There is nothing in my post or my subsequent comments about needing to increase the population. We don't need new humans because we have too few humans - we need new humans because old humans die.
Policy are supposed to get judged by real world effects. If we want a certain number of new humans those people who want to go through the experience of childbearing should start producing children. In the present world those already produce too much children, so there no case of the people who don't want to produce, to produce.
I do have particular counterarguments to that (including the quasi-racist stuff you'd expect) but it's also just a turn in the conversation I didn't anticipate at all.
Giving that you do point to the quasi-racistic stuff you are basically holding the position that not everyone should get children but that the right people should as Mestroyer said.
In that case you just disagree with him about who the right people happen to be. He thinks it's about being intelligent and the type of person who goes on lesswrong while you might also want more of stupid people that share your racial identification.
Without restricting the arguments to being about the right people getting more children the case is easily dismissed in a world with overpopulation. In the spirit of fixing the arguments of other people it makes sense to treat you as saying that you want the right people getting more children even if you don't explicitly say so.
Gah, no, that's not it at all. It feels like we're moving farther, rather than closer, to understanding each other's position.
I seem to have irreparably placed us on a wrong track with my post so I think I'll stop trying to recover from it. To make progress it would be best to start again from the ground up with a completely different write-up of my core idea. But for now, at least, I'll let this rest.
This topic is in vogue, so here's my pitch.
My fellow humans, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that you are likely to eventually enter an enfeebled state, during which you will not be able to independently provide for yourself. Even worse, you will at some point altogether cease to function and then you can no longer contribute to the things you care about. The good news is that both of those problems can be ameliorated by the same scheme – the creation of new humans. The new humans can provide us with the assistance we need as our own abilities diminish. And when we cease to function, the new humans can carry on with the projects we value.
Now, the thing is, creating fully functioning new humans is a huge project, consuming many man-years of work. A person engaged in preparing and outfitting a new human will need to sacrifice a lot of time that could otherwise be devoted to personal leisure and other projects. We currently have a volunteer system for replenishing the population and in many ways this works well. Not everyone is well-placed for creating humans while some people are in a good position to create many. But this system is not perfect and it can be exploited. There are some freeloaders who do not create humans even though they are in a suitable position to do so. Those same people almost always value receiving care in old age and value humanity having a future. But they are relying on the rest of us to provide enough new humans for this to happen while they can devote all their time to other projects and zero time to diapers with poop in them.
Sometimes the non-child-creators justify their decision by suggesting that the projects they are working on are especially socially valuable and thus they can spend time on them in preference to child-creation without violating their duty to society. While it is *possible* that this argument goes through in some cases, it seems suspiciously self-serving. What is especially worth taking into account is that if the humans in question really are so highly valuable, they would statistically have highly valuable offspring. Thus, it seems doubtful in the general case that high-value people refraining from procreating is a net gain for society.
[Poorly conceived section on my personal experiences removed.]