If our economic model depends on eternal population growth, it is the model that needs to change, not the eternal growth that needs to be subsidized.
Our planet cannot support 10 billion people.
With automation and robots, we can support a population without an eternal underclass of serfs to throw their vitality into the meat grinder of capitalism.
This is exactly the problem. It's not about how many bodies we can stack on top of each other, it's how many people can this one specific area sustainably support, knowing that the number we come up with will fluctuate with time and circumstance and that same calculation has to be made for every "area" we care to define. It's a highly complex problem.
As resources like clean drinking water get more and more scarce, and climate change and the refugees it produces cause all of us to pack into smaller and smaller areas we'll need to start paying more and more attention to this to make sure that we're not destroying what resources we still have.
I agree that eternal growth on a finite planet is the fundamental issue facing humanity. I wouldn't put any absolutes on the "carrying capacity", but I'm certain that things would be much nicer for everybody if the population returned to earlier levels.
> With automation and robots, we can support a population without an eternal underclass of serfs to throw their vitality into the meat grinder of capitalism.
But then the people who own the robots won't feel special...
I feel like with automation of work, people would have more kids than they already do. They’d have more time to raise them, less concerns about resources or their future.
People have always hoped for that but it doesn’t materialize, the opposite effect does as societies mechanize. Part of the reason I think is that the value of labor magnified by automation is higher, so the opportunity cost of not working more is higher as you mechanize more!
Exponential growth gets away from you even when you allow for resources that are vastly beyond what we now have access to.
At an annual growth rate of 1%, starting from the present population in 3400 years the amount of mass we need for human bodies is equal to the combined mass of the Earth and the Moon.
In another 600 years and the mass we need for humans equals the mass of Jupiter.
From there it is only 700 years until we need the mass of the entire solar system, including the Sun, for human bodies.
From then it is about 2000 more years before we need the mass of the entire Milky Way galaxy, which is problematic because unless we have FTL travel we won't have been able to use any resources that are farther than 6700 light years from Earth, which is only a small fraction of the Milky Way.
Another 5600 years (about 12300 years from now) we need the mass of the observable universe.
Without FTL after about 12000 years at 1% annual growth the amount of space we could theoretically have access to (a sphere of radius 12000 light years around the Earth) does not have enough space to hold everybody. The volume of that sphere divided by the population would fall below 0.006 m^3, which is about how much volume a human body takes up. (And we can't actually pack people that densely because we are not actually a shape that packs well).
How about energy, rather than mass or space? If our energy needs grow by 1% per year in about 9300 years our annual energy consumption will be equal to the total energy of the Milky Way. By "total energy of the Milky Way" I mean what we could get if all of it were converted to energy (E=mc^2).
In 12000 years we'd need the energy of the entirefreakingobservableuniverse.
well yes eventually we'll reach a regime where growth must become cubic rather than exponential, because we run up against the speed of light. but we are nowhere near that yet and it is silly to worry about it.
There's no question that the survival of humanity depends on our ability to colonize space. I just worry that destroying our planet on the assumption that future generations will be able to escape to other worlds is going to make it so much harder for that progress to happen that we might not make it that far.
That people who have to fight each other just for clean water and food will focus on building guns and bombs instead of spaceships and won't have the time or resources to search for suitable planets.
Unless I've gone blinder the author seems to have put no thought towards what sort of childhoods might be had by those whose parents had had them purely for monetary gain.
this is robin hanson we're talking about. the guy who wrote "age of em" where quadrillions of simulated people work in cubicle farms for subsistence wages and this is good because their lives are slightly better than nothing at all.
This is the kind of stuff I used to worry about before I started SSRIs. Now I can get off the train before I get to ridiculous things like world Amish domination.
I wonder if chemically sterilizing almost every young women starting around the age of menarche (to “regulate” their cycles) and through their otherwise most fertile years has something to do with the precipitous drop in fertility in the developed world.
Just make human fertility longer. It's painfully short. Modern women are only really fertile for 25% of their life, and significant part of that period is spent on trying to become financially stable.
If women would be fertile up to 60, which is also something reasonable for almost every other mammal, we would be swimming in children even in developed countries and will have much more severe issues with overpopulation :)
Currently there is a huge evolutionary pressure towards having longer fertility period so it is bound to arrive in some quantity anyway.
I think kids require more energy than the average 60-year-old has to spend. If the solution to that is then to just have the state look over the kids, then why bother messing with fertility? Just clone the children, or cook them up in vats and incubators. Enabling 60-year-olds to birth children seems like a pointless endeavor that will cause just as many problems as any other solution that's an apparent affront to nature/god/whatever.
A family of two 60-year old middle class, stable income citizens owning a home have way more resources to have a baby than a 25 yo upstart young women with no home or spouse.
They may hire a part time assistant for the first two years and it becomes pretty easy later on. Even single grannies of that age can host a kindergarden or school age kids for a prolonged period of time.
A lot of people even today are mostly raised by their grannies.
A 60 year old having a child implies being 78 by the time the child reaches adulthood. That has seriously negative effects on parent/child relationships.
Do you want parents worrying about breaking hips when chasing kids around or playing catch?
Raising a child does not become easy after 2 years. It still requires the majority of your time and energy - energy that is in decreasing supply as you age.
The author is surprisingly confused about how the national debt works. Who, exactly, does the author think the debt is owed to? Directly and indirectly the people, that's who.
This is blindingly obvious when he mentions social security obligations. Most people both pay into the social security system and they receive money out of it -- just at different times of their lives.
In other words, there isn't really a net debt at the societal level (you can quibble about foreign effects, but the relevant numbers there look very different). It is primarily a system of (re-)distribution.
The fact that the author doesn't seem to understand this fairly basic fact makes the entire argument suspect.
