"We" can do whatever we want but if not "everyone" is doing it then the impact is fairly limited.
You would be better off having children and just consuming less than making a grave decision that impacts your whole family tree for the sake of a Humanity collective that likely will not be making the same "sacrifice".
I don't see how a two-child family is a sacrifice, really. But regardless, it seems like people have fewer children by choice as they become wealthier, have better access to education and birth control, etc.
How many families are large because the person who had to be pregnant had no real say in the matter?
Er … for those potential parents already living at the economic margins, where having a child would be a demonstrably poor decision, then just having children and consuming less would help them or their children how?
Indeed, who is to say that the perpetuation of one’s family tree is at all desirable or necessary?
Maybe the best outcome is not to play the game at all.
I believe so, yes. If birth rates continue to decline then the pool of available workers will decline, and their work will become much more valuable. At that point, workers will be making enough money to feel comfortable enough to have children again.
Exactly. I'm boggling at all these people who think that a dip is an inevitable decline and that civilisation will evaporate in a straight line without anyone ever thinking to change anything.
On the other hand there is always the possibility that we regress to a sort of feudal age, and the lords of the land require that all inhabitants produce children while surviving off of the allotted amount of rations, otherwise they face consequences.
Edit: Not only are there natural corrections that occur, there is also a lot of room for human-made "corrections". Is it ugly? Yes. Is it unfair? Yes. Will it ensure that the local economy continues to function? Yes. The vast majority of us in such a scenario would live in poverty.
(This is where I go off the deep end) Imo, the proliferation of LLM's will truly lead to massive amounts of people being displaced from meaningful work. I foresee that in the not-so-distant future "normal people" who didn't attend elite institutions (or who are otherwise not extraordinary in some sense) will only find "flesh work" available to them - i.e. prostitutes. As long as human flesh exists there will always be work for humans. It's dark, I know, but ask yourself if it's true.
Disclaimer: I find prostitution appalling and sad, but its existence is no secret. In my experience the people who are okay with it are either socially inept people who can't manage to hold down a partner, or socially competent people who are bored with their partner(s). In the latter case I wonder, why not just get a new partner? I didn't ask them about it because the answer doesn't actually matter to me. To them I say, "Do you", just as I would say to the poor souls who know no other way. Who am I to question how someone feeds their kids? I don't even have kids.
Certainly. Continuing to grow the population ad infinitum could result in a population crash that settles down at 0 people after we have pushed the world to 5C+ warming.
It actually is considering that the root cause of our environmental problems is human activity and that billions of people are still poor.
For instance, when we're told we need to eat less meat, we'll it's not so much that meat production is a problem, it's that meat production for billions of people is a problem.
So all the constraining measures we're seeing either being suggested or enforced "for the environment/climate" are constraints to fit so many people on the planet.
Similarly, there are groups who encourage people to go vegetarian or vegan for the climate, which makes some sense, but considering how few people do so long-term we might be better served by encouraging people to treat beef, dairy, etc. as a treat (or at least not something you need 365 days a year) than forgoing these things completely.
For what it's worth, I would be delighted to live on a planet of 10 billion people who have found a way to live in a way that can persist for millenia, but we don't seem to have done so. Although, living in a well-insulated flat made with renewably-grown timber (a great carbon sink!) walking and biking distance from all of my daily needs where my meagre energy needs are met with 100% renewable energy (when I lived in San Diego I worked from home and our apartment's average load was 100 Watts so this can be done!) on a mostly-vegan diet and working 20 hours per week or less sounds pretty nice to me.
I haven't said anything about "the wrong kind of people having babies" and have been pro-immigration in another comment so I don't see how this has anything to do with what I said.
Would 15 billion people be too many? 20 billion? Are we to imagine that Earth could support an infinite number of people? Because that seems like magical thinking to me. Though a different lifestyle (vegan, low energy consumption, etc.) would probably allow the current number to get by fine.
The world can sustain the current number of people many times over in terms of food supply. Indeed based on sustainable (vegetarian/vegan) food.
Talking about how many people can be sustained by earth is talking about the wrong thing. It only leads and HAS only lead to the eugenetics part. Because it's always poor people in different countries who gets sterilised.
The real topic is that capitalism and consumerism is 100% unsustainable, right from the start. That is the real debate to be had. That this world is not about human well-being and happyness, but about GDP and growth, making a tiny number of people wealthy at the expense and misery of the majority.
Unfortunately this site - Hacker News - and everything related to it, Ycombinator, Paul Graham, is only fueling the capitalist game.
"We" can do whatever we want but if not "everyone" is doing it then the impact is fairly limited.
You would be better off having children and just consuming less than making a grave decision that impacts your whole family tree for the sake of a Humanity collective that likely will not be making the same "sacrifice".