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Selfish reasons to want more humans

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Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#291

Post by james_levy »

"And yet, there are good reasons for thinking that precisely the opposite is true: the more people there are, the more solutions to problems will be found."

Choked up while reading

"A 2022 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research compares U.S. states and shows that ageing is already a persistent drag on economic growth and productivity; when the proportion of the population over 60 years old increases by 10 percent, economic growth (GDP per capita) decreases by 5.5 percent and productivity by almost 4 percent."

Ha now we talking !

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#292

Post by Sammi »

Depurator wrote: post #227
educaysean wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So more humans is value neutral but more earth-like planets is value positive? Your standards seem bizarre. Can you please elaborate?

As i replied to the sibling comment, coming from another species perspective it would be reasonable to assume that a world optimized to fulfill the need of another species, such as humans would be seen as negative. It's not like they can enact their discontent, so i would argue we have to account for other species as well when we remodel the natural world. Evolutionary adaptation takes a while, so its not nice to cha…

Those that can adapt quickly will be quite happy about it.

So who gets to set the metric?

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#293

Post by savingsPossible »

maxglute wrote: post #119
kelnos wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, maybe we should focus on fixing that first. But I'm somewhat sympathetic to this argument. While there are certainly more people in absolute numbers living in poverty than there were 2000 years ago, the percentage of people in bad shape is probably lower. And many versions of "bad shape" today is probably still a lot better than the average at many points in history. That leads to a philosophical argument, thoug…

I think the argument is that the marginal utility/productivity of a person > the resources it costs to sustain a body, even if that body is minimally productive (i.e. subsistence farmer). I think we're better off trying to improve ratio of estimated 2B subsistence farmers that can be replaced with (generously) 100m farmers + machines, and try to figure out how to improve productivity of rest. IMO there are still so m…

You are arguing for a different optimization strategy

Let's!

Your optimization strategy can be tried, is being tried, and is yielding results.

Por que no los dos, though?

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#294

Post by usrusr »

savingsPossible wrote: post #285
usrusr wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, this is not the end game yet. The end game is "breeder tribe" subcultures who raise their children to reject the idea that that two or three children might be enough. Those subcultures will be immune to change as long as there is still enough "them" around for "us vs them" to keep "we're the ones with the children" a core of their identity. I write "subculture", because they exist in many different cul…

You give me hope! Hopefully those breeder subcultures will inherit the earth. Hopefully not nazis though. Care to start a non-nazi breeder subculture?

Sorry, they are all Nazi even if they don't know it yet. Put two breeder subcultures in the same room and it's about Lebensraum in no time.

PS: and that's not a coincidence. Any would be breeder subculture that does not sufficiently discourage outside marriage would see too many of its children defecting to the general population. They'd be out-bred by breeder subcultures that do. Seen across a several generations time window, it's a "survival of the close-mindedests" situation.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#295

Post by savingsPossible »

em-bee wrote: post #212
imgabe wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever driven across the US? There is an unfathomable amount of open space. Same in most countries, aside from maybe Europe. We are nowhere close to running out of land.

yes, but do we want to turn all that land into high density housing? (ok, i exaggerate but) there are tangible benefits from leaving spaces open and untouched.

No, and we absolutely can keep 95% of the open space for the next 200 years with much higher growth

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#297

Post by paulcole »

abigail95 wrote: post #157
hcfman wrote: post #149

Unbelievable! 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.

Is the world worse off because you exist in it? What should people who care about the planet do about that?

Yes, 100% it’s worse off because of me.

The obvious answer is to not repeat the same mistake. Encourage people to not have children.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#299

Post by totetsu »

healsdata wrote: post #122
adastra22 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billions have been lifted out of poverty in China and India alone. Africa is next. The problem is not too many people. If anything, people who think there are too many people are a problem.

The combined population of those countries is 2.8 billion. For your assertion to be true, 71% of those countries would have had to have been in poverty in the recent past and now are not.

Don’t derail my message with irrelevant pedantry :(

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#300

Post by Sammi »

android42 wrote: post #10

> Economies of scale. In particular, often total costs are a combination of fixed and variable costs. The more output, the more the fixed costs can be amortized, lowering average cost. Except that after a certain point total costs increase again as the raw inputs become more scarce and expensive to obtain.

Then we should grow so we can mine asteroids.
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