Selfish reasons to want more humans

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.<p>Also, some parts just are off:<p>“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.<p>“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.<p>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.<p>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.

<p><pre><code> 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. </code></pre> This doesn&#x27;t mean people, we&#x27;re no longer bound by labour intensive solutions.<p>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&#x27;t require more people.<p>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.

<i>&quot;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.&quot;</i><p>Utilitarianism doesn&#x27;t say that <i>&#x27;good is the sum total of happiness across all humans&#x27;</i> but rather it says it&#x27;s <i>&#x27;the greatest good for the greatest number&#x27;,</i> 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 <i>Utilitarianism.</i><p><i>&quot;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).&quot;</i><p>I can&#x27;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&#x27;t seem to have enough understanding about the implications of exponential growth.<p>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&#x27;s resources.<p>Of course the elephant in the room is the world&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t lose a word on the fate of any other species on this planet, and I don&#x27;t know how one can even have this discussion without recognizing that we&#x27;re only one of the many inhabitants here. If you&#x27;re going to propose an entire world view based on some superficial notion of self-interest you can justify anything.<p>For a worldview that leans so heavily into utilitarianism it&#x27;s very odd to ignore most sentient life on earth. I invite the author to visit a large scale factory farm to see the &quot;technological progress&quot; in action that sustains 8 billion people and then to ponder how that squares with his own supposed standard for ethical progress.<p>Second point is this naive Steve Pinker-esque belief in &quot;progress&quot; to begin with. If you&#x27;re going to argue that &quot;more geniuses&quot; and &quot;more ethnic restaurants&quot; constitute some deep and authentic moral progress for human civilization you have your work cut out for you, most people on the planet don&#x27;t share that value system, and it&#x27;s not obvious that anyone should buy into it without justification. It&#x27;s almost naive to the point of being tautological, where &quot;progress&quot; 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.<p>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.<p>Demographers predict a population collapse (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2023&#x2F;09&#x2F;18&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;human-population-global-growth.html?unlocked_article_code=1.YE0.lKLn.Y_nGJFimv4NH&amp;smid=url-share" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2023&#x2F;09&#x2F;18&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;human...</a>) 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This is based on nothing but my own rumination. I’d love to be proven wrong, as this worries me.

&gt; 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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s hard to imagine eliminating them entirely.<p>I don&#x27;t really buy the idea that we can forever stay on this train of finding new&#x2F;better&#x2F;less-scarce resources every time we find that whatever we&#x27;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&#x27;t something we can support with what we know today.<p>Then there&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t have much optimism that this will change, ever; even if it does, I expect that to take millennia, at best.<p>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.<p>Having said that, I do agree that it&#x27;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&#x27;m just skeptical of how long we can continue to do that.

Wrong.<p>You want the largest <i>viable</i> population. That is, a population below carrying capacity.<p>A population over carrying capacity just consumes the environment that sustains it and dies off collectively.<p>Today we are over carrying capacity at a global level, and many regions are also over carrying capacity at a local level.<p>The population centers built around groundwater aquifers pumped aggresively, overfishing, or dying topsoil, which are most of them, are doomed.<p>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 &quot;brains&quot; that simply never get a chance due to malnutrition, disease, lack of education and opportunity. We&#x27;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.<p>John Baez, mathematician at UCR, talks about this approach among a number of others, such as, reducing air travel for conferences.

I don&#x27;t know what the optimal population is, but here are a couple of arguments against the &quot;ever greater&quot; 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.

<i>More geniuses</i><p>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&#x27;s population, so many wasted brains especially in the &quot;third world&quot;, 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!<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

&gt;A bigger world is better for everyone<p>Current world isn&#x27;t good enough for everyone.

Egypt now has a much bigger population than egypt then, and they are a very poor country<p>Larger populations get significantly harder to manage and educate.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;re depleting those resources faster.<p>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&#x27;t go extinct our population is doomed to absolutely plummet during an age of poverty.

