Hacker News Reader

Comment by neaden | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done. There were so many visions of the future based on overpopulation and the problems it would bring. Now we've switched to the opposite side, I never even got to enjoy the apparently brief moment when things were exactly right.

I say all this not to say that this article and all the worries about demographic decline must be fake/overstated, but I don't like the certainty that we just switched our worries from one extreme to the opposite.

View on HN

The thing is, the people who were saying that were wrong even at the time. Fertility was already declining in the late 60s when The Population Bomb was released, but population was still increasing from the earlier boom, in the same way your car will continue coasting up the hill for a little while even after you release the accelerator. People were freaking out about absolute numbers, instead of extrapolating trends for the data they already had, because they were being actively misled by folks like Ehrlich.

So this is less "we believed one wrong thing, are we now believing a second wrong thing?" than "we believed one wrong thing, and corrected it to what we should have known all along".

> I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done.

It is still true, but it was inaccurately presented as overpopulation, rather than excess resource consumption and entropy generation.

The mass starvation and death is not going to be a sudden nuclear bomb type event, it will be gradual decreases in quality of life due to changing environmental variables leading to changing political climates and eventually physical conflicts.

One is bad for the the earth, the other is bad for the economy.

Bad for our present (grotesque?) ecology - not bad for the Earth, nor bad for her resident life.

(If humanity decimated itself via overpopulation, Earth & her life - likely even class Mammalia - would be rather better for it, by any metric besides net intelligence.)

>I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation.

Moral: Journalists are stupid and ignorant, and you should always keep in mind Gell-Mann amnesia, and go to the source papers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com