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> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population - climate change is caused by energy usage which is too high because there are too many people. Wars, migration, resource depletion, hunger, water scarcity, all of it.

Any evidence for these assumed causal relationships? Wars have been waged by small numbers of people in the past and today, migration in such general terms has always been inherent to humans, resources are depleted by mass-consumption of a tiny fraction of the global population, and hunger is caused by not distributing available food to those who need it.

These problems are hence mostly political. Again, only a tiny fraction of the global population has any significance in the relevant decisions.

- Imagine you dug a hole 1 mile deep and 1 mile wide. How many humans do you think you could fit into it? The answer is about 60 billion, many times the current global population.

- If you dropped a human on a random spot on this planet, even if we just assume land, the median number of people within a mile would be exactly 0.

I think the second thought experiment is quite informative because it's easy to lose track of the reality when we mostly travel from packed city to packed city. But these cities, and the pathways that connect them, make up a negligible percent of the Earth. China is smaller than the US, and has pretty rough geography, yet was food self sufficient with a population upwards of a billion. They only became food dependent as their economy expanded and they replaced farms with iPhone factories, metaphorically speaking at least.

Finally, population growth in the longrun will always be determined by the groups with high fertility. It's never longrun stable unless everybody has the same fertility rate. So for instance the Amish today maintain a fertility rate of around 6. This is why there are now hundreds of thousands of them, and within a few decades they'll number in the millions. As highly educated, highly secular, high income individuals remove themselves from the gene pool, they'll simply be replaced by Amish. And as the former die off, and the latter grow - we'll eventually see population growth resume.

One last point. Fertility rates also determine age ratios within a society. Low fertility = most people are elderly, high fertility = most people are young. So it's not only economic collapse due to fewer people, but you create societies where there's a much greater social cost (due to elderly care), and far fewer people to take care of them. South Korea is a great example of this. If they don't fix their fertility rate, they'll collapse as a nation within the lifespan of some people alive today. 'Breaking News 2094 - North Korea successfully invades South Korea with one tank.'

Climate change being caused by too many people is oversimplifying. We have had 40 years of inaction by most world leaders with the power to do something. The global economy is run by terrible, cynical, self-interested people. We could be powered by solar, wind and nuclear by now.

Also relevant for this discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend

Naive or not depends a lot on the subjective view of the reader So you shouldn’t worry. I like your response.

I am worried in terms of "holy shit, humanity is literally going extinct".

It's not just people across the world having less children, all fertility indicators have plummeted in the last 40 years across the world. People simply can not have more children, even if they wanted to.

We have a genuine public health crisis and we don't really know the cause.

Framing the issue of elder care in population decline as a financial one misses the mark, I think. I think it'll be more about not having enough people wanting to work in elder care.

> I try to understand this worrying mindset but it still seems like short-term thinking. Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population - climate change is caused by energy usage which is too high because there are too many people. Wars, migration, resource depletion, hunger, water scarcity, all of it. So we (as in, human civilization) short-term think our way into rationalizing that it'll be ok because technology will provide a solution and we don't need to make any real changes.

Which people do you propose should not exist?

I don't think there has ever been a period of time when economic growth has been decoupled from population growth. If you look at the curves, they're basically the same. So that's a bit of a problem.

The issue is not so much the decreasing population but that fact that its aging too fast and the proportion of productive working age people will continue to shrink.

> But we can!

Unless we get robots to replace nurses etc. in retirement homes no we can't...

> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population

Absolutely not. We have the technology to feed multiples of the population, house everybody, and give all modern comforts to everybody. The reason why it is not happening is that the economic system needs to induce artificial scarcity to profit.

> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population

Except of course the problems caused by insufficient population. That is: insufficient production of food, lack of infrastructure, scientific research for mitigations of climate change...

Of course these are not really caused by "insufficient population", in just the same way your problems are not really caused by "excessive population". If you push a magic button labelled "give me all the benefits of a small population and none of the downsides" then every problem is going to look like an overpopulation problem!

