Too many people?

[TV and credit cards]

I can hardly find a valid reason why population decline is bad. There are many stories saying it's bad but few providing much support for their argument. Short term the concern seems to be taking care of the elderly and a shrinking workforce to produce all the crap we don't need to buy in the first place. Long term the reason seems to be with a declining population, creativity will necessarily suffer. I don't know if I buy that. It looks like AI will be doing much of the hard and slow research for us soon enough freeing up great minds to be even more creative.

If there's one thing killing this planet it's capitalism. If everyone lived like Americans do, we'd need five earths to support us.

 

[steve_bank]

I expect nature will run its course and population will diminish

That is a certainty, if nature’s course includes stuff like nuclear war.

That is part of it. The way I frame it we are screeching feces flinging chimps with nukes. Chimps really do throw shit at each other wen pissed off.

It looks like the Chinese leaders are backing themselves into a hyper frenzied frame of mind. Nuclear war seems more and more possible.


We are what we are genetically. Packing more people into high density cities and expecting there to be no side effects is another form of ignoring reality.

The global complexity is well beyond human capacity to manage.

Large areas are well beyond sustainability. Ethiopia, Sudan Bangladesh.. Cut off Ukraine wheat and Lebanon starves.

In the 70s I had a philosophy prof who attended a state department conference. Part of it was a prediction that in cumming decades the have nots will try and over run the haves.

We see it at our southern border and across Europe. Global breakdown is happening in slo mo.

In the 0s I listened to an anthropologist on a show who studied the history of collapase of civilizations.

Paraphrasing. A civilization grows and becomes successful with a set of paradigms. It grows to the point where the old paradigms no longer work. Leadership changes, but the new leaders confrom the same pool, and nothing changes. System breaks down and colpses.

The Mayan civilization went from a high culture and economy to collapse very quickly.

Congress is incapable of managing the nation. We are mired in 19th century paradigms on both sides. What is good for business is good for America. That is no longer the case.

 

[Elixir]

IMO Musk has the correct response that we should be looking to Mars and/or the rest of the universe to at least further our overall odds against extinction. Because you can explore and conquer other planets without pissing anyone off who wants to have babies. Exploration and science will work when politics and dictating reproduction can't.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but no, you won't be taking a trip to Mars to see your grandchildren. See https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/why-not-space/ .

No worries, maybe Santa Monica will look like Mars by then.

 

[steve_bank]

Population decline is not in itself bad. It is the economic consequences that are bad.

China ad Jap are running into the same problem. An aging population and not enough yiung peole to support it. Neither China nore Japan have an open immigration system, cultural bias. Permanent utsiders are not welcome.

I knw a woman who word in China ad Hong King for decades manging outsiders moving to work in China and technology transfer. When she reached a certain age China kicked her out.

China went from forced sterilization and abortin to coaxing people to have kids even unmarried women. I think Russia has done the same. Russia has kidnapped Ukrainin kids and is turning them into Russians. Their population has been declining for a long time.

The now global free market growth paradigm requires growing populations.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

There is no maximum number of individuals that the planet and its ecosystems can support. In effect the planet can support an infinite number of any and all species because that's how our planet works.

Uh, no, finite planets cannot support infinite numbers of inhabitants. Do the math.

The planet is self correcting when it comes to all this so humans don't have to worry about anything.

Tell that to the folks on Easter Island and other civilizations that suffered collapse. The problem is we can overshoot, leading to dramatic collapse.

Holy fuck! I thought my sarcasm was obvious. BTW, Rapanui did not overpopulate and collapse. Its demise is traceable to European exploitation and the introduction of European disease.

 

[bilby]

Population decline is not in itself bad. It is the economic consequences that are bad.

For whom?

Economic growth on a per capita basis can increase while both population and the absolute size of the economy fall.

There's no economic consequence here, unless you blindly worship the absolute GDP figure, which has no particular importance, and certainly doesn't complain if we make it smaller.

