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passive_fist comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
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Every single time the subject of overpopulation comes up and I offer my opinion (which is that in some respects the world is overpopulated and that it would benefit us to have a smaller or negative population growth rate), I seem to get one or two negative votes. The negative karma isn't nearly as important to me as the idea that I might be missing some fundamental idea and that those who downvote me are actually right.
Especially, this recent thread: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jgg/we_need_new_humans_please_help/ has highlighted this issue for me again.
So, I'm opening my mind, trying to set aside my biases, and hereby asking all those who disagree with me to give me a rational argument for why I'm wrong and why the world needs more people. If I stray from my objective and take a biased viewpoint, I deserve all the negative karma you can throw at me.
Well, let's try to be a bit more specific about this.
First, what does the claim that "the world is overpopulated" mean? It implies a metric of some sort to which we can point and say "this is too high", "this is too low", "this is just right". I am not sure what this metric might be.
The simplest metric used in biology is an imminent population crash -- if the current count of some critters in an ecosystem is pretty sure to rapidly contract soon we'd probably speak of overpopulation. That doesn't seem to be the case with respect to humans now.
Second, the overpopulation claim is necessarily conditional on a specific level of technology. It is pretty clear that the XXI technology can successfully sustain more people than, say, the pre-industrial technology. One implication is that future technological progress is likely to change whatever number we consider to be the sustainable carrying capacity of Earth now.
Third, and here things get a bit controversial, it all depends (as usual) on your terminal goals. If your wish is for peace and comfort of Mother Gaia, well, pretty much any number of humans is overpopulation. But let's take a common (though by no means universal) goal of long-term economic wealth. We want to create value and keep on creating more of it for a long time. Given this, you want more humans since that will accelerate the process up until certain limits. Where these limits are is debatable but I haven't seen much evidence that we are facing them right now.
Fourth, overpopulation is pretty local. Taking the simplest possible measure of land area, it's hard to argue that countries like Russia or Canada or Australia are overpopulated.
Not if Mother Gaia is expansionist.
There's a reason they don't have many people per square mile. It's really difficult to live in large parts of them.
Southern Siberia, for example, is pretty benevolent and pretty empty.
I agree that a single metric would be hard to define, but I don't see any problem characterizing it as a combination of various metrics. Is not employment rate vs. population one valid metric, for instance? Or what about worldwide (not just USA, but worldwide average) cost of various foodstuffs vs income?
A set of metrics are given in this paper: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/
Absolutely correct. When I speak of overpopulation, I'm speaking in terms of the present. What is the present population, and what are our current technological capabilities?
I entirely agree with you that future technology could make overpopulation moot. But we don't know enough about future technology and sociology to say for certain.
My terminal goal is (if I am allowed to speak in somewhat vague terms here) continuing prosperity for individual human beings. My goal is for individuals to have more wealth and access to more resources, and as we know, increasing wealth is correlated with increasing happiness. Throughout the last couple of centuries, and especially in the last century, the quality of life in the developed world increased by leaps and bounds. But it didn't increase as much in many other places in the world. It increased a little, but not that much. I want that increase in quality of life to continue in the West, and I also want it to occur everywhere else as well.
By the way, this increase in access to resources is only good up to a limit, of course. What that limit is is the subject of another debate, but I think both you and I would agree that as of the present we are safely below the limits.
True, but if you were to disperse the population of India and China around the world, what would be the case then?
It is not. Is there any correlation between unemployment and overall population across time? I don't think so. Is there any correlation between local population density and local unemployment? I don't think so. Is the unemployment in Hong Kong hugely greater than in Mongolia or Greenland?
As with unemployment, look at this criterion over the last few centuries. Even during the XX century I believe the percentage of income spent on food has been steadily dropping in the developed countries.
It's funny how the proponents of the overpopulation thesis have absolutely no problems with linearly extending resource consumption lines far into the future but can't say anything about the future technology and so conveniently assume that it won't change.
So, that's pretty mainstream. Would you be fine with calling it the total economic wealth of the world?
Let's stick to reality.
So are you saying that the metrics I suggested aren't valid at all, or simply don't make a case for overpopulation existing?
That's why I mentioned the worldwide average, not just developed countries.
Not total, average.
Anyway, it's no use going back-and-forth like this, because I feel like I'm seriously straying from my goal of being neutral and unbiased. I liked Manfred's response because he explicitly mentioned one well-defined issue he thinks I'm overlooking, rather than trying to overcomplicate the discussion.
Yes, I don't think they have anything to do with overpopulation.
Ok thanks, at least now I know where the disagreement lies.
And now you're down-voting me just because you didn't read my post before replying?
I am not downvoting you. I rarely up- or downvote posts in threads in which I participate, anyway.