1. Wars are fewer than before, we are killing fewer people per capita

2. Climate change won't end humanity itself, by all probability, people will be better off in 100 years even if we don't do anything about emissions. Better off in terms of life expectancy, poverty etc

3. Water scarcity and hunger have reduced over the last 100 years and will continue reducing thanks to technological progress

In fact, I'd say contrary to you that a lot of problems are solved because of over population - we have more people, more intelligence and more technology created thereby.

There's a guy called Paul Ehrlich who prophesied end of days in very similar ways to you. He mainly blamed overpopulation and resource use and predicted something similar to a world catastrophe in 2000's. Many times. Nothing happened.

Unless we have an AI x-risk event, I assure you that people will be more prosperous 100 years from now and you'd prefer to live then than today.

I'm also very wary of this rhetoric that population is the cause of all problems. This rhetoric is very popular in certain circles and is anti-human inherently.

Edit: more lore on Paul Ehrlich: he had a bet with an economist Julian Simon that the price of metals would go up because of scarcity. His logic was that the population would increase with limited supply of raw metals. Simon OTOH bet that it would go down because of technological progress - more people would have more intelligence combined and find better ways to extract metal. Simon won btw.

Your logic about solving the second problem also applies to the first.

Quality of life was far worse for the average person when we had far fewer people than today.

> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population

I agree with your overall point, but this is a bit too simplistic. Even with just 10% of the current population, if we'd build as many AI data centers that we are doing today and beyond and power them all with coal and oil, climate change would not end up much different.

How many we are is a substantial factor, but how we behave also is.

> Worried in economic terms though

The techbros who publicly fret about population decline are worried about white population decline. Population decline in the West is easily managed by letting more non-Western people in. It's not like Germany/UK/US/France have a monopoly on intelligence and hard work.

Globally small economies outside the West don't depend on continuous growth, and a "soft landing" where population declines but gradually and possibly asymptotically is not a threat to the economy.

How does a declining population where one worker has to support multiple retirees solve any of that, though? All these degrowth arguments fail to address the age pyramid question, which is the fundamental reason economists are warning against population decline.

Or are you proposing we make sure all age groups degrow at the same rate? Because that's the one way to make population decline actually work for us (for some values of "us").

>Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population - climate change is caused by energy usage which is too high because there are too many people. Wars, migration, resource depletion, hunger, water scarcity, all of it

I mean, yeah. If there were no people, there would be no wars.

Very aptly put wrt population. It boils down to misplaced values. A lot of decisions like led lights have to do with ignoring the value of human wellness. Even near sight is a privilege and a luxury, yet it's abused by small font on paper for the non trivial literature.

> Worried in economic terms though, because the foundation of that is an assumption of continuing growth?

Our society is based on the promise to our children that they will be better off than what we were.

That requires growth.

Earth is going to have a different climate there is no doubt about it. More akin to the times where Greenland was actually green.

I wouldn't be too worried about it, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it and it is over sensationalized.

Just enjoy the warmer winters and more tropical summers. And I definitely wouldn't stop whole economic progress only because Toronto got a bit longer vegetation period and less rain.

It's a boon for the northern hemisphere countries, now we start to get all these vineyards that were previously thought to be a mediterranean luxury. Winters are milder and more tolerable. Summers are luxuriously tropical. Palm trees can be grown in the backyard and olives.

More often than not when I look upon the weather radar, I pray for it to get warmer just a little bit more. There are still too many cold, merciless nights but it is getting better, albeit slowly.

As you’ve just said, the decline isn’t the problem, it’s the global financial system. We should be looking to reform that, not to boost the population: that’s a long-term impossibility in a closed system.

It’s not really the “global financial system”, tax-funded pensions are mostly a richer-country thing. In less developed places, young people often “pay” for the elderly without ever giving them a tax dollar, e.g. by staying put to care for an elderly relative instead of moving somewhere with better pay or quality of life.

Well structuring the global financial system is one thing, but we really need assume very little about finance. If someone is retired they aren't working, so almost by definition others still working must provide for them.

