Worried in economic terms though, because the foundation of that is an assumption of continuing growth?<p>I try to understand this worrying mindset but it still seems like short-term thinking. Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population - climate change is caused by energy usage which is too high because there are too many people. Wars, migration, resource depletion, hunger, water scarcity, all of it. So we (as in, human civilization) short-term think our way into rationalizing that it'll be ok because technology will provide a solution and we don't need to make any real changes.<p>Now the population trend looks like it's about to reverse and we can finally see a way to a possible future without scarcity, and we short-term think that into being a problem because we might find it difficult to afford to care for our elderly anymore. But we can! The economic engine will never be more powerful than it is now: so exploit it, use it to solve the pain of population contraction while we adjust our economic and productive structures so they can serve us effectively in a world where growth isn't purely consumptive.<p>I'm sure this is all hopelessly naive.
> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population - climate change is caused by energy usage which is too high because there are too many people. Wars, migration, resource depletion, hunger, water scarcity, all of it.<p>Any evidence for these assumed causal relationships? Wars have been waged by small numbers of people in the past and today, migration in such general terms has always been inherent to humans, resources are depleted by mass-consumption of a tiny fraction of the global population, and hunger is caused by not distributing available food to those who need it.<p>These problems are hence mostly political. Again, only a tiny fraction of the global population has any significance in the relevant decisions.
I think maybe both of you are correct, in a sense - the population growth provides means (labor, competition, consumption) for increasingly extractive and unequal society.
Innovation relies on bigger groups, which then allows a smaller portion of the population to do more.
While I tend to agree with you, I find the Japanese are incredibly innovative and they are not growing. Maybe I should look at the rate of innovation and see if that has stalled out with population growth?
I have heard this before...in what sense would adding population result in more innovation rather than having a more supportive environment for the people we already have (healthcare, education, financing, etc).
Population growth drives the competition for jobs, which encourages education as a means of achieving social status and a higher salary, which enables the research that produces knowledge. Highly unequal wealth distributions then enable wealthy individuals to spend vast amounts on moonshot projects that turn knowledge into technology. These things still happen without the population growth or inequality, just slower than when the pressure to advance is high. People without that pressure will tend to make more conservative choices about what to study or research, make fewer irrational investments, and spend less time working (because wages are higher when you're not in competition for jobs).
Simply more nodes for experiences to bounce through, so long as they have ways to communicate enough to copy, recombine, and incrementally improve on their activity. The more people copying, recombining, and improving on stuff, the more innovation.<p>Often easier to consider this in terms of competitive sports, though you could check seshatdb or something to see if it holds at scale. For example, YouTube really changed a lot with sports.
You figure our society is "increasingly extractive and unequal"? That <i>may</i> be true relative to post-WW2 America, but on a larger scale--either historically or geographically--can you really hold that modern society is more extractive and unequal than slave societies, serfdoms, and empires of the past?<p>Honestly, population growth has, if anything, correlated to increasingly equal and egalitarian societies.
<p><pre><code> > has, if anything, correlated
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This phrasing is delicate. Correlated, but likely not caused by nor a cause of. Just two things that happened in parallel.<p>To be clear, I am agreeing with you.
Wealth inequality in the USA today is worse than 1789 France <a href="https://populareconomics.substack.com/p/is-wealth-inequality-today-as-bad" rel="nofollow">https://populareconomics.substack.com/p/is-wealth-inequality...</a>
Wealth inequality is largely irrelevant outside of limited goods like real estate. The poorest today live lives that much more closely resemble the lives of the wealthiest of today than was the case even 100 years ago. Access (to resources, shelter, entertainment, etc) inequality is far lower than in the past. Social inequality is lower than ever before. 50-60 years ago the US was still de jure racially segregated in many places.
Causal arrow goes the other way. Complex societies are dissipative structures, whose increasing complexity is powered by surplus energy.
Plenty of examples of conflicts and wars without scarcity. Greed is deeply ingrained in humans and leaders are willing to sacrifice a lot just to gain more, even though they are objectively well off.
I have family that has worked to fight corruption and poverty, for decades.<p>They believe that <i>poverty</i> is the root cause of most human problems. For example, some of the worst despots in history, got there, escaping grinding poverty, in their youth.<p>When you are skint, your priorities change, and things like labor laws, ecology, and species diversity, are non-starters.<p>It also doesn't help, to have rich people, dancing around, showing off their wealth. That tends to breed resentment (see "war").
Poverty is the default state of the world and is definitionally the absence of resources to solve problems. I’m not surprised that if you’re struggling to eat, you’re not going to have surplus energy to be concerned with longer-term problems, but this doesn’t seem especially insightful to me, and further, would lead me to invest in net-GDP-positive actions as opposed to poverty- or inequality-reducing ones so that there are more resources to bring to bear to longer-term and larger-scale problems.
Well, discussions of poverty, seem to be unpopular, amongst wealthier folks.<p>Probably comes from the only real solutions to poverty, are transferring portions of wealth from richer people, to poorer.<p>That type of discussion won't really happen, in the Halls of Power, because...<p>...those folks are richer, so they look for <i>any</i> solution that doesn't involve them, having to divest anything.
Smart people will let green flow from themselves before any red.
> Probably comes from the only real solutions to poverty, are transferring portions of wealth from richer people, to poorer.<p>What a strange conclusion. Why is that the only real solution? How much wealth was transferred from rich to poor during 1870 to 1950 in the US (when most of the US population was freed from poverty)? What was the mechanism that transferred the wealth?
