "conflict" is foolish (I mean, I get to inherit from the wealthiest generation in the history of the world, so it's not all bad I guess?), but it is worth considering that people who have come of age and lived through different periods of history will be shaped differently and have different views of the world. If those views lead them to believe that having children is not desirable, than so it is; I don't know that there's really much to be done in the end anyway.
I'll hazard a guess that you're Gen X based on our brief conversation here, which I believe was actually the first US generation to see themselves worse off on their parents than average, but I think the difference is almost negligible? Certainly it's bit of an in-between generation, squeezed by the bulges of the Boomers and their echo generation, the Millennials, and I'm honestly not too up on the dynamics there.
[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-net-worth-versus...
I know that some charts show that the newer generations might not be doing as well as previous. And maybe I'm too optimistic. But I think it is hard to argue that -- even if our "wealth" is lower on some chart -- our world is much better. The web didn't even exist when I was a kid. Medical tech continues to advance. Pollution (of the non-CO2 kind) is down. Crime is (generally) down -- though it does fluctuate. We're not dying in wars. And so on.
Plus our lives are different enough now (marry later, etc) that it isn't easy to compare 1:1. Houses are bigger and have more bathrooms. We have way more entertainment at our disposal. We tend to work in offices rather than manual labor. And so on.
Finally, as you said, Millenials will be the ones inheriting all that Boomer wealth.
So I'm pretty sure at the end of the day, when you add it all up, the newer generations are continuing to continually have better lives than those before them. (But I can't prove it, so feel free to ignore me :)
The web didn’t exist, but then neither did social media, which apparently is driving record teenage depression and anxiety (and I’d guess it isn’t limited to teenagers either). You could actually disconnect from your work since you didn’t have PagerDuty ever ready to call you in. I loved the web of the 90’s to mid 00’s as well, but what we have today is not that.
People don’t just marry later, they marry less (and as we’ve noted, have fewer children). You can choose to see this how you wish, but generally the pro-natalists see it as a bad thing; another sign of increased social fragmentation.
Houses are bigger yes, but that means less affordable; homelessness is rising.
The real kicker for me though is the falling life expectancy in the US. It’s literally been attributed to “deaths of despair”; drug overdoses, suicide, and other misadventure. That’s despite the advances in medicine.
Cancer rates are increasing (I literally found out yesterday that my sister has a growth that may be cancerous; she’s got a biopsy scheduled, and a woman who I dated died of cancer before she turned 40). Reasons are unclear but record rates of obesity can’t help. On that one at least we may have turned the corner with some really revolutionary drugs that are quite expensive now but I do believe will come down in price.
I don’t really want to do the pollution/CO2 thing because I’ve had enough already. Suffice it to say it’s hard for me to be an optimist.
I think the drug issue is complex. Too complex to talk about. I'm lucky that I don't have whatever my dad had.
FWIW, I suspect cancer "rates" are going up due to detection. I think the rate of dying by cancer is going down (https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/facts-and-...)
We'll survive climate change. We're installing solar and wind power at a crazy rate (and the rate continues to increase): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/12/climate/clean...
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/05/cancer-cases...
So basically cancer said, “screw the millennials in particular”? It’s actually a bit darkly comedic.
If it is paid for by others, will they really value it? A lot of children just don't value what is handed to them.
And houses today are also probably a lot bigger than they need to be; often justified as a requirement for families. I don't think it's really necessary, but I seem to be an outlier with my 950 square foot house.
I imagine you've made more pragmatic choices, but I think there is also an element of luck; a lot of people get bankrupted by medical needs, and each kid is a reverse lottery ticket there. Speaking as someone who was once a kid with a lot of medical needs that didn't always get addressed, I can tell you that that does happen sometimes. And I needed to go to school; with my medical issues, the trades or military or whatever was never an option, so someone had to pay for that.
I guess all I can say is "shit's tough"; sometimes you get lucky, but I never seem to.
4 kids, typical tech salary ladder career / upper middle class lifestyle, my marginal costs are maaaaybe another $40k year in total ... and I get about a $25k tax break for having them.
Here is the cost of living by state: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/states-with-lowes...
Some interesting states are West Virginia.
Cost of living is hard to calculate and I don’t know the best source. This one might be better: https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/budget-map/
Idk if the fertility rate is factored into the cost of living calculator … if it is then I guess the measure isn’t relevant.
To see the nature of your fallacy, just look out at your universities and wonder how they will operate, as effectively as they have so far, with half the staff. And then, that staff halves again in 10 years.
Doing this, honestly, do you still have faith that the deleterious effect of humanity upon itself will be replenished with new perspectives, new generations, new ideas?
