Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

https://maartenboudry.be/2023/11/forget-about-overpopulation-soon-there-will-be-too-few-humans.html

by lawrencechen • 2 years ago

48 129 2 years ago

Zetobal4• 2 years ago

Ok I have to ask but why is HN flooded with pseudo scientific climate change/ population control far right bullshit today?

DandyDev2• 2 years ago

You clearly didn’t even look at the article, because it’s not at all about climate change

Zetobal4• 2 years ago

Yeah, maybe not all of the article but it still is. Pro life ass propaganda without scientific merit.

isthatafact• 2 years ago

I think it is.

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.

sitkack2• 2 years ago

It is a reskin of Quillette.

hiddencost• 2 years ago

I had a long conversation with an anthropologist so studied the emergence of agriculture, who argued that it wasn't invented but instead adopted by necessity.

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.

ekianjo• 2 years ago

Life expectancy dropped from the adoption of agriculture

based on what data exactly?

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

I do not remember now links, but the study of the human remains from the early Neolithic societies has shown that they had become much smaller and much sicker than their ancestors.

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).

Calavar• 2 years ago

So what were the necessities that prompted the adoption of agriculture?

monkeydreams• 2 years ago

10 half-starving farmers could beat 1 fat hunter gatherer in a fight.

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

The disappearance of the big animals that could sustain hunting.

philips4• 2 years ago

The article is heavy on criticism of population decline and light on an argument of why it is so bad.

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.

inference-lord2• 2 years ago

The climate change anxiety is super real just most politicians are too old and out of touch to understand it.

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.

ericmcer• 2 years ago

What are you picturing climate change looks like in +50 years when you say your kids/grandkids will have horrific lives because of it? Are they wandering a dystopian hellscape in search of water?

timmg6• 2 years ago

Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children.

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).

ang_cire4• 2 years ago

I think that when someone says "can't afford" what they really mean is "I'd rather spend that money on something else".

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.

philips4• 2 years ago

Perhaps your argument is correct. And my use of afford is unjustified.

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.

wood_spirit• 2 years ago

Those whom I know who talk about not being able to “afford children” mean that they wouldn’t be able to give those children the lifestyle and financial security that they deem acceptable. They don’t want to compromise and give their children less future comforts and safety than they currently enjoy, so they don’t dare have children on those terms. And often they have a nagging natural need to have children, so the discussion and reasoning is always tinged in a deep sadness.

silverquiet8• 2 years ago

A luxury lifestyle is cheaper than a child. The last estimates I’ve seen are around $300K (and that was before the recent bouts of inflation) to raise a kid and that didn’t include college. So that’s like a Lamborghini, right? Or a lot of fancy vacations. And that’s just one kid; you might get some economies of scale with more, but the marginal costs are there too.

vehicles2b2• 2 years ago

I’d like to know if the following are relevant to the discussion. Here is the fertility rate by state: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/fertility_rate/fer...

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.

tonis22• 2 years ago

"The more people there are, the more solutions to problems will be found." Has not been true so far, I wonder at what population amount, will this start working ?

philips4• 2 years ago

The article provides zero evidence for the thesis and it is baffling to see it upvoted.

inference-lord2• 2 years ago

When I see people thinking about voting for someone like Donald Trump I know the argument that more people = better solutions is complete bullshit. Even if we technically have more solutions, having more dumb people who are able to negate all the benefits is a far worse situation to be in.

helpfulContrib• 2 years ago

Of course its true - we wouldn't have gotten to the moon, or been able to build world-encompassing highway and Internet systems, without the critical mass of people who built our academic and industrial institutions.

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 ..

tonis22• 2 years ago

A Lot of academics already today are just trying to keep their job, and don't keep up with innovative teaching methods, they don't record their lectures, cause who would pay them if there's a video about it ?

So in reality we would be fine, if we focus on doing the job not keeping the job.

the_duke• 2 years ago

This seems pretty logical to me.

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.

CrzyLngPwd2• 2 years ago

It might start working when we take away their screens, 24/7 couch-based entertainment, and their safe spaces to escape the violence of being misgendered.

never_inline• 2 years ago

"Lack of people and manpower will create new challenges which will lead to innovation and efficiency" you can also say that.

There are too many variables here and we the typescript and django developers with fancy command prompts better stay quiet.

nielsbot• 2 years ago

Too few humans? I see this said a lot but it’s so counter-intuitive to me that humankind will be worse off in the long term with fewer of us around.

hackerlight• 2 years ago

Even if I grant the premise that we should maximize the number of humans, it's not clear that growing the population immediately achieves that, unless you're biased to favor of humans alive in the year 2025 above humans alive further into the future.