Where and when did this wealth transfer reduce poverty, what are the historical examples of this solution working?
This is a good example of where the conversation goes, when the subject comes up.<p>The issue is not with resource <i>transfer</i>, but of resource <i>hogging</i>.<p>History also shows a fairly regular cadence of what happens, when an elite minority starts accumulating all the resources for themselves, to the detriment of most.
> History also shows a fairly regular cadence of what happens, when an elite minority starts accumulating all the resources for themselves, to the detriment of most.<p>When and where? I gave a specific example of when and where poverty was actually reduced in a significant way. 1850 - 1950 US is probably one of the most objective examples of free markets in history. Of course there were super rich (robber barrons) that concentrated wealth, but there was also huge amounts of people being pulled out of poverty. That's how capitalism works. What resources did super rich hog in a free market society that hurt everyone else? (btw resource hogging is a different problem than poverty. You are goal shifting, unless you can prove that resource hogging causes poverty)
This is an uncomfortable truth for HN where a large number of participants believe themselves to be the next Elon Musk. They're not temporarily embarrassed millionaires, they are millionaires that are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. Speaking of re-allocation of wealth is the scariest thing you could say around here :) Keep doing it anyway.
I will. It's funny to watch the reactions, and worth the downvotes (I can afford them). There's a rather ... <i>predictable</i> ... zeitgeist on this site. I basically enjoy being here, but watching the Musk stans at play can be a bit irritating. I often see jaw-droppingly heartless comments, made here.
You can't engage in an actual conversation about your beliefs or conclusions here, because it's pretty easy to disprove your ideas or solutions. You have shifted the thread away from my questions or examples. You have zero evidence that transferring wealth solves poverty.<p>And pretending its people that idolize musk is pure cope. At least get it right, and watch some Milton Friedan if you want to understand where many of us get our views from.
You prioritize signaling that you are virtuous ("heartless comments") versus actually doing good. I hope that one day you use a rational, scientific rigor to actually examine do your family's preferred solutions do good or just feel good. I give to charities that actually deal with the root causes of poverty in the US, and I have first hand interactions with the people that it helps.
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The majority of wars are fought over control of territory, not resentment, and the aggressor is almost always either on equal footing or more powerful than the victim. The leaders of a nation won't start a war if they think they could lose it so they must have some materially founded belief that their nation can over power the other (a stronger economy, a more powerful military, a technological advantage). Resentment can be used as a rhetorical tool to motivate hatred of an enemy and to justify an already planned war but it's not the instigating factor.
I do believe that poverty can be (psychologically) traumatising, potentially resulting in abusive behaviour by those affected. However, I don't see that most human-made catastrophes are caused by such individuals.<p>Firstly, political decisions are never made by a single person. Even the most brutal dictator needs to be enabled by his environment.<p>Secondly, most powerful people have always been as far away from poverty as possible. For dictators, corrupt presidents and oligarchs, growing up in a wealthy environment seems the most unifying factor among the people in such positions. They are also the ones that cause wars, poverty, starvation.
Life is about struggle and satisfaction. Some are content to plow fields, and some want to rule nations.<p>Effective leaders now how to move and sway both groups. If you sway only one group, you offend the other.<p>There will be a group that yearns to learn, and another that chooses a simpler life.<p>A group that wishes to push to the sky, and another that wishes to tend to the Earth.<p>Who is more right? Who should exist? Politics and War....<p>What happens when someone powerful chooses to give it back to the people? When a King decides to share?<p>To empower the man plowing the field and elevate his status. Do you think the man that was happy plowing the field will suddenly be happy running a business? If his society crumbles around him, would he still be happy?<p>Will the once happy plower see the good deed of his King? Or will he look for another leader, one who will return his life to something he considers normal?
I think poverty and its threat to personal wellbeing (and the power dynamics surrounding it) are indeed a large driver. Looking back in history…<p>Genghis Khan [1: approximately 10 to 15 million deaths during his 1206 to 1227 reign, or roughly 2.5% to 4.2% of the 360 to 400 million global human population] and his family were abandoned by his clan following his father's death by poisoning. Joseph Stalin [2: approximately 6 to 9 million deaths during his 1924 to 1953 rule, or roughly 0.2% to 0.5% of the 2.0 to 2.5 billion global human population] grew up in an impoverished family with an abusive father. Hong Xiuquan [3: approximately 20 to 30 million deaths during his 1850 to 1864 rule, or roughly 1.6% to 2.4% of the 1.25 billion global human population] was raised in a poor peasant family that sacrificed heavily for his education; his repeated failures in the imperial civil service exams triggered a psychological breakdown prior to his path. Adolf Hitler [4: approximately 17 million direct regime murder victims, or 35 to 40 million including all European WWII war deaths during his 1933 to 1945 rule, or roughly 0.7% to 1.7% of the 2.3 billion global human population] grew up lower middle class; his father's death in 1903, his mother's in 1907, and two rejections from Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts left him impoverished by 1909 prior to his pursuits. Pol Pot [5: approximately 1.7 to 2.2 million deaths during his 1975 to 1979 rule, or roughly 0.04% to 0.05% of the 4.1 billion global human population, and 22% to 28% of Cambodia's population] came from a prosperous, royally connected family and lost his government scholarship in Paris after failing his exams. Mao Zedong [6: approximately 30 to 45 million deaths from the Great Leap Forward famine alone during his 1949 to 1976 rule, or roughly 1.0% to 1.5% of the 3.0 billion global human population] grew up in a prosperous farming and grain-dealing household under a strict father who had built the family's wealth from poverty, but who pulled him out of school at about 13 to work the farm and later cut off his allowance.<p>Evidence & Sources via latest Gemini model then grounded with Fable<p>1. Genghis Khan [Active Rule: 1206 to 1227]: Isolating Genghis Khan's personal campaigns [Northern China against the Jin, Western Xia, and Central Asia or Khwarazmia] from later 13th century conquests under Ögedei, Hulagu, and Kublai Khan suggests a rough estimate of 10 to 15 million deaths [an approximation drawing on census comparisons by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones in Atlas of World Population History, 1978, and historian John Man's Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection, 2004] out of a global population of approximately 360 to 400 million.
