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knb comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
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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.
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.