Comment by shittyanalogy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shittyanalogy | Hacker News Reader

Since this is an opinion piece, I'll give mine on the same topic:

We don't need more jobs or a re-imagining of the meaning of life, we need less people. We're pushing into the golden age of mechanization, automation and robotics and instead of being able to celebrate we have to wonder what everyone is going to do with themselves and invent assistant-inspector-inspector jobs. We're continuing to over fish, over build, over pollute, under service people at the doctors office, and under deliver on educational goals. We've just got too many people plain and simple if you ask me. Every major solution is aimed at trying to figure out how we're going to live together as a society of 10 Billion, IMHO we should be figuring out how to reduce the numbers and figuring out how to live together as much less.

I don't have a good answer and I don't think anyone on this planet has more of a right to live or have kids than anyone else. And this isn't some immigration rant. This planet has too many people on it.

People have been worrying about mass starvation due to overcopulation since the Victorian age (I believe it was a big motivation for the missionary movement).

That's truly interesting but food productions is really only one tiny part of the problem, and we also already kind of have mass starvation. I mean not in the developed world, but there are plenty of children that die either of plain outright starvation or of having extremely weak immune systems due to malnourishment. I'd imagine that the number of children that die every year from malnourishment in 2013 would be a pretty staggering figure in 1850.

China's one child policy comes to mind. You could approach this in the west without force by tying tax thresholds to number of children.

I don't like this idea for two reasons: first, tax incentives for having children help to make sure the children are taken care of - socio-economic status is negatively correlated with number of children, and lots of kids are born into big families that can't afford to take care of them properly. Giving these families additional money seems like enabling them, but the kid didn't do anything and deserves to have a reasonable standard of living.

Second, financial penalties for having children give the wealthy more freedom to reproduce. And couldn't tax penalties be considered a form of government force? Not that we don't already use incentives and penalties to shape behavior.

Education, access to birth control, and improving the standard of living of the poor all seem to result in lower birth rates with no force necessary.

Implying western countries produce too many children relative to the death rate. Overpopulation is far more prevalent in the underdeveloped countries. If their standard of living improves, with enhanced education (contraceptive) the populations are estimated to balance out to that of Western countries.

Western countries have to worry far more about immigration than birth rate control.

"We're continuing to over fish, over build, over pollute,"

ok...

"under service people at the doctors office, and under deliver on educational goals"

Hold on - these two do not fit with the previous three. Neither is about too many people but rather about not enough percentage of skilled doctors/teachers.

I disagree, I think it becomes massively harder to scale these services with the kind of population growth we're experiencing and I think that humans living in denser and denser cities leads to poorer living conditions in general across the income spectrum. Just because you feel better off than your neighbor doesn't mean you're not actually worse off than your parents.

Granted we have a longer life and health expectancy and demand more of our educational system than ever before. I just feel, and again this is all opinion related conjecture, that we've pushed past the point of diminishing returns in scaling these types of resources.

Unfortunately the answer for this is for every country in the world to go through the phases of economic development until they have a vibrant middle class. The only humane cure for overpopulation is economic wealth. Middle class people have fewer children.

Hans Rosling says the answer is to reduce child mortality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYpX4l2UeZg

"Year by year child mortality fell in almost all countries and as child mortality fell women chose to have fiewer and fiewer babies, and that enabled them to invest more time and resources in each child."

500,000,000? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones

Reply on news.ycombinator.com