In the grand scheme, HIV/Aids has not had a large effect on population growth in Africa (and unlikely to have for the future as it is a mostly localised to southern parts of Africa and has been coming down rapidly).
I'm 99% sure that Africa is not going to reach 4.3 billion inhabitants. Climate change, food insecurity, economic growth and global instability will ensure that it doesn't turn out that way.
No one knows the future - but all we do know points that the future is far more optimistic than people realise. If Africa fails to reach 4.3bn then it will most likely be because of faster prosperity and not due to the pessimistic causes you mention.
To illustrate the point: The last 40 years have been the worst we will see in terms of stability, economic growth etc .... yet Population growth in Africa thrived and the % of people living in poverty reduced dramatically and the current population is healthier, wealthier, and more educated than ever before (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/above-or-below-extreme-po... ).
That makes little sense - what we're seeing in Africa like everywhere else is that increased living standards, education and healthcare including family planning consistently leads to dropping birth rates. At most improved treatment of HIV will lead to a short-term bump if life expectancy increases faster than birth rates drop.
For how long? Being recent (on evolutionary timescales), evolution has created selection pressures on previously irrelevant variables (the desire to have children, in particular). Without contraception or female labor force participation, people didn't decide how many children to have before urbanisation: everyone who didn't die just kept having kids. The poorest places are still like this. But in evolutionarily novel urban contexts, people choose how many kids to have; if this decision has a genetic component, that means the current urban millieu selects for people who want more kids. Basic genetics tells us that the number of people who "want more kids" will grow exponentially (so long as culture doesn't keep driving preferences for children down). The key question, of course, is "what's the exponent?". It depends on the heritability of fertility, and data from behavioural genetics indicates that it's high in urbanised societies. If your parents had more kids than average, you probably will (even if you were adopted at birth and didn't grow up with your parents). The effect is large enough that it would have a big impact on the UN population estimates by 2100. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...
The cultural offset is an important caveat, but it's possible that most of the cultural fertility decline due to urbanisation has been exhausted in urban socities, in which case the heritability effect will become more important.
I find it strange that natural selection is never part of the argument on debates like this. It's laughable that it's completely ignored by the UN. I suspect the tendency of humans to view themselves as separate from the animals meakes selection seem irrelevant. But we shouldn't forget its power: the types of people who deciding not to reproduce today are the types of people who won't be there to make that decision tomorrow.
All this to day, our contemporary perspective might seem very parochial in a few generations and while we can't predict future culture, the power of selection should never be ignored.
It doesn't matter when Africa is exploding. All the low birthrate in the West does is weaken the countries trying to protect the environment. As this continues corporations will bring in the people from these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them.
This whole "stop having children to save the environment" bullshit is dumber than the anti-nuclear crap and even more obviously wrong.
>these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them.
I live in Latin America, in my trips to the US I get disgusted when I see hundreds of family cars with giant gas engines that we only use in construction trucks, idling all day just to run their air conditioner in a slightly hot day.
It's incredible the delusion that the first world has about how 'sustainable' their lifestyles are.
Heh. When the complaint is that the high birthrates of the world are unsustainable, it's the people with the high birthrates that are doing that. Also keep in mind that Africa relies heavily on aid from these countries with the high CO2 emissions. Cutting CO2 really means starving them.
> As this continues corporations will bring in the people from these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them
Cut this xenophobic crap right now. Have a look at the facts. For example, the per capita CO2 emission in Ethiopia is 0.13 tonnes, whereas it's 14.24 tonnes in the US. That's over a factor of 100 more.
It doesn't matter when they're brought to the West to replace the children we didn't have they'll live with the infrastructure that's already here which means having a similar carbon footprint.
They're also relying on us for a lot of aid, I'm not sure if your calculation takes that into account.
Once they move to the US they have a high carbon footprint like anyone else there. Their culture won't change though, that takes many generations and a relatively homogeneous culture to assimilate into which is going away (largely due to attitudes like this.)
Doesnt matter how small of a footprint the Ethiopian has. The Ethiopian is an exponential function, and the Westerner is a linear one. The exponential function will always overtake the linear function. Eventually.
