Comment Re:human overpopulation (Score 1) 146
"Seriously, that gets brought up regularly. The problems start when you start considering 'who' we need fewer of. People have a tendency to assume there will be fewer of the 'other' people, but we'll keep the population of 'good people like me'."
The solution is "simple". We just need to make the entire world prosperous, make birth control freely available, and convince major religions to stop preaching that more children is a good thing. Given all three (and in some cases even just two out of the three) population turns out to be self limiting. In one of the cases where the free market actually does seem to get things right, if having more kids is a net loss (as it is for 1st world Americans) instead of a net gain (as it is for people living in a manual labor based agricultural community) then families make the "correct" decision to have fewer children.
The tricky part is of course how to achieve the above. And how to achieve it in a way that doesn't doom the Earth before the population can naturally correct itself. (If we could magically give the entire world the kind of lifestyle Americans, or even Europeans, enjoy now with all the same energy and natural resource requirement, the results would probably not be good.)
Ideally between green technology and automation we can figure out how to make a good lifestyle available in a cheap and sustainable manner. And then we need to learn to let everyone share in that lifestyle instead of requiring people to find jobs that are no longer available, because in the long term the cost of letting everyone share is a lot less than the cost of the social disruption of diving the world into haves and have-nots. I'm a lot less optimistic about us figuring out that second part than i am about the first.
The solution is "simple". We just need to make the entire world prosperous, make birth control freely available, and convince major religions to stop preaching that more children is a good thing. Given all three (and in some cases even just two out of the three) population turns out to be self limiting. In one of the cases where the free market actually does seem to get things right, if having more kids is a net loss (as it is for 1st world Americans) instead of a net gain (as it is for people living in a manual labor based agricultural community) then families make the "correct" decision to have fewer children.
The tricky part is of course how to achieve the above. And how to achieve it in a way that doesn't doom the Earth before the population can naturally correct itself. (If we could magically give the entire world the kind of lifestyle Americans, or even Europeans, enjoy now with all the same energy and natural resource requirement, the results would probably not be good.)
Ideally between green technology and automation we can figure out how to make a good lifestyle available in a cheap and sustainable manner. And then we need to learn to let everyone share in that lifestyle instead of requiring people to find jobs that are no longer available, because in the long term the cost of letting everyone share is a lot less than the cost of the social disruption of diving the world into haves and have-nots. I'm a lot less optimistic about us figuring out that second part than i am about the first.