Who, exactly, is the victim of the "bad economic consequences" of a population decline, in which every individual in the population is wealthier tomorrow than they were yesterday?

The economic consequences of reduced population are something that can only exist where productivity is tied to the number of people working in a given economic area - but productivity hasn't been tied to the absolute size of the workforce since the start of the industrial age.

When a single backhoe driver can dig, in an hour, a ditch that previously took fifty men with shovels all day to dig, how is it an economic disaster, or even an economic problem, if a handful of the forty-nine now unemployed former ditch-diggers had never been born?

Sure, our backhoe operator might be diverting far more of his earnings to the support of not only his own aging parents, but also those aging non-parents who chose not to bear his non-existent coworkers; But he can afford to - he's so much more productive, that those pensions are easily within his means.

Well, unless his boss is (mis)appropriating his increased productivity to support the boss's beer-and-hookers fund. But then, if that's the case, the boss can pay to support the old folks, and still have money left over for beer and hookers.

It's been a couple of centuries since the best way to do more stuff was to get more people doing it. The best way to do more stuff, is to get bigger and faster machines to do it, with proportionally fewer human operators (and machine builders, and maintenance workers, and bosses) needed to make it all happen.

Mechanization means people no longer need to work. Not working isn't a problem unless you are poor; The rich have been very happy not working for centuries, and the only problem here seems to be their reluctance to let a bunch of new people follow them into unproductive lives of idle enjoyment of the productivity of the economy.

 

[Swammerdami]

Much of the discussion in this thread is about energy production. With nuclear power and perhaps eventually fusion power this isn't the major issue. Habitat destruction and loss of ecological diversity is the big fear.

Huge portions of the Earth's land surface are now devoted to direct human usage and raising man's livestock. Rivers are dammed, aquifers are drained, land is diverted to wind farms, and so on. Artificial chemicals (e.g. pesticides, and hormones and antibiotics for cattle) are applied to maintain high population and are polluting lakes and rivers. It is habitat destruction and chemical pollution as much as climate change which have taken us to the brink of a Great Extinction. Some types of habitat are fast disappearing. Desalination will damage coastal areas. Even the vast Amazon forest is predicted to fail as climate change diverts rainfall. Insects are already suffering massive population declines; because of insects' importance in the food chain, birds and amphibians will also suffer. Even if Man's technology can somehow cope with the coming Extinction, will this be the happy Earth we want to leave our grandchildren? "What was a bird, daddy? Did they all die when the other dinosaurs died?"

Even the great seas are affected. Jellies rather than fish are now dominant in vast swathes of the oceans. Coral reefs and other features of the seabed are being pulverized. Rising acidity is killing shellfish. Trillions of plastic bits degrade the ocean. We might assume that Earth's life will continue to be magnificent, just changed; but there will be great disruption during the changes.

Many important resources are not renewable. We've already spent much of the Earth's coal and petroleum. Built up over millions of years it served to kick-start technology. This cheap carbon -- which has uses other than energy production -- is gone; millions of years must pass before another species might kick-start its industrial revolution as mankind did. Aquifers can remain stable when population is only a billion or two. Instead important aquifers are depleted. Food growing is increasingly dependent on fertilizers, and their cost is rising due to shortages of raw materials.

And all these problems are caused by the high human population.

It is wrong to blame only the rich nations. Poor people also use water and fertilizer. Another misconception is that hunger continues to fall. Instead hunger has risen sharply in recent years, due to climate change and disruptions due to Covid and the Ukraine War. But with increased population and its associated disruptions, wars and epidemics may become more common.

The human population is simply too high^*. I do NOT offer any remedy (though some Infidels will pretend that I advocate massacring babies), but let's not bury our heads in the sand and pretend that overpopulation is not a major problem.

* - And anyway, what purpose does the excess human population serve? Are ten billion humans with no birds or butterflies happier than a billion humans living in a garden of Eden?