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.

questinthrow• 2 years ago

Yes yes, more people means more progress which means line goes up which means we will all live in a utopia or something like that. That's why everyone is trying to escape their country and conduct a huge trek to reach countries like uhh India, China and so on and so forth.

Rochus4• 2 years ago

more people means more progress

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?

RugnirViking3• 2 years ago

You clearly missed the parents sarcasm

defrost5• 2 years ago

See:

Selfish reasons to want more humans (rootsofprogress.org)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497686

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 ...

r0ckarong• 2 years ago

When the article starts with "my scientific hero ... and why I think I am smarter than them" I'm having a really hard time following the rest of your argument, especially if there is little to no evidence, data or, substance to back whatever youre saying.

asadotzler• 2 years ago

This article is brainless and attempts to make no argument other than "The more people there are, the more solutions to problems will be found" which hasn't happened yet despite massive population growth over the last 75 years. This kind of low quality content seems pervasive here lately. I can only presume it's the result of a generally lower quality of participant here lately.

palmfacehn2• 2 years ago

So no productivity gains or increases to the standard of living since 1949?

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.

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

Your examples are not very good.

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.

whydoineedthis• 2 years ago

The world population in 1900 was only 1.6 Billion. We're at 8 Billion now, and they predict capping at 10-11 Billion.

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.

A_D_E_P_T2• 2 years ago

I've spent an awful lot of time in both Croatia and Japan, and the problem looks more or less the same in both places.

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.

gurumeditations• 2 years ago

Transportation revolution. Cars that fly themselves at high speed. Superconducting maglev trains shooting between downtowns and between suburbs. Cutting the distance is the only way to expand and combine low cost of living with economic density.

CrzyLngPwd2• 2 years ago

Totallly fine for a Ukrainian woman to become Miss Japan: https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/ukrainian-born-miss-japan-...

thriftwy12• 2 years ago

With both Japan and Ukraine leading in depopulation, no amount of population swapping between them will save either one.

gklitz• 2 years ago

if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese

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.

A_D_E_P_T2• 2 years ago

There are, quite literally, third and fourth-generation Korean-Japanese people who are still not considered fully Japanese.

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.

ChatGTP2• 2 years ago

They won't have a choice at some stage. The population is declining so rapidly, and they're struggling so hard economically they are, whether they like it or not,importing more and more immigrants and the truth is, they can be as racist as they like but it only worked when they had the clout to get away with it. It's less and less viable for them to continue on this trajectory. People might never be "accepted" but the face of Japan itself will likely be different in the future simply because they've failed to embrace change properly.

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.

BlueTemplar• 2 years ago

While I can understand that they would find this upsetting, how long ago did their ancestors leave ? Are you sure that this doesn't stem from them having been used to self-identify as (American-)Croatian, but which hardly corresponds to the evolution of Croatians since then ? Their assimilation might be even harder than for some other immigrants without Croatian ancestry, if they feel like they might be "owed" something ? (And that's not even starting with other potential issues, like being of a different class...)

Typically, first generation immigrants rarely fully assimilate (unless immigrating very young of course), it's their kids that will.

justanotherjoe• 2 years ago

There are always groups. Even when your country is one race. The difference is just it will be eating their own people instead of having an 'other'.

bcaxis4• 2 years ago

Have to bare your own babies if you want your people, culture, or way of life to continue.

snapplebobapple• 2 years ago

Immigration is not the solution. Identifying what policies make your nation an ecological sink where humans go to die childless is the solution. Immigration is a temporary solution that has negative consequences vs just having a birthrate above replacement and it only works as long as some place has a very high birthrate. Which is increasingly untrue as more countries catch the low birth rate disease pioneered in the first world.

nec4b2• 2 years ago

> 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.

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.

ang_cire4• 2 years ago

Forget About Overpopulation, Soon There Will Be Too Few Humans

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.

singularity2001• 2 years ago

Other than genetic minimum population numbers, there should be civilization minimum population numbers, and I'd suspect modern technology would allow for a few hundred(?) million people to hold up the same standard of living and progress.

ang_cire4• 2 years ago

Barring an apocalyptic scenario, Earth is never going to see populations dip back below 2 billion, and honestly probably never even below 5. It's not even declining now, it's just [growing YoY at 0.8% instead of 1.2%](https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...). That's the "decline".