2. Joseph Stalin [Active Rule: 1924 to 1953]: Post-Soviet archival studies by historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010) and demographic historian Stephen Wheatcroft support 6 to 9 million direct and policy-induced deaths [executions, Gulag mortality, forced deportations, and the 1932 to 1933 Soviet famines] within his tenure, against a global population of approximately 2.0 to 2.5 billion [per U.S. Census Bureau historical estimates]. Older, pre-archival estimates run higher.
3. Hong Xiuquan [Active Rule: 1850 to 1864]: Sinologists Jonathan Spence (God's Chinese Son, 1996) and Ho Ping-ti estimate 20 to 30 million war, disease, and famine deaths during the Taiping Rebellion up to Hong's death and the fall of Nanjing in 1864, out of a global population of approximately 1.25 billion.
4. Adolf Hitler [Active Rule: 1933 to 1945]: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates total approximately 17 million civilians and prisoners of war murdered by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Including European theater WWII military and civilian war deaths up to Germany's surrender in May 1945 brings the total to approximately 35 to 40 million out of the 2.3 billion global population in 1940.
5. Pol Pot [Active Rule: 1975 to 1979]: Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program estimates about 1.7 million deaths from execution, starvation, and forced labor during the Khmer Rouge's 1975 to 1979 rule, and most scholarly estimates fall between 1.7 and 2.2 million. Demographer Patrick Heuveline's reconstructions allow a wider range of roughly 1.2 to 3.4 million excess deaths. This is out of a 4.1 billion global population in 1976 [roughly 22% to 28% of Cambodia's 7.8 million population].
6. Mao Zedong [Active Rule: 1949 to 1976]: Demographic reconstructions of the Great Leap Forward famine [1958 to 1962] by demographer Judith Banister [30 million], journalist Yang Jisheng (Tombstone, 2012, 36 million), and historian Frank Dikötter (Mao's Great Famine, 2010, at least 45 million) place famine excess deaths at 30 to 45 million out of a 3.0 billion global population in 1960. Deaths from the early 1950s campaigns and the Cultural Revolution [1966 to 1976] would add several million more. The account of his father's treatment comes largely from Mao's own 1936 interviews with journalist Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China, 1937).
Your family is on the right side of history in this.
I was raised in a tradition of Service. Most of my family are highly-educated (I'm the exception), and could have written themselves much bigger slices of the pie, but generally have remained in academia and public administration.<p>For myself, I have been a member of an organization for over 46 years, where it's all about helping folks that no one else wants to help.
does your family promote free market capitalism? Can you cite a economic system that has raised more people out of poverty than free markets? I'm open minded here, but all my research has shown that free markets combined with new land to expand to is historically the best way to eliminate poverty.
I think you're over focusing on the decision making. If there were few of us, building replacements for our engines would be more economical than bombing our neighbors to influence gas prices. Even if its just one maniac who decided the bombs were necessary, they did so against a background that would encourage other behavior if we had fewer people.
> If there were few of us, building replacements for our engines would be more economical than bombing our neighbors to influence gas prices.<p>This is a fundamental misunderstanding of human motivation. We could do the more economical thing <i>right now</i> but we don't. We could have done it decades ago when there were much fewer people on the planet but we didn't. No change in the population level will alter this.
I don't know what you mean. Of course we could have, but we didn't. We didn't because building 10,000 electric cars vs 10,000 bombs is a no brainer, but building 500,000,000 cars vs the same 10,000 bombs is a different kind of problem. Intimidation and transportation scale differently. At different scales, different decisions are more likely.
- World population in 1967 was around 3.5 billion people, less than half of our current population<p>- The U.S. nuclear arsenal peaked at 31,000 warheads in the same year 1967<p>Why did we need more bombs when there were less people? Why was there a greater perceived threat when there were less people in the world to fight over resources? Why would reducing our population level by half cause a change in our behaviour when these factors seem to be independent?
I feel like we agree: The amount of force necessary to be an effective bully is independent of population.<p>And its pretty obvious that the amount of oil necessary to run an economy is population dependent.<p>So one is a constant and the other is a function with positive slope. The lines cross at some point. To the left of that point you get investment in renewables, to the right of it you get war. Therefore whether or not people will consider waging war over oil is population dependent, since its a choice between the two.<p>I mean, this is all given some totally awful blend of shortsightedness and cruelty. But that does seem to be the blend our leaders are using these days.