&gt;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.<p>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.<p>Also, whatever this dude wants, the world is in major decline. For example, because of China&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t be fact-checked, but still, what an absolutely ignorant and naive take on the subject.<p>It seems like the author has never come across the concept of what a &quot;Behavioral sink&quot; is, which is not really hard to find&#x2F;understand; as well as the many other sources of data, experiments and thoughts that would <i>easily</i> invalidate the purported benefits he portrays.<p>&quot;More geniuses, more R&amp;D investment, more ambitious projects, better aesthetics, better careers, more niche communities, more niche markets&quot;; no correlation between this and population size. If you take a look at the most populated cities on Earth, about 8&#x2F;10 are FAR from being &quot;an aesthetic population center where people live happy and fulfilled lives, with artists and geniuses together to improve human progress&quot;. Had the author not traveled outside the US ever in life?<p><i>&quot;but that&#x27;s due to economic and social factors that have kept them subdued for centuries&quot;</i><p>1. It&#x27;s not ...<p>2. ... even if it was, why would a <i>larger</i> population get rid of those issues instead of making them worse?

Never ever thought I&#x27;d see this argument. It&#x27;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 &quot;just because&quot;. Or even better &quot;Aim for the Bushes Scene&quot; -- check it out, a new approach to population management.

&quot;Growth&quot; - everything in this world is about &quot;growth&quot; - if your economy is not &quot;growing&quot; it is a disaster, thus you import more people because people == &quot;growth&quot;.<p>Despite the fact that growth is bad for the environment and espite constant &quot;growth&quot; for decades our problems have not been solved.

&gt; 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.<p>There are a lot of big ifs in this statement.

So the author mentions a <i>sustainable</i> population level but does absolutely no research into what level is sustainable, nor talk about it at all in their own argument.<p>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.<p>Arguments about more people meaning more cuisine need much greater support. It seems much of the culinary <i>development</i> flourished because of isolation first followed by globalization. What we&#x27;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&#x2F;tech to another.<p>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&#x27;s inevitable someone is going to start a fire we can&#x27;t put out. Be it a grey goo scenario, a weaponized or misaligned super intelligence or a bioweapon or lab accident which I&#x27;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]).<p>&gt; bigger societies are better for everyone.<p>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&#x2F;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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Human_impact_on_the_environment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Human_impact_on_the_environmen...</a> (&quot;Wikipedia: Human impact on the environment&quot;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Human_impact_on_the_environment#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:20200118_Global_warming_and_climate_change_-_vertical_block_diagram_-_causes_effects_feedback.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Human_impact_on_the_environmen...</a> (&quot;Wikipedia: Climate Change Flowchart&quot;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Planetary_boundaries" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Planetary_boundaries</a> (&quot;Wikipedia: Planetary boundaries&quot;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=Planetary+boundaries&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;qu...</a> (&quot;HN: Planetary boundaries search&quot;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;fertility-rate#empowerment-of-women">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;fertility-rate#empowerment-of-wom...</a> (&quot;Our World in Data: Fertility Rate - Empowerment of Women&quot;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guttmacher.org&#x2F;fact-sheet&#x2F;unintended-pregnancy-united-states" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guttmacher.org&#x2F;fact-sheet&#x2F;unintended-pregnancy-u...</a> (&quot;Guttmacher Institute: Unintended Pregnancy in the United States&quot;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unfpa.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;nearly-half-all-pregnancies-are-unintended-global-crisis-says-new-unfpa-report" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unfpa.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;nearly-half-all-pregnancies-are-...</a> (&quot;UNFPA: Nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended—a global crisis, says new UNFPA report&quot;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldvision.org&#x2F;sponsorship-news-stories&#x2F;global-poverty-facts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldvision.org&#x2F;sponsorship-news-stories&#x2F;global-...</a> (&quot;Fast facts: Global poverty&quot;)<p>(thesis arrived at by a preponderance of all available information)

I am shocked by the overwhelming negative comments<p>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&#x27;s simple.

&quot;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.&quot;<p><i>Choked up while reading</i><p>&quot;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.&quot;<p>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 &quot;their precious&quot;.<p>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.<p>Over the ages, we&#x27;ve had many population declines [3] but they&#x27;ve tended to be smaller and smaller (relatively to the total population). Is there a massive &quot;correction&quot; coming, as challenges of carrying capacity, climate change, global conflict and disease rear their ugly heads? Hard to say.<p>Regardless - I object to using the word &quot;progress&quot; as a stand-in for &quot;more&quot;. It hardly ever is.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;iSNbGTN.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;iSNbGTN.png</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;73zV927.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;73zV927.png</a><p>3: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;sccJBGB.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;sccJBGB.png</a><p>(these are hastily back-of-the-napkin&#x27;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.<p>We don&#x27;t because the resource of human learnable undiscovered physics was kind of limited resource that kinda ran out.<p>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.

