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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

Besides feeding the economy (and by that, I mean buying consumerist stuff from large corps) and providing the army with cannon fodder, I still haven’t haven’t heard a lot of good arguments for having these babies.

Humanity would shrink (I think this is calculated to start after 2050 or so), but besides those two reasons, does that matter? Where is the foundation of the argument that we must have population growth to sustain? Or where is the research that shows if we halve the population, everything will be terrible?

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> I still haven’t haven’t heard a lot of good arguments for having these babies.

A larger population means bigger numbers on the everything that's on a normal distribution, like intelligence. That one genius in a 100 million? With 1B population, you only have 10 of them. With 8B population, there are 80. That's 8x more chances one of them does or finds something revolutionary, 8x chances that person is not perishing somewhere in a cobalt mine as a kid. It slashes times waiting for a genius to appear 8x.

A bigger population also enables extreme specialisation in very niche fields. It enables bigger recruitment pools for complex processes and manufacturers like, for example, ASML.

It's, in a short word, massive parallelism.

Now, a counter-argument to everything I said is looking at the demographics of geniuses, revolutionaries, specialists and noticing most of them were well-fed, well-educated and raised in stable, liberal societies (liberal as opposed to, say, taliban-like societies). So, in theory, we could get by with a smaller population, if it was a rich, western-like, population. In that case, the only constraint would become genetics; so an 100M population would have to wait a couple of generations for their genius, instead of a 8B pop potentially getting them all at once.

Seems like a balancing act... If all 8B people have western living standards, we'll boil the planet up even more quickly than at the current rate...

Well-fed, well-educated and safe doesn't necessary imply western living standards.

Not clear to me that Western living standards really imply Western resource usage.

Like: flying costs a lot in terms of resources, but is it more than 1% of the perceived living standards?

See China.

I always hear this from people who are unwilling to fix current problems. They always push it onto some future genius that is going to pop up and act as the second coming of Jesus. In reality the average person is already more intelligent both in terms of education and IQ than people from a hundred years ago. The difference is that you are no longer losing them to mining accidents. Meanwhile the growth strategy glorifies the mining accidents as something that can be compensated simply by having more people. It's ok if our "geniuses" die, because we have eight times more. There is a deeply misanthropic logic behind this since one is discounting vast amounts of the population.

The average person has a higher IQ, true, but the problems we face also require a higher IQ (and higher specialisation) than in the past.

It might sound misanthropic, but the average person is average. Nothing wrong with it, morally or otherwise, but they won't be doing revolutionary work in specialist fields, they will be raising families and be happy.

Like I said in my original comment, we can get by with a smaller population with western levels standard of living, and then only be constrained by genetics.

Chances are the Genius will never get to actually do anything. It’s not like we select for Geniuses in roles that have power

and that's exactly the thing with having a bigger population: more geniuses, more chances one of them actually fulfils their potential.

As opposed to optimizing the Genius efficiency by making structural changes.

It’s the most stupid of arguments for growth. Everyone in funnel optimization knows that.

Like I mentioned in my original comment (weird how many times I had to type this today), we can get by having a smaller population with western levels standard of living; there's a bit more detail on this in my last paragraph of my comment.

On the bright side, we're probably a couple of centuries away from being able to genetically engineer geniuses and avoid having to play the numbers game.

Genetic engineering might also be a way out of the reproductive Ponzi scheme. Grow ready-made adults in pods! No painful stupid 25-year investment period with uncertain payoff.

Your generation's genius is currently wasting his life on a 12 hour minimum wage job to barely pay the rent on his shitty old tiny flat. He will not have the brainspace and time left to invent hyperspace interplanetary travelling.

Fix the former first if you want the latter to happen.

I feel like my original comment fully addresses your point, but I will restate here in a shorter form for your convenience: 1) bigger population means more chances a potential genius is born in the right circumstances 2) we can have a smaller population if everyone lives at western standards (and then genetics becomes the bottleneck)

Psychopathy is also on a normal distribution... this "big numbers" argument is very weak. We all know what the masses like to do with the environment.

More people also mean a bigger, smarter pool for recruitment into mental health professions. Again, the key word is massive parallelism: more people working in specialised fields, at the same time. And there are A LOT of specialised fields nowadays.

An aging population that lives longer and longer + shrinking workforce means

- the pension system can't be sustained, but also

- more and more people need support of doctors, nurses, care homes, etc. but can't find it or it becomes more and more expensive (but see problem above regarding their pensions).

Historically children take care of their parents when they are old and in need; in the past century more and more of this has been delegated to society at large. In both cases though you need young people.

There has to be a system where pensions and elderly care can be sustained at replacement birth rates, doesn't there? Otherwise we're in real trouble.

It is also question of what level of care and investment to elderly is accepted. Many of us want to live as long as possible, but maybe there needs to be some qualitative cut off. Age and situation this happens varies but at some point society can't pay things like life support forever...

Sure, that is not this system though.

If you'd like to implement it you're welcome to go tell your largest voting bloc that your primary objective is to almost completely remove their entitlements and leave them to starve to death. Who knows, maybe after they are finished lynching you you might get elected.

As johngladtj says, there might be one, but it's not the current one.

And the articles states that "some estimates now put the number of babies each woman has below the global replacement rate of about 2.2. The U.S. long ago passed that level." - so even finding one that works at replacement birth rates could not be enough.

Because we're idiots and terrible at forward planning. Currently pensions and retirement ages are based on the idea that there will be some large cohort of people working to pay the pensions of the folks that are retired. In fact, governments are even borrowing against future pension contributions made by that cohort, so it's not even that the future cohort needs to pay for the current cohort, they need to cover it and some to make up for the lending. Realistically, this is never going to happen, and this is where fiscal policy starts to deviate from mathematical first principles.

