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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 will have wet bulb temperatures that are unsurvivable in the next few decades.
Also, some parts just are off:
“A bigger society has more cuisines, more architectural styles, more types of fashion, more sub-genres of entertainment.” Then why are tons of languages on the verge of extinction? Why do so many apartments around the world look like IKEA exploded in it? How come the weaver I visited in Lombok is making patterns and cuts for westerners rather than their traditional stuff, and he himself was just wearing basic tshirts? How come the clothing store across from the spot I stayed at in south Goa was selling Jack Daniel’s t-shirts rather than traditional crafts? How come every gen z person is wearing what I wore in middle and high school? It’s not like SHEIN is making new niche styles for people.
“Better matching to careers” Tell that to the young men in Algiers that asked us for directions to any consulate that would maybe help them get a work visa to leave since there’s no work. Or any of the migrants getting on dangerous boats to cross the Mediterranean to do whatever work they can find. Every cousin of mine that can leave has left. There are plenty of geniuses sitting around without many options just because of where they were born, we don’t need more population to get more geniuses if we’re not even working with what we’ve got.
I’ll give him the niche markets one, though that’s more a function of communication via the Internet than it is about population numbers go up.
I don’t know, it’s hard to take a think piece like this seriously. 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. Living in a luxury Airbnb in Canggu doesn’t count. Happy to be wrong though.
> 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.
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.
I live in a single state with a tiny population that mines and ships 16x more raw iron ore, almost a billion tonnes per annum, than peak annual iron ore mining in the entire USofA ever. We also mine a millions of tonnes of other resources. This is entirely down to bigger machines, smarter technology, and factors that don't require more people.
The arguments presented here for even more people on the globe are sketchy at best, no weight at all is given to the downsides of truly challenging levels of resource extraction currently at play to meet the high consumption demands of a small proportion of the large population we already have on the planet.
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 effects are totally absent.
Will technology allow us to sustain larger populations - likely but at what cost.
And where are those mining machines that allow this to occur manufactured? How about all the components of the mining machines? The locomotives that take all that iron ore to port? The port infrastructure? The ships that transport the ore to its overseas customers?
WA and its mining wealth and efficiency wouldn't exist without a global market for both its supply and demand.
> no weight at all is given to the downsides of truly challenging levels of resource extraction currently at play to meet the high consumption demands of a small proportion of the large population we already have on the planet.
Those arguments are addressed in the second paragraph:
> Historically, as we run out of a resource (whale oil, elephant tusks, seabird guano), we transition to a new technology based on a more abundant resource—and there are basically no major examples of catastrophic resource shortages in the industrial age. The carrying capacity of the planet is not fixed, but a function of technology; and side effects such as pollution or climate change are just more problems to be solved. As long as we can keep coming up with new ideas, growth can continue.
If "more people" was always better then India and Africa should be much richer than Europe.
A lack of people can be an innovation driver: "hiring people is too expensive, so we have to automate everything", i.e. innovation is a must for survival.
We are still bound by labor amount, but now it's mostly the intellectual labor.
The amount of thinking happening in the world depends on the amount of human brains available, and their level of education and knowledge, in the widest sense. Solving current challenges faster is often only possible by applying a larger amount of thinking to them.
(No, the AI is not yet a game changer here.)
The amount of people living in good conditions is also higher than it ever was. In fact the % of people living poverty world wide is decreasing while world population is increasing.
The OP also claims that growth is possible indefinitely.
But somehow, we need more humans to to have critical resources necessary to execute some projects.
The contradiction is lost on the OP author.
"One argument for a larger population is based on utilitarianism, specifically the version of it that says that what is good is the sum total of happiness across all humans."
Utilitarianism doesn't say that 'good is the sum total of happiness across all humans' but rather it says it's 'the greatest good for the greatest number', which is substantially different, so this is a distortion of the facts. I would refer the author to the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill especially his work Utilitarianism.
"If each additional life adds to the cosmic scoreboard of goodness, then it’s obviously better to have more people (unless they are so miserable that their lives are literally not worth living)."