Yes, but how many geniuses will live in squalor and never be given the proper environment to thrive?<p>I know I&#x27;d rather there be geniuses but who are given a life to support their growth and contributions, of which perhaps half really realize their potential, than more geniuses where most struggle to find even the basic necessities, let alone the support and resources needed for their talents to flourish. It&#x27;s not just about the quantity of geniuses that a larger population might yield, but the quality of life and opportunities available to them.<p>Having a high number of geniuses doesn&#x27;t automatically translate to societal progress or innovation if the conditions aren&#x27;t conducive to their development. It&#x27;s essential to create an environment where potential can be recognized and nurtured. This means investing in education, healthcare, and social programs that help identify and support individuals with extraordinary abilities, regardless of their background. The goal should be to maximize the potential of every individual, not just increase the population in hopes of statistically getting more geniuses.

Wow, it’s so easy when you don’t have to consider downsides!

This is a good example of a very narrow human centric view that captures why its bad to try to maximize for particular made up metrics, such as human utility. It also a wonderfully hare brained view of technolocial innovation that disregards the dark sides, material input, or externalities at all.<p>Is this person an economist or something?

Progress isn&#x27;t infinite, status is often a zero-sum competition, and exponential economic growth is something that only people who are bad-at-math want (and should they be doing economics?). Also, the whole essay is begging-the-question; so much of the argument is &lt;&lt;we need more people because &quot;more is better&quot;.

At a personal level, it doesn&#x27;t matter how many more people exist on this planet. It&#x27;s the quality of them that does.

I&#x27;m pretty sure there&#x27;s too many people on this rock already

Its been fascinating reading through this thread and seeing real world examples of deccelerationism and the despair and pessimism that drives it and those calling for more people, accelerationism and the overall hope for humanity that they carry. Deccelerationism is just depression and surrender.

&gt; and there are basically no major examples of catastrophic resource shortages in the industrial age<p>is this really true? there were tons of supply-line problems during covid for example<p>I feel like to make this point you would have to define &quot;catastrophic&quot; and &quot;resource&quot; and &quot;shortage&quot; extremely narrowly.

How about instead of telling people to have more kids or less kids, we let them do whatever they feel like?

What was wrong with the title <i>Why you, personally, should want a larger human population</i>?

People saying &quot;he doesn&#x27;t address the downsides&quot; could read the three pages on the same site which do address the downsides, and which are prominently linked right at the start of the essay:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rootsofprogress.org&#x2F;unsustainable" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rootsofprogress.org&#x2F;unsustainable</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rootsofprogress.org&#x2F;catastrophic-resource-shortages" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rootsofprogress.org&#x2F;catastrophic-resource-shortages</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rootsofprogress.org&#x2F;can-growth-continue-ignite-talk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rootsofprogress.org&#x2F;can-growth-continue-ignite-talk</a>

Does AI&#x2F;Robotics counter a lot of OPs arguments? AI in 50 years time could be totally mind blowing. And there could be all kinds of robots running around by then. I think the human population going down to 2-5 billion is a good thing.

Quality always trumps quantity, but management can make or break situations. If you&#x27;re yourself exceptional but have control over a primitive civilization, you&#x27;re doing okay. But if you&#x27;re not a stellar performer who manages to control an advanced civilization, you&#x27;ve really pulled something off. All these questions about population always skirt around eugenics, but there&#x27;s a good case to be made for encouraging population growth of a people that&#x27;s respectful towards others and tries to minimize social conflicts. Such people are found everywhere in the world, &quot;race&quot; notwithstanding.

I&#x27;m shocked at the comments in a great way. Usually this place is full of frothing-at-mouth pro-natalism. Even the AI hype cycle is finally shutting up. Miracles <i>do</i> happen.

