141–150 of 480 posts
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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.
>First, more people means more outliers—more super-intelligent, super-creative, or super-talented people, to produce great art, architecture, music, philosophy, science, and inventions. There might be 1,000 certified geniuses per billion, but we are still slaves to probability. That genius might be born in the slums of Calcutta or in the middle of the Amazon rainforest or in the vastness of the Mongolian steppes. I g…
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…
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?
As a human, I have a human-centric mindset. I don’t want to live in the forest with rain filling up my mud floor. I like nice things.
I think the whole discussion is about which amount of humans on this planet would maximize the probability of having nice things for each individual. Certainly it would be hard for you to have nice things when there is only a million humans on Earth, but probably even more so if there is a trillion of them around.
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We are still bound by labor amount, but now it's mostly the intellectual labor. The amount of thinking happening in the world depends on the amount of human brains available, and their level of education and knowledge, in the widest sense. Solving current challenges faster is often only possible by applying a larger amount of thinking to them. (No, the AI is not yet a game changer here.)
The US, at least, seems to be past peak intellectual labor. Somewhere between 30% - 60% of people with STEM degrees don't work in jobs that need them.[1] Bloomberg has worse numbers for degrees generally.[2] "A quarter of grads over the age of 25 make less than $35,000 a year, with many close to the poverty level." It's entirely possible that the economic reward for intelligence is decreasing. Up until 1920 or so, wh…
I'd argue that we're not exactly beyond peak intellectual labor, we've just got 8+x as many workers vying for these jobs (for multiple reasons)
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…
The OP also claims that growth is possible indefinitely. But somehow, we need more humans to to have critical resources necessary to execute some projects. The contradiction is lost on the OP author.
The predicted 10-12 billion humans should have more than enough everything. We don't because capital and access are rationed.
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?
> Instead, I’m going to argue that a larger population is better for every individual—that there are selfish reasons to want more humans.
I'd say yes, and that this person assumes we are all economists. The 'selfish' part also assumes that economy-boosting reasons for wanting more humans is what would make us indiidually happy
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The only way you could possibly argue that more humans is good if you also believe that it’s perfectly fine to wipe out all other species on the planet. The most true thing about this thread is the word selfish.