Why on Earth not?
In 20-40 years when developing nations have gone through the same cycles and are also below replacement rate, can we finally acknowledge the problem then? You realize that immigration doesn’t actually solve the underlying issue, it just “flattens the curve”?
Why??? 
I don’t understand anti-natalism at all. How is having fewer people a good thing?
Oh, okay. But tbh when I made that post I was thinking of what politicians do here in the UK, which is raise the population with massive immigration and then refuse to build anything in the name of being green. Worst of all worlds.
I’d like fewer people in the UK. It’s really overcrowded; there’s no real nature and it’s impossible to do anything without inconveniencing other people.
I think i already answered these questions:
I’m not seeing us being at anything like a sustainable population. I’m not opposed to more people, just opposed to more people than a sustainable level. If we halt global warming, we can start talking about how many more people we can sustain.
Which would be nice if we had “arbitrarily advanced” technology and could actually approach those theoretical limits. As it is, we’re already above the planetary carrying capacity and are strongly dependent on maintaining that with multiple non-renewable resources, and consuming renewable ones (like topsoil) faster than they can replenish.
The population is going to go down; the question is how much of that will be death by old age, or by some mix of thirst, starvation and war.
People are awesome. So is beer. But you don’t want to drink twenty pints of beer even if you could figure out some way to make it physically possible. And while you can drink five pints and enjoy yourself, I think one or two is a happier medium for your health.
Just because we can expand the human carrying capacity beyond what we’re currently sustaining, doesn’t mean we should. I’d frankly rather see an extra 100,000 elephants than an extra 100 million people. I realize that is a philosophical divide too far for some, but there you have it. I value less overcrowding and more natural areas over more people. Because people are awesome, but so are other things.
Below 8 billion? I highly doubt that.
There is less war, starvation, and thirst today than at almost any time in history, including the periods of explosive, exponential population growth.
More of those other things, a diversity of diverse ecosystems, is also likely safer for humanity, decreasing our existential risk.
Long term gradually slightly decreasing our footprint is, IMHO, a good thing from a human selfish perspective.
But dropping down rapidly in individual countries or economic units, by low fertility or by disaster, natural or otherwise, not so much of a good thing.
The difference is that beers aren’t productive, they don’t invent cures for cancer or nuclear fusion. The more people there are, and the higher standard of living and education they can access, the better for society.
Without passing judgement on the comparative value of 100,000 hypothetical elephants and 100 million hypothetical people, practically, you will never see what you desire through decreased population.
Rewilding is a noble goal and one I also support. But you don’t get rewilding by having fewer poorer people who consume less; you get nature back by making our capacity for production so high that dedicating large areas to nature is of trivial cost.
Because we are burning through unrenewable resources and ruining the environment in general; when those resources are gone, then we’ll see plenty of starvation, thirst and war. Less arable land, less water, no more fossil fuels, barren oceans. The carrying capacity of the planet is decreasing thanks to us.
I feel the more people that can access higher standards of living and education, the better for society. But not more people net. Not if the productive value of more people is overridden by the higher consumptive cost of more people. A larger mass of lumpenproletariat in this day and age is not massively enabling progress.
And I’m not really talking about rewilding (though that is a noble goal). The elephant thing was not intended to be a real example, more a general statement of my philosophical bias (it came from a long ago geography professor of mine that I agreed with). What I am more concerned with is reducing current pressure to an even or slightly negative value. The problem is that there is too much pressure now. IMHO, of course. Reducing global population growth to net zero or very slightly negative potentially could at least help limit or over time very slightly ease off that pressure.
Of course the problem is how to achieve this in the most efficient and least disruptive way, for which I have no concrete answers other than the vague thoughts I have already thrown out.
Yeah, I know, people have been saying so since 1798, when our global population first reached that clearly unsustainable benchmark of 8,000,000,000.
Oh wait, we had an order of magnitude fewer people, but it didn’t stop Malthus from declaring that we’ll be running out of food any day now.
I disagree. More people means more innovation and eventually more efficiency. It’s true that if you have twice as many people you might need twice as many people taking care of basic necessities like food, shelter, extracting resources for raw materials, etc; but if there are twice as many people farming, that’s twice as many people to come up with better farming techniques and implement them, which will then spread to all farmers. And those same benefits are happening at every level.
