Ask HN: Are there too many people in the world?

I tend towards the view that this book is accurate, simply because I read a lot. When you read explorers accounts hundreds of years ago you have sea and land teeming with life and biodiversity. Now, when you watch a reality TV show like 'Naked and Afraid', there is very little to no wild animal life, the show should be called show up and starve.

For example, we can trade labor for money and money for wood. So we create great logging corporations who try to chop down as much wood as possible. At some point, the demand for wood drops, so we start creating more wooden products, marketing toothpicks, or selling cheaper cardboard boxes. Later on, some meal box startup decides that the price of cardboard boxes is so low that they can send a meal box every day.

Housing prices have not 'gone up'. In fact they get a little cheaper as people have better house building tools, and the raw material costs are about the same. But the average person produces less average value, and struggles to produce enough value to trade for a house.

Maybe a big part of this is that all this automation technology really has made people less useful. Inflation and overhiring masks the fact.

It postulates, that if everybody would consume/travel, we would need two more earths to sustain that.

On the other hand, I heard that most of the big population bump were families still used to having 5+ children, because most wouldn't survive childhood, but medicine being just good enough to save them all. We no longer should have bumps of billion per decade as in the beginning of 20ct.

Strangely enough, it's still surprisingly popular.

Groups like the Club of Rome and reports such as "The Limits to Growth" often don't state so explicitly but when you assert that artificial limits should be imposed on economic growth you're basically making a decision about which human beings get to be born in the future.

In my opinion that's a both patronising as well as deeply anti-humanistic notion that doesn't take into account that there have always been and - extrapolating from the past - likely will still be paradigm shifts in the future which will allow us to make both more efficient use of existing resources and to discover new types of resources or new avenues for extracting existing ones.