History is the process of oil getting into everything. The financial system is a structure for distributing surplus energy founded on growth resulting from accessing a material which can do 500 people's worth of work in a single barrel.

No, this is not the case at the moment. The previous generation HAS paid lots of taxes, social insurance and retirement in order to pay for themselves. So let's not make up fantasies here.

Now will this be true going forward? Not sure, that's where you can argue.

I wonder how that got started. Seems like someone must have gotten a free ride in the beginning. It must have seemed like a great idea to those who initially benefitted because they never had to pay in.

It's not taxes that's the problem, you can't magically solve the problem by storing cash or gold under your bed.

If you increase demand for labour (more people getting old needing more care, more doctors) and reduce supply for labour (fewer people working), then the cost of labour will skyrocket.

Put 5 billionaires on an island and 1 carer. How much will the carer charge to care for an hour. They auction their time, and the bidding starts at £1m an hour.

> Arguing solely on the basis that it hasn't happened to date is like a gambler asserting he was 'right' when he bets the farm in Roulette and wins.

Roulette is a finite game. Life is an infinite game.

The way I think of it: a world in which the apocalypse happens looks just like one in which it doesn’t, right up to that point where it starts to fall apart.

Or in joke form: an optimist falls out of a skyscraper window. As he plummets past the 10th floor he thinks: so far, so good!

> Even though there are disasters all around him.

Isn’t this catastrophizing? I’m trying to think of an example where there are disasters all around someone that precludes them from navigating it. Do you have an example?

I've heard it described as "Pollyannaism"

>As a result of the novel's success, the adjective "Pollyannaish" and the noun "Pollyannaism"[2] became popular terms for a personality type characterised by irrepressible optimism evident in the face of even the most adverse or discouraging of circumstances. It is sometimes used pejoratively, referring to someone whose optimism is excessive to the point of naïveté or refusing to accept the facts of an unfortunate situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna#Influence

Pronoia

I have it, I acquired it to balance the paranoia

Its awesome.

Nirvana?

Panglossian - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Panglossian

From Voltaire's Candide. Doc Pangloss was always happy as the world was burning around himself.

"this is fine" meme with a dog on a chair surrounded by fire?

Naive

Of course. But this time, the world will really end, because the thousands of historical examples of extrapolation being hilariously wrong never apply to the future.

haha yeah, was thinking the same! "Stop extrapolating from past data", then proceeds to extrapolate that nothing happens from a few past examples.

That's called cherry picking to suit your opinion. I imagine train executives of Nord Express weren't very worried about air travel in 1910s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Express

> One of the major contributor to global population decline is one-child policy of china,

Yes, one of the stupidest policy decisions in human history. China will start having massive demographic issues than they would have otherwise but in hindsight it just shifted them by a couple of decades.

Isaac Asimov's Daneel Olivaw series of books had the overpopulated Earth alright, but it also had spacer colonies on distant planets that very much kept their populations at a sensible level and were magnificently wealthy in comparison because of it (and robots).

Blade Runner the movie looks anything except depopulated. Well, excluding the vast empty building where Deckard lives. The city is enormous and literally blowing up gigantic amounts of energy and pollution; the streets are packed with people, languages, and clutter of all types (a PKD obsession). In some ways it is fully within the overpopulation zeitgeist of the times.

That's incorrect. They did fit the population growth to a hyperbolic curve, which predicts (predicted) an infinite population in finite time: a singularity. It hyperbolic growth does not approach infinity, it actually reaches it.

Of course a singularity can't happen in reality, so this paper was in jest. (And in fact population growth stopped fitting a hyperbolic curve shortly after it came out.)

Agreed, and--regarding the end of the article--note the publication date: 2019, well before the AI explosion we find ourselves in the middle of now.

Avengers: Doomsday release date :|

There's still 11 1/2 hours left

I have a feeling that's possibly just a property of life itself, reshaping its environment to maximize its ability to continue. Even simple one cell organisms cluster together to form biofilms to better survive in their niche.

Hairy or not, that is the question.