I can't be bothered to debate population argument in detail again as it always polarizes and ends up in unresolved arguments—except to say the author doesn't seem to have enough understanding about the implications of exponential growth.
The facts are clear even to Blind Freddy that the resources and environmental problems presently being experienced are caused by excessive demands on the planet's resources.
Of course the elephant in the room is the world's population but any serious discussion about that is verboten in the public discourse.
What strikes me about this recent wave of pro-natalism is how banal and devoid of serious argument it is.
Just to mention a few things, any ethical system of a mature civilization should have something to say about the entire biosphere, not just homo sapiens. The article doesn't lose a word on the fate of any other species on this planet, and I don't know how one can even have this discussion without recognizing that we're only one of the many inhabitants here. If you're going to propose an entire world view based on some superficial notion of self-interest you can justify anything.
For a worldview that leans so heavily into utilitarianism it's very odd to ignore most sentient life on earth. I invite the author to visit a large scale factory farm to see the "technological progress" in action that sustains 8 billion people and then to ponder how that squares with his own supposed standard for ethical progress.
Second point is this naive Steve Pinker-esque belief in "progress" to begin with. If you're going to argue that "more geniuses" and "more ethnic restaurants" constitute some deep and authentic moral progress for human civilization you have your work cut out for you, most people on the planet don't share that value system, and it's not obvious that anyone should buy into it without justification. It's almost naive to the point of being tautological, where "progress" is when more people do more things, and therefore having more progress is having more people.
This may be a bit reductive but the article is basically saying that the larger the population the quicker progress and innovation will occur. What’s unclear though is if this progress and innovation leads to greater human happiness and fulfillment. As we’ve seen lately, the opposite could also be true. With climate change on the horizon, we may have even reached peak human happiness sometime in the late 20th century
This is an absolutely terrifying perspective. The planet can realistically support about one billion human beings. It was only the Haber–Bosch process in the early 1900s that made it possible to grow enough food to maintain the 8 billion humans we have today.
At the time, it seemed like an incredible humanitarian advance, feeding so many more people than before, and providing higher profits for farmers, boosting the world economy. But the unintended consequences were devastating. Resource extraction has been catastrophic, of course, as has the destruction of natural habitats that come from population explosion, the accelerated extinction of animals, and the potentially apocalyptic global warming that has resulted both directly and indirectly.
Demographers predict a population collapse (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/18/opinion/human...) that could see the world drop under 2 billion again, but without help, it will probably come too late to save the planet as we know it now. We should be doing everything possible to discourage birthrates and get the only habitable planet in our known universe back to a sustainable equilibrium.
I strongly disagree, while technology clearly helped us growing, there are always tradeoffs, even agriculture is not ideal. We can solve some problems but it is almost never « for free » and the cost is newer problems to solve. I think there is a compounding effect with population growth, and I don’t think that population can grow forever on a single planet, that is nonsense.
How much is enough? My intuition is that population stability is more important than actual number, but between 2 Billions and 10Billions is likely the sweet spot.
I often wonder how much the average return on the stock market, which everyone with a retirement plan depends on, has simply been a function of a population growth.
If the population shrinks, economies will have to contract, the market will need to fall in proportion to the people available to buy stuff, and the compound interest gravy train for a comfortable retirement will end. This is my selfish reason for wanting more people.
This is based on nothing but my own rumination. I’d love to be proven wrong, as this worries me.
> 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.
Some of the underlying logic here feels suspect to me.
Sure, more people likely leads to more production of non-rival goods, but more people will also make rival goods more scarce and harder to come by. Sure, some rival goods will be replaced by non-rival goods, but it's hard to imagine eliminating them entirely.
I don't really buy the idea that we can forever stay on this train of finding new/better/less-scarce resources every time we find that whatever we're using today is going to run out. As a bit of an extreme example, there is only so much matter in the universe, and even if we find a way to convert any kind of matter into any other with minimal energy expenditure, if the population keeps growing and growing, eventually there will not be enough matter for further growth. I suppose then the author might suggest that we will find loopholes in the laws of thermodynamics that allows us to create matter from nothing, but at some point you have to admit that this is the fictioniest of science fiction and isn't something we can support with what we know today.
