The Population Bust • Hacker News Board

Re: The Population Bust

#101

Post by philwelch » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 3:21 AM UTC

toasterlovin wrote: post #97

philwelch wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mechanism is that the propensity to have more children is partly genetic. So as people with those genes out-breed the rest of the population, those genes come to predominate in the population. Thus overcoming the demographic transition. Is this entirely a genetic thing or are there also cultural components? I’ve long entertained a crackpot theory that North America will be almost entirely Mormon or Roman Cathol…

The heritability of fertility is about 50%, I believe. So about half of the variance in number of offspring is genetic. The remainder is other stuff: culture, chance, etc. I would imagine that the genetic component is multi faceted. Some of it might be a desire to have children. Some of it might be a resistance to certain ideas or lifestyles that result in fewer offspring (if that seems far fetched, consider first th…

But also consider that it’s hard to experimentally separate cultural and genetic influences because most children are raised and hence inculturated by at least one of their genetic parents.

Re: The Population Bust

#102

Post by philwelch » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 3:23 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #81

philwelch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we’re nowhere near the theoretical limits of our own solar system yet.

We're closer than most people think. Isaac Asimov's essay "The Power of Progression" from his monthly science column in the May 1960 issue of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction", and reprinted in the collect "The Stars in Their Courses" in 1971 [1], goes through the math for how long it would take to reach various population levels at the rate the population was growing at the time. It was doubling every 47…

I mean, a bunch of O’Neill cylinders turns the carrying capacity of our solar system into potentially trillions of people if not more. Turning the entirety of habitable ground into Manhattan is hilariously far off just because we can expand habitable ground pretty damned far.

Re: The Population Bust

#103

Post by guerrilla » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 3:26 AM UTC

dumbfoundded wrote: post #88

jdkee wrote: post #5

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell." -Edward Abbey

For all we know, we're the brightest light of consciousness in the universe. (Hopefully not, feel free to prove me wrong). Expanding this consciousness seems a worthy goal. In terms of "killing" the Earth. It's not really possible for us to do (yet). We could surely kill humanity but we cannot possibly eliminate complex life from Earth. More interestingly, I think we have a burden placed upon us by our own developmen…

> We could surely kill humanity but we cannot possibly eliminate complex life from Earth.

Why do you think nuclear war can't do that?

Re: The Population Bust

#104

Post by philwelch » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 3:28 AM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #66

triceratops wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity increases though, don't rely on population, and are the actual driver of economic growth. Growth due to population increase is the baseline rate and shouldn't count because people aren't more prosperous per-capita.

Productivity increases due to automation go to the owners of capital. Many individual’s productivity is not going up, therefore they are worth less.

That’s actually not true. The Baumol cost disease means that people who are not actually more productive in their current roles (eg orchestral clarinetists) still make more money because of productivity growth elsewhere. You couldn’t possibly pay an orchestral clarinetist as much today as you did in 1800 because they’d just quit and do literally anything else for a living. You have to pay them more.

Re: The Population Bust

#105

Post by surfmike » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 3:35 AM UTC

tabtab wrote: post #35

jdkee wrote: post #5

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell." -Edward Abbey

"Humans are a cancer." -Earth

“Life is a cancer”

Re: The Population Bust

#106

Post by guerrilla » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 3:36 AM UTC

simplecomplex wrote: post #90

0xfaded wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Australian, have lived in the US, and now live in Denmark. I'm also pro immigration, both for skilled and unskilled workers. However Non-Western (as defined by the Danish Ministry of Statistics) has been financially costly for the welfare state, and the assumption that unskilled immigrant descendents will (as a whole) outperform their parents has not been realized. There's blame on both sides. Denmark doesn't do…

By definition welfare is a net loss. Otherwise it wouldn’t be needed. How can it be bad for immigrants to get more than they put in, but not citizens? The “immigrants will get more out of welfare than they put in” is exactly how welfare is supposed to work!

Many (most in some countries) immigrants are citizens, so I don't think that's the distinction you meant to make.

Re: The Population Bust

#107

Post by guerrilla » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 3:38 AM UTC

fallingfrog wrote: post #76

tathougies wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem 1: who would want to come to a country where they can be indoctrinated not to have babies? Problem 2: it is unethical for rich people to depend on the fertility and then parental obligations of poor people in order to produce new people who will then be taxed to pay for the sterile old rich person. That is asking someone else to do all your hard work for you for free.

“..new people who will then be taxed to pay for the sterile old rich person. That is asking someone else to do all your hard work for you for free.“ Um do you live here? That is basically how the economy works.

One cannot conclude an "ought" from an "is" without further assumptions.

Re: The Population Bust

#108

Post by guerrilla » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 3:43 AM UTC

Yetanfou wrote: post #50

sambal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have a culture if it doesn’t change, you have an ideology.

...but if you import an ideology into your culture you'll end up with escalating conflict. The refusal to see this has created something more akin to a powder keg than a melting pot (to paraphrase the old moniker) which has the - already partly realised - potential for some serious destruction.

You realize all of the larger cultures on Earth are melting pots, right? Sweden, France and Germany each by themselves are cultural mutts, for example. To deny this is to deny history and archeology.

Re: The Population Bust

#109

Post by pdonis » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 4:25 AM UTC

pascalxus wrote: post #4

Relying on a larger and larger population to keep supporting endless growth is not sustainable. I know this is unpopular, but: We need to find a way to sustainably live on this planet with a reasonably sized population. People keep talking about how the next generation needs to support all the debt and extravagances of the past generations but this unethical. the next generation was born without first being asked whe…

> Relying on a larger and larger population to keep supporting endless growth

The article talks about "growth" as though it has to be absolute growth, but it doesn't; it only needs to be per capita growth. If the population is shrinking, absolute growth can be negative but per capita growth can still be positive (all that's necessary is that the rate of absolute decline of the economy is less than the rate of decline of population). In other words, per capita productivity just needs to increase. Which it has been at least since the industrial revolution.

Re: The Population Bust

#110

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 4:32 AM UTC

dumbfoundded wrote: post #89

I'd recommend "The Accidental Superpower" - Peter Zeihan. To summarize, he views the world economy as entirely enabled by the US Navy. The protection and projection of this naval forced has allowed an unparalleled level of relatively free global trade. With the population bust, he predicts the US will turn inwards. The world economy will fragment. Less rigid economies will collapse. Global investment will all but dry…

Whales, and supersized cargo ships, are both enabled by much the same dynamics:

- Widely separated, highly-beneficial, feeding grounds.

- Exceedingly efficient onboarding systems.

- No credible predators.

This enables long hull shapes, high speeds, few resources devoted to defence, and exceptionally efficient metabolisms.

A blue whale eats 8,000 - 16,000 kg/day of krill, or 7-15 million calories. That's a continuous energy output of 350 - 700 kW, or about 500 - 1,000 horsepower.

Cargo ships, whether liquid, bulk ore, or container, load and unload tremendous amounts of cargo quickly (the Iranian tanker in the news today carries 2.1 million barrels of oil, a $115 million cargo, which it can load or unload in a matter of hours).

In a world where ships cannot simply sail direct routes to destinations, must detect and evade, or defend against assaults, or risk capture or loss, transport logistics will become vastly more complex, and costs far greater.

The SS Great Eastern, the first large steamship, launched in 1859, still carried cannon on her decks:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deck_of_the_%27Great_Ea...