No. Just no. For a population to be stable all it needs is for births to match deaths. If we provided access to reliable contraception and somehow counter those parents who want to convince their children that they are failures if they don’t breed - the “Why aren’t you giving me grandchildren?” brigade - then that could well be enough to do it.
I’m getting confused. You seem to be trying to disagree with me, and then you say things I agree with. Yes people are not abstractions. When talking about the possibility of the population declining I’ve already stated: “And I really hope we can do that by making people seriously think about whether they should be having children rather than by the violence that is likely to happen as food, shelter and medical care become constrained.” It’s a real concern that people are already dying from lack of food, exposure and preventable diseases.
Well sure. Arguing about the easy questions is a waste of time. I’d much rather be arguing about the hard stuff. I make more mistakes that way, but I learn more. Definitely keep raising the hard questions.
You’ve said the US can produce enough food to feed the world, (but didn’t respond to my question about sustainability) You hope that we can find a way to distribute food more equitably. I really hope you’re right. Repeating myself, but you’re more optimistic than me on this score. When I see the selfishness of the anti-vaxxers and the white supremacy movement, and so on, I get really pessimistic about this. But I wish you all the luck in the world on your mission. Sorry - I don’t think I can say anything useful to progress this issue.
Sure - traditional thinking tends to lead to gradual incremental improvements. We need big improvements quickly, so we need to think more broadly.
You only quoted the first sentence of that paragraph and omitted the parts where I said pretty much what you’ve said above. Things like “If we want to live in a civilised society we’ve got to use our ability to think to override a lot of selfish behaviours that were selected by evolution.” Yes - we agree that Social Darwinists are wrong. (And it’s really irritating when a movement labels themselves using the name of someone famous who would disagreed with pretty much everything they espouse.)
Still agreeing. I’ll even give that one a “Hell, yes!” In the developed world we’ve massively reduced the pregnancy related mortality rates. Female life expectancy at birth now exceeds the male figure. In the developing world, still a major problem to fix there.
And I disagree on this bit.
Sure there are bigots who will jump onboard the sustainable population research when it suits their purpose. And they’ll jump off again whenever it goes what they regard as the “wrong” way, such as if it says the current population is unsustainable in their OWN country rather than just being unsustainable in, you know, poor countries. But I have met ecologists working in this area who seem genuine to me.
Once we was arguing with a climate change denier who asked something like “If you REALLY believe the planet is doomed why are you still having children?” And I was able to describe a really depressing conversation from a dinner with a bunch of ecology research students where most of them pretty much saying that they were so pessimistic about the future that they weren’t planning on having children. And the kicker was that most of their research supervisors - sort of one generation earlier - didn’t have children either. I mean, it was great that they realised it was THEIR choice and they weren’t going to be pressured by parents. But the disparity between their excitement about all the great research they were doing and the depressing nature of the conclusions they were reaching was jarring. I’m not seeing any bigotry amongst them. Just genuine fear.
But to take this discussion into a less depressing area: I previously conflated two ideas that maybe I should have better separated. One is that I think the research shows my country is over the sustainable population level, and I suspect that’s a problem elsewhere. The second is that I couldn’t see a good reason for wanting the population to increase. While you’ve been responding to most of my points on either issue you’ve been framing your answers as arguments about the first issue. So you’re arguing that we can cope with population growth but not really dealing with whether there’s a good reason to actively PURSUE population growth.
So, pretend there has been a massive technology improvement which we can measure accurately and we know without any doubt that your country can support a population 20% bigger than the current level. Would you support government policies that actively encourage the population to increase by 20%, by any sort of mix of immigration and increased birth rates as you wish? If yes, what are your reasons for wanting the population to increase?
I probably wouldn’t actively encourage population growth. As I stated above, I’m really struggling to find a reason to WANT to increase the population, even if we CAN support it. I can’t see any advantage in encouraging an increase. I’d feel much more comfortable knowing that we’ve got enough spare capacity that we cope with the next drought or local natural disaster, or influx of climate refugees due to an overseas disaster. (NEXT drought? Maybe I shouldn’t say that when some parts of country are starting to wonder if their current drought is permanent.)
