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Selfish reasons to want more humans

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Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#461

Post by savingsPossible »

usrusr wrote: post #294
savingsPossible wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

idk about that...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish

this is one of the fastest growing populations in the US, and they are notoriously pacifistic, to the point of forbidding mustaches because they are associated with the military

> During the French and Indian War, the Hochstetler Massacre occurred: Local tribes attacked the Jacob Hochstetler homestead in the Northkill settlement on September 19, 1757. The sons of the family took their weapons but father Jacob did not allow them to shoot due to the Anabaptist doctrine of nonresistance.[10] Jacob Sr.'s wife, Anna (Lorentz) Hochstetler, a daughter (name unknown) and Jacob Jr. were killed by the Native Americans. Jacob Sr. and sons Joseph and Christian were taken captive. Jacob escaped after about eight months, but the boys were held for several years.[150] When freed, both of these sons joined the church and one of them became a minister

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#462

Post by lo_zamoyski »

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…

> we're no longer bound by labour intensive solutions.

You're committing the same kind of error as the Malthusians. They assume conditions, technology, and accessible resources are fixed. You assume that the labor to be done is fixed.

By your reasoning, the invention of the dishwasher should have led to a permanent increase of unemployment, putting all the dishwashers out of work. But that didn't happen. Instead, it created an industry, a supply chain, a whole market around the dishwasher. Labor-saving tech creates new forms of labor, but you won't notice that if you assume a fixed state of the world and focus only on the immediate effects of a technology.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#463

Post by lotsofpulp »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #459
lotsofpulp wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's their culture, why would they be unhappy? Because you have no reason to assume they would tell you the truth, or that they are not lying even to themselves. Actions speak louder than words, and 99% of women who attain financial and physical security choose to not have 14, or even 4 kids.

Quite patronizing of women. As recently as the generation that was born before WWII, even the Boomers, were born into relatively large families. The idea that they hated having so many children would have been foreign to them. On the contrary, it gave them meaning. Family and community life was vibrant. Now, things are desolate. We live in a culture of death.

I am not patronizing anyone. I am just presenting statistics, and the possibilities for why they are what they are. By far, most (almost all) women who have access to financial independence, physical security, and access to contraception CHOOSE to have 0, 1, 2, or maybe 3 kids.

No one tells them they cannot have 8 or 14 kids. But after having seen what a woman goes through during pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and child rearing, I would easily say that I would also choose 0, 1, 2, or 3 kids. Certainly not double digits.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#464

Post by strangattractor »

synecdoche wrote: post #216
strangattractor wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2 most prominent proponents of this idea happen to have the resources (money) that will allow them to avoid most of the downsides a larger population would create. Great for them bad for me. There are plenty enough geniuses in existence today. They cannot be utilized because they live in shitty conditions created by the too large population we already have. As others have pointed out consideration of of negative…

How about providing concrete methods for reducing population? Exactly how do you propose to reduce population and who should be forced to not have children first? Should we assume that you will lead by example?

I think it has been demonstrated multiple times in various places that empowerment of women and access to birth control ultimately stabilizes population growth. [1] There is no need to have a program or have governments decide who and how. People naturally do it on their own given the means.

[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_...

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#465

Post by strangattractor »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #388
strangattractor wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2 most prominent proponents of this idea happen to have the resources (money) that will allow them to avoid most of the downsides a larger population would create. Great for them bad for me. There are plenty enough geniuses in existence today. They cannot be utilized because they live in shitty conditions created by the too large population we already have. As others have pointed out consideration of of negative…

> There are plenty enough geniuses in existence today. They cannot be utilized because they live in shitty conditions created by the too large population we already have I’m pretty sure that the shitty conditions are not caused by a too large population of humans more broadly. If society took the wealth of a few billionaires and distributed it to the most impoverished I think a lot of our overpopulation woes would va…

People always look for the one size fits all solutions and or reasons for problems. There are multiple reasons for shitty conditions just as there are multiple reasons for homelessness. That is why these problems seem so intractable IMHO. I seriously doubt cramming another billion or so people onto the planet is going to improve those conditions. At least I have not read a convincing argument for it.

I think people totally underestimate how the current 9 Billion inhabitants of this planet are depleting our oceans of living things and how large a percentage of those inhabitants depend upon the ocean for food. Sounds like one of those externalities Economist only account for after the fact. Ooops - To bad for you starving children in (put your starving country here).

