Why would fewer people make people in general happier though?
More resources to go around. Less need for / chance of wrecking the environment. Less chance of catastrophic famine. Our food system, for instance, as of now is propped up by fossil fuels-- from fertilization to refrigeration to transportation. For example, I don’t think my home state of Arizona can produce enough food for all 6 and a half million of us residents year round. It has to be grown somewhere else, using fertilizers made from fossil fuels, refrigerated, and transported here. Now, fossil fuels aren’t going to dry up tomorrow, but at some point they more or less will, and what are we going to do if we’re carrying 12 billion people at that point? A few billion are going to starve to death. If we’re carrying, say, 4 or 5 billion, they might not run out until long after we’ve solved that problem. Or say one of the increasingly ubiquitous monocultures of GMO crops is attacked by something akin to chestnut blight. Or a massive drought occurs somewhere like Iowa or central California. We’re intentionally using innovation and technology to feed more people than the land can naturally support. If one of our schemes fails, then the artificially high number of humans it has produced will be . . . corrected. And there are more obvious effects of too many humans; just take what we’re doing now and multiply it. Pollution of fresh water, nuclear and/or biological war, some big “oops” like the ozone (CFCs were consiredly perfectly innoucuous for the first several decades they were in use), etc etc. I’m not at all the doomsay type who believes these problems are insoluble- not in the least- but I do think they are real, and it sometimes worries me that no one is even looking for solutions yet.
As a counterpoint, you have to consider that a world with fewer people means fewer scientists and engineers to solve those problems.
Environmental degradation is still a problem. But that is more an issue of wealth than population IMO. Much of the true damage comes from wealthy countries or countries trying to become wealthy rapidly (China). So its not so much reducing population we need to work on, but on ways to build wealth w/o wrecking the environment. Africa has a huge population, but contributes very little to major environmental problems, that is my impression. A poor world of 5 billion won’t produce as much pollution as 2 billion people in wealthy or rapidly industrializing countries that are industrialized and eat tons of meat. So that is the area to work on.
As far as famine, the majority of our crops are used to feed livestock, which require 5-15 calories of food to make 1 calorie of beef. So switching to a vegetarian lifestyle would provide more than enough food for everybody, which is something we may have to do is population keeps going up but agricultural yields do not (which isn’t realistic, yields are supposed to double in the next 2 decades). But I don’t think famine is really realistic, the worst that will likely happen is a meat free diet and a world w/o corn based ethanol for a few years.
I think a human can live on about 8 bushels of corn a year, and a field produces about 150 bushels an acre per season. Advances predict it’ll be 300 by 2030. But most of it is used on growing beef or ethanol, instead of being eaten. So starvation isn’t a risk. Plus with the food riots of 2008, there has been investment to open new fields in Africa and Eastern Europe, so we may be flooded in cheap food soon.
As far as fossil fuels, much of it is used wastefully. Car pooling and switching to coal based sources (coal made diesel, using coal instead of petroleum in industrial manufacturing) could allow us to dramatically lower our petro use. It is still polluting, but coal isn’t running out anytime soon.
I really don’t know what the land can naturally support. But I don’t personally believe we have feedback mechanisms in action. Our entire agricultural system is artificial, and it has more or less worked for 6000 years.
My point is I see your point, but I think a declining population also means less innovation, and the major problem isn’t overpopulation, it is learning to become wealthy w/o wrecking the climate and environment.
Surely the idea that we need a bigger population to support the large number of elderly leads to a population Ponzi scheme. Don’t you always need even more or do you kill off one generation. In places like Japan people routinely work into old age and are not crying out to be supported by the taxes paid by an expanding younger population.
Archery, cycling, and cooking all rely on technology. You are disallowed those. So is reading and writing. Air conditioning is disallowed. Refrigeration is disallowed. Clothing is disallowed. Your computer is disallowed. Medication, sanitation, transportation…
We will just see how much time and energy you have left for your remaining hobbies when you do not have any technology to use to survive.