Yeah that came out entirely different to what I had intended to ask. Retracted.
I don't recall downvoting you, but I think that there is a very high chance technology makes the problem moot - either by killing us or by alleviating scarcity until a superintelligence happens.
I agree with you that future technology will probably allow us to sustain far far greater population than we can now. However, my view concerns problems were are creating at the present, and not all present problems can be retroactively solved with future technology. For instance, if you value biodiversity in the natural world (and there are good, practical reasons to do so), and biodiversity is lost, it's irreversible. Once the gene pool of a species is wiped out it is extremely difficult to restore it again. And sure, even though species go instinct all the time irrespective of human activity, throughout the history of the planet, the long-term trend of biodiversity has been to go up.
Now, as to whether human activity is decreasing biodiversity, it's a complex subject and I don't claim to be very knowledgeable about it. As far as I've heard in the scientific literature, humans are negatively affecting biodiversity.
A very nice review of human activity and socioeconomic progress and their impact on biodiversity is given in this paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X11001051
This book does a nice job of explaining the interrelationships between biodiversity, poverty, and overpopulation: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=111842848X
It's an argument based on false premises. Limitations on resources have, in past, proven to be fairly meaningless, and there's no particular reason to believe this will change going forward. Every time we think we've hit a wall(running out of wood in the 18th century, whales in the 19th century, food in the 20th century, or oil in the 21st century), we've come up with new technologies to keep going without much trouble(coal, oil, GMOs/agricultural chemistry, and tar sands/fracking respectively). Limitations on space are even less relevant.
Conversely, we've built first-world societies on a governmental safety net that only actually works with an increasing population. If we don't grow, then pension plans will start detonating like someone's carpet-bombing the economy. (Yes, worse than they are already). I think the people who created those pyramid schemes should be taken out behind the woodshed for a posthumous beatdown, but it's a bit late to fix it now.
If you want to know what a negative population growth rate looks like, look at what will happen to China over the next couple decades. It's the biggest demographic time bomb in human history.
Also, if you're bringing sustainability into this, IMO the only truly sustainable option is to advance technology so fast that we can defeat the Second Law somehow. Anything else just delays the inevitable.
Or you can look at Japan right now. Their total workforce has been contracting for the last few years and the only way to go is down. And their amount of government debt is not a coincidence.
Yup, them too. Both were held up as countries that were going to overwhelm the US through their superior economic performance, both are going to suffer long and agonizing collapses as their demography ruins them. I went with the more topical example, but Japan is probably the better one, because they're so much further along.
A "long collapse" is a bit of an oxymoron -- presumably you mean they will collapse and stay collapsed.
But that raises an interesting question -- can a society/country downscale without a collapse? Theoretically, it's perfectly doable -- you population decreases, so does your GDP but not GDP per capita. You just have more space for less people.
In practice, of course, there are issues.
I don't regard "collapse" as referring to something instantaneous. The fall of Rome, for example, could be referred to as a multi-century collapse.
And in principle, yes, it could happen. But in practice, before people die, they get old. And old people suck, economically speaking.
Taking away the pensions of people who've paid a tax that's supposed to fund pensions all their lives would be political suicide.
It depends on what the alternative is.
If you have nothing to pay pensions with, you have nothing to pay pensions with. See Detroit.
For sovereigns who can print fiat money the situation is a bit more complicated but the same in medium term. The amount of money doesn't matter, what matters is the amount of value that the country produces and which it then redistributes among people. If there is not enough value, printing money will just lead you into an inflationary spiral.
This isn't even slightly true. Historically the the normal state for humanity was malthusian stagnation. Resource limits were a hard fact of life, with lots of people starving at the margins.
Yes, we've escaped from Malthusian conditions for the time being, but progress is already stagnating. I think planning to limit population growth is a common sense idea, although as a coordination problem, this seems hard to solve (how do we punish defectors, etc.)
We are currently producing enough food to feed the highest population the Earth is expected to ever at any point have. We are doing so in perfectly sustainable fashion. Malthus is dead.
Edit: For clarity, the sustainable fashion I refer to may involve shifts to less meat consumption, between different sorts of crops, or the substitution of machinery with more labour, to deal with various future crises. Modern crops and farming knowledge alone, which should both survive even a collapse of civilization largely intact, ought to be enough to feed any projected human population. It's theoretically possible for Mathus to come back, but the conditions that would lead to it are so unlikely that for the purposes of ordinary debate it can safely be said to be a fixed problem.
Have you read The Mote In God's Eye?
I have not. Summary of the point you're making, please?
That, in the long run, due to natural selection, population will increase to match increased food production. Improvements in farming technology only buy a temporary abundance.
