Hacker News Reader

Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

"Have fewer children" implies that people are a burden, which can be true in a dysfunctional society, like perhaps China under Mao.

But in a well functioning system, more people get more things done and make society wealthier.

The old idea was that the planet can only produce enough food for a certain number of people. But it turned out that people produce the food, not the planet!

View on HN

Probably neither "larger n is always better, for any value of n" nor "smaller n is always better, for any value of n" adequately captures the nuance involved in assessing whether having more or fewer children will increase wealth.

It also turns out that producing food requires some amount of both planet and people.

There's only so much food people can grow on planet Earth, so it remains true, even if the number varies depending on the means available for producing that food. So yeah we can grow more food than people thought decades ago, but the Earth and the energy available to it, along with arable land are still finite.

Empirically, we now get more than 3x the yield per land area than 1960, and the trend is steadily rising (see graph link below).

Your argument is that it can't grow to infinity, which is probably true. But there is nothing indicting we're close to any hard boundaries.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/index-of-cereal-productio...

Haha, what a delightfully backwards way to look at things. This ranks closely with “humans are not part of the ecosystem”.

You should look into what carrying capacity means, and in particular how our access to abundant cheap oil enabled us to overclock our chip in a manner of speaking.

So most people believe it was a mistake. We were misled by some so-called experts at the time. Conspiracy theorists claim that many of those experts weren’t Han Chinese, since the one-child policy only applied to the Han population.

The policy last about 35 years and didn’t end till 2015. Even today there a limit on procreation as the cap was only increased to three children in 2021. At some point the CCP has to own its mistakes.

The problem isn’t that China instituted the policy (although its use of forced abortions to enforce was… problematic), it’s that its system of government prevented open discussion, reflection, and self-correction.

at least on this topic, i agree with you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com