Whatever the rate of happiness is without technology.
It’s self-proving \o/
Only according to your completely bizarre strawman and fallacy of excluded middle. Seriously guy, pass whatever you’re smoking. On second thought, don’t. It doesn’t seem good for you.
My statement was that, on the whole, technology has made life better. You seemed to disagreed with that statement.
There are only three alternatives in the whole world:
- Technology makes life better (overall).
- Technology doesn’t make life better (overall).
- Technology doesn’t impact the quality of life (overall).
Your statement was that you disagreed with item #1. You seemed sufficiently hostile to the idea that it seemed likely that you intended #2. I pointed out how item #2 is entirely stupid and farcical. You now seem to be agreeing that item #2 is stupid and farcical.
If your only purpose was to point out that some parts of technology are bad, well sure but I* never said otherwise*, so what relevance that has to what I said is unclear. Why you would feel a need to point out vociferously that some parts of technology are bad when you yourself find the idea of abandoning technology to be stupid and farcical is unclear.
Did you have any real point to make? If not, then let’s not be talking about straw men and excluded middles. The issue is someone (i.e. you) trying to interject some politically correct feeling of “No! Natural is good! Down with the man!” without considering what that statement actually means.
Actually here, let’s break it down to simpler terms.
1 - Me: Pursuing X has been good.
2 - You: X has had some bad.
3 - Me: That isn’t an argument against the continued pursuit of X.
4 - You: Sure it is.
5 - Me: Then let’s get rid of X.
6 - You: Now that’s just being silly.
7 - Me: I agree. So how do you resolve 6 with 4?
I can envision that your answer is, “Well let’s get rid of the bad parts of X.” But
…but that’s not saying anything other than, “Y would be better than X”. Well sure, but you have to propose a Y. otherwise it’s still just the Nirvana fallacy. If you can’t think of a Y then you’re just being daft.
All right, here’s the deal. Overpopulation is bad because it puts a strain on resources and infrastructure. Yes, you can say that for all intents and purposes, resources are nearly infinite at the moment, but that is irrelevant. To get at those raw material resources, convert them into products people actually need and use and get them to where they need to go requires infrastructure. Massive grain surplusses in Kansas are irrelevant if they can’t get to starving people in Africa.
If there is too much of a population decline, there wont be enough people to run the infrastructure needed to keep society functioning. Part of that will be offset by the fact that there are less people in society. But part of it won’t.
For an example of the effects of population decline, look at the city of Detroit. The population of Detroit has decline by about half since the 1950s, mostly for economic reasons. But the quality of life hasn’t exactly improved, has it? That’s because you have 800,000 people living in a city designed for 1.5 million. As people depart, they leave abandoned homes and businesses that deteriorate with no one to care for them. The quality of city services becomes less and less efficient as a shrinking tax base must support a system that continues to get increasingly larger, relative to the number of people it has to support. It becomes an increasingly undesirable place to live as occupied homes and businesses are increasingly scattered across a wastland of derelict and decaying structures.
Fewer farmlands razed and paved over to erect McMansions would make ME happier. Who the HELL is buying these things? I thought unemployment was rampant, but not for some. Bankers and insurance company drones seem to thrive in these exurban wonderlands. (Just my personal opinion, I have no real knowledge of how a declining population is good or bad in the long term. Short term? Yeah, I’m for it!)
I believe that is incorrect. I checked and there are 74 counties with a fertility rate of 2.1 or lower and the number goes up every year. The current projections are the whole world will reach ZPG between 2040 and 2050. If countries with fertility rates below 2.1 aren’t in the majority now, they should be soon as Indonesia and Mexico drop below 2.1.
Here is the Wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate
Are you completely insane or are you just fucking with me? Because you can’t possibly believe that you can spin an entire exchange this hard only a few hours after it happened and in the very same thread, can you?