(Some claim that having more people increases the number of top performers: more Mozarts, more Taylor Swifts, more Elon Musks, more Tucker Carlsons. Is this even true? Has the 20th century even produced another Mozart? Archimedes is sometimes called the greatest genius ever and he lived when the human population was a tiny fraction of what it is now.

Is it plausible that none of the many billions of humans who lived since Archimedes matched him in genius? It's very off-topic but I am intrigued by this recent research:

... we also find that human brain size reduction was surprisingly recent, occurring in the last 3,000 years. Our dating does not support hypotheses concerning brain size reduction as a by-product of body size reduction, a result of a shift to an agricultural diet, or a consequence of self-domestication. We suggest our analysis supports the hypothesis that the recent decrease in brain size may instead result from the externalization of knowledge and advantages of group-level decision-making due in part to the advent of social systems of distributed cognition and the storage and sharing of information.

)

 

[laughing dog]

It is a fallacy that economic growth requires a growing population.

It is a fallacy to think that the environment and ecology of the planer will necessarily adapt to climate change that humans will find helpful.

It is a fallacy that the humans can necessarily adapt to survive an increasingly warmer planet.

As a number of posters have pointed out, humankind as a whole lack the will to come to a workable consensus to deal with the issues that the OP points out. Perhaps our species will muddle through this, but I strongly suspect that outcome will come at a cost to many of the existing species and ecosystems.

 

[Politesse]

The human population is simply too high*. I do NOT offer any remedy (though some Infidels will pretend that I advocate massacring babies), but let's not bury our heads in the sand and pretend that overpopulation is not a major problem.

How perfectly useless, to demand inaction on the real issues that threaten the planet in favor of solving "overpopulation", but offer no solution for overpopulation either.

 

[bilby]

Population is people, and people are the point of the exercise - the objective is to ensure that the planet is as pleasant as possible to live on for everyone who is alive at any point in time.

Imposed population controls can take one of two forms - killing people, and telling people they're not allowed to have children. Neither of these is pleasant at all.

Of course, should population levels be the cause of even greater suffering than would occur due to killing lots of people and/or stopping people who want children from having them, these measures could become unavoidable.

However there's no evidence whatsoever that this has yet occurred, nor that it ever will.

So stump up the evidence, or stop advocating genocide and/or forced birth control.

Ehrlich was very clear that the evidence would very shortly be forthcoming in the form of worldwide mass starvation and huge increases in commodity prices in the 1980s and '90s. Neither happened - in fact, commodity prices plummeted, and famine virtually disappeared from the world.

His response to this was indistinguishable from that of the Jehovah's Witnesses when their prophecies of the end times failed to arrive on schedule - he ignored his failure, told everyone else to ignore it, and kept right on making dire predictions about a future that he had already predicted could never come.

Where's the evidence that today's population is too high? Where's the evidence that the population will become too high at some point in time? What does "too high" even mean?

 

[Jarhyn]

people are the point of the exercise

Not really.

I don't know how to describe how utterly Christian that view is.

People are not the point and frankly, I think the problem can be addressed a third way: encouraging all the lifestyles that people can be and are generally happy with that don't lead to folks having children.

To me it seems like the point is to enjoy our time while we are here, and that can be done without so many babies.

There are a few things in this class of actions:
-Reducing child mortality to the point where "backup children" are not necessary.(the majority of folks who want kids want between 1-3 of them and no more)

-Not forcing or encouraging those who wish to reproduce to stay reproductively capable "because they may change their mind later." (63% of female persons; I got this from 2 seconds of googling)

-Providing high quality education so that people have things to do that aren't "making babies". (53% reduction!?!)

-Letting LGBT+ folks be LGBT+ without telling them they need to reproduce. (Between 5-15% reduction).