Then there's just plain old shitty human nature. The larger an individual society is, the more people are going to be at the bottom of it, falling through the cracks. There will always be people who want more wealth and more power, and someone -- more and more someones, really -- has to suffer for it. THe idealist in me wants to imagine a post-scarcity society, but I'm not sure I have it in me anymore to believe in such a thing; we have the ability to feed every person on Earth, today, and yet we don't do it, because those in power are selfish and more concerned with their stock prices than in actually helping fellow humans (and we, the unwashed masses, constantly enable them). I don't have much optimism that this will change, ever; even if it does, I expect that to take millennia, at best.
On another tack: we have so many people in the world who are unhappy, beaten down, in poverty, hungry, unhoused today. Maybe we should fix that before working to grow our population more and more and more.
Having said that, I do agree that it's preposterous to think that the ideal size of humanity is a half billion, or even a couple billion, as the author points out others have suggested. We have, so far, overcome resource limitations, and likely will be able to continue to do so for some time. I'm just skeptical of how long we can continue to do that.
Wrong.
You want the largest viable population. That is, a population below carrying capacity.
A population over carrying capacity just consumes the environment that sustains it and dies off collectively.
Today we are over carrying capacity at a global level, and many regions are also over carrying capacity at a local level.
The population centers built around groundwater aquifers pumped aggresively, overfishing, or dying topsoil, which are most of them, are doomed.
Unless there is an innovation that unlocks rapid topsoil regeneration, freshwater replenishment, and plentiful food sources covering the growing global demand for fish, at scale and meeting market demand at low prices, humanity is bound to have a conflict over the remaining resources.
More geniuses — there are plenty of talented "brains" that simply never get a chance due to malnutrition, disease, lack of education and opportunity. We'd have far more of them if we could provide a higher minimum standard of living throughout the entire world.
The population growth rate needs to be controlled, even reduced, to reduce the pressure on natural resources and slow down the climate change.
John Baez, mathematician at UCR, talks about this approach among a number of others, such as, reducing air travel for conferences.
I don't know what the optimal population is, but here are a couple of arguments against the "ever greater" thesis. Diminishing returns kicks in at some point. The economic value of human life is subject to supply and demand. Where there excess supply, life is cheap and not in a good way.
More geniuses
The problem here is with the distribution of future geniuses. More likely than not they will be born into a population with low education. The probability of nurturing this talent for the betterment of mankind will be low. In highly educated populations, the birth rate is normally low.
If you were serious about this line of argument you would be appalled by the massive waste of potential in today's population, so many wasted brains especially in the "third world", and you would be an advocate for global wealth redistribution, generous welfare, increased spending on education, better nutrition, reduction of pollution that affects health, etc.
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.
I doubt things scale this way. There are only so many opportunities to have impact. I don't think increasing the random generation of geniuses would have that much of an impact compared to an increase in quality of life for a smaller number of people.
The problem is that infrastructure doesn't scale nearly as quickly as birth rates, let alone immigration. Cities are getting overcrowded, and many, many attempts by many different countries have proven the difficulty of bootstrapping new cities in the middle of otherwise economically underperforming land, like agricultural fields or even desert. Pretty much every existing major city is bursting at the seams: insufficient housing, insufficient transportation infrastructure, insufficient utility infrastructure.
>A bigger world is better for everyone
Current world isn't good enough for everyone.
Egypt now has a much bigger population than egypt then, and they are a very poor country
Larger populations get significantly harder to manage and educate.
1 programmer can do in 1 month what 9 programmers can do in 9 months
Many of those who want to have more kids can’t afford it. Plain and simple. In conversations like this, people often skip over this reality which always surprises me. Instead, they seem to focus on winning the ideological battle of what the ideal world should be.
This could easily all be arguments for why you personally should want a more equitable world where we don’t have a Third world full of unhappiness and wasted tallent.