These all have the same fundamental error -- the presumption that progress and faster progress is desirable. With today&#x27;s luxuries but half the people, everyone could live pretty well, and have meaningful work. Genuinely, if we focused less on driving progress at all costs and focused more on &quot;well being for all&quot;, we wouldn&#x27;t even need to reduce the population. We have the capacity to provide a safe, comfortable, low effort society for everyone today. We just choose not to arrange ourselves to pursue it.

The thing that bothers me about this line of argument is...there already are a lot of people! We&#x27;ve had _massive_ population growth over the past few centuries, especially in the last 100 years or so. We have 8 _billion_ people now...and I personally don&#x27;t see a lot of the benefits that the author talks about. I really don&#x27;t think going from 8 billion to 10 billion or 16 billion or even 50 billion people would really make a meaningful difference in &quot;the number of geniuses&quot; or the number of people to populate a subreddit for a niche hobby, to draw on two of his examples. We have lots of geniuses now and we have lots of people on subreddits already.<p>We can already see that many (most?) societies are really quite bad at dividing finite resources&#x2F;wealth&#x2F;capital&#x2F;land&#x2F;etc. in an efficient (let alone equitable) manner among the billions of people in the world today. Are we really supposed to believe that resource management would magically become better&#x2F;more efficient&#x2F;more equitable somehow with even more people to divide them between? My hunch is that the vast majority of new people that got added to the global population would be relatively quite poor, whereas the global number of billionaires and millionaires would stay relatively flat.<p>Yes things like whale oil and bat guano are resources we&#x27;ve progressed past the need for...but we can&#x27;t progress past the need for land. Or water. Both of which are in relatively short supply for many people, especially in places that are more desirable to live.<p>Large population centers have historically tended to form where they are for a reason (proximity to water, natural resources, natural recreation&#x2F;beauty, desirable weather&#x2F;climate, etc.), and most of the world&#x27;s large cities are already pretty tapped out in terms of population. You can&#x27;t magically fit a billion extra people in New York or Shanghai or Paris without it having disastrous repercussions for the people already there (and the new people). Sure we could build new massive cities in presently rural&#x2F;unpopulated areas, but I think there&#x27;s a reason that lots of people don&#x27;t live in those places now, and if a billion-person city was shoved into South Dakota (to use an example of a very sparsely populated place) out of necessity, I&#x27;d imagine many people wouldn&#x27;t be too happy about having to live there.<p>To be very clear (and preempt any bad-faith readings of this), I&#x27;m not endorsing the view of dramatic population reduction or anything like that. I&#x27;m just saying that the idea that massive population growth is always an inherent good strikes me as quite wrongheaded.

Is there any discussion of <i>how</i> we would do this in the article, or is it entirely fantastical discussions of what is possible, and how great the world could be?

I call it bullshit.<p>Arguments like &quot;more progress&quot; and &quot;more geniuses&quot; would make sense only if global population manages &quot;geniuses&quot; and &quot;progress&quot; efficiently. Which in fact is completely opposite. Homo sapiens brains are evolved for small population size, and unable to comprehend the modern structures involving millions of people. As a consequence, billions of already existing humans still don&#x27;t have access to proper education, economy or tech scene to unlock their potential. So the more humans you bring, the more potential Einsteins will stuck in Congolese villages, that&#x27;s it. Even &quot;developed&quot; countries, from what I observe are quite far from the ideal talent-unlocking - they still have crowded classes, non-motivated teachers and fixed curriculum. So millions will be (and already are) also stuck in &quot;boring 9-5&quot; &quot;paying their student debs&quot; even don&#x27;t knowing their full potential.

It&#x27;s not a new argument, and is also one used to justify anti-abortion policies, bans on contraception and the like. Wasn&#x27;t just the religious folks.

We need more time to deal with finite resources and pollution. A larger population would decrease the time we would have to find solutions. Even if most of the current world population lived sustainably, we would still need 2.5 earths to support the current population size indefinitely. I believe that we need about 6.5 earths at the moment.<p>Maybe if we had off world colonies this would be a good opinion, but this blog post is just a bad argument

That&#x27;s the stupidest article ever. &quot;Let&#x27;s destroy our planets and kill all the animals because it might lead to better science maybe&quot;

Ecosystems need space. Space is limited and we&#x27;ve already eaten most of it and destroyed so many ecosystems to feed people and other reasons.

More people leads to lower value of each human life.<p>What are many times more geniuses worth if they are they are not valued thus often unable to achieve anything?