Given the "theme song" linked to in your profile, it's quite obvious where this is coming from, but let's talk unsustainable cultures then:
Again, from your theme song and your apparent fondness for the Teutonic Order I'm assuming you're at least familiar with Germany and the German social security system, which is very much a part of their culture.
The German state pension system basically amounts to a Ponzi scheme that requires a continuous influx of new contributors in order to not implode.
Not only is this pretty much a textbook case of "unsustainable", but given German culture is quite averse to change (which is unsustainable, too, by the way) and it therefore isn't particularly likely they're going to abandon their current pension system anytime soon, "bringing people from these undeveloped countries" also is about their only option left to keep the system from collapsing for just a little longer.
I'm not even talking general economic and societal repercussions here. It can be argued that a society with a declining population isn't long-term sustainable and ultimately will succumb to stagnation and a lack of innovation.
> The German state pension system basically amounts to a Ponzi scheme
Yes and no - that is how the world, how life works!
The currently working take care of the currently too-old-to-work. No matter what layer and labels you put on top, that has always been and will always be true. Unless you create time machines, or eliminate aging (with its own huge set of issues).
So yes, the new generations have to take care of the previous ones. "Capital" is only an information layer on top of that reality used to determine who gets what, but it does not replace the reality of who and when produces goods and services. You can shift information about capital into the future (you "saved" for retirement - but only this information is transmitted to the future, not goods or services, which are always used in the present), but actual goods and services always have to be produced and provided by the working part of the population. You can shift as much "capital" (information) into the future as you want, "save" incredible amounts of money, it will change nothing.
> Not only is this pretty much a textbook case of "unsustainable",
Quite the opposite. That is the best kind of sustainable because it actually represents truth most faithfully. The "capital" based magic - that is much more problematic. It masks and attempts to hide the reality. Also a problem in the German system is the many exceptions.
The core German system is the most honest one about reality: The currently working take care of those that no longer don't. If there are too few in the new generation to take care of the expected number of old non-working people in the country, then seeing that problem is GOOD, trying to hide it behind some finance magic is bad.
Just looked up the Teutonic Order (from Wikipedia [0]):
> Before and during World War II, Nazi propaganda and ideology made frequent use of the Teutonic Knights' imagery, as the Nazis sought to depict the Knights' actions as a forerunner of the Nazi conquests for Lebensraum. Heinrich Himmler tried to idealise the SS as a 20th-century reincarnation of the medieval Order. Yet, despite these references to the Teutonic Order's history in Nazi propaganda, the Order itself was abolished in 1938 and its members were persecuted by the German authorities. This occurred mostly due to Hitler's and Himmler's belief that, throughout history, Roman Catholic military-religious orders had been tools of the Holy See and as such constituted a threat to the Nazi regime. Hitler based his German Order on the Teutonic Order, especially the Hochmeister's ceremonial regalia itself even though they abolished the said order.
Linking to this "theme song" and your (not yours, usrn's) xeonophic comments have no place on Hacker News.
All available data shows that high birthrates are linked to societal effects of poverty, low access to education and healthcare, not to culture. When Africans move elsewhere, their birth rates adapt rapidly to their new home countries, as do every other group.
As such, talking about "unsustainable cultures" here is pure xenophobia.
>will do the environment a huge favor and keep the birth rate trending down.
Why? intuitively it would seem that that less humans will improve the environment, but intuition is often wrong.
The planet can sustain much more people, it's essentially empty. More people means more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment.
Remember, most of the environmental damage was done by a very small number of very rich countries. The poorest countries is where most of the population lives, and those cause the least environmental impact.
> The planet can sustain much more people, it's essentially empty. More people means more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment.
"Empty" is a very biblical word, with shades of the brass age Hebrew mission of “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
It's time to drop superstitious beliefs and take a hard look at reality. For example, we're using resources at a rate that is no longer sustainable (https://www.footprintcalculator.org/home/en).
We can discover new resources though. Look at the discussions around "peak oil." Every time people think we can't get more oil we find a way. It's going to be the same for every other resource.
