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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Please expound on the complexity.
Well a lot of social safety nets require on a continually growing work force, of course they could be removed but that will never happen. Immigration is also a good solution but it's unclear if in many places that will ever be expanded. But furthermore, there is no reason to stop people having kids in most situations.
have you seen the hellscape out there mate?
introducing more load onto an overloaded system isn't going to do those future generations any favors.
The world is not overloaded, Malthus thought it was a long time ago, but the planet I pretty big.
fuck malthus he didn't know shit from shinola. the world is cooking friend. baking. shit's on fire yo.
Yeah but that's not due to pure numbers of people
you're disregarding basic physics. more consumers burning more shit for energy food and heat.
this is ridiculous, I'm done here. blocking.
Exactly, burning. If we do away with the burning, trading fossil fuels for environmentally friendly alternatives, we can reduce or eliminate greenhouse gases, the biggest contributor to climate change.
Here's a few things to consider, but I'm hardly the person to give an authoritative list.
We can support a crapton more people if we all go Amish. We gotta reduce growth to a global lottery system 30 years ago if we want everyone in the world to live like a median American.
This isn't a one-size-fits-all-age answer, either. People need more resources as they get older, and contribute less work in return. An aging population means more economic stress on the younger population, and less economic output relative to each senior citizen means less access to medical care.
Some things are getting bad faster than others, some things are closer to breaking points, etc.
If we assume only tiny incremental improvements for centuries to come, then we're preparing for something very different than if we're trying to keep research investment steady or even accelerate progress on things like fusion, carbon removal, microplastics remediation, and power distribution and storage.
Some philosophies say that limiting a person's reproduction is categorically immoral, even if the predictable consequence is that everyone dies. Some TESCREAL dudes say we should use nukes cuz the ends justify the means.
We have lived experience that an aging population isn't great for getting effective policy in place.
Population change policies certainly won't be done globally in lockstep, which means in order to stabilize local economies, there will be more immigration for places where the internal population growth is slowing/reversing. That can easily lead to xenophobia, which could destabilize everything. It's hard to fight global climate change when you're dealing with local fascism.
etc.
That's why I can pretty much only reliably say "people who don't want kids... not being forced to have kids... is an unambiguously good thing" and I can't extend that to people who do want kids.
Chiming in with my own thoughts.
I regularly see people calling for massive reductions in population and I don't think they are as informed about the subject as they think they are. For starters I usually get the feeling that they think degrowth will be painless or relatively painless even when massive. It won't, even a slight reduction in worker population each generation is massively going to decrease the standard of living, starting with pretty much every luxury service we have. Any innovation in tech? Yeah not gonna happen anymore, there is not enough breathing room in the economy to waste on fancy little toys. In a system set on degrowth any available resource will be exclusively used to maintain the status quo, forget improvements.
Thinking further beyond the immediate consequences there is the long term question of what we want to happen to humanity. If people think we should go extinct then degrowth is a perfectly viable strategy for making that take a bit longer, if we are to potentially survive indefinitely degrowth is not an option. We are consuming more depletable resources than any individual can count and a great many of them have already dropped below a level where we could rediscover them. For example: There is not enough surface ore (coal, iron, copper, etc) in the world anymore to repeat an industrial revolution. If we lose the capacity of mass production that's it, no second attempt. And it is like that with many resources, Helium is running out in iirc ~100 years, Uranium for reactors in iirc ~80 years, nitrate needed for fertilizers is running low and concrete manufacturers are looking into alternatives to river sand because that is also running dangerously low. Now we can stop growth and extend the usable time we have left with these resources but they will run out eventually. Or alternatively we can stop pretending that stagnation has ever worked for anything (no not even nature works with stagnation, a forest with only old trees dies together with its entire animal population and is eventually replaced by a new forest with young trees) and start working on solution to that problem. If we don't want to got extinct the only solution is to get off this rock and start mining the planets we don't have to be careful with. We cannot strip mine earth because it's the only habitable place we have but we don't have that problem with any other celestial body.
As for the short term, getting rid of the excessively wealthy would be a good start, it's not like we lack resources as is, it's just that 0.1% of the population are hogging 99% of it for themselves. Imo eating the rich will net much better results than doing a china and having less kids (btw anyone check on how their industry is doing, cuz last I checked their government is panicking a bit about the side effects the decline in workforce brings with it)