We got a huge percentage of humans who are struggling. Many under educated. We got slavery. We got wars. We got food issues.
I’m not convinced that these problems would be addressed by a smaller population. On average, people today are better educated, more peaceful, and better nourished than they were 100 or 500 years ago. I think this is mainly due to technological progress rather than population size.
I think asking why population needs to continue to rise?
I don’t think the population needs to rise, but there will definitely be problems if the population shrinks rapidly over just a few generations, one of the main ones being “who will take care of all the old people?”. Japan and Korea are already struggling with this, and other countries are not far behind.
I’m not convinced that these problems would be addressed by a smaller population. On average, people today are better educated, more peaceful, and better nourished than they were 100 or 500 years ago. I think this is mainly due to technological progress rather than population size.
I didn’t read it as saying smaller populations would fix this necessarily, but that we should focus on fixing those problems before we worry too much about falling birth rates outside of countries like Japan and Korea that have such elderly populations. Even if letting the population drop doesn’t directly cause the prevalence of these problems to drop as well, I think trying to force the matter of growing the population before addressing these problems would likely only aggravate them. We can’t necessarily count on technological progress to keep up with infinite population grow, so we’ll continue to outpace our ability to find adequate solutions with our ability to generate massive problems for ourselves.
I’m not convinced that these problems would be addressed by a smaller population. On average, people today are better educated, more peaceful, and better nourished than they were 100 or 500 years ago. I think this is mainly due to technological progress rather than population size.
I don’t think the population needs to rise, but there will definitely be problems if the population shrinks rapidly over just a few generations, one of the main ones being “who will take care of all the old people?”. Japan and Korea are already struggling with this, and other countries are not far behind.
I didn’t read it as saying smaller populations would fix this necessarily, but that we should focus on fixing those problems before we worry too much about falling birth rates outside of countries like Japan and Korea that have such elderly populations. Even if letting the population drop doesn’t directly cause the prevalence of these problems to drop as well, I think trying to force the matter of growing the population before addressing these problems would likely only aggravate them. We can’t necessarily count on technological progress to keep up with infinite population grow, so we’ll continue to outpace our ability to find adequate solutions with our ability to generate massive problems for ourselves.
An excellent point.