-Letting people who want to terminate pregnancies do so. (198/1000 births ~20% reduction in reproductivity)

-Making prophylactic birth control freely available. (Not active distribution, passive free availability; unknown effectiveness )

-Figuring out methodologies to provide high quality care for the elderly that will be exercized regardless of whether they have children. (Unknown effectiveness).

-Making agricultural technologies globally available so that those who farm the food do not need large families to run the farms.

The fact is, so many kids are unwanted and accidental, and so few female persons want kids that just giving people real license and education to avoid that will cause population growth to retract below "replacement rate", and especially so when combined with all the other purely benign measures.

I strongly doubt repressive measures are necessary to cause a major retraction of the global population, since so few people actually want to have that many kids, but rather they feel (or are) forced into doing it.

The really nice thing about this strategy is that it is accomplished by solving a number of real problems already plaguing our world and global cultures.

 

[Jarhyn]

Additional measures which are more repressive although not particularly, which would reduce the growth rate further below attrition rates:
-Propaganda focusing on advertising vasectomy and tubal ligation, though targeting would have to be carefully monitored to prevent it being directed specifically towards minorities.

-Government funding, advertisement, and coverage for family planning services (Planned Parenthood) across the board would further reduce unplanned births.

-Removing government funding for fertility measures.

-National/global standards being set for sex education would reduce early births significantly without direct "repressiveness" but in practice could include propaganda efforts to focus on how miserable some parents end up being.

-Propaganda encouraging people to opt out of sex hormonal puberty altogether.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Mars?! 1% Earth gravity, solar radiation, no oxygen to breath Mars?!

People were freaking the fuck out over not going to the bar after one month during Covid... but we gonna settle on a planet we weren't evolved to live on, and can't go outside without a mega mask (helmet)?!

Fuck Musk and his stupid ideas!

 

[Swammerdami]

The human population is simply too high*. I do NOT offer any remedy (though some Infidels will pretend that I advocate massacring babies), but let's not bury our heads in the sand and pretend that overpopulation is not a major problem.

How perfectly useless, to demand inaction on the real issues that threaten the planet in favor of solving "overpopulation", but offer no solution for overpopulation either.

Hunh?

Where did I "demand inaction" on any threatening issues, real or not?

And I am not allowed to discuss overpopulation if I don't provide a remedy?

In a math thread, may I discuss the Riemann Hypothesis if I can't prove it?
If someone asks for an explanation of the Poincare Conjecture I won't be allowed to answer unless I understand Perelman's proof??

Yes, I realize that I'm overworking the confused emoticon. That's because I find your comment UTTERLY BAFFLING.

 

[Jarhyn]

The reason I say these things are necessary is that human activity releases WAY too much carbon, generates too much novel chemistry, and disrupts too much geological structure. In the same way relatively few cancer cells can still kill the host, we are producing unprecedented levels of long-lasting toxicity, especially in the form of plastics and plastic monomers.

If the population ever is threatened with collapse from extreme reduction, we can always encourage more births, and the fact is that simple natural selection will eventually catch us as the population falls, and it's not like fertility technology will cease to exist just for no longer being funded or discouraged.

I don't want to burn the library and frankly we should absolutely retain knowledge and skills for improving fertility when we need it -- like a benign trait in a genetic population -- in case our existence is ever actually threatened.

I don't want humans to ever extinct themselves even were we to accomplish the reductions I would seek, even if some post-human form of life emerges.

I think it's important to recognize the value of the diversity of human and nonhuman life and cultures.

But we can absolutely should reduce our presence.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

There is no maximum number of individuals that the planet and its ecosystems can support. In effect the planet can support an infinite number of any and all species because that's how our planet works.

Uh, no, finite planets cannot support infinite numbers of inhabitants. Do the math.

The planet is self correcting when it comes to all this so humans don't have to worry about anything.

Tell that to the folks on Easter Island and other civilizations that suffered collapse. The problem is we can overshoot, leading to dramatic collapse.