Seems to be fixated on the idea that only Human Resources matter at the expense of all other resources.
Our current population is being propped up by all number of finite resources, most significantly oil, for which we have no certainty of finding more supply of in the future. With a higher population, we're depleting those resources faster.
It may in fact be better to get to a lower level of population which is long-term stable. We are aggressively burning through our natural resources and while humanity won't go extinct our population is doomed to absolutely plummet during an age of poverty.
>First, more people means more outliers—more super-intelligent, super-creative, or super-talented people, to produce great art, architecture, music, philosophy, science, and inventions.
There might be 1,000 certified geniuses per billion, but we are still slaves to probability. That genius might be born in the slums of Calcutta or in the middle of the Amazon rainforest or in the vastness of the Mongolian steppes. I guess the hope would be that 3 or 4 might have the luck to be born to a middle class or higher family in the first world.
Also, whatever this dude wants, the world is in major decline. For example, because of China's one child policy, their population will be halved in 50 or 70 years and nothing can stop that. Japan has a high over 40 population, Italy, Germany, Spain, and especially South Korea. Russia has been declining in population and with the war, the best and brightest have left Russia, never to return (they are devoloping lives, wives, children wherever they are now), and the meat grinder of the war. Same with Ukraine.
The same thing happened in ancient Rome as well. It got so expensive to raise a child in Rome (yes, inflation existed back then as well), because of money pouring into the administrative city of Rome - for the same reason now in the first world, that people stopped having children. Even back then they had rudimentary birth control. The Roman Emperors gave all kinds of incentives for families to have children - grants and tax reductions, but it was not enough.
Too much of a single thing is usually not good. Wild populations of animals have diminished rapidly. More people also means less space for the dwindling wild populations. Making all life on earth one species is not a good idea, one dimensional thinking is usually detrimental to the system.
The population already exists. But we don’t see that many geniuses working on ambitious projects because they are working minimum wage jobs or wasting away without education in Africa, India, China, or downtown LA. We don’t have a population problem, just a utilization problem.
Wow, I get it is an opinion piece so it shouldn't be fact-checked, but still, what an absolutely ignorant and naive take on the subject.
It seems like the author has never come across the concept of what a "Behavioral sink" is, which is not really hard to find/understand; as well as the many other sources of data, experiments and thoughts that would easily invalidate the purported benefits he portrays.
"More geniuses, more R&D investment, more ambitious projects, better aesthetics, better careers, more niche communities, more niche markets"; no correlation between this and population size. If you take a look at the most populated cities on Earth, about 8/10 are FAR from being "an aesthetic population center where people live happy and fulfilled lives, with artists and geniuses together to improve human progress". Had the author not traveled outside the US ever in life?
"but that's due to economic and social factors that have kept them subdued for centuries"
1. It's not ...
2. ... even if it was, why would a larger population get rid of those issues instead of making them worse?
Never ever thought I'd see this argument. It's amusing in the same way you would be if you saw someone intentionally throw off all their safety gear before attempting a dangerous activity "just because". Or even better "Aim for the Bushes Scene" -- check it out, a new approach to population management.
"Growth" - everything in this world is about "growth" - if your economy is not "growing" it is a disaster, thus you import more people because people == "growth".
Despite the fact that growth is bad for the environment and espite constant "growth" for decades our problems have not been solved.
> The carrying capacity of the planet is not fixed, but a function of technology; and side effects such as pollution or climate change are just more problems to be solved. As long as we can keep coming up with new ideas, growth can continue.
There are a lot of big ifs in this statement.
So the author mentions a sustainable population level but does absolutely no research into what level is sustainable, nor talk about it at all in their own argument.
And of course we see no mention of obvious counterpoints. More geniuses, ok. But how about more psychopaths? Not just from a pure numbers perspective, but higher psychopathology rates correlate with higher living densities, which are sure to increase when increasing the population significantly.