> Why did we need more bombs when there were less people<p>Bombs don't really scale with #people do they? I'm not a military expert of any kind but I would expect the number of bombs required to end humanity is really more a function of how much landmass people occupy?<p>Eg if you have a nuclear bomb that levels a city block it does not matter if 100 people live there or 10000, it pretty much just kills everyone there?
- Imagine you dug a hole 1 mile deep and 1 mile wide. How many humans do you think you could fit into it? The answer is about 60 billion, many times the current global population.<p>- If you dropped a human on a random spot on this planet, even if we just assume land, the <i>median</i> number of people within a mile would be exactly 0.<p>I think the second thought experiment is quite informative because it's easy to lose track of the reality when we mostly travel from packed city to packed city. But these cities, and the pathways that connect them, make up a negligible percent of the Earth. China is smaller than the US, and has pretty rough geography, yet was food self sufficient with a population upwards of a billion. They only became food dependent as their economy expanded and they replaced farms with iPhone factories, metaphorically speaking at least.<p>Finally, population growth in the longrun will always be determined by the groups with high fertility. It's never longrun stable unless everybody has the same fertility rate. So for instance the Amish today maintain a fertility rate of around 6. This is why there are now hundreds of thousands of them, and within a few decades they'll number in the millions. As highly educated, highly secular, high income individuals remove themselves from the gene pool, they'll simply be replaced by Amish. And as the former die off, and the latter grow - we'll eventually see population growth resume.<p>One last point. Fertility rates also determine age ratios within a society. Low fertility = most people are elderly, high fertility = most people are young. So it's not only economic collapse due to fewer people, but you create societies where there's a much greater social cost (due to elderly care), and far fewer people to take care of them. South Korea is a great example of this. If they don't fix their fertility rate, they'll collapse as a nation within the lifespan of some people alive today. 'Breaking News 2094 - North Korea successfully invades South Korea with one tank.'
You can't even assume that Amish population growth will remain constant! See e.g. <a href="https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-amish-268e3d0de87" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-...</a>. We also don't know what will happen to Amish retention as the population grows, or what will happen if the population spreads into previously non-Amish areas -- it's just really hard to predict what's going to happen multiple decades in the future.
In general I don't disagree, but more because of the rest of society than the Amish. Every country that's entered into fertility crisis has basically started freaking out and none are anywhere near the worst of it yet. It's only the countries that <i>will</i> be in fertility crisis, but aren't there yet that still have some people think it just comes down to being kind of like now, but with fewer people. I think there's no way the status quo simply continues on. The country to keep an eye on will be China. They're having a catastrophic fertility crisis, have long-term oriented leadership, and have a strong precedent for some fairly batshit means to 'adjust' fertility.<p>There's also the issue that I don't think I'm a snowflake. Fertility has become a big issue for me and is part of the reason I now have children - not as many as I'd like, but infinitely more than I was thinking about having not that long ago. I've come to view it as a core social responsibility since cultures/societies literally cannot exist without people having enough babies, and I think more people are coming to see it this way as well.
> And as the former die off, and the latter grow - we'll eventually see population growth resume.<p>Previously (centuries ago) most of the people were like the latter group. And things changed. I would not bet that a group can remain completely unchanged in the next tens to hundreds of years. There is of course a chance, but don't think it is as clear cut as you make it sound.<p>> Fertility rates also determine age ratios within a society<p>Plus immigration. Some like and accept that, some hate it and don't like it, we will see how it plays out, but there are more things involved than just fertility rates.
Immigration is largely irrelevant at the current rates of decline for many reasons. A simple one, and without any controversy, is plain old numerics. A shared fertility rate of 1 will trend towards you losing approximately 2.5% of your population per year, compounding. This is why Japan's current deterioration will be seen as the 'good ole days' in the future - they're currently "only" losing about 0.5% per year. So after 80 years, a single human lifetime, your population declines by 87%.<p>There simply are not enough people to replace this sort of decline, even if you just grab anybody regardless of skills, education, or even the ability to speak your language - which is not exactly a great recipe for a healthy country. Like if 60% of the world, by population, is losing 80% of their population over that timeframe, that'd be a global population decline of 48% with only 40% of people in the rest of the world. You'd need all of them and then a good chunk of their babies too, and that's for less than one human lifetime of change.<p>I'd say immigration is just kicking the can, but it scarcely even counts as that given how little of an effect it can have even at theoretically absurd levels.
The problem is rates never stay the same. What you say is correct, if nothing changes. But things do change (for one, population is decreasing).<p>Let me put it another way, if a pandemic would reduce the world population by 50%, what do you think birth rates would do?<p>Now, if your argument is "it will soon be a shitty time to be old and it will last for a while", with that I do fully agree. The old people of today have it much easier than the old people in 30 years. But people in 80 years might have enough (resources, space, etc.) to start making children again at different rates.<p>I would say we will live and see, but doubt it is the case for that long periods...
Climate change being caused by too many people is oversimplifying. We have had 40 years of inaction by most world leaders with the power to do something. The global economy is run by terrible, cynical, self-interested people. We could be powered by solar, wind and nuclear by now.