Our food supplies have been getting more secure for centuries, and we've seen no meaningful selection pressure towards larger families as a result - quite the opposite, in fact. And this isn't a millions-of-years sort of selection, this is the sort that ought to be apparent in a few generations. I don't think that number of children is really a heritable trait - it's a cultural and economic effect, and even if you start speaking of cultural evolution, the economics of having lots of kids are so bad today that there's no selection pressure in that direction.
In principle you're probably right, but by the time we need to worry about Malthus again, the name "Malthus" may well be forgotten.
How do you know which sort it is?
Heritability depends on the environment. It is quite plausible that it is much more heritable in the modern environment than the pre-modern one.
I don't want to discuss this, just to suggest that you might be very confused.
We are, in point of fact, not feeding that population you are talking about. We are feeding merely a part of it.
We're feeding essentially all of it - out of a world population of over 7,000,000,000, about 400,000 die of malnutrition per year. World food production per person is as high as it's ever been, over 2700 calories per person per day(which is really not a starvation diet). The ones who aren't getting fed are dying for logistical, financial, and administrative reasons, not because there's any sort of global food shortage.
We can beat the pension-based need for more people by vastly increasing productivity and ameliorating the effects of old age and/or automating more of the care of debilitated people
And how will this happen? The productivity growth has slowed down considerably and shows no signs of picking up, never mind "vastly increasing".
Well, there was at least one report suggesting that half of all jobs might be automated over the next two decades.
You are overstating the report's conclusions -- it said the "jobs might be at risk" which sounds to me like "we want to sound impressive but actually don't have anything to say".
I've paged through the report and wasn't impressed. For example (emphasis mine), "...First, together with a group of ML researchers, we subjectively hand-labelled 70 occupations, assigning 1 if automatable, and 0 if not. ... Our label assignments were based on eyeballing the O∗NET tasks and job description of each occupation." Essentially this a bunch of guesses and opinions with little support in the way of evidence.
Productivity, agreed.
Ameliorating the effects of old age, disagree - too many people treat retirement at 65 to be a God-given right for any real bump in the retirement age to solve things any time soon. Remember, this was an age set by Otto von Bismarck, and it's remained unchanged since - we've already had massive increases in quality of life for the elderly, and it's done nothing to improve the financial footings of the pension system(Quite the opposite, really).
Automating the care of the elderly will help some, but you're still left with extremely low workforce participation and a very high dependent ratio. That's not a pleasant situation, even if you don't need millions of people working in nursing homes.
As far as I can tell, this argument seems to be the same as "technology has improved before, letting us overcome resource limitations, and there's no particular reason to believe that the new innovations will stop coming".
But that sounds much more suspect. There have been cultures that collapsed due to resource limitations before, and the current trend of very fast growth in our ability to extract more resources or replace them with more easily extractable ones has only been going on for some hundreds of years. "We will always be able to come up with the kinds of innovations that will save us" is a very strong claim, implying that observed cases of diminishing returns in various extraction techniques (e.g. taking advantage of tar sands requires a much larger energy investment and is much less efficient than traditional sources of oil, AFAIK) don't matter since we'll always be able to switch something completely different. There don't seem to be any strong theoretical arguments in support of that, as far as I can tell - only the observation that we've happened to manage it of late.
It's a somewhat weaker claim. Society isn't really dependant on any single resource - oil is the closest we come, and even oil is only really essential in aviation and certain chemical processes(and it can be synthesized for that). My claim is closer to "No essential combination of resources will run out before replacement technology is available". Still strong, admittedly, but weaker.
That said, I will freely agree that we're going to take a financial hit as certain supplies run low. Oil will likely never again be as cheap as it was 20 years ago, because the extraction of our reserve oil supplies is so much more complex and expensive. It won't be pleasant. But our society has a technological mindset, huge diversification, and a larger base of wealth than all of humanity before living memory combined. I think we'll do better than Easter Island did.
And yes, there's no theoretical reason it has to be true. But the accumulated evidence that it generally is is pretty strong. How many of the catastrophes predicted in recent centuries have actually come to pass, if society has had 5+ years to prepare? Peak oil, the population bomb, nuclear war, Y2K, expansionist Germans(twice!), the collapse of the Internet, and on and on. All of those were perfectly real concerns, and had the potential to be devastating if left unchecked. But we saw them coming, took steps to deal with it, and beat back all of them, many so thoroughly that nobody even noticed that they'd been and gone.
I broadly agree with your opinion, provided certain socioeconomic problems resulting from population contraction could be overcome.
Then you have to agree in any case as population contraction must happen after hitting the limit (all simulations of the "limits to grows" study show overshoot) and I'd guess that the earlier this is addressed the better.