More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to invest in every person and their ideas. I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?

I want to attack the premise that a shrinking population is inherently a problem. The only clearly stated problem that I've seen is how social security will likely crumble since the fewer younger people won't be able to support the large aging population.

But this ignores how productivity has been and will continue to rise thanks to machines. I think we can easily take care of an aging population if we make proper use of new technology.

In fact I think that reducing our numbers is necessary for our survival.

We live in a capitalist world, where constant growth is assumed and expected, but the earth is a relatively closed system and you know what happens with bacteria in closed systems? They reproduce until they exhaust the system's resources and then they all die.

It's arguable whether a smaller population can be a lot richer and better off. More people = More specialization and more minds solving problems = faster advancement = better living for everyone.

Yes I get you can make your own progression that goes negative. The point is not that more people = better. It's that less people = better is not a fact, it's an opinion or conjecture

It's true, and it's enraging. But at the same time, are you wishing for the people in the developing world to keep producing so few emissions per capita? Because they would emit as much as we do if they could, and I'm sure they dream they'll be able to do it one day. And it's fair: but then we need to think of a recipe for sustainability that factors in much higher consumption levels for the now developing countries- instead of much lower ones for the developed world.

Different day, same Malthusian bullshit. These people can only think of humans as net negative parasites on the planet, rather than individual agents with a positive expected value to society. Density is GOOD — it leads to cross-pollination of ideas and the advancement of the world. Yes, the planet is on a path that will require us to eventually get smarter about resource consumption. Advocating fewer people on Earth is the most harmful & naive way to solve that problem.

If your life raft is sinking, do you try to patch it, or do you throw someone overboard? Your instinctual answer says a lot about the type of person you are.

[edit: I'd remove the last paragraph if it weren't intellectually dishonest to do so. I feel like it's causing people to miss my main point. It was written more out of anger than reason. Please ignore.]

Global population is still increasing and will most likely continue to do so until 2100.

> we need more efficient people.

It take less people to mine, process, and produce a billion tonne of steel today than it did in the 1970s.

Efficiency has steadily increased.

Here's a thought experiment: Why don't you and I end our lives right now, then? Every breath we take contributes to the carbon footprint.

(please don't do it, human life is the greatest cause of human progress)

That's a completely different problem. So basically what you want is to poor people to stay poor.

Well, luckily technology improves and with that resource consumption is optimized. But that wont happen if you halve the population because there will be half of the scientists and engineers to do it (and likely, much less than half).

What we’re seeing is the beginning of a sudden and massive drop in the working population across vast regions of the planet. That’s a recipe for famine, decaying infrastructure, war, burning wood and coal instead of maintaining sophisticated energy infrastructure.

This is where I really think it gets into the grounds of a moral or philosophical argument. Life without this neverending economic growth is nasty, brutish, and short. We would never have advanced modern medicine, cured diseases, or invented any of the conveniences we all use every day with it. There are no systems other than broad economic/productivity growth that have ever worked on a large scale for improving the living conditions for humanity. Denying this type of progress to future generations of humans, for a purely aesthetic reason such as we just kind of feel like we don't need more people, is unconscionable.

There is plenty of water on the earth, and capacity for clean energy production, it's just a question of how do we harness it effectively while mitigating the downsides. I'm all for making some short term sacrifices and paying some costs now to avoid the worst of climate change, but that does not mean accepting that the future for humanity should be degrowth.

This is true, but not in the way they mean it - it is affecting the quality of life way upward for most people.

We aren't doing that. Increasing human populations don't increase resource consumption because 1. resources aren't always consumed per-capita 2. we have the spare human capital to invent new cleaner technology.

It's backwards actually - decreasing populations, making for a deflating economy, encourage consumption rather than productivity investment. That's how so many countries managed to deforest themselves when wood fires were still state of the art.

Also, "resources are finite" isn't an argument against growth because if you don't grow /the resources are still finite/. So all you're saying is we're going to die someday. We know that.

Not exactly. The bottom 85% (in income terms) of the global population contribute very little to unsustainability. There are too many people in OECD countries, perhaps.

The problem is that the developed world needs too many resources per capita. The developing world will have similar issues when it reaches a standard of living where they start declining. Also this decline is too slow and too far out to matter. We need to effectively at least halve global resource usage in the next 1 or 2 decades. Waiting until the developing world stops growing in 30 years is not a solution.

I thought you were arguing against forcibly shrinking the population (which I don't think anyone was advocating btw), but are you actually arguing to grow the population as a way to improve things environmentally?

Having more people in the world does not lead to "more people are working on these issues". Well, maybe it could, but it would be one of the least efficient (and most indirect) ways to make it happen.

> Btw more population also usually results in more urbanization and more efficient energy use per person.

Problem: We've got a problem with too many humans being ineffecient.

Answer: increase the population to get more ubanization, which brings some efficiencies.

I'll just ignore the decrease in quality of life for everyone, and just say that this doesn't seem like an elegant solution.

The efficiencies that we've gained hasn't kept up with population growth. If it did, we wouldn't be having major issues with things like climate change, over fishing, or water shortages. Moreover, if you've read one of Bill Gates' more recent blog posts; gaining efficiencies doesn't lessen demand for resources.

http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Making-the-Modern-World

> Also, at what point will you be satisfied? Ideally, with humanity extinct,

Please re-read the post that I replied to. I was just merely giving an answer to a question: "Why is a smaller population a good thing?" You're making too many assumptions with too little data.

Not at all, people don't create resources, we consume resources.

> As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down.

As long as we believe in infinite exponential growth. Instead we are starting to hit the wall and it time to stop dreaming.

Earth doesn't have too many people. The people inhabiting it are just, currently, quite wasteful with resources.

Taking a perhaps unwarranted broad view, economies of scale allow for us to achieve certain productive activities that we would otherwise not be able to. Taken to an extreme, a tribe of 100 humans would never be able to develop a space program, for example.

Even aside from that, more people means more "black swan" thinkers/entrepreneurs that can have a population-wide impact. It took just one Einstein to develop General Relativity and now humanity will benefit forever.

Obviously humans are chewing through natural resources at an astounding and unsustainable rate, and we'll extinguish ourselves in a few hundred years if nothing changes. If your view is that humanity should co-exist in much smaller numbers in harmony with nature on Earth, your statements are reasonable. I take the optimistic view that we're meant to keep growing indefinitely beyond the Earth, and so a shrinking, aging population is indeed a concern.