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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, maybe not all of the article but it still is. Pro life ass propaganda without scientific merit.
Population is separate to climate change.
Predicting birth rate for 2060 from today might be roughly equivalent to someone in 1850 trying to extrapolate birth rate to 1950. They would have been completely wrong because there was no way they could predict the level of development.
Even ignoring that, shouldn't we expect birth rate to be autocorrelated, as the impact of having children, and therefore people's decisions to do so, would depend on the population count itself?
> Forget About Overpopulation, Soon There Will Be Too Few Humans This can be easily and summarily dismissed if you know anything about minimum population numbers. Humans will never, through simple declining birth rates, reach the low-or-sub-1000s numbers that would result in there being too few humans to maintain genetic diversity. https://www.livescience.com/minimum-people-to-survive-apocal... > how many people woul…
Selfish reasons to want more humans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497686 - Feb 2024 (214 comments)
The article is heavy on criticism of population decline and light on an argument of why it is so bad. As a parent in the USA I also don’t buy the argument that it is all education and birth control driving these changes. Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children. And for others climate anxiety makes them question the future.
> Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children. I can't speak for your friends. But I think that when someone says "can't afford" what they really mean is "I'd rather spend that money on something else". Some people literally can't afford children. But those in the middle class (or better) in the US certainly can . It would just take money away from other parts of their lifestyle: the…
No, what many of us mean is that "We can't afford to give a child the kind of support and resources and opportunities that a responsible parent knows it is their job to provide."
Many of us grew up poor, and saw people around us who didn't make it out. Many of them are still poor bordering on destitute, some are in prison, a couple I know are dead. Until I can *reasonably guarantee* that I'm not putting my kid in that position, I'm not going to have a kid.
I've spent an awful lot of time in both Croatia and Japan, and the problem looks more or less the same in both places. Croatia has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people to other EU countries that offer higher salaries, or to Zagreb if they can't find a job in Denmark or Germany. Japan has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people from sma…
"The more people there are, the more solutions to problems will be found." Has not been true so far, I wonder at what population amount, will this start working ?
If we assume that distribution of professions scales linearly with population size, a 2x increase in population means there will be twice as many researchers and inventors that can dedicate their life to finding new solutions.
I would assume that the scaling is not linear. Do we need twice the workers in agriculture to feed twice as many people? With our modern agriculture technology that seems unlikely to me.
One could argue that this is counter-balanced by diminishing returns, as in: 2x the amount of researchers won't have 2x the output.
But it's hard for me to see how "more people = more progress" is false.
I had a long conversation with an anthropologist so studied the emergence of agriculture, who argued that it wasn't invented but instead adopted by necessity. He pointed out the huge host of health problems that came with agriculture: hard labor; poor quality food; diseases from living densely. Life expectancy dropped from the adoption of agriculture until well into the industrial revolution, with the adoption of pub…
So what were the necessities that prompted the adoption of agriculture?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what were the necessities that prompted the adoption of agriculture?
10 half-starving farmers could beat 1 fat hunter gatherer in a fight.
But if you are someone terrified about the future and one of your pain points is overpopulation, the argument seems to make the case that populations are likely to begin falling at some point. (Granted I didn't click through to any of the cited links, so I am basically taking their word for it./pedant)