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Lumifer comments on US default as a risk to mitigate - Less Wrong Discussion
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Empirically, in reality, there is no runaway population growth.
Empirically, what level of population growth would it take for you to consider it runaway?
Population growth rates are not steady-state. They are a function of many things, notably the prevalent wealth and education (which tend to go together) in a society. So far all human societies which reached a certain level of wealth sharply curtailed their growth rates and in many cases actually sent them into negatives.
...and this wealth is possible because of technological growth. We might make the world wealthy enough fast enough to bring population far enough down to be sustainable, but it still amounts to a race between technology and population growth, which was my original point: invent or die
Your original point was that each technological advance enables another jump in the population.
My point is that in reality this does not happen: a certain level of technology/wealth/education (already attained in large parts of the world) stops population growing. It does not enable further expansion.
Where did I say that?
Here is my actual original point.
Well, we better hope that this trend causes the population to level off fast enough to avoid overshoot. Maybe we should be just a little bit curious about how likely that is. And we should remember to offset the population growth slowing with the fact that per-capita resource demand increases.
Let's continue this thread here please.