I think you have this reversed unless I am misunderstanding you.
We do not owe the debt to ourselves. We are liable for the debt ourselves, directly and indirectly. We owe our debt to creditors, which can (and does) include other countries.
And obligations like social security are not debt. They may be funded by debt, but the obligation itself, being paid out to some US citizen, does not represent debt being paid off. Its payment is funded by debt, and in order to fund $100 of SS, we had to take $100 from someone's paycheck, or by issuing new debt, etc.
You're largely restating what I wrote, and in any case none of this understanding is visible in TFA. In particular, TFA very explicitly suggests that some measure of social security promises should be counted as if it were debt.
Can somebody explain to me why a declining birth rate is so horrible?
Gov debt? If we are worried about debt for any reason, we should just reduce the deficit. I'm old enough to remember when we were running surpluses--I actually read a WSJ article which was in near panic that by 2020, we would run out of 30-year treasury bills--how ever could Fannie Mae subsidize home mortgages!!
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadOur planet cannot support 10 billion people.
With automation and robots, we can support a population without an eternal underclass of serfs to throw their vitality into the meat grinder of capitalism.
Source needed
Food is not the limiting factor for population.
Parent post hints that X < 10B, but I'd wager many believe X < whatever we have now
It is obvious Earth could hold a very large human population - but not for very long, and not (for those people) very well
As resources like clean drinking water get more and more scarce, and climate change and the refugees it produces cause all of us to pack into smaller and smaller areas we'll need to start paying more and more attention to this to make sure that we're not destroying what resources we still have.
But then the people who own the robots won't feel special...
Instead they would line up for an overpriced apartment in London or a condo in Silicon Valley. A nice coast with view if they have the money.
It would not be easy to beat people into moving off Earth en masse, if they aren't willing to move out of metro area.
At an annual growth rate of 1%, starting from the present population in 3400 years the amount of mass we need for human bodies is equal to the combined mass of the Earth and the Moon.
In another 600 years and the mass we need for humans equals the mass of Jupiter.
From there it is only 700 years until we need the mass of the entire solar system, including the Sun, for human bodies.
From then it is about 2000 more years before we need the mass of the entire Milky Way galaxy, which is problematic because unless we have FTL travel we won't have been able to use any resources that are farther than 6700 light years from Earth, which is only a small fraction of the Milky Way.
Another 5600 years (about 12300 years from now) we need the mass of the observable universe.
Without FTL after about 12000 years at 1% annual growth the amount of space we could theoretically have access to (a sphere of radius 12000 light years around the Earth) does not have enough space to hold everybody. The volume of that sphere divided by the population would fall below 0.006 m^3, which is about how much volume a human body takes up. (And we can't actually pack people that densely because we are not actually a shape that packs well).
How about energy, rather than mass or space? If our energy needs grow by 1% per year in about 9300 years our annual energy consumption will be equal to the total energy of the Milky Way. By "total energy of the Milky Way" I mean what we could get if all of it were converted to energy (E=mc^2).
In 12000 years we'd need the energy of the entire freaking observable universe.
That people who have to fight each other just for clean water and food will focus on building guns and bombs instead of spaceships and won't have the time or resources to search for suitable planets.
Perhaps this is a satirical post?
A dog is happy to run through grass and you need not parental love to find your own happiness - I say this from experience
I will have children because I enjoy them, a shallow self interest to enjoy my life
Parental love is a big factor in folks lives / happiness.
The Amish lose a significant share of their children to secularism each epoch.
Climate change will force 1/3rd of the world's population out of Africa and into Europe/The Americas/South Asia within the next 30 years.
Unless you kill them at the border like the Saudi's are doing they will always still have incentive to get into your country by any means.
Only difference is you have the option to stop it.
You’d be very confused had you started Return of The King with no idea of Tolkien or the previous movies.
If women would be fertile up to 60, which is also something reasonable for almost every other mammal, we would be swimming in children even in developed countries and will have much more severe issues with overpopulation :)
Currently there is a huge evolutionary pressure towards having longer fertility period so it is bound to arrive in some quantity anyway.
They may hire a part time assistant for the first two years and it becomes pretty easy later on. Even single grannies of that age can host a kindergarden or school age kids for a prolonged period of time.
A lot of people even today are mostly raised by their grannies.
Do you want parents worrying about breaking hips when chasing kids around or playing catch?
Raising a child does not become easy after 2 years. It still requires the majority of your time and energy - energy that is in decreasing supply as you age.
You can play catch with your brother who is 15 years older and your sister who is 30 years older will haul you around.
Grannies raise children just fine, and if the family is complete they can do it indefinitely.
This is blindingly obvious when he mentions social security obligations. Most people both pay into the social security system and they receive money out of it -- just at different times of their lives.
In other words, there isn't really a net debt at the societal level (you can quibble about foreign effects, but the relevant numbers there look very different). It is primarily a system of (re-)distribution.
The fact that the author doesn't seem to understand this fairly basic fact makes the entire argument suspect.
We do not owe the debt to ourselves. We are liable for the debt ourselves, directly and indirectly. We owe our debt to creditors, which can (and does) include other countries.
And obligations like social security are not debt. They may be funded by debt, but the obligation itself, being paid out to some US citizen, does not represent debt being paid off. Its payment is funded by debt, and in order to fund $100 of SS, we had to take $100 from someone's paycheck, or by issuing new debt, etc.
Gov debt? If we are worried about debt for any reason, we should just reduce the deficit. I'm old enough to remember when we were running surpluses--I actually read a WSJ article which was in near panic that by 2020, we would run out of 30-year treasury bills--how ever could Fannie Mae subsidize home mortgages!!
If we have a smaller population we are at a tactical disadvantage in inevitable wartime.
Lower birthrates are only acceptable if they are experienced equally. They are not.