We _can_, but will we? We're not fated to discover new resources to sustain ourselves. Fracking opened up new oil reserves, for sure, but that didn't mean that the concern wasn't valid.
> It's going to be the same for every other resource.
That's superstition / survivor bias.
Is your statement that far off from "the house is on fire, but I'm not going to move from the couch because a fire crew will be here sooner or later"?
It is not remotely the same. Technologies in agriculture, energy production, and human health have all followed this path. By the way, it isn't just fracking that defeated calls of "peak oil" - deepwater drilling came the time before that, and offshore drilling the time before that, and so on. People have been crying "peak energy" and "peak food" reliably for the last 150 years, and we're still growing as a species.
This isn't just some hope, this is the way human history has run. To suggest otherwise is the lunacy here.
It's absolutely the same. You're predicting the future based upon the trajectory of the past. In 2019 you'd probably have ridiculed the idea of a pandemic occurring, based on us having "solved" the various outbreaks that took place in the prior 20 years; or in 2021 you'd have ridiculed the idea of a land war in Europe based on the relative peace achieved in the previous 70+ years.
The past 50 years have shown abundant evidence of us causing severe damage to the environment. Physics is finite, discoveries are finite, human ingenuity is finite. The chances of us being on a fantasy path of becoming magicians, able to conjure up anything our hearts desire, is low. There are bounds to reality.
There are, but our species is not even remotely close to them. Also, we aren't even remotely close to exploiting all the resources in the solar system.
By the way, a land war in Europe over Ukraine has been very likely since Crimea and the election of Zelensky, which some people believe was rigged by the CIA. It was only a matter of time. The evidence from 80 years ago is there.
I am suggesting that the entire course of history is marked by the expansion of available resources to the human race. Not a cherrypicked 70 years.
For now! They all want the quality of life of the rich nations and understandably so. I really doubt that the world can support 8bn people with the average US standard of living, let alone more. There isn’t enough land to grow feed for all the livestock we’d need for a start!
>I really doubt that the world can support 8bn people with the average US standard of living
That's a completely different problem. So basically what you want is to poor people to stay poor.
Well, luckily technology improves and with that resource consumption is optimized. But that wont happen if you halve the population because there will be half of the scientists and engineers to do it (and likely, much less than half).
I think this argument that engineers or scientists will save the world removes the responsibility everyone has to consume less/better. Besides that this will probably only happen once the richer countries get hit, see the famines and water shortages all over the world. Mostly NGO’s and organizations like the UN are trying to fix those issues, while most of the money is spent on trying to get us to buy more
I’m definitely not saying I want the poor to stay poor!
I’m saying I’d like more equality and that isn’t possible at current technology levels. I don’t buy that decreasing population would limit technological progress at all. The vast majority of people are currently living subsistence existences and contributing almost nothing to technological progress.
We could easily reduce population and end up with more not less scientists and engineers
The problem isn't that we want the poor to stay poor but rather that the "rich" utilize resources very inefficiently. By our current definition of rich it is impossible for every human to live like the rich, that would mean automating everything like food production, food delivery, food preparation, construction and all of the associated menial labor which we are a very long way from.
In theory you are right, there is a lot of space to grow the population but in practice most people want to live in big popular cities and chase the dream of being rich which simply isn't sustainable and promotes a lot of waste.
A lot of people as they mature will give up their big city life dreams once they realize the cost / stress / commute isn't worth it unless you're very successful and rich. They move to the city to "make it", survival of the fittest selects some % of people who make it and the rest either cope with distractions / drugs or move to cheaper areas.
So we have a lot of space for many people to live but they won't live in luxury and since human nature is to compare ourselves to others and strive to climb social hierarchies most of the population will just overcrowd the already popular areas to live which is a problem
> more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment.
> was done by a very small number of very rich countries
And where do you think the (actionable) "intelligence" and money comes from?
It's not that poorer countries don't have intelligence, but they don't have the resources to put it to good use. One random person in a TED talk gets more attention than the people actually dealing with the issue
"More population" has always meant more misery and more conflict