Arguments about more people meaning more cuisine need much greater support. It seems much of the culinary development flourished because of isolation first followed by globalization. What we've seen more recently seems to be less new styles or dishes and more homogenization of existing styles. Much of the exposure to other cuisines is actually from negatives like war and famine, both from occupation, refugees, and warriors returning home with newly acquired tastes. And of course many of these conflicts were around scarcity of resources especially during transitional times when switching from one resource/tech to another.
Like they say in the market, past returns are not indicicators of future returns. Blindly relying on benefits of infinite technology growth exceeding the rate of population demands is not a compelling argument.
I think the best reason for a lower population is that in the age of AI having 8 billion people of every persuasion with access to a wealth of destructive information and accelerated research it's inevitable someone is going to start a fire we can't put out. Be it a grey goo scenario, a weaponized or misaligned super intelligence or a bioweapon or lab accident which I'm certain covid was. Our best shot right now at surviving the next 50 years is to reduce our population and hope that proportionally reduces the risk of an existential threat by self replicating means. A nuclear war might actually save our species. Is that a radical point of view? Pretty sure the logic is sound at least
Not selfish enough, sorry. Empower the human, regardless of total fertility rate decline trajectory (~40% of global annual pregnancies are unintended; assuming reproductive wishes are affirmed [less or no children], extrapolate future total fertility rate accordingly [points down]).
> bigger societies are better for everyone.
This does not appear to be the case based on the evidence. Bigger societies are better for those in political power, with economic control, and anyone who is a beneficiary of excess/surplus. We should do what is best for the human, not the machine. We already do not properly provide for hundreds of millions of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_environmen... ("Wikipedia: Human impact on the environment")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_environmen... ("Wikipedia: Climate Change Flowchart")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries ("Wikipedia: Planetary boundaries")
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... ("HN: Planetary boundaries search")
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#empowerment-of-wom... ("Our World in Data: Fertility Rate - Empowerment of Women")
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u... ("Guttmacher Institute: Unintended Pregnancy in the United States")
https://www.unfpa.org/press/nearly-half-all-pregnancies-are-... ("UNFPA: Nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended—a global crisis, says new UNFPA report")
https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-... ("Fast facts: Global poverty")
(thesis arrived at by a preponderance of all available information)
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
The author’s third point, “More progress’, is what I find the most compelling. We tend to think of ourselves living in a techno utopia, but in my view we are barely out of the dark ages. Disease and poverty still run rampant and our lives are frustratingly short. There are people personally close to me that live in chronic pain; there are healthy people in their 20s that die from cancer; our understanding of biology and physiology is so poor we currently can’t help this people. Broad technological progress is the only answer and this will require talented people.
Wrong. Other people should have fewer kids and fade away. My people must continue grow and prosper. It's simple.
"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 !
The endless-growth mindset will eventually be viewed as a mental illness. We pity hoarders, but we somehow look up to the unreasonably wealthy, even though they are eerily similar in their attitude and behaviour towards "their precious".
If you look at a graph of human population over the last 1000 years [1] (and since -10000AD if you want [2]), it looks eerily like a stock market chart that has temporarily spiked before crashing back down to a more reasonable valuation.
Over the ages, we've had many population declines [3] but they've tended to be smaller and smaller (relatively to the total population). Is there a massive "correction" coming, as challenges of carrying capacity, climate change, global conflict and disease rear their ugly heads? Hard to say.
Regardless - I object to using the word "progress" as a stand-in for "more". It hardly ever is.
1: https://i.imgur.com/iSNbGTN.png
2: https://i.imgur.com/73zV927.png
3: https://i.imgur.com/sccJBGB.png
(these are hastily back-of-the-napkin'd with GPT, so take with a grain of salt)
If more people means more geniuses we should be getting new groundbreaking insights about fundamental physics every year.
We don't because the resource of human learnable undiscovered physics was kind of limited resource that kinda ran out.
In the spirit of the article we replaced one resource with another. So now most of our numerous geniuses instead of discovering how to steal more from the universe learn how to steal more from consumers in investment banks, marketing companies and tech giants.