Agree. Especially considering the most pollutants come from relatively few people/corporations/industries.<p>This has nothing to do with "too many people":<p>> Private jets emitted more climate pollution than all flights departing Heathrow Airport in 2023<p><a href="https://theicct.org/pr-air-and-ghg-pollution-from-private-jets-2023-jun25/" rel="nofollow">https://theicct.org/pr-air-and-ghg-pollution-from-private-je...</a><p>or this<p>> US will rescind policy targeting oil and gas industry methane leaks<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/epa-says-will-soon-act-rescind-biden-policy-targeting-methane-leaks-2026-10-07/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/epa-says-will-soon-...</a><p>or this<p>> Super-polluting plumes were also seen in the US, the largest detected in 2025 occurring in Texas and leaking 5.5 tonnes of methane per hour, equivalent to running about a million fuel-guzzling SUVs.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/revealed-world-worst-methane-leaks-global-heating" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/revealed...</a>
Also relevant for this discussion:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend</a>
Naive or not depends a lot on the subjective view of the reader So you shouldn’t worry. I like your response.
I am worried in terms of "holy shit, humanity is literally going extinct".<p>It's not just people across the world having less children, all fertility indicators have plummeted in the last 40 years across the world. People simply can not have more children, even if they wanted to.<p>We have a genuine public health crisis and we don't really know the cause.
> I try to understand this worrying mindset but it still seems like short-term thinking. Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population - climate change is caused by energy usage which is too high because there are too many people. Wars, migration, resource depletion, hunger, water scarcity, all of it. So we (as in, human civilization) short-term think our way into rationalizing that it'll be ok because technology will provide a solution and we don't need to make any real changes.<p>Which people do you propose should not exist?
Framing the issue of elder care in population decline as a financial one misses the mark, I think. I think it'll be more about not having enough people wanting to work in elder care.
The issue is not so much the decreasing population but that fact that its aging too fast and the proportion of productive working age people will continue to shrink.<p>> But we can!<p>Unless we get robots to replace nurses etc. in retirement homes no we can't...
I don't think there has ever been a period of time when economic growth has been decoupled from population growth. If you look at the curves, they're basically the same. So that's a bit of a problem.
> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population<p>Except they aren't. This is the old Malthusian claim and it has been debunked time and again.<p>> Wars<p>Historically, war has been on a downward trajectory for a long time, certainly when measured by the violence and death any given person is likely to experience. Most war is not about the scarcity of resources. It is usually about power, the desire to dominate others, greed, and other intangibles, and of course defending oneself from such actors.<p>> migration<p>Like war, this claim is reducible to the one about limited resources, because "overpopulation" (whatever that means) per se is not a cause of anything. People generally migrate because somewhere else looks better in some way, usually because the destination is economically better developed and have better institutions. This has nothing to do with absolute resources, but with the standard of living in their home country <i>relative</i> to the standard elsewhere. Refugees and so on are a very small percentage of any global migration.<p>> resource depletion<p>This claim begins with a current understanding of the available resources. What we have found instead is that with more people, we have more resourcefulness and discovery. Farming is an excellent example. Innovation in agriculture tracks population growth. Today, we have more food than any of our ancestors would have dreamed of. We waste enormous amounts of food.<p>> hunger, water scarcity<p>Famine is nonexistent in the developed world and almost completely absent everywhere else. Most hunger is a matter of resource misallocation, not because there isn't enough to go around.<p>> we can finally see a way to a possible future without scarcity<p>This misunderstands scarcity, as if it were some fixed piece of pie on the table before us. According to this simplistic understanding, yeah, sure, you'll have to slice up that pie into thinner and thinner pieces until eventually everyone gets close to nothing. But this is not how things work. In practice, the more people there are, the more labor and ingenuity there is that scales non-linearly (including those caused by agglomeration effects and specialization). People will not only find new pies, but they will find things other than pies, or ways to replenish the supply in a renewable way.<p>> The economic engine will never be more powerful than it is now<p>Bold claim. History does not support it. Population contraction doesn't have to last forever and we can't know how economies will unfold.<p>> where growth isn't purely consumptive<p>I will say here that <i>consumerism</i> is a real problem, because it is not only wasteful in a number of ways, but it entrenches a habit of thinking that consumption is the purpose of life rather than a means to support it. Look at where the most consumption and waste occurs and you'll find it doesn't align with population density as a simplistic account of human beings would suggest.<p>What population contraction might achieve in the interim is that it may force a course correction. People are very stubborn and easily attached to bad habits, to the point that entire economic and political orders are reshaped and become dependent on those bad habits to function, entering into a vicious cycle that entrenches these very habits and bakes them into a common cultural sensibility of what is normative. We have refused to wean ourselves off the drug of consumerism, which I claim is one of the primary, fundamental, and underlying <i>ideological and cultural causes and drivers</i> of population contraction because the imperatives of consumption conflict with having children. As a result, we suffer the self-destructive consequences, and these consequences may very well force us into abandoning consumerism because it will have been made impossible to sustain. Time will tell.
1. Wars are fewer than before, we are killing fewer people per capita<p>2. Climate change won't end humanity itself, by all probability, people will be better off in 100 years even if we don't do anything about emissions. Better off in terms of life expectancy, poverty etc<p>3. Water scarcity and hunger have reduced over the last 100 years and will continue reducing thanks to technological progress<p>In fact, I'd say contrary to you that a lot of problems are solved because of over population - we have more people, more intelligence and more technology created thereby.<p>There's a guy called Paul Ehrlich who prophesied end of days in very similar ways to you. He mainly blamed overpopulation and resource use and predicted something similar to a world catastrophe in 2000's. Many times. Nothing happened.<p>Unless we have an AI x-risk event, I assure you that people will be more prosperous 100 years from now and you'd prefer to live then than today.<p>I'm also very wary of this rhetoric that population is the cause of all problems. This rhetoric is very popular in certain circles and is anti-human inherently.<p>Edit: more lore on Paul Ehrlich: he had a bet with an economist Julian Simon that the price of metals would go up because of scarcity. His logic was that the population would increase with limited supply of raw metals. Simon OTOH bet that it would go down because of technological progress - more people would have more intelligence combined and find better ways to extract metal. Simon won btw.