On the other hand if there are only two people you can probably pollute as much as you are capable of without worrying (too much).

Luckily, population growth is dampened by the housing market, modulo transportation technology. No natalist policy can change that, when young adults are living with their parents because they can’t afford housing, they are not going to make babies.<p>This is not education and wealth, or at least only indirectly as those are related to living in large crowded cities.

&gt; More geniuses<p>I am going to hazard a guess that we aren’t missing the underlying number of geniuses. We are probably wasting a lot of potential geniuses.<p>&gt; More progress<p>Unless the limiting factor isn’t those factors.<p>&gt; More options<p>The west has more options than ever. We also have more people without purpose than ever before. We aren’t lacking people.<p>&gt; Deeper patterns<p>We all want rival goods. Shelter. Clothing. Food. That’s not even getting to diseconomies of scale.<p>The population debate is fraught with charlatans.

&gt;More geniuses 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.<p>&gt;If genius is defined as one-in-a-million level intelligence, then every billion people means another thousand geniuses—to work on all of the problems and opportunities of humanity, to the benefit of all.<p>The same is valid for psychopaths and other bad people.

how about a principled calculation of the planet carrying capacity for humans, Based on water, agriculture and industry requirements ? I mean we already have states fighting over water rights to rivers. I suspect we can’t go much higher than a 100 billion. But resources are already being diverted towards silicon life. from here I suspect we go towards 50&#x2F;50 human &#x2F; silicon . Until the silicon declares independence.

&gt; If genius is defined as one-in-a-million level intelligence, then every billion people means another thousand geniuses—to work on all of the problems and opportunities of humanity, to the benefit of all.<p>That’s just making up numbers. The author has shown absolutely no basis for the argument that for every million people born, one of them will be a genius with the intellect <i>and opportunities</i> to advance humanity and offset the harm of the other 999999 and then some.

Would all this matter in an era of super-AI?

L&#x27;enfer, c&#x27;est les autres

I want a smaller human population.

We, as in humanity, haven&#x27;t even figured out how to support the people we already have. We never have. Even without the threat of climate change, billions are under-nourished.<p>High tech might alleviate some issues, but the root cause could be addressed through existing social technology. For example, say we had AGI robots that could do all the work that humans do today - if owned only by rich capitalists, the quality of life for many may actually drop. But, combined with land value taxes and universal basic income, the result would likely be an increase quality of life (unless it turns out humans are willing to keep increasing population as long as the amount of aggregate suffering is below a certain level). AGI robots don&#x27;t necessarily make things better. But social tech like LVT+UBI could meaningfully make things better, and, it could do it today (without the need for more &quot;geniuses&quot;).

I really believed this argument growing up in a white, middle class household in the 1980s. I’m more skeptical now, after two decades of helping build our current technocracy. I think there is a sweet spot between the dystopian lawlessness of prehistory and early human history, and the dystopian future of rapacious consumption and late stage capitalism.

I think we could apply Brook&#x27;s law[0] here. &quot;Throw more scientists&#x2F;engineers at the problem&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean that problem will be solved faster.<p>Moreover, he assumes that increasing number of people will result in higher number of geniuses, but &quot;Correlation does not imply causation&quot;.<p>Ok, even if we assume, that number of exceptionally smart humans will increase. We have limited resources of our planet and industries. Having even more people will most likely lower the average standard of living. Wouldn&#x27;t it be harder to find those geniuses if most of the population are homeless, drug addicts and living in slums?<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brooks%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brooks%27s_law</a>

Duh. Of course I should want a bigger population: more market for my business, more chances for me to mate, and more people I can talk to and learn from.<p>It&#x27;s a no brainer, no ?

Direct violation of HN rules editorializing the title.<p>@dang

There has not been a single country so far whose GDP and overall wellness decreased with increase in population.

graph go up means world more gooder - that&#x27;s the real simpletons reasoning, a literal moron writing that more people equals a better world, an idiot who disregards social and economic reasons why we can&#x27;t have so called &quot;geniuses. we&#x27;re currently around 8 billion people on the planet, there&#x27;s enough &quot;genius&quot; and &quot;talent&quot; out there, they just lack access to education, to jobs, to clean water and nutritious food. there&#x27;s probably more that one person who could add value to the world who&#x27;s stuck gluing sneakers for cents a day somewhere. I guess it gets the unfuckable right wing natalists going and it&#x27;s the easier to understand solution for these &#x27;tards, because really solving the problem requires actual effort and intelligence.