We humans are instinctively cannibals. We don't eat each other literally any more, but spiritually and culturally. The moment there is less of that human culture to consume, the closer we get to actually reverting to the physical manifestation of it ..
So in reality we would be fine, if we focus on doing the job not keeping the job.
If we assume that distribution of professions scales linearly with population size, a 2x increase in population means there will be twice as many researchers and inventors that can dedicate their life to finding new solutions.
I would assume that the scaling is not linear. Do we need twice the workers in agriculture to feed twice as many people? With our modern agriculture technology that seems unlikely to me.
One could argue that this is counter-balanced by diminishing returns, as in: 2x the amount of researchers won't have 2x the output.
But it's hard for me to see how "more people = more progress" is false.
There are too many variables here and we the typescript and django developers with fancy command prompts better stay quiet.
This can be easily and summarily dismissed if you know anything about minimum population numbers. Humans will never, through simple declining birth rates, reach the low-or-sub-1000s numbers that would result in there being too few humans to maintain genetic diversity.
https://www.livescience.com/minimum-people-to-survive-apocal...
> how many people would it take to keep our species going? The short answer is, it depends.
> "With populations in the low hundreds, you can probably survive for many centuries. And many small populations of that kind have survived for centuries and perhaps millennia," Cameron Smith, an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University in Oregon, told Live Science.
What the article is really just arguing is that scientific advancement relies on larger populations, which, cool story bro. Having more kids in economically or ecologically untenable situations just to keep new tech being sold, is not a serious argument that people who are choosing not to have kids are going to be receptive to.
It's more plausible to assume our population peaks, as predicted, then falls, and then levels out and stabilises | oscillates.
It'd be odd for it to peak and then plummet to zero from 10 or 11 billion.
Population dynamics are not very insightful. We see villages which had population for three millenia deserted, with nobody wishing to live in that empty place and grow their cattle or whatnot.
In your opinion, sure.
For most that's just a fanciful outlier possibility.
The economic issues are only projected to get worse. There are no known mechanisms for fertility to rebound.
Yet you assume with certainty that the trend will reverse. Great to be you.
Correct. This is seen in all manner of real world dynamic systems with constraint pressures. "Stabilize" in this context includes "bounces up and down between a few too many and a few too little".
Now you're getting it.
> There are no known mechanisms for fertility to rebound.
Now you're being silly and all doom and gloom.
> Yet you assume with certainty that the trend will reverse.
Predict with high probability based on looking at lots of dynamic systems, yep.
> Great to be you.
This is hardly an esoteric or unusual viewpoint, perhaps you might look at cheering up and doing away with the OMG we have to breed w/out limit or die!!
Seems a tad black or white for the much richer more complex world we live in.
We haven't seen any population rebounds yet. Not even close.
The solar system is still spinning, perhaps you might widen your outlook and quantify.
The guide from Applied Mathematics is the only "numbers" that matter long term are -1, 0, 1, sin, and infinity. Systems either dwindle, explode, stabilise, invert, or oscillate ... and everything around us in the universe is part of some system or another.
> We haven't seen any population rebounds yet.
One example (in humans)
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep04541
Another example of a type of constriction with evidence that this likely occured in human population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck
Many many examples in nature (eg: cyclic boom | bust of kangaroo populations).
Have you considered looking about before uttering readily falsifiable platitudes?
Is that really the case? Isn't it more a matter of experience that some countries or even continents show impressive population growth and at the same time are pretty resistant to progress? Isn't it rather the case that even in the so-called developed countries only a small part of the population is responsible for technological progress? And do the exceptional geniuses (such as Einstein), to whom we owe a considerable part of progress, really come from areas with larger populations?
A less biased objective is to maximize the expected value of the number of all humans that will ever exist from now onwards. Then you have to start thinking about things like global warming which will cause destabilizations (e.g. large scale climate refugees fleeing the equator in the year 2060 and the rise of authoritarianism in the global north as a reaction) which causes future population decline which is self-sabotaging of the objective of increasing the number of humans.
I think the real problem here is really just global warming. If we can fix that, we should be able to add many more billions of people, with all the associated upsides and without the biggest downside.
Predicting birth rate for 2060 from today might be roughly equivalent to someone in 1850 trying to extrapolate birth rate to 1950. They would have been completely wrong because there was no way they could predict the level of development.
Even ignoring that, shouldn't we expect birth rate to be autocorrelated, as the impact of having children, and therefore people's decisions to do so, would depend on the population count itself?
Even if the cap is true (and it's all theory at this point), I think the words "too few humans" does not mean what they think it means.