"we have more people, more intelligence and more technology created thereby."<p>If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution? I'm not even a believer that general intelligence brings out more technology creation, we've had rising university attendance in the west since the 70s but actual tech disruption was way bigger in the late 19th century.<p>I do agree that some of the overpopulation rhetoric is anti-human but at the same time there's some things caused by overpopulation leading to worse quality of life e.g. countries like Netherlands/South Korea/Israel where a home with a nice yard is basically unaffordable. There's also some goods which have become increasingly expensive because of a higher population like hardwood where technology can do only so much (of course there's ersatz goods). If somehow the whole world were to live more like Americans and the population would grow even more you would increasingly see more products where tech can only do so much (e.g. copper, real red meat, fish ...).
> If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution<p>There is a case to be made that the opposite is true. Labour scarcity in Western Europe meant significantly higher wages than in China which made investment into automation more profitable.
> If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution?<p>England had high population <i>density</i> concentrated in towns, trade with different cultures, high demand for labor after they banned slavery, a tradition of craftsmanship and invention, and a class of people who had a secure income but couldn't grow it easily. All of these factors came together at a time when modern science was becoming established.<p>India at the time had a rigid social hierarchy where it just wasn't possible to move up no matter how rich you got, and everyone was used to that so there was no real attempt to change things. China's population was high but too evenly distributed and they never had as much cultural diversity as Europe.<p>> there's some things caused by overpopulation leading to worse quality of life e.g. countries ... where a home with a nice yard is basically unaffordable<p>Worse quality of life <i>for you</i>. I would take a cramped studio in the most notorious neighborhood over a nice house in a village where nothing ever happens. Boredom would kill me. If it was up to me I would have everyone live in cities and leave the countryside for agriculture with workers coming there on month long shifts as needed. And I think there are more like us.
While housing may be specifically costlier today, overall people have much more to spend, even in the Netherlands after accounting for inflation.<p>This is the case almost everywhere in the world.<p>On the topic of why China or India didn’t bring many innovations: I fundamentally don’t believe in blank slate theory. But I do believe that China is better off with higher population. I also hear that China regrets its one child policy. Good to understand the reason behind this
> If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution?<p>This sounds like asking: 'Why did I get heads when I flipped a coin? Why didn’t I get tails?'. Innovation happened everywhere (examples: printing technologies developed way before in China than in Europe, Arab numerals and others)<p>> but actual tech disruption was way bigger in the late 19th century.<p>Not sure anybody can make an honest comparison. Sure, maybe that’s your opinion, but without some thorough analysis, I think it’s just an opinion.
I know this is HN, but this is such a technocratic view. “Technology is both our savior and the only risk we need to be concerned with.” Even the AI risk you outlined is exceptionally narrow. Even without AI, we still face significant nuclear technological risk.<p>As far as the bet goes, the wager was for a decade and Simon may have won (depending on what market used) if extended to 2026. So, like with much investing, Ehrlich may have gotten the directionality correct but the wrong timing.
Per Claude, if you use Chinese prices for the metals (especially tungsten) Simon still wins from 1980-2026. If you use US prices, Ehrlich wins. Copper is the only metal with a market price above the 1980 value, but tungsten is export-controlled by China, so much more expensive in the West.<p>I think directionally Ehrlich was quite wrong, given that he expected widespread and crippling shortages before 2000, with a much lower population than we actually have, and there's no sign of such shortages being inevitable. In particular, we are opening new extractable oil sources and switching to solar fast enough that pure market actions seem on track to where we'll be leaving cheap oil in the ground in a couple decades absent AI X-risk, and this is <i>after</i> we politically killed the previous tech that would have produced this result earlier: widespread fission.
> I know this is HN, but this is such a technocratic view.<p>I really don't understand how after these last 30 years were the Internet freedom dream became as well an en-masse surveillance and mind-control nightmare, there are still people with such a blind faith in technology and technologists that will save us all.
I mean, in general I think we move 1.3 steps forward and 1 step back, so we do advance, but if we were just a bit let careless we could move the whole 1.3 steps forward without going back.
"2. Climate change won't end humanity itself, by all probability, people will be better off in 100 years even if we don't do anything about emissions. Better off in terms of life expectancy, poverty etc"<p>I highly doubt that if we don't do ANYTHING about emissions. Much of world's agriculture depends on predictable weather. If world's big bread baskets get disrupted badly enough, food prices will rise so much that starvation becomes a big problem in much of the world. Rich people may be OK, others not so much.<p>Sure, you can mitigate some of the impact with technology, but probably not enough, at least not fast enough.
1. true, hurray!<p>2. Sooner or later, climate change will end humanity. It has been responsible for nearly every other extinction, it would be silly to think ours will be different. It's really just about whether it's sooner or whether it's later.<p>3. The Ogallala aquifer will eventually reach a level where it's not economical to tap in to for agricultural purposes. Probably within our lifetime. Meanwhile, snow in the Rockys is increasingly rain in the Rockys, which means the rivers don't flow steady, but just corral floods down to the oceans. What technology is going to replace all of that water?
