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Selfish reasons to want more humans

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Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#91

Post by kelnos »

osigurdson wrote: post #54

How about instead of telling people to have more kids or less kids, we let them do whatever they feel like?

Because people do irresponsible, selfish things, and in many cases fail to consider how their actions can negatively impact others.

Not saying that having more or fewer or no kids is going to have a negative impact. But if it was important for humanity to encourage more or fewer or no kids, I think it's pretty natural that there would be campaigns (funded by governments and NGOs alike) to push people in the direction that was supposed to be better.

That's pretty much the entire purpose of any kind of public policy. In theory, anyway.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#92

Post by kiba »

kelnos wrote: post #68

Some of the underlying logic here feels suspect to me. Sure, more people likely leads to more production of non-rival goods, but more people will also make rival goods more scarce and harder to come by. Sure, some rival goods will be replaced by non-rival goods, but it's hard to imagine eliminating them entirely. I don't really buy the idea that we can forever stay on this train of finding new/better/less-scarce reso…

Matters in the universe is a lot. Ditto the amount of energy. People may argue that unlimited growth is unsustainable, and I agree.

But what people don't realize is just...how much resources there is and how much just sits there being wasted by being radiated and hitting inert rocks and gases.

The problem is not resource availability(of which they are abundant and uselessly radiating out), or even engineering or economic challenges. It's political. If you take care of the politics, the world is your oyster, and you can have as many billions of people you want within physics and economic reasons.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#93

Post by arbitrary_name »

adastra22 wrote: post #14
aborsy wrote: post #8

The population growth rate needs to be controlled, even reduced, to reduce the pressure on natural resources and slow down the climate change. John Baez, mathematician at UCR, talks about this approach among a number of others, such as, reducing air travel for conferences.

[flagged]

Interesting that another account posted this exact response slightly further up.

It's a non sequitur designed to degrade the conversation and it implies that having reservations about constant growth within the current paradigm is somehow akin to desiring large scale mass killing?

Bizarre and troubling.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#94

Post by adastra22 »

nine_k wrote: post #27
adastra22 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Real gentlemen start with themselves. Not having children is one such choice.

I sincerely hope that in 50 years when the concern over population growth has been shown to be misguided, just as it has in the last 200 years since Malthus predicted the Earth could only support a few hundred million people, you won’t be sad and alone regretting a missed opportunity.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#95

Post by amiga1200 »

More geniuses

The problem here is with the distribution of future geniuses. More likely than not they will be born into a population with low education. The probability of nurturing this talent for the betterment of mankind will be low. In highly educated populations, the birth rate is normally low.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#96

Post by arbitrary_name »

wonderwonder wrote: post #49
aborsy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rate of the growth can be reduced. After a generation or two, so does the total size.

Who gets to decide who can reproduce and who cant?

No one has to decide. It's as simple as not actively encouraging unsustainable growth and letting people choose.

No one is advocating forcing anything on anyone.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#97

Post by adastra22 »

orthecreedence wrote: post #37
adastra22 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You could start by not incentivizing population growth as many states do. Why does every response to "we should probably not multiply exponentially" need to be some variation of "oH sO YoU wANt GENOCIDE?!?!11"

Because a lot of the degrowth movement does want radical population decrease that we are never likely to see without such drastic measures. Those harmful ideas need to be countered before they become reality.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#98

Post by r_hendricks »

Many of those who want to have more kids can’t afford it. Plain and simple. In conversations like this, people often skip over this reality which always surprises me. Instead, they seem to focus on winning the ideological battle of what the ideal world should be.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#99

Post by felipemnoa »

defrost wrote: post #22

More ambitious projects need a certain critical mass of resources behind them. Ancient Egyptian civilization built a large irrigation system to make the best use of the Nile floodwaters for agriculture, a feat that would not have been possible to a small tribe or chiefdom. This doesn't mean people, we're no longer bound by labour intensive solutions. I live in a single state with a tiny population that mines and ship…

>>that don't require more people.

More people does not necessarily mean more laborers. It also means more consumers. Without more consumers we humans would not be incentivized to mine so much. Without the need to mine so much engineers would not have invented more efficient ways to mine. So on and so forth...

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#100

Post by Depurator »

hazbot wrote: post #59
Depurator wrote: post #15

This is a good example of a very narrow human centric view that captures why its bad to try to maximize for particular made up metrics, such as human utility. It also a wonderfully hare brained view of technolocial innovation that disregards the dark sides, material input, or externalities at all. Is this person an economist or something?

I think they are quite upfront about their values, and I suspect they would quite likely be OK with being labelled human-centric, as would I!

Certainly, it was just more of a general criticism toward such a view, as leading to long term degradation of the world. I totally get how humans would always protitize humanity first, but in the long term we have some issues such as overfishing, global warming, biodiversity loss etc. as a result. But the esiest would of course to not belive in thos issues, and have cool toys
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