Let’s do this one more time, but with our feet grounded in reality:
What I said was:
You replied:
Now this is tenuous at best and makes a few assumptions. The first being that geniuses are born and not made, and better education in the future won’t produce a higher number of them. The second being that “production” is an end unto itself. What are we increasing production of, and why, and for how long? Does the human race need to increase production infinitely?
But let’s move along.
I replied:
And then you responded (now this one is important. Start paying attention here and please feel free to click the link, because you seem to be acting like you never said this):
This is clearly absurd, so I pointed how happy I am without sitting around in anticipation of future discoveries (because that’s all you’re talking about-- reducing, not even getting rid of, reducing future inventions-- if the population declines and we have fewer inventors. How you made the leap from there being fewer inventers in a less-populated world to telling me that I can’t wear clothes or use a bow and arrow is truly bizarre) :
That’s when you replied:
Seriously . . . all this happened right here in this thread. It’s completely surreal that you’re pretending otherwise. Get a grip, Sage Rat.
More people necessarily leads to more demand for material goods and a greater burn rate of basic resources to produce those goods.
More people does not necessarily produce innovation at a rate commensurate with population growth.
Scientific breakthroughs are not something you can achieve on a timetable, or for a specific investment price. If you can conclude anything about the rate of scientific advancement at all, it is that advancment has a diminishing return in comparison to the volume of raw research applied.
So, while human population increases at exponential rates, scientific advancement increases at a rate dictated by the pace of punctuated breakthrough. Stacking more people in the lab does not help to lift the test tube any faster, and multiple labs generally just reproduce each other’s work.
Someone mentioned upthread that agriculture has “more or less worked” for the last 6,000 years. Perhaps, but 6,000 years ago there were about 7,000,000 humans on the planet. Today, there are more than 7,000,000 people in the State of California alone who hold degrees of Bachelor’s or higher. There is damn little insight that this avalanche of Scientists would miss if there were just one-tenth as many of them. An exponential increase in lab-rats does not guarantee an equal increase in the volume of blood that can be squeezed from a turnip.
That’s only because you have misquoted me twice. I did not say “only technology can make you happy”, I said “only technology can make you happy (beyond what is natural)”. Dropping half of my sentence and then arguing that it doesn’t make sense is rather like lopping a person in half and then complaining that you have to carry him everywhere.
I thought I was helping you out when I cut that part. It didn’t make sense when you originally posted it, it made even less sense when you tried to explain it to spark240, and it still doesn’t make any sense now that you’re trying to use it as an out to explain a bunch of crazy posts you made.
I think the goal we should be aiming for is sustainable population, not necessarily stopping breeding. We need to aim for a global population that can live sustainably on the entire earth (which means bringing up the standard of living for poor people, and probably bringing it down for rich people). I think this also must include looking at the whole population of the earth, rather than us fat, rich North Americans thumbing our noses at poor countries and saying, “I can have as many kids as I want! I live in a rich country!”
Well, it’s typically the poor countries who tend to have as many kids as they want while the wealthy ones leave it at a one or two.
I was born in 1975. Births had dropped off in the US since the baby boom, so I was in a sort of local population minimum. I can think of some ways in which that benefited me.
It was easier for me to get into college than it was for someone born much earlier or later. The colleges had expanded their capacity to accommodate the baby boomers, but had fewer people applying because of lower birth rates, which means I got into a better school than I would have had population growth continued.
If there were an overall population decline, it would be easier to find jobs, assuming the number of jobs available stays the same. That’s an obvious advantage if you’re looking for a job.
At my college, there were a lot of single dorm rooms available, because of the drop in enrollment. It was easier for me to get one than it would have been for someone born earlier or later. The same kind of principle might apply to the housing market. That’s obviously an advantage to a first-time homebuyer, or to someone who wants to move into a desirable area.
If housing prices are flat and jobs are easy to find everywhere, it might result in a population that lives in one place for longer than people generally do now. Some of us don’t think that would necessarily be a bad thing.
But not everywhere where population has declined is so badly off. Pittsburgh has also had a population decline since the 1950s, but most people would say the quality of life here is better now than it was then.