Holy fuck! I thought my sarcasm was obvious. BTW, Rapanui did not overpopulate and collapse. Its demise is traceable to European exploitation and the introduction of European disease.

And Hunter Biden's laptop.

 

[Merle]

It is paywalled. Please provide a copy of the text.

I won't violate copyright by posting the whole thing, but I will give you a few key quotes:

Anyone considering parenthood should have all the alternative options at their disposal, including (a) abstaining from sex—in marriage and outside of it, an option few couples choose, (b) using truly reliable forms of contraception, or (c) abortion. Environmentally speaking, a woman or couple choosing abortion over giving birth is the more responsible choice, while having a child is the most damaging action for the environment a person can take. After all, “human birth” means a growing human population, and as the population continues to grow, there is no hope for a stable compatible environment. The inevitable consequence of this unchecked growth is suffering and death on a magnitude that none of us have ever experienced to date...

It seems that only with a very substantial reduction in the size of the human population can we hope for a stable order for Earth’s biosphere and its human inhabitants. And this will only be possible when all world citizens have access to a full range of contraceptive devices, medications, and procedures, including abortion. There are no other means by which we can achieve universal sustainability, the prerequisite for continuing human life on Earth...

We must somehow eliminate greed, dishonesty, and selfishness at the personal, societal, national, and international levels if we have any hope of humanity persevering on the Earth for longer than just a few hundred years. We must use our scientific knowledge and models rather than ancient mythological treatises as guides. Unfortunately, it is not clear that we humans are capable of such an achievement, but it is our only hope.

Source: https://secularhumanism.org/2023/04/save-the-earth-dont-give-birth/

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Interesting, as the last paragraph in the quoted text seems to imply that people are the issue, not the number of them. If people are incapable of managing enough compassion and care for 10 billion, why would it work for 1 billion? And of course, when we say 1 billion, we mean fewer poor people, not fewer people who write articles like that.

They want population drops? They can go first. If they aren't that committed to the cause, they are full of shit.

 

[rousseau]

we're already seeing mass starvation due to global warming

No, we aren't.

Mass starvation was a twentieth century phenomenon, and hunger on that scale hasn't been seen anywhere for thirty years or more - during which time the population in the last place to see a major famine, Ethiopia, has almost quadrupled.

The problem, then and now, that leads directly to large numbers of people suffering from hunger and even starvation, is war.

Not global warming; Not population growth; War.

The key thing that changed at the end of the 1980s, that led to the end of mass starvation, was that the end of the Cold War meant an end to the proxy wars between the Cold War powers that had plagued the third world since the "end" of WWII.

My reading of the situation is that climate change is already affecting the African Sahel. Would you say that's not the case?

It certainly is. It's not causing mass starvation though.

Would you say that it's exacerbating food insecurity? What impacts were you thinking?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

we're already seeing mass starvation due to global warming

No, we aren't.

Mass starvation was a twentieth century phenomenon, and hunger on that scale hasn't been seen anywhere for thirty years or more - during which time the population in the last place to see a major famine, Ethiopia, has almost quadrupled.

The problem, then and now, that leads directly to large numbers of people suffering from hunger and even starvation, is war.

Not global warming; Not population growth; War.

The key thing that changed at the end of the 1980s, that led to the end of mass starvation, was that the end of the Cold War meant an end to the proxy wars between the Cold War powers that had plagued the third world since the "end" of WWII.

My reading of the situation is that climate change is already affecting the African Sahel. Would you say that's not the case?

It certainly is. It's not causing mass starvation though.

Would you say that it's exacerbating food insecurity? What impacts were you thinking?

Stresses are on the system, but it'd be a stress if there were 1 billion people on Africa or 100 million... because the issue is much much more supply lines, than lack of food. And the supply line issue is caused by geopolitical instability and crap governance.

Just look at Ukraine and the impact an invasion can have on the supply chain for grains. That isn't being caused by population values, it is being caused by assholes (metaphorical ones).