Not to mention, society is only one factor to consider; the other is the individual. More people living meaningful lives is a good thing for those people.
Maybe this is best for another thread, but I think this may be a key point of disagreement.
I value wilderness, and more specifically elephants, because of the benefits they provide people - both their role in maintaining the environment, advancing our knowledge of biology, and harder to place benefits like the joy we get from seeing elephants at the zoo or in a documentary, etc.
But I’m guessing you value them more intrinsically than that?
Maybe to a limited extent, but even the current 8 billion people are going to demand higher standards of living (even if the portion that’s already doing well is content, other people will want to catch up to them) and that will require more resources.
Ah, yes; just because we haven’t hit the bottom of the cliff yet, clearly it’s infinitely tall and we never will. We can destroy the topsoil, kill the oceans, use up fossil water and fossil fuels and none of it will ever run out.
What problem? The “cycles” are caused by aggregated individual responses to circumstances. Overriding the results of aggregated individual responses to circumstances (i.e. central planning) has an absolutely abysmal track record for producing efficiency or new technology or pretty much anything else.
And i believe that part of the lower birth rate in the “i believe my children will survive to adulthood” parts of the world is a belief that there are (more than) enough people. Certainly, that’s why i stopped at 2. It’s why none of my friends intentionally had more than 2 kids. (One had twins for her second pregnancy.) I rather suspect that if population were falling and people felt like their societies needed more people, many would choose to have more babies.
Worrying that the whole world will stop having any babies in 40 years seems like borrowing trouble while ignoring today’s problems. Like global warming.
One of today’s problems is that a few countries are in demographic trouble. But the world population growth is still positive. We are not in any short-term or even medium-term risk of running out of people due to voluntary birth control.
While necessity may be the mother of invention, that invention is likely to be stillborn if the inventor doesn’t have resources. Resources to mock up potential new devices, resources to explore and measure the world, and to calculate. One away to increase the number of people who have those resources is to move people from poor countries to wealthy ones. Like… through voluntary immigration. Especially to countries where immigrants get access to resources.
We don’t really need a lot more babies to keep up the pace of innovation. Increasing the potential of existing people works, too.
As has been repeatedly said; the short /mid term problem is the demographic age imbalance, which can best be solved by immigration. Worldwide population decrease due to a lowered birthrate might start to be a genuine problem in, say, a century but good luck on accurately predicting trends that far. I expect the Four Horsemen will decrease the world population by a large percentage well before then. And that the birth rate issue will be “solved” by women worldwide being stripped of their rights and reduced to chattel.
The main reason for discussing raising the birthrate now is because that’s the subject of the thread.
I will re-visit my thoughts on optimal population after (if?) we achieve major breakthroughs in clean energy. Until then we are seriously stressing the planet, perhaps beyond the point of repair.
Having 20 billion people with 18 billion of us living substandard lives in a fracturing environment is far worse than having two billion of us living comfortably on a clean and replenishing planet.
I don’t think you can, primarily because paid work gives people the means to make a living, while having kids does not.
Having children has never been a source of status or prestige even remotely close to career achievement, sporting victories, etc., for people who had full access to those other sources of status. Namely, men.
How many men throughout history have been renowned, or even especially honored in their own social circles, simply for being prolific fathers? Damn few, except maybe for a literal handful of superfecundity legends like Genghis Khan. For the average man who has his living to earn, and various forms of professional, athletic, etc. achievements available to him, fatherhood has never been comparable in terms of “status” or “prestige” to those other achievements.
Motherhood has traditionally been seen as a major source of status for women, true, but that’s because women traditionally didn’t have much of a social role outside of domestic life including motherhood. Caring for homes and families was pretty much the definition of most women’s perceived mission in life. In such circumstances, obviously, being a mother is going to be strongly valorized over those widely despised figures, the barren wife and the old maid.
But nope, you’ll never level the “status and prestige” playing field between parenthood and career achievement for people who have full access to career achievement opportunities. Not unless and until society literally starts employing people to be parents and childcarers. Not just giving them a little extra financial relief and time off work while the kids are babies, mind you, but actually sponsoring parenthood as a career.
That’s a nice belief to have, and I certainly hope it comes true. But looking at our technological capacities realistically, I’m not convinced that it’s prudent to bet the planet on it.