> Sooner or later, climate change will end humanity.<p>What makes you think this? Even in the worst case scenarios, I can imagine a smaller global population surviving in what remains.
Depends what timeframe you're talking about. As stars burn they get hotter, and eventually bigger. So yes, climate change will eventually end humanity though this would be the later scale.<p>>smaller global population surviving<p>This is just an unfound assumption on your part. Passenger pigeons went from billions of birds to extinct in less than a century. There are hundreds of different scenarios around climate change and disease evolution alone that could wipe us pretty quickly and a rapidly falling population would make it worse quickly as things like new medicines could not be developed quickly enough, or more technology couldn't be created fast enough (unless we have full AGI working on itself, but then you have alignment being its own problem).
Passenger pigeons did not have the capacity to alter their environment.<p>I simply find it unlikely that any amount of climate change (beyond the eventual death of our sun) will result in the complete elimination of humanity.<p>Yes, there are many likely bad scenarios that would drastically reduce the population.
The easy scenario to imagine where humans become extinct due to climate change is the scarcity of resources that will lead to the drastically reduced population will cause full on nuclear war to secure those scarce resources. Given our history I actually find it quite plausible. "If I can't have it nobody will."
We're something like a million years old and you're extrapolating our survival out to billions? Bold move.
Forever? I mean we'll probably be long gone by the time this happens but eventually changes to the nature of the sun will strip us of our atmosphere. That too will be climate change.<p>What sort of non-climate-threat do you suppose will take us out?
2. A big change in the climate will end humanity one day. I am skeptical it will be human caused climate change. Much higher probability it comes from asteroid or another exogenous event. The climate has always been dynamic, and it has been much more dynamic in the distant past.
> 2. Climate change won't end humanity itself, by all probability, people will be better off in 100 years even if we don't do anything about emissions. Better off in terms of life expectancy, poverty etc<p>Overall maybe, even if 2 or 3 C more in the average temperature can be hard to bear in summer in some places or require much more energy to cool us, which means that we won't be as adapted to those places as we used to be.<p>In some spots of the world, tough luck. I would like to see (actually I don't) what happens if the sea rises a few meters. Will the people in the north east of Italy and China build coastal dams and raise river beds or let those regions go underwater and migrate somewhere else? There are certainly some areas of the USA that will go underwater too (Florida? NYC?)<p>And what if the Gulf Stream really stops and Western Europe gets the same climate of the regions of the USA and Canada at the same latitudes?
Economist Julian Simon was an energy advisor to the US government and said that if we use all the energy in the Sun there may be other stars out there.<p>As Prof. Bartlet wondered, would you base US energy policy on the plan to go and get another Star and drag it back to the Solar system?<p>Talk: Arithmetic, Population and Energy from 20+ years ago: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY</a>
"i assure you". Provides no tangible evidence. Ecosystem breakdown is much more of a tangible societal risk than whatever those infantile LLMs are at this time. Like it or not (unless you are a bot), you need to eat, have access to clean water. Not a huge challenge right now if you live in the western world. Not so much already in other areas on this planet. I smell hints of technosolutionism in your answer and I don't like it a bit. We won't SaaS our way out of the ecological mess we're creating.
Please try to answer this: how did poverty and hunger reduce so dramatically in the last 100 years.<p>I'm reasonably extrapolating much like most economists would.<p>Also here's my other bet: even the WORST areas in the planet would see prosperity and better living conditions in 100 years compared to today. That's how it has always been, unless you come up with tail risks due to climate change which I don't personally buy.
Try Spain, for example. Wikipedia: "Over 30% of the area is already severely impacted by desertification". Agriculture will depend more on irrigation, and there will be less water available.<p>There will be enough food for people to live there, yes. But agricultural yield is expected to go down by ~20% or so if emissions continue. And people sitting in worse spots are not just going to sit there and wait for the flood and die. There will be wars about who gets the resources from the new best places.
1) Development of industrial processes for the production of ammonium sulphate and other synthetic fertilizers;<p>2) Development of internal combustion motors and their application in agricolture.
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Try extrapolating like climate scientists do.<p>Trad econ has as much predictive value as fantasy football.
I won’t extrapolate toy models that predict end of human civilisation due to tail risks. None of that is going to happen.<p>even if the tail risks do happen like ice sheet melting, it is over 1000s of years before it truly makes an impact. And even then the impact is minor in grand scale of things.<p>You could always find some looney model that predicts the world would end if we don’t control emission. Agree to disagree on that.
> 2. Climate change won't end humanity itself, by all probability, people will be better off in 100 years even if we don't do anything about emissions. Better off in terms of life expectancy, poverty etc<p>That is a very specific version of "better off". There are many versions for which this is quite obviously not true. Anybody who wants to take a walk in pristine nature in Europe or large parts of NA needs to travel far to even have a chance of doing something resembling this. Not important you might say, well, that's your personal value judgement. Liberal democracies might also just be a temporary glitch and we're all back to dictatorships 100 years from now and I don't know how that would make us "better off" necessarily. Though that's not very related to overpopulation necessarily.<p>Even for your metric, life expectency has been stagnating in substantial areas. It's not a given that tech will solve that.<p>> 3. Water scarcity and hunger have reduced over the last 100 years<p>US water aquifers are approaching irreversible depletion, so I'd be careful with such statements.<p>> he had a bet with an economist Julian Simon that the price of metals would go up because of scarcity<p>Have you looked at the price of gold over the last decades?
> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population<p>Except of course the problems caused by insufficient population. That is: insufficient production of food, lack of infrastructure, scientific research for mitigations of climate change...<p>Of course these are not really caused by "insufficient population", in just the same way your problems are not really caused by "excessive population". If you push a magic button labelled "give me all the benefits of a small population and none of the downsides" then every problem is going to look like an overpopulation problem!
> Except of course the problems caused by insufficient population. That is: insufficient production of food<p>That does not make much sense as this is a <i>relative</i> limitation. If you have twice as many people you also need twice as much food. If the manpower is the problem of food availability (which it isn't really, but let's say it is) then you need to increase the fraction of people working on it, not just the absolute number.<p>In contrast, emissions have an absolute effect on the climate. Twice as many people doesn't mean we get to emit twice as much for the same effect. The carbon budget is per planet, not per person.
Your logic about solving the second problem also applies to the first.
> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population<p>Absolutely not. We have the technology to feed multiples of the population, house everybody, and give all modern comforts to everybody. The reason why it is not happening is that the economic system needs to induce artificial scarcity to profit.
Quality of life was far worse for the average person when we had far fewer people than today.
> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population<p>I agree with your overall point, but this is a bit too simplistic. Even with just 10% of the current population, if we'd build as many AI data centers that we are doing today and beyond and power them all with coal and oil, climate change would not end up much different.<p>How many we are is a substantial factor, but how we behave also is.
How does a declining population where one worker has to support multiple retirees solve any of that, though? All these degrowth arguments fail to address the age pyramid question, which is the fundamental reason economists are warning against population decline.<p>Or are you proposing we make sure all age groups degrow at the same rate? Because that's the one way to make population decline actually work for us (for some values of "us").
Well, aging people should use their accumulated wealth to pay for their support. This is how a defined contribution retirement system should work.
It’s typical leftist pseudo-rebellion. Lofty words, with just enough of an argument to convince the average college student that it’s a good idea.<p>Their only practical goal is to give the government more power and to force you to pay more taxes. Don’t try to find any more rationality in it than that.
> Worried in economic terms though<p>The techbros who publicly fret about population decline are worried about <i>white</i> population decline. Population decline in the West is easily managed by letting more non-Western people in. It's not like Germany/UK/US/France have a monopoly on intelligence and hard work.<p>Globally small economies outside the West don't depend on continuous growth, and a "soft landing" where population declines but gradually and possibly asymptotically is not a threat to the economy.
><i>Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population - climate change is caused by energy usage which is too high because there are too many people. Wars, migration, resource depletion, hunger, water scarcity, all of it</i><p>I mean, yeah. If there were no people, there would be no wars.
Very aptly put wrt population.
It boils down to misplaced values.
A lot of decisions like led lights have to do with ignoring the value of human wellness.
Even near sight is a privilege and a luxury, yet it's abused by small font on paper for the non trivial literature.
LED lights have nothing to do with human wellness. They are just a more efficient source of light. PWM dimming or spectral differences aren't harming anyone.
If you're comparing the decline of hundreds of millions of people, economic disasters, entire countries disappearing - with that of small fonts, I think you need some perspective.
> Worried in economic terms though, because the foundation of that is an assumption of continuing growth?<p>Our society is based on the promise to our children that they will be better off than what we were.<p>That requires growth.
Have you thought about what kind of world we're leaving behind for the next generation? What's left of this "growth" will be captured by people who are currently alive.<p>The next generation, the ones that are supposed to benefit from this, will be left paying the bill and dealing with the fallout. Forget about growth, mere stagnation will feel like a dream outcome when the systems we took for granted start collapsing - food and water shortages, mass migrations of people who used to prop up lifestyles of rich countries. Natural disasters that increase to the point where you're stuck in a perpetual cycle of rebuilding and trying to mitigate the next one.<p>Those people won't thank us for our "enlightened" pursuit of growth, they'll talk about our abject arrogance and ignorance in disbelief.
It requires increased productivity, which can be driven by growth, but also without (population) growth.
> Our society is based on the promise to our children that they will be better off than what we were.<p>This phenomenon stopped a long time ago in the USA - with each successive generation since the 1940s, wealth has concentrated further in older generations.<p>Of course that's largely because the supply of various asset classes (i.e. housing) ceased to grow at their previous rates, so prices have skyrocketed, and the capital gains accumulate to the older generations who own the most property.
That promise has already been broken for most of the western world.
Earth is going to have a different climate there is no doubt about it. More akin to the times where Greenland was actually green.<p>I wouldn't be too worried about it, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it and it is over sensationalized.<p>Just enjoy the warmer winters and more tropical summers. And I definitely wouldn't stop whole economic progress only because Toronto got a bit longer vegetation period and less rain.<p>It's a boon for the northern hemisphere countries, now we start to get all these vineyards that were previously thought to be a mediterranean luxury. Winters are milder and more tolerable. Summers are luxuriously tropical. Palm trees can be grown in the backyard and olives.<p>More often than not when I look upon the weather radar, I pray for it to get warmer just a little bit more. There are still too many cold, merciless nights but it is getting better, albeit slowly.
> It's a boon for the northern hemisphere countries, now we start to get all these vineyards that were previously thought to be a mediterranean luxury<p>grapes absolutely do not require a mediterranean climate, they grow in places as cold as USDA zone 3