Some scientific / technological advance takes X human-years to achieve. Low-hanging fruit like Newton's laws or the printing press took a few human years. Nuclear fusion or landing a rover on Mars, takes many more.
Note this is a drastic simplified view of how science progresses in real life.
Large population: yes, advances can be quicker. But it still takes time to run experiments, have discoveries filter down in scientific community, and new tech to get built, tested & deployed at scale. In the meanwhile, people will live (and thus, consume resources) like they're used to.
Small population: roughly same # of human-years required to achieve a similar state of science & technology. But with population consuming resources at a lower rate, there's more time for new tech to be applied.
This reminds me of the behaviour of an electronic amplifier circuit: with fast-enough responding circuit (or slow-enough changing input), output signal closely tracks the input (the "small population" case).
With too-slow responding circuit (too long delay, damping not appropriate etc), output does NOT track input well and makes wild swings: over- and undershoot (the "large population" case).
Humanity's case looks much like the latter.
So: yes, I understand author's argument. But all in all, I doubt the "large population" is a net benefit long-term. Aren't we seeing various types of planet-wide over- and undershoot right now?
He pointed out the huge host of health problems that came with agriculture: hard labor; poor quality food; diseases from living densely.
Life expectancy dropped from the adoption of agriculture until well into the industrial revolution, with the adoption of public health.
based on what data exactly?
This is as expected, because they had switched from a diet where the main sources of proteins and fat were of animal origin to one where the main sources of proteins and fat were plant seeds.
They did not have our modern knowledge about essential nutrients, so at least in the beginning they had not been able to choose a balanced diet.
It appears that they have eventually accumulated enough experience to improve their food habits (after some centuries). Since the beginnings of agriculture, the cereals have always been the cheapest source of food, but in time it has been learned that they are not enough so they have been then combined with legumes (e.g. lentils, peas and faba beans) and with oily seeds rich in essential fatty acids (e.g. flax seeds).
I think it confuses causation and correlation by claiming that having more people, faster population growth, leads to finding solutions to major problems humanity deals with faster. I don’t buy that. In fact, I’d say our inventiveness has been the _cause_ of both population decline and solving the major issues the article mentions (like progressing agriculture to use less resources)
I also think it takes a too anthropocentric stance. In the beginning of the article it claims that population decline is bad for the planet, but surely humanity going extinct does not have a net negative effect on the planet. As many climate change critics are prone to point out, nature will do what it wants despite the influence of humans and nature will adapt with or without us.
But if you are someone terrified about the future and one of your pain points is overpopulation, the argument seems to make the case that populations are likely to begin falling at some point. (Granted I didn't click through to any of the cited links, so I am basically taking their word for it./pedant)
The author simply assumes we still have much to do there so the argument heavily hinges on that assumption.
The author makes no effort to counter this with the innate ease on Earth by simply being less people around? Surely, this factor may or may not be even more powerful than optimizing agriculture further than where we already are in a very advanced society.
Or did I miss something? If I didn't, this article is biased.
Besides, isn't there a risk that research made us more harmful for Earth? He points to reduced agricultural footprints but the cost for this has been monocultures that damage Earth and require use of antibiotics which damage Earth (humans included).
So I don't think more research innately lends to a healthier planet either.
- climate change
- wealth inequality
- declining birthrates.
The problems are interlinked, and solving the first two would go a long way to dealing with the last.
How about an even more basic set of premises:
Do you believe that greater specialization leads to increased productivity?
Is there a correlation between specialization and the size of the labor pool?
Why is it that we develop software products and buy bread from bakeries? Why not own tractor, maintain a tractor, apply fertilizer, till acreage, sow seeds, irrigate, manage pests, harvest, mill the resulting wheat, knead the dough and bake the bread ourselves?
Better yet, just build a tractor at home from iron ore.
As a software developer, I have stopped buying bread from bakeries many years ago, because I no longer like the bread made by modern industrial methods.
Now I make every morning a bread for myself, kneading the dough and baking it (in a microwave oven, where baking is much faster and more reproducible than in a traditional oven).
I would like to also mill the wheat seeds into flour, but I do not have a suitable electric mill. Nevertheless, I mill other plant seeds that I use in much smaller quantities, e.g. poppy seeds, from which I bake a sponge cake.
Anything that you can do yourself at home independently of others will always provide better results than anything that you can purchase.
I agree that there is a correlation between specialization and the size of the labor pool, but even in a small country with a few million humans the size of the labor pool is enough to cover all specialities.
The reasons why various industries are now missing from most small countries (even if they frequently have existed there earlier) have nothing to do with the size of their labor pool. An explanation of those reasons would need a much ampler space.
