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by brokenmachine 2541 days ago
>We demand constant growth in the economy which won't play well with a rapidly shrinking population.

That ridiculous and frankly insane expectation of constant growth is the reason we're in this mess in the first place.

Also, a "rapidly shrinking population" has never happened so who knows what the effects might be.

>Personally, I am OK with waves of forced mass sterilization but I understand, because human nature, it will be just as poorly implemented as any war draft so I can't promote this idea.

I wasn't suggesting either genocide or mass sterilization, but lets not go too far the other way and pat ourselves on the back too hard for simply making more people, and making vapid statements like, "All the accomplishments of humanity stem from having children".

Those billions of accomplishments are rapidly destroying the only planet we have, so clearly on average every extra person is a net negative.

I haven't had children myself so the effects of all those accomplishments won't be my offspring's problem when I'm dead.

1 comments

Replying to myself because I found this interesting, so someone else might as well:

>We demand constant growth in the economy which won't play well with a rapidly shrinking population.

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/world-population-ch...

Especially interesting/scary is the "World population since 10,000 BCE" chart.

I don't think a rapidly shrinking population is the problem that we are likely to experience.

Look at Japanese, Korean, and European birthrates. Look at the birthrates as a function of how 'developed' a country is. The trend is clear- as countries develop, they die. They stop having kids. Even the US, I'm pretty sure, is below replacement rate- without immigration, their population would be going down. If you want to stop population growth and kill off the human race, do whatever it is Japan, Europe, Korea did to themselves and people will stop having kids.