> More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things.
More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to invest in every person and their ideas. I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?
> I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?
One of the most stunning and under appreciated facts about the last two centuries is that, no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased. Innovation is amazing.
> poverty has decreased even as population increased. Innovation is amazing
That's because humans exploited all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species, exploited so many animals too, just look at Earthling the documentary. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
> That's because humans exploited all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species, exploited so many animals too, just look at Earthling the documentary. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
the max? I don't know about max. However, yeah, you're right. That does not mean we cannot continue in the future and do it better. Lab Grown meat is nearly a thing, and reducing the price of that will drop global emissions. EVs are becoming far more common and will be replacing ICE vehicles come the turn of the decade, we're building more and more solar and renewable energy resources.
We can fix these problems. Yes, the problems are created by us. That does not mean we cannot fix them while continuing to progress and reduce poverty. More people, more brains only benefits that effort. Not reduces it.
The system of our society needs tweaks. Our incentives are sometimes wrong. But again, reducing people doesn't fix that. More people aids us to build better systems.
Yes but this has been improving in recent decades as well. See the book More From Less for an argument. Thanks to modern efficiencies, digitization, and government action, resource use has decoupled from economic growth and some has even peaked.
And all that innovation happened thanks to the population living a good life with excess of resources. The people who lived in poverty didn't create much innovation at all, making more people who live in poverty wont add any innovation.
And even worse, if you add people until most has to live a life on the brink of starvation again that could stop innovation from ever happening again in the future, our current time is an historical anomaly and there is no guarantee that we can ever get back here if we screw up and get everyone back to a state of misery. There are only so many ways we can improve food production, we found a lot of them the past 200 years and that led to a ton of innovations since people no longer had to worry about starvation. But all of that will quickly revert if you can no longer buy food at a supermarket, since there is simply not enough food to feed every American, some will have to starve to death.
> The people who lived in poverty didn't create much innovation at all
But as their incomes tripled and their children survived childhood, their birthdates dropped and their surviving children are better educated and less malnourished. This has been happening almost everywhere in the world, and is why world population will peak in a couple decades without mass starvation.
> no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased
Surely not based on any way of measuring it, since in some reasonable definitions you could say there's 1.5bn people living in poverty right now and only 1bn total humans existing two centuries ago.
I mean, If you want to be pedantic you could define poverty in such a relative way that we’re all poor compared to Musk and Bezos. But I think you’d be surprised how much you have to inflate the definition of poverty to still fit 1.5 billion people into it. It’d certainly be the richest definition of poverty the world’s ever seen, with the lowest numbers of starvation, malnutrition, infant mortality, etc
Just put off curiosity, it looks like only 689 million are "living in extreme poverty" but 1.3 billion people are "multidimensionality poor" which seems to be trying to capture some the things you're talking about.
How about $2 to $6 in just the last 40 years. Give it a couple generations with rising incomes, lower birth rates, higher literacy, lower child malnutrition, and you’ll see more Einsteins.
> I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty.
Fortunately, we've made huge strides in this area in the last few decades. Global poverty is at an all time low and is decreasing. The same is true for food, female empowerment, family sizes, suicide, plastics, etc.
The world, really actually is getting better on a lot of major measures.
Yes, there are big challenges ahead. But as a species, we're honestly doing okay, maybe even better than okay.
There's a lot of data backing all this enthusiasm up. I'd link to a few papers, but GapMinder[0] is the best place I've seen where all the data is collated and searchable. They have great graphing interactives too [1]. GapMinder is an effort by the late-great Hans Rosling. You may remember his as that Swedish doctor from the TED talks [2]. I'd suggest any HN readers to dive into the site and see. They have a great little quiz[3] to help you renormalize yourself to current data as well.
All hope is not lost! Things really are going to be okay-ish. Not the same, but not terrible. Our work is not in vain.
> More people means less energy and resources per person though
Malthusianism didn't work in 1700s and doesn't work now. Economists produced endogenous growth theories explaining how more population could lead to higher output per capita in the 80s. Romer won a Nobel prize for it.
The evidence we have now strongly supports their arguments. Productivity scales superlinearly with urban population so that each doubling leads to a 15% increase in p.c output. This is true everywhere we look i.e. regressing log(income per capita) on log(city population) produces near-perfect lines with slopes close to 1.15 whether you're looking at the U.S or Bangladesh. This is easily explicable in terms of the network externalities. Furthermore, studies comparing the networked lives of people living in more/less populous areas (inferred from phone usage data) show that people living in bigger cities do indeed communicate more. How much more? 15% for every doubling of city size! All of this can be explained in terms of graph theory. More nodes -> more cultural and technical niches (interconnected node clusters) -> more potential synergies as every niche has more niches to connect to. And so on. Connectivity increases faster than linearly, hence the superlinear scaling. Not coincidentally, the connectivity of brains seems to be the same (double the number of cortical neurons in a mammal, the number of synapses per neuron increases by 15-20%).
All this to say, we certainly aren't approaching a world of less abundance per capita as the world continues to urbanise. Anybody who thinks this just isn't acquainted with the evidence.
> More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems.
I mean .... why? Why are we assuming that more people aren't working to create more energy, more resources? The Earth can feed, and provide far more energy than we currently are using. Pump out nuclear reactors for every town and we will have enough energy for 10 times the people. Granted, it's not as easy as saying that but my point is that energy is not finite, and resources are far more that we are currently not utilizing.
I don't imagine more people will be living with the same resources. After all, the growth to nearly 8 billion resulted in most people's quality of life rising and poverty decreasing. This is a fact. A cold hard fact, that nearly everyone on an absolute level has gotten better lives.
If we can do that for 8 billion, why can't we for another 8?
More so, increased population results in different, new problems and solving those problems results in us further progressing, not regressing.
I guess, I just don't like thinking of this as the end of history. We can grow and grow, and grow. I don't wish for humanity to simply fizzle out. We've done pretty well till now, let's keep going. We can do better.
As far as we know, we're the only species in the universe, in the whole wide universe that can truly appreciate the beauty of the universe. That can observe. Catalogue. Create Art. Sing songs and so on.
The vast wide massive universe. It deserves to be seen. It deserves to be documented. To be explored. We need to live, and grow far more than now to do that.
Population growth doesn't create nuclear plants, well educated people who don't have to worry about their daily needs creates nuclear plants. Our current infrastructure only supports X billion people to not live in poverty, every person you add over that X will be a miserable and thus unproductive life that still costs resources.
Sure I believe the earth can support 10 billion people who doesn't live in poverty, but that would require a lot of infrastructure that we don't yet have. Adding people before you can ensure they don't have to live a life of misery will just hurt progress, for progress it is better to have 100 people who live a good life than 1000 people who live near starvation, so the fastest way to get to 10 billion people living a well life is not to first add 10 billion people who have to live in misery.
> More people means less energy and resources per person though
Does it? It does if we're at the level of cutting wood to feed our individual fireplaces, and there's only so much wood around. But we don't live in that world any more.
You need a large number of people to be able to manufacture giant windmills in... Texas, I think? Installed in Wyoming, with generators built in Switzerland. Combined with solar panels built in China. This is to replace oil from North Dakota, drilled with equipment manufactured in Texas, piped to whereever. And that's replacing coal dug in Wyoming, hauled hundreds of miles by locomotives built in Pennsylvania or Texas or Mexico or Canada.
That takes people. It takes a lot of people, connected to each other, to give us a world where we're not just competing for who can chop down more of the few remaining local trees.
More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to invest in every person and their ideas. I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?