If I compare my standard of living with that of my grandfather before WWII, there are no real improvements, except that now I am able to do myself a lot of work that he did not do, but my grandmother did for him.
Because now I cook everything with a microwave oven, I can spend very little time with cooking in comparison with my grandmother. The same by using a programmable washing machine for clothes and a vacuum cleaner instead of brooms.
So the progress in living standard is only that I no longer need an unemployed spouse or a servant to do the housework, which is good, because unlike my grandfather I could not afford to support adequately a second person from my salary.
It does have good arguments, but I think the reasoning take in account only a part of the problem, which lead to a wrong conclusion.
From my understanding, the statement is: Overpopulation is not a problem, it's the solution, because statistically we have more smart young people that improve and optimize resources available through discovery, reducing its impact on the environment (climate included).
It throw some arguments and datas:
- If we’d gone on as 1950[s] organic farmers, we’d have needed 82 percent of the world’s land area for cultivation, as opposed to the 38 percent that we farm at the moment.”
- resources are becoming more abundant and cheaper as the world population grows
- Especially since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been drastically shrinking their cropland use per capita, and there is no reason to believe this progress can’t continue.
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On this later arguments, it falacious as cropland increased A LOT since industrial revolution.https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-over-the-long-te...
Also, from the same source, it seems that optimization of land is not moving a lot since a decade or two.
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But then, to make all of this viable, because the author know about climate change, he make a very brave, optimistic at best irrealistic at worse, asumption:
- With clean energy technologies, we can completely decouple material well-being from CO2 emissions, for the first time in history.
This single assumption make its whole arguments vanish. It's the only argument that is not scientific, yet so important in its theory.
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And never ever he is talking about the environmental debt that allowed this productivity progress, that don't show up in the graphics he use. It only talks about short terms, not long term. Only about science, not about economy. Economy that is really linked to productivity and consumption, and debt. It avoid to talk about tipping point where things fall apart. It avoid the role of oil and gas in the productivity.
Author should read the story of the [hen that laid the golden eggs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hen_That_Laid_the_Golden_E...): the production methods are killing the chicken, soon we'll not have golden eggs anymore.
"With novel technologies like precision fermentation and vertical farming, we could further shrink our “foodprint” by at least three quarters, thus freeing up more space for nature to flourish."
That is just silly speculation. For example, vertical farming may just be a vehicle for impact investors in silicon valley to diversity their portfolio into the new hot mega trend of saving the planet.
Its hard to justify a high-tech intensive verticle potato farm as net effective than just having half the mouths to feed from a traditional potato field.
Everybody is more or less like that, and here is where the issue roots.
Right now, some influential cultures, but not all of them, feel existentially endangered.
Selfish reasons to want more humans (rootsofprogress.org)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497686
119 points by pr337h4m 6 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 215 comments
this is yet another variation on the same arguments from yet another roots of progress writer:
Published first in Quillette. Many thanks to all my Roots of Progress fellows for their inspiration and feedback, in particular ...https://www.statista.com/statistics/1067138/population-unite...
The entire premise of the article (as it seems to me) is to not worry about climate change and limited resources because adding more people will result in solutions to those problems. Unfortunately, there is no evidence given -- just intellectual babble.
The fact that food production has increased enough to allow most of us to survive so far does not imply that an increasing population can be indefinitely supported.
The human world survived just fine when there was 1% of the current population.
The whole idea that we "can't afford to take care of so many old people" is premised on the assumption that Elon and Bozo need 2/3 of the world's economic output, and the other 1/3 should be spent bombing each other.
The idea that the consumption/person is declining is also bullshit. As 3rd world countries see how 1st world populations are living, they also want these opulent lifestyles.
The physical world (you know, the one that "might be a simulation" and is ignored in favor of twerk tic and fortnight) cannot support the world's 3rd world residents going through the same consumption bender that the 1st world has gone through in the last 50-100 years.
We need to stop breeding people, just like we need to stop breeding dogs and cows...
In 100 years when the population is back below 1 billion, then we can worry about under-population...
We're in a world where low productivity jobs are rapidly being replaced by robots, operated by the society's richest. These aren't different species, of course, but the effect is the same. The newly-low-productivity jobs do not provide enough to afford offspring in the new reality, and only the fewer, elite humans can afford them. They will breed smart, well educated and endowed, if spoilt and brattish offspring, who will, perhaps, continue to thrive.
It sounds brutal and Darwinistic, but at the same time we're angsting about what humans will do post-AI. Well, perhaps the answer is, they won't be born.