this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Nonsense. You don't need more people in a new generation for that generation to have new ideas.
Not to mention that we are at a point where the resources of our planet just aren't enough to give everyone a high living standard, especially once climate change causes more droughts and destroys some current places as human habitats.
The planet has capacity to feed this and far more population . The issue is capitalism and bad administration , greed and bad strategy. There even A LOT of free space for people to live, we are gathered in big cities and that also affects everything .
No, the issue is that most people don't understand exponential growth. If you have even 5% population growth your population doubles roughly every 14-15 years. Growth itself is simply unsustainable.
I have the feeling speaking of percentage paints an incorrect picture. 5% yearly growth doesn't sound much, but this might require a very high rate of children per person.
Let's say we have 80 men and women, i.e. population of 160 evenly distributed between 1 and 80 years. Everyone dies at 80, every woman gets 3 children at 28. This means next year we loose 2, gain 3, i.e. have a growth rate of 1/160~0.6%. In 28 years, we have 1.5 women giving birth to 4.5 pops, i.e. 2.5/188~1.3%. Were it 4 children per woman, it would be 1.2% in the first years, 6/216~2.1%
You can roughly approximate the doubling time for a given percentage by dividing 70 cycles (years in case of annual growth) by the percentage. So 1% annual growth doubles the population every 70 years. 2% every 35 years. So pick whatever percentage you think is a realistic growth rate.
That malthusian bullshit. We have the resources for everyone to live comfortably. But a suv a 1kg/day of meat per person is not high standard, it's consumerism bullshit.
Even if you reduce consumption significantly, at most you can cut down the consumption by a fixed factor less than 100% (since you can't make everyone consume literally nothing). Meanwhile population growth increases resource consumption exponentially. At 1% the population doubles roughly every 70 years, at 2% every 35 years, at 5% every 14-15 years. Growth is unsustainable in a quite literal sense of the word.
I'm not an advocate of growth. Consumerism and capitalism are stupid and suicidal for mankind.
But malthusianism is still as stupid as it was in the 15th century.
Human population won't grow infinitely first. Which means there isn't an infinite amount of resources to find. And second, there is also space where we can go. Not to fuel stupid consumerist shit but simply to expand our hirzons and universe.
There are more philosophies to see the world through than just growth and degrowth.