DandyDev2• 2 years ago

This article reinforces my knee-jerk dislike of philosophy. This article - like many works produced by philosophers - provides some contrarian ideas with zero evidence to back them up.

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.

jaybrendansmith• 2 years ago

Exactly this. I look at the evidence provided here around how much farming land it takes to sustain each person I think that we got lucky. Through research we figured out how to sustain all these people with less land, without which by now we would have mass starvation and famine. But I also think that here in the US, we have less humans per square km than just about any other country, and we're doing just fine, in fact, we are contributing more than our share of new research and tech. There's no correlation here, let along causation.

thriftwy12• 2 years ago

Quite obvious, I want there to be more people if my culture around, whereas I do not mind whether the rest of the cultures dwindle to the numbers more appropriate for them.

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.

ncclporterror• 2 years ago

Birth rate is not a law of nature that can be naively extrapolated. Increased pace of technological development implies an increased pace of societal changes, which will impact birth rate.

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?

linehedonist2• 2 years ago

2060 is 36 years from now, not 100. People having kids in 2060 are alive today or will be born in the next 20 years. Not crazy to make predictions about those people.

dang3• 2 years ago

Related ongoing thread:

Selfish reasons to want more humans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497686 - Feb 2024 (214 comments)

jakeogh2• 2 years ago

That is not even remotely the title of the article!

andirk• 2 years ago

The article is almost the opposite of that title, but let's discuss that title. Having children is absolutely inherently selfish. There is no good reason besides ones own self fulfillment to overpopulate a world that is on the verge of irreversible climate damage where people may very well be fighting over water and air conditioning while fleeing some of the most densely populated regions due to uninhabitable heat in less than 100 years. Luckily there is a solution though: just have generational wealth.

dang3• 2 years ago

It's a representative subhead. Those are a legit alt when the article's main title is baity. (Lots of past examples: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

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'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

DoreenMichele• 2 years ago

It's got some interesting data that I haven't seen before on falling fertility rates and projected future populations. I don't agree fully with the claim that a growing population is all upside. Nutrient density of produce has been falling for decades, so there are some problems that I don't personally see as something that can reasonably be hand-waved off.

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)

jug• 2 years ago

Alright. So the tldr of this article is that the more we are, the more we can commit to research in eg shrinking agriculture area per capita, which will be less hard on Earth. That we need a large population because it's cross discipline research and besides... More Researchers, right?

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.

sylware• 2 years ago

In my country, roughly speaking, only the really poor with state assistance seems to be able to afford having multiple children (or I guess, people who are members of powerful network of "in-betweeners" with translates to a near state assistance level). People seems to adapt their choices and behavior based on that fact. For instance, middle class women usually would not pick a socialy and economically risky father, this is an expected behavior. I guess "solid" fathers are more and more rare.

mrkeen• 2 years ago

Too many humans or too few. Why can't it be both?

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...

logtempo• 2 years ago

I heavily disagree.

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.

----------

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.

----------

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.

----------

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.

somewhereoutth• 2 years ago

There are 3 fundamental problems facing humanity at this point:

- 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.

jacknews• 2 years ago

Too few humans for the infrastructure we've built, perhaps

RetroTechie• 2 years ago

From my (limited) understanding, scientific progress roughly derives from human-years put in.

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?

rich_sasha• 2 years ago

I never thought about it this way, but perhaps what we're seeing is the "lower classes" becoming extinct. I say this with no pleasure.

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.

thriftwy12• 2 years ago

Many of the countries claimed they are service sector dominated, until they understood that service sector jobs are basically menial, low income positions doing things that do not scale. There is proliferation of those. I can't imagine most of service sector workers ever buying a home, raising kids or having pension savings (unless they pivot to other occupations). Unless they are recent immigrants and have much lower expectations, and even then. The economy is inherently negative to that, since their direct customers are often other service sector workers, who can't just pay more for the services.

Depurator• 2 years ago

These are shallow arguments built on the good old techno-optimist view that technology will solve all our problems by perfecting resource extraction.

"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.

sershe• 2 years ago

I think the negative is the birth rates falling too fast, resulting in an "unbalanced" population pyramid. If the birth rates were falling slowly, and stabilized at replacement, does it really matter where within reasonable range the population ends up?

johnea• 2 years ago

More neoliberal bullshit.

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...

M95D• 2 years ago

I'll just leave this link here and not comment anything.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1067138/population-unite...

Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

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