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What of it? China + India = 2.864bn Not China or India = 5.244bn I think the characterization that a turning point has occurred is perfectly supportable. The article never even tried to say anything other than that it only just barely happened 11 minutes ago and a few metrics metrics don't show a clear past peak yet.
Your math might need adjusting for that.
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I think we are just all different - I can't imagine children bringing me any happiness; I felt the way Tolstoy did already when I was a young child. Interestingly, my grandmother once told me she only had children because of social expectations, and I can say that her children were absolutely aware of that. For me, the philosophical reasons were enough; the monetary savings are in a sense a bonus, but for others econ…
> but for others economics may be the main force preventing them from having children Economics never prevents having children. As before, only the rich even get the luxury of choosing to not have children. But the rich could have children too if they so choose. Their fear of children making them look poor under the whims of today's fashion is an entirely self-imposed limitation. Good for them if that's what they wan…
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I mean yeah. Not existing has a utility value of 0. You can make the same argument for people who don't exist yet. Is it infinite utility to go around as a government and force people to pump out 100 babies a year? Since not existing is so bad? TBH if I never existed by definition I would be fine with it, you know, since I don't exist and was never born. I don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate uti…
> I don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate utilitarian POV I do, because second-person collectively-singular Humanity is a living thing all its own, and the more humans there are the more alive We are. Your argument is the anthropological equivalent of “640K ought to be enough for anybody”.
Similarly higher population isn't a good in of itself. It seems to me that there's much less evidence that there's something that needs higher population.
I don't see how higher population necessarily makes humanity as a collective organism more human. That seems like saying that an individual human is more human if they weigh more.
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Posted from a huge house with air conditioning while using multiple petroleum products (iPhone/computer, chair, desk, fleece, etc). The pollution lifted every single person’s standard of living across the globe to levels unimaginable 100 years ago. It’s easy to be in Seattle or New York and say we gotta stop burning oil and coal but there are trade offs that were worth making. If you live in a developing country with…
Every single person? Not exactly. What about farmers forced off their land for corporate interests? What about people working in the garbage dumps of Tijuana in Mexico [1]? I've actually lived in the "first world" (born there) and now have lived over a year in a developing country where most people (including myself) don't have "aircon", and whether technology has improved things is not as clearcut as you might think…
Compared to what? Where do you draw the line of the "pre" technology? Technology has been as part of human society since before we invented history.
Do you have a specific point after which you think technology became a net negative? Do you think thinks were fine pre-industrial revolution, but after we invented the steam engine things when to shit? Perhaps it was the domestication of bananas that really took us away from living in harmony with nature rather than twisting it to our own ends.
I don't think it really makes a sense to draw a line in history and say everything after this point is bad. The only sensible way to draw a rational technophobic line is to look at specific technologies and their effects and decide if your life will be better or worse with each.
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My problem with the “peak population” hypothesis is that all of the non-breeders will eliminate themselves from the gene pool soon. All of us that have kids for whatever reason chose to reproduce despite the abundance of modern society. Also the groups that have many kids (the Amish have 7 children on average, and you also have Mormons and Orthodox Jews) will expand exponentially.
If the future is agrarian, extremely-religious people living a very low-productivity lifestyle of essentially subsistence farming, then that’s probably actually a nice balance for the Earth and humanity. However it really doesn’t feel like that’s where things are headed in spite of the current demographic trends you note. In a sense, I think that’s the way the Americas were before Columbus re-united them with the old…
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> Wow, seeing peak baby is a little scary honestly Are you worried 8 billion is somehow not enough humans?
Yes, I am. Humans don't live forever. No offspring and it's all gone in one generation, disregarding if they're 8 billion or 100 billion.
Further, people alive in 2300 will be decedents of people who chose to have kids generation after generation despite living in an industrialized environment. That self selection both in terms of DNA and culture means a population bounce back becomes increasingly likely over time especially as fewer people means less pollution and less competition for resources.
Humanity might even end up cycling through industrialization, collapse, hunter gatherers, agriculture, industrialization, multiple times before settling on some stable equilibrium. You just can’t extrapolate exponential curves indefinitely when they depend on the population size.
The good news is you’ve taken your foot off the gas. The bad news is the car is going 100mph and there is a cliff edge in 10 feet.
Given that (with regard to greenhouse gasses) we've a) unlocked positive feedback emission loops from tropical & arctic methane and b) still pumping increasing amounts of carbon into the air, it's clear to anyone paying attention that we've already fallen off the cliff. We're just hovering for a second like Wile E Coyote.
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Every single person? Not exactly. What about farmers forced off their land for corporate interests? What about people working in the garbage dumps of Tijuana in Mexico [1]? I've actually lived in the "first world" (born there) and now have lived over a year in a developing country where most people (including myself) don't have "aircon", and whether technology has improved things is not as clearcut as you might think…
> Actually, I think the standard of living, at least in the long-term and for the many future climate refugees, is not actually that much improved. Compared to what? Where do you draw the line of the "pre" technology? Technology has been as part of human society since before we invented history. Do you have a specific point after which you think technology became a net negative? Do you think thinks were fine pre-indu…
To wit, the negative effects of technology are simply an increasing function of how advanced it is. There is no need to think in terms of "pre" or "post" good technology. As it becomes more powerful, we need greater wisdom to control it. And of course, we completely lack that wisdom.
2B humans out of 8B are in China. You do not have numbers for China nor, if you manage to get it, can those be trusted anyway. I feel that while the West started the downtrend, China will not offset that but surely pass as how much pollutants it spews. We are not out of the woods until China gets on board too.