Jason Crawford...

What is this drivel of nonsense. We’ve been combating overpopulation, the population and natural destruction cause by overpopulation. And now you have nut bags like this? What is this industrial revolution&#x27;s swan song?

This author is completely out of touch. Species are hopelessly in decline; climate change is causing havoc for many already. The last thing this planet needs is more consumers.<p>He&#x27;s very hopeful about the future of a growing population and how it can create more geniuses that can save us. He points to more people finding us more Einsteins, but he neglects to acknowledge we are just as likely to find more Hitlers, antisocials, narcissists, terrorists, serial killers and school shooters as well.<p>Nearly everything in our modern world is made worse with more people. Our human habitat is being depleted, our healthy food sources are becoming scarce, and we scorch the land and the air to provide modern necessities to all. We go to war over resources, and our ever-growing need for energy results in a Chernobyl or Fukushima or Exxon Valdez or Gulf War far too often.

“We f*<i>ed the world, and we’re gonna f*k our way outta this!”</i>

“We fucked the world, and we’re gonna fuck our way outta this!”

I don&#x27;t want more humans per se. I want more humans to have access to a life of dignity where their basic needs are met and there&#x27;s absolutely no reason why every human currently on Earth can&#x27;t have that. The only reason they don&#x27;t is we choose to withold it from them.<p>Why? Capitalism. So a tiny few people can hoard even more wealth. Also, much of the talk around more people is strictly self-serving: to preserve and create even more concentrated wealth (by creating more humans to exploit) and the preservation of power structures by maintaining certain ethnic majorities.<p>In much of the world we have what I&#x27;ve seen called a &quot;hopelessness crisis&quot; and it goes well beyond people not having children because they simply can&#x27;t afford to. Many people now believe they&#x27;ll <i>never</i> have security so what&#x27;s the point in doing anything? Particularly anything long-term. Why should someone who struggles to have enough to eat and put a roof over their head care about, say, the long-term risks of climate change? Particularly when we, as a society, have chosen to deny that person housing and food security. As a planet, we produce enough food to feed everyone and enough wealth to provide shelter for everyone.<p>Now this also touches on how many people the Earth could support. Many argue the Earth is overcrowded. That&#x27;s simply not true. We&#x27;re not far from the point where quite literally <i>trillions</i> of people could be supported comfortably on Earth.

Oh, HN. Always upvoting the dumbest contrarian thinkpieces. It&#x27;s like accidental 4Chan without the humor.

More neoliberal bullshit.<p>The human world survived just fine when there was 1% of the current population.<p>The whole idea that we &quot;can&#x27;t afford to take care of so many old people&quot; is premised on the assumption that Elon and Bozo need 2&#x2F;3 of the world&#x27;s economic output, and the other 1&#x2F;3 should be spent bombing each other.<p>The idea that the consumption&#x2F;person is declining is also bullshit. As 3rd world countries see how 1st world populations are living, they also want these opulent lifestyles.<p>The physical world (you know, the one that &quot;might be a simulation&quot; and is ignored in favor of twerk tic and fortnight) cannot support the world&#x27;s 3rd world residents going through the same consumption bender that the 1st world has gone through in the last 50-100 years.<p>We need to stop breeding people, just like we need to stop breeding dogs and cows...<p>In 100 years when the population is back below 1 billion, then we can worry about under-population...

yeah let&#x27;s trash the planet at an even higher rate. let&#x27;s set up more slaughterhouses to kill animals to feed all these new people, because we sure don&#x27;t have enough of those &#x2F;s

What do you suggest? Gas chambers?

The arguments in the linked article all seem rooted in a traditional Western <i>weltanschauung</i>.<p>This worldview is increasingly characterized (not without basis) as racist, sexist and fascist, mostly by critics whose personal positive contributions to human improvement are unclear.<p>I&#x27;m not driving this bus; I just seem to be going under it.<p>Maybe after the societal collapse the survivors can agree that the Critical Theory folks were mistaken?