United States. Population: 335M. Vehicles: 305M.

Germany. Population: 85M. Vehicles: 52M.

India. Population: 1428M. Vehicles: 79M.

China. Population: 1400M. Vehicles: 500M.

Ethiopia. Population: 121M. Vehicles: 1.2M.

Nigeria. Population: 230M. Vehicles: 13M.

Indonesia. Population: 279M. Vehicles: 23M.

etc.

And comparison of different, potentially codependent variables, is notably relevant.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

> Today the lake is completely infilled, acting as "a near-surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility."

I hope most understood that I meant to say peak greenhouse gas emissions.

Don