71–80 of 427 posts
I wonder what a world of 2bn and falling will look like in 250 years time?
Those worst case scenarios didn't end up happening because of changes that occurred.
Now we are looking ahead and seeing the opposite. That will motivate change as well -- but we need to have change.
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As we have seen in China, if you limit the number of children people become selective about them. In this case in regards to gender, which will develop into a large problem for the country in the future because they now have very unbalanced demographics. This will doom a lot of people to have no partner.
China’s birth rate is arguably declining because basic needs (housing) and child needs (education and child care) became expensive, applying back pressure on fertility (which is why the CCP and Xi is pushing “common prosperity” hard). People are selective on children already, which I don’t see a problem with; this is a natural result of a free society with healthcare where you can selectively terminate pregnancies yo…
If lifespans increases then the population will still grow for some time. And it's increased steadily for the past 70 years.
Average lifespan has increased because of changes on the low end. Fewer people are dying young. There has been very little movement on the upper end of lifespan. The current trend of improvement has a natural wall at about 100-110 average lifespan. Having said that, I suspect that once we crack aging, we may blow past the current limit and see a relativly sudden jump in lifespan
Isn't this going to create another problem. Where the country gets old before it gets rich?
Why is the goal to get rich? That seems lame and shortsighted
Look at how the poor in India live. "Getting rich" does not mean becoming multimillionaire, it just means reaching a developed country's standard of living.
The "population bomb" is the invention of eugenicists trying remake themselves into demographers in a bid to stay relevant. The very same people who funded "sterilisation vans" in Asia were rooting for abortion bans in the West, and promoting "traditional family," in other words plain, old HITLERITES.
Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…
> I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did. I think that unfettered population growth would have caused massive issues -- you could say that global warming is one of its legacies. But there will be a whole host of new issues as we face this new challenge of moving towards sustainable fertility. I suspect we will see a lot of government intervention with incentives towards l…
There was a good episode of The Weeds podcast, "Baby making vibes," which talked about this. Some of it is focused on the American political lens of Liberal vs Conservative birth rates, but much is broadly applicable discussion of policy and the more "vibes focused" angle that conservatives tend to take with the issue.
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Mobility != GDP
GDP == The room available for mobility.
A country can be "highly mobile" with flat GDP and limited income growth opportunity for the individual. That is just how the math works out. Social mobility is a term-of-art that does not mean what most people intuit it to mean.
My "modest proposal" for humane population reduction is: every individual is born with the right to have one child. A couple then, can have two children, which is below the natural replacement rate of 2.1 leading to a gradual reduction in human population naturally. People who don't want to have kids or can't for whatever reason could sell their right to others who want to have more than their normal allotment while…
I don't see why I want to reduce human population. The real problem isn't population but our insane demand and energy intensive process needed to support the lifestyle of the global wealthy. Put it this way: Cars required insurance, road infrastructure, gasoline or battery, steel, electronics, etc to make car a viable transportation option both for logistics and to drive people around in general. Whereas we could hav…
This is a nice halfpinion, but the entire country can't essentially be some monolithic ecumenopolis like Mega-City One or Coruscant. I'd think most people here would love to see a few more efficient transportation options, more walkable suburbs, and other things you're describing, but there's certain infrastructure that can't really work in a suburban or rural setting. Cars, or something very much like them, are a necessity in areas where food is grown and everything is spread out.
Personally speaking, I'm not worried about the general theme of overpopulation/climate change because nuclear energy has already solved human needs.
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Is there a need to a sustainable population rate? There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations. There is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Once we do that, we will need generations of sub replacement fertility just to compensate for having more generations…
> Is there a need to a sustainable population rate? At some point yes we do. > There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations. For sure. But at some point there won't be enough humans to run an advanced society. > here is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Onc…
How can we acknowledge that we need a lot of people to run the sort of society we ended up with today without also reasoning that the more advanced society we might achieve in 100 years might need a lot more people?
There's nothing special about 10 billion people. People have been throwing out numbers as "overpopulation tipping points" for hundreds of years, and we've passed all of them. And now we acknowledge that it's important that we passed them, because we can't even keep our advanced version of "the lights on" without having done so.