In case there is some kind of reduction in the workforce, then we do not have a plan to care for our elderly. Already, young adults are finding it difficult to afford homes for themselves, even with a higher proportion of families with two incomes.

We would see an increase in the chasm between the rich and poor, as those able to own property would be able to both look after themselves and their families, and would be able to continue to grow their wealth by charging rent to those who are unable to afford to buy. This especially would be accentuated if population decline were gradual, as then the rich would be able to continue to snap up the homes that come onto the market and rent them out.

A short sharp halving of the population would likely leave a surplus of homes on the market, at affordable prices for everyone, and would perhaps even lead to a better quality of life for most. But that's not an organic process, and certainly leads to a worse quality of life for the unlucky half...

The change is a problem.

If you expect x plumbers to be needed in year y and x/2 not many years later (within the span of a plumber's working life), how many should choose to become plumbers in each year? How about buildings and other infrastructure with long lifetimes?

Rapid change makes those things difficult. Don't want random home owners to have to speculate on that, and for some of them to lose their shirts when the population is too low to find a buyer for their home.

How haven't these problems _always_ existed? What do they have to do with drop in overall population? If change is the problem, then both population growth and movement of populations are already problems and always have been.

They always exist. Sometimes they're a minor problem, the steepness of the expected change makes them a major problem in some areas.

But this kind of thing always exists. For example, logistics companies have problems hiring in some countries right now because young people don't see driving trucks as a viable career for forty years, but the logistics companies need drivers for the next ten years or more.

It doesn’t have to be growth vs reduction. It can be slower growth or let’s stay close to replacement rates?

Others have listed why this will be bad.

That's not the 1st time I see this thinking fallacy.

please talk to your grandparents about the topic and report back to us.

Grandparents who lived lot more poorly or had their siblings die as babies? Lot more babies survive and their living standards are much higher. Maybe that is reasonable trade-off...

My grandparents are dead, but I doubt they would have much to say about it; they had kids (in the 1940s) because their parents would not accept anything less; religion + marriage + kids. They often told me and my parents they didn't want kids and they were supposed to have as many as possible but they only had one and promised to have more but never did.

But what great insights would they come up with pray tell? In those days (it was WOII) it was to work the land (economy), cannon fodder and pension plan (have them take care of you). What else?

If it wasn't for your grandparents you wouldn't be here.

That's what is else, your very existence!

I'm sure you would agree, your life has value and meaning beyond a utilitarian or disposable cog in a wheel.

By extension therefore all lives are equally valuable and necessary.

> Your life has value

It does? Measured by what? That's what I say; I'm a consumer, but beyond that, how am I valuable? How are you?

> By extension all lives are equally valuable and necessary.

You are a vegan? Are plants lives lives?

Also, putting too much pressure on the planet with over population makes it the opposite of valuable.

By any measurement you care to make yourself. You value your own life.

> You value your own life.

We are an accidental blib in a cold vast cosmos; nothing and no-one would think of us or remember us if the earth explodes today (or if someone hits the nuke button). I 'value' my life in so far that I am not in pain and I was born in the right location with the right interests (math + computing) to do whatever I want to sit it out until I die.

How is any of it a reason to make more babies though or a sign we have a shortage just because we make less than we need to create a population equilibrium or growth?

"You, an existing person, find you prefer to stay alive" is not an argument for "more babies are always better". If the reason that there are fewer babies is that potential parents don't want them, then it's possible that there are exactly the right amount of babies, and the ensuing problems should be solved by other means than pressuring these unenthused couples to reproduce.

I think that creating more happy people is better, not more people per se.

More people generally is better.

I do some fantasy world-building in the little free time I have. The setting is diesel-punk/atom-punk, so 1950s era. A little bit of disco-punk mixed in too. Essentially, modern post-war USA.

So, when I try to model a city, or a country in this era, you gotta go after the data. Because we actually have it for this setting.

Medieval data is just horrible in comparison. The high fantasy settings will get a little bit of data on city dynamics and some on 'nation' level data and the like. But most of the modeling is starting from pretty much guessing with wide errorbars.

But in the atom-punk setting I have, there is just mountains of data from all over the world. It makes modeling really easy and you can get really fine-grained about it (much to the detriment of story-telling, I get lost in those tables and charts, happily so).

One thing that really stands out in trying to model this data is that population is literally everything.

How grimy a city is, how tall the skyscrapers are, the walking speed of people in the city, the talking speed of bank tellers, the number of patents per capita, the monthly charge for sewer access, tonnage of warships, the length of subway track and it's heights, etc. Pretty much every metric will correlate best with the population of the area. It's not just cities, it's states and countries and smaller towns too. Really anything about the setting and world-building is best modeled by looking at the population first and then working from there.

To be clear here, not the population density. The only metric I could find in my notes that better correlated with population-density was the number of subway stops on a line. I'm sure there are other examples, too.

But, in the years that I've been doing this, the number one thing that seems to pop out to me is: Raw population is everything.

Now, I'm mostly interested in themes and settings and the like. But most of the data is coming from the motivation of trying to increase the quality of life of people. So I get to stare at that a lot and make graphs.

And I can say from my eyeballing of all this data over the last few years: More people = better.

Most of the metrics we use to quantify if things are 'good' or 'bad' will correlate with more people = better. It's not, by any means, a 1-1 thing. This is human population stuff, If you see a r2 value of, like, 0.6, that's pretty darn good. There is a lot of noise here and the stats that are taken have just huge issues with them.

I'm not going to be able to really prove this, I'm just mucking around with a setting and world-building. But from the years that I have been staring at my poorly organized notes and the various governmental and NGO data tables, the underlying message is that things get better with more people around.

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