[BurningFrog]

A big dividing line is between those who think people are a burden vs those who think they're an asset.

I've grown convinced people are overwhelmingly an asset. In a rough sense that means they/we produce more value than they consume on average.

I think debates about population size are mostly really about this difference.

[abdullahkhalids]

The key phrase in your problem statement is "more value", which assumes that all value can be projected onto a single axis. Typically [1], this means that you can assign a dollar value to any change in the physical world [2].

The "debate" for many people is whether this simplistic economic model can be used at all. They say that value is multi-dimensional, and those value dimensions are not fungible. Concretely, if making a medicine factory results in the extinction of a specie, you can't say that it is okay, because the benefit of the former is incomparable to the loss of the latter.

Coming to population, more humans mean more destruction of ecosystems. And it is not clear whether destroying ecosystems can be fungibly compared to the additional human economic value those extra humans create. It's not about more or less, it the incomparability of the two.

[1] but not necessarily what you meant

[2] Just to be clear, the economics discipline already has a wealth of research that humans cannot in fact consistently assign absolute or relative dollar values to the same thing. Yet our political-economy and popular conceptions have this as a central assumption.

[BurningFrog]

[1] is right.

This argues against something I didn't say and don't believe.

[snapcaster]

Thanks for putting this so well, I think that is the divide as well. I've struggled to express this idea without being too offensive to the "liability" camp but i think you've made it more clear and less emotionally charged

[Dylan16807]

The way the burdens and assets scale is non-linear. There's no reason to expect that we always or never want the population to go up, regardless of current population.

And we went from 1 billion to 2 billion to 8 billion very very fast. The burdens are really piling up.

[BurningFrog]

You're clearly on the other side of this dividing line.

[Dylan16807]

Don't label me so quickly.

I'm not saying we need less population at present.

I'm just saying that at some point the cost outweighs the benefit. And humanity has been trying pretty hard to go toward that point.

Do you really think it will always, always be better to have more people? If you say no to this, then you don't get to say we're on different sides of the line. If you say yes, then you need to explain how that's physically possible.

[BurningFrog]

OK, I over-interpreted your position.

Not that there is anything wrong with disagreeing with me on this.

Two point as a taste:

1. One way more people is always better is in invention. Ten billon heads invent more than one.

2. People always worry that with more people there will be food shortage. They are also always empirically wrong. Because food is made by people! Twice as many people means twice as many farmers!

[Dylan16807]

Inventions are great but they can only do so much to improve land use.

I don't think we even have a way to put one billion people to work on optimized farms. More labor won't lead to more full mouths.

As an example of costs catching up, going from 20% of land to 30% of land needing to be optimized farms used to feed people directly? That's easy enough, and those numbers would support more people than we have today. Going from 80% to 90%, however, is extremely worrying. And we could go from the former to the latter and past it very fast too.