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#466

Post by wonderwonder »

xipho wrote: post #457
wonderwonder wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will "Our climate and ecosystems" have human representatives who relay these decisions and enforce them? "akin to believing in gods, and perhaps that might not end well" Mankind has believed in gods since essentially the beginning, hundreds of thousands of years and during that time has risen to become the dominant species on the planet. During this rise, human quality of life, and life expectation have continues to…

> Will "Our climate and ecosystems" have human representatives who relay these decisions and enforce them? You mean things like earthquake detectors, disease monitoring, our weather services, climate predictions, air-quality testing, lead in your water testing? Then yes. > has risen to become the dominant species How do you define "dominant"? Homo sapiens is not not dominant in many ways: 1) in numbers; 2) in evoluti…

"I'm not going to disparage human religion, but when push comes to shove I'm going to look to science, technology and a better understanding of our world as a whole, particular how evolution led to species interacting with one another as the route to maximize our "greatness"."

We are on the same page here. I fully believe that no matter what happens we will be able to figure it out. I have essentially zero concern for global warming because of that. We will adapt. I am very optimistic on our future as a species.

We cannot stop fossil fuels currently as the third world has not yet reaped the benefits of cheap fuel that the first world has. We would be asking them to cripple their potential. Technology will eventually make renewables as cheap as coal / oil and then globally we will switch. Just a matter of time.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#467

Post by chaostheory »

hef19898 wrote: post #446
chaostheory wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a moot point. Yes, socioeconomic factors do negatively affect birth rates, but what you don't understand is that even before those socioeconomic factors were in play, male fertility was already on the decline. A good example is Canada. Before contraceptives were popular, before abortion was legal, and before economic incentives for having nuclear families disappeared; they already lost the ability to replenish…

1972? So, after the sexual revolution, the pill, emancipaction, the beginning of urbanization (which really started in the early 60s), the rise of automated agriculture, the beginning of women having real career opportunities as part of the work force and both, a rise of the industrial and service sectors of the economy. All of which, across the globe, drive birth rates down. But sure, it was male fertility that caus…

> which really started in the early 60s

Thats when the sexual revolution happened in the US. As I’ve already mentioned in my previous comment, in Canada it started later than 1972. Even then, the effects of the sexual revolution shouldn’t be immediate, so it’s obvious that something else was at play since birthrates actually started to go down in the early 1950s. It just came to an irreversible head in 1972

> All of which, across the globe, drive birth rates down.

There are still a lot of places where abortion and contraception are both frowned upon and aren’t even legal, yet they still experienced lower birth rates. Again, socioeconomic factors have been accounted for

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#468

Post by madacol »

I am shocked by the overwhelming negative comments

I do not think the author is arguing for mindlessly expanding the population disregarding our current consequences. I think his concern is that people seem to have forgotten that population growth is generally very good in most situations, especially in the long term. So instead of promoting de-growth as the solution to our problems, we should be trying to solve our current, and temporary, bad externalities of our growing population (climate change, loss of biodiversity), and that is a technological problem

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#469

Post by yellowapple »

mtalantikite wrote: post #407

I’m curious to know if the author has spent any significant time in any place that is going to feel the brunt of the climate catastrophe. I’d invite them to spend a couple months in Delhi or Dhaka and then take another pass at this think piece. Or maybe they’re cool with taking in a few hundred million climate refugees into the US and just didn’t mention it, as many parts of South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa wi…

> It just reeks of privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US that hasn’t really experienced much of the world outside that niche.

Even a "privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US" would be feeling the brunt of a growing population in his wallet. More people = more demand for land = higher land prices = higher housing costs. Even in my somewhat-minor metropolitan region of the US am I feeling it.

There are of course approaches to solve that issue (cough cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax cough cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism cough cough), but the exact sort of person who'd benefit from population growth under the socioeconomic status quo is also in all likelihood someone with a vested material interest in opposing said approaches - that is: someone who owns land and seeks to profit from said ownership, be it by renting it to others or by speculating on its future sale price.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#470

Post by naveen99 »

how about a principled calculation of the planet carrying capacity for humans, Based on water, agriculture and industry requirements ? I mean we already have states fighting over water rights to rivers. I suspect we can’t go much higher than a 100 billion. But resources are already being diverted towards silicon life. from here I suspect we go towards 50/50 human / silicon . Until the silicon declares independence.
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