Alternative approach: let the population decline so we have more natural resources per person
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
57 points (100.0% liked)
ShowerThoughts
2362 readers
2 users here now
Sometimes we have those little epiphanies in the shower.. sometimes they come from other places. This is a home for those epiphanies.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
We have no real shortage of natural resources, the problem lies with equitable distribution of said resources.
At this rate we might run out tho
Of what? The general issue is mismanagement and unsustainable usage of resources. If we're sustainable, it doesn't matter how big the population is. If we're unsustainable, we'll run out anyway and it's just a matter of time.
You go ahead and convince Trump to not "drill baby drill". There's more to having enough resources than the theoretical optimal usage. There's also real world usage
You're making the assumption that with less population, they won't be able to mess up the environment. I personally find that assumption extremely dubious. There's no limit on idiocy. Short of us losing technology, it's a great force and idiocy multiplier.
Can you not put words in my mouth? We'll run out of non-renewables eventually. Lets have that in a 1000 years and not a 100 please
Unsustainability is unsustainability. Does it matter if we run out in 100 years or 1000? The goal should be to go sustainable, and that is actually MORE likely to happen with a larger population base, as sustainable tech requires a higher tech base, and consequently a larger population base to support it.
It does matter, yes. How great are our odds of figuring out sustainability in 100 years vs 1000? And not just the tech. Also the politics and such.
Perhaps there is a balance. But right now I think we're on the too much side of things
Human nature being what it is, we won't be making any progress on sustainability until it's staring us in the face and has become a survival issue. FFS, we KNEW about global warming and what coal-burning would do back in the 19th century, and what did we do on that front in the couple hundred years since? Literally speed up the process, until we hit survival-level issues.
Oh, forgot to mention previously - population inertia is a thing. While birthrates may have dropped precipitously, it takes a long time to reflect that in actual population figures. So much so that every scientist speaking on the issue takes pains to state that the reducing birthrate will not affect our current environmental woes. For better or worse, we're stuck with our current population size to figure out the environmental thing. The birthrate issue is not about the current catastrophe, but the upcoming one.
Did you miss nuclear and solar existing? China's investments? Heat pumps? We're not standing still on progress. It's just not enough
Yeah. How much of that progress, as a result of sustainability focus, came about solely in the past 2 decades? You're proving my point, that we just don't do something about future problems until it's become a today problem.
Quite a bit, we have not been standing still. New salt based batteries have been announced recently. You're going to have to explain how this proves your point tho
We can predict a disaster 2 centuries in advance, and yet accelerate the onset of the disaster until it's almost too late to avert it. What makes you think humanity would do anything useful if they had a thousand years? We'd just revert to our old behaviour because the urgency wasn't there any more.
I think we might just have a better shot, or at least more time to adapt to a harsher climate. I'm not saying this is a guaranteed solution
The issue is not the lower fertility rate itself. The issue is
- capitalism assuming the impossible - infinite pop growth
- governments with a tribal mindset trying to outcompete each other in number of heads, so they force their populations to murder or subjugate each other
Infinite growth is absolutely possible as long as it's combined with regular terrifying contraction and reduction; When growth slows down, engineer genocide until there's plenty of room to grow. It's a long embraced human tradition.
mmm bring on that malthusian magic
I think that globalised megacorporations make this sort of chainsaw growth less feasible over time, since you can't extract surplus value from dead people. That wasn't a big deal before because corporations were mostly restricted by country/government, but now they're basically everywhere.
[inb4: this does NOT mean that globalised megacorporations are against genocide. Far from that - it's just that they'd rather order their governments to engage in genocide in other situations. Such as megacorpo turf wars.]
Time for Big Grave to get a piece of the pie
Now to harvest all data and materials out of dead bodies for max-profit.
Multiple post-mortem scans to identify lifestyle parameters and extrapolate to get past buying habits and predict future generation's buying trends.
Then extract longer living organs and bones for use in hyper-processed products. Leave the skin, so that taxidermists can then charge a premium from the relatives to make the "body" look like a real dead person's body before public incineration or embalming and engraving.
Then research zombification ...
>When Big Data meets horror movies
There's a fundamental disconnect between people who live in highly developed nations and their awareness of how much populations from intentionally underdeveloped nations are subsidizing their ability to accrue material wealth. I believe this creates a scenario where the only way to continue maintaining the high living standards the West has known for 50+ years without incurring increasing costs is through the manipulative create of underclasses that allow capital accumulation to occur. Unfortunately now that globalization is out of fashion, many governments are shifting to bringing these underclasses much closer to home, which is adding to the resulting anti-immigrant, xenophobic political discourse we're now seeing. Population growth could mostly be a flash in the pan, but if countries really do start shutting the door on immigration and have to also contend with collapsing fertility rates you can bet they're gonna start rationalizing how to strip women's rights away; have to keep the underclass there to feed the billionaires and scare the workers.
Everybody knows what needs to be done.
I'm not convinced it's as simple as you make it out to be, as places that experience more poverty and violence appear to have higher fertility rates (1).
- In places with poverty and violence, kids are an asset. They work and contribute to the family in times of crisis.
- General lack of education, awareness and access to birth control means there are no options for women.
- Women have fewer or no rights, and little to no say in whether they have kids.
Unless we're planning on this route (which it seems the US is set on), the alternative is to make parenthood attractive (or at least not-unattractive) enough to negate the costs.
Additionally, fertility rates are dropping worldwide, even in low-income countries. They're further back on the curve, but they're definitely moving along it. Some institutes claim we've already dropped below the global replacement rate of ~2.3, though it'll take a few years to confirm the current statistics.
- Poverty and violence also increase the likelihood of losing children, so people have more in case.
That reminds me my grandma. My family is not exactly wealthy, even for Latin American standards; and even in times where women were not supposed to work, my grandpa was doing grunt work while grandma worked as a hotel maid.
And as I was getting older, I often visited my grandma. Drink some yerba together, chitchat, smoke some cigs together, this kind of stuff. And she told me some shitty stories about my mum and her three siblings when they were kids. In plenty of those, one of the four muppets almost died. (Including my mum. Hoooooly fuck - eating berries known locally as "horse destroyer", rolling inside a tire into a high traffic road, perhaps she likes cats so much because she identifies herself with them, they both have nine lives?)
Well. Turns out that they weren't supposed to be four children, but six. My mum wasn't the oldest one - her two older brothers died before she was born. My grandma once mentioned that once, but in no moment she showed a change in expression; it was a fact of life.
Even as a man I could not picture myself being so stoic. If I had a child and they died, I'd probably lose my marbles.
It first came to my attention in a book - The Poisionwood Bible - about missionaries into Africa.
And fwiw, my friend with four healthy children has also had nine miscarriages. Nine!
You forget that most of the assholes in charge right now don't give a flying fuck about fertility rates, having an educated workforce, or even anyone's rights and opportunities. All that matters to them is making more money and hanging onto power. The fuckers can practically read the future as long there is a dollar sign in front of it, and as far as they are concerned, the rest of us don't factor into that future.
I believe some of the rich assholes really do see birth rates as a sort of global crisis. Mostly because it poses a threat to their bottom line. Less workers = less labor to exploit, less consumers to buy their shit, pay subscriptions or blast with ads. And a demographic shift where the size of the older generation is greater than the younger generation massively screws up social security systems that depend on taxes from the young to pay the benefits for the old. And, more nefariously - because parents necessarily consume more and become more reliable workers: when you're living paycheck to paycheck you can't afford to quit, take unpaid leave, turn up overtime or go on strike. But perhaps too, some may be experiencing the existential crisis that there is a real, natural limit to the growth of the human race, that we are not god-destined to just expand forever and ever, but rather finite in our place in the cosmos.
Many are concerned. Capitalism requires a growing population. It is just they seem to believe force is the way to go.
Capitalism requires a growing population.
How so?
Capitalism requires a growing population.
How so?
Sloppy/oversimplified explanation:
In capitalism, each business is trying to maximise its own margin of profit. And to do so, it needs to produce more for a cheaper production price, and sell it.
Technology makes each worker output more production, but it also makes their labour more expensive. So to produce more, better tech is not enough; you need more workers.
And to sell more of your production, you need more people buying your stuff, because there's a limit on how much each will buy.
This means each business needs an increasingly larger number of workers and customers. At the start they could do it by venturing into other countries, and killing local businesses; but eventually you reach a point where you have megacorporations like Unilever, Google, Faecesbook*, NestlΓ© etc. Where do they expand into? Where do they get more customers and workers from?
*call me childish, I can't help but misspell it.
Isn't that a bit like argueing that a bathtub needs to increase in size every time you take a bath, as you add water?
In other words, it's ignoring a whole part of the bath: the drain.
In the same way it's ignoring a whole part of capitalism: bankrupcies and other forms of debt foregiveness. As some businesses become irrelevant, and as new ones are started.
Bankruptcy is a mostly a risk for small and nascent businesses: raw material is more expensive, economy of scale works against them, they start out with less know-how, they have a smaller reserve of capital to handle eventualities, banks are less eager to give them loans, so goes on. Eventually they get outcompeted by another business, often a considerably larger one, that keeps growing.
So the analogy with a bathtub full of water doesn't work well. It's more like a box full of balloons; except those balloons keep growing, and the bigger balloons are actually harder to pop than the smaller ones. Eventually the pressure forces a few small balloons to pop, but as soon as they do the bigger ones take the space over. And they keep exerting pressure over the box. [Sorry for the weird analogy.]
Bankruptcy is a mostly a risk for small and nascent businesse
That's untrue? The big ones also go bankrupt. It's a risk shared by every company, to keep adapting as the world changes.
Even the VOC, at a point the largest company in the world with more assets than most countries, folded.
Thatβs untrue? The big ones also go bankrupt.
The likelihood of the company going bankrupt decreases with its size. It's a gradient, not categories, so saying "big companies can also go bankrupt" does not falsify what I said at all. (Note that I outright listed some of the reasons why this risk decreases.)
to keep adapting as the world changes
And bigger companies are clearly in a better position to adapt to changes than smaller ones, so your argument is only reinforcing my point.
Even the VOC [Dutch East India Company], at a point the largest company in the world with more assets than most countries, folded.
You're now aware that the VOC would look like an ant in comparison with modern megacorporations. For example, Walmart is around 350 times larger than the VOC was in its prime*.
Also note how poor of an example the Dutch East India Company is, given that it was effectively a vassal state of the Dutch government, not an independent group like the megacorpos of today. And it didn't simply go "bankrupt", it lost a literal war against the United Kingdom (the fourth Anglo-Dutch War).
*Note: around 1670 the VOC had 50k workers (source), and its annual operating profit was estimated to be equivalent to US$ 80 millions (source). In the meantime, Walmart controls 2.1 million workersΒ³ and its operating income for 2025 is around US$ 29 billions (source for both).
And bigger companies are clearly in a better position to adapt to changes than smaller ones, so your argument is only reinforcing my point.
How so? The replacement rate is shorter than in recorded history (1)
It seems that the older corporations had a very hard time adapting to new technology, to the point that they've been replaced by new smaller ones that outpaced them in only 30 years?
And it didn't simply go "bankrupt", it lost a literal war against the United Kingdom (the fourth Anglo-Dutch War).
It also went bankrupt.
*Note: around 1670 the VOC had 50k workers
Of course you have to place it in historixal context: both in world population and in respect to other contemporary companies.
How so?
A bigger business:
- has more capital at its disposal to invest capturing a nascent market, created by changes in the economic landscape caused by tech?
- has better chances to buy smaller businesses in other markets, so it's ready in case its main market dies tomorrow due to technological disruption?
- can survive temporary losses for longer than a smaller one, while it's adapting itself?
The replacement rate is shorter than in recorded history (1) (archive link)
Data contradicting my claim would show that smaller businesses have a similar or better rate of survival in comparison with bigger businesses. Your link does not show that, it does not even compare smaller vs. bigger businesses, as it focuses solely on the S&P 500 bankruptcy over time.
Note that your link confirms what I said here, as it shows big companies being eaten by biggER ones:
- Increased buyout activity beginning in the 1980s certainly had a hand in shortening that life span
- Rather, the report said, there will be an increase in M&A [merger and acquisition] as more of them team up to compete with the disruptors.
- βWe argue that disruption is nothing new but that the speed, complexity and global nature of it is,β
- "but the increased pace of the disruption by companies like Amazon, Alphabet and Apple [i.e. GAFAM] today is causing the trend to accelerate even more."
It also went bankrupt.
And the war totally had nothing to do with this, right. Nope, the VOC "just" went bankrupt, the UK snatching its stuff was totally irrelevant, and the VOC's fate can be totally generalised for the sake of your "ackshyually, big biz also go bankrupt, see VOC." /s
Of course you have to place it in historixal context: both in world population
If you did the maths beforehand, to know if your argument is sensible or bullshit (it's the later), you'd know that Walmart is ~twice the size of the VOC in number of workers, even when normalised for the world pop. (500M back then.)
But odds are you ain't bringing context up because the context would be relevant here; you're only grasping at straws.
and in respect to other contemporary companies
There was barely any global market back then, almost all companies would stick to their country of origin. The VOC was the anomaly, being the first multinational and being rather government-like. You got an elephant and 503499398988989387349 ants.
Nowadays a Walmart or Unilever or Alphabet or Apple or NestlΓ© is not an exception. Those companies seised the economic activity of the world. You got a handful of blue whales, and most ants got the DDT.
inb4 "then this shows that VOC was hueeeg for other companies lol lmao" - refer to what I said about it being extremely government-like, and fighting a literal government.
Given that you brought up exactly zero relevant counterpoints, I'm not wasting my time further with this discussion - it's simply unproductive.
Your link does not show that, it does not even compare smaller vs. bigger businesses
It does, even if you fail to see it. In only 30 years, those small garage sized startups outpaced century old megacorporations.
According to the logic: "Larger companies can better adapt, has more capital, can survive temporary losses, etc", that should not be possible. We should be conversing on ExxonBook. Yet the examples are right there.
For a really bad summary? Capitalism requires economic growth, business, industry, etc. must increase output, therefore the consumer base must increase, and so it goes with the true labor underclass. For a real explanation check the link below to a PDF file of a dissertation on the subject.
https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1462&context=dissertation
That dissertation does not explain why capitalism requires population growth.
Rather it takes "capitalism requires positive economic growth" as an axiom, to argue that such growth can not persist.
Yes, and growth is sustained by striking a balance of quality and quantity in terms of the human population. If this balance becomes out of whack you will decline into what they refer to as "malthusian stagnation". So the population does need to grow in order to sustain economic growth, along with the quality of the individuals that make up the population. What they refer to as "economic darwinism" beings to truly take place as a population has the extra resources to put more into children than parent, creating generational progress. Post industrial economic darwinism gets a buffer, so-to-speak, due to the increased per capita productivity introduced by technology. However this is also not infinite, and so, at some point this will plateau, and the population will need to begin rising again to spur growth. We are likely in the midst of this plateauing.
So the population does need to grow in order to sustain economic growth
The argument is going round in circles, but never explains if nor why capitalism requires economic growth. Therefore it also does not explain if nor why it requires population growth.
I didn't forget it, that is one of the main reasons why there's no political will.
Israel has high fertility.
A gentle drop in fertility rate is preferable to steady growth until there's a crisis triggering a population crash. Check out this crazy ass line:
Keeping our society stable and happy while the economic system adjusts may be tough.
I agree, but based on current trends there's nothing gentle about the coming decline. Some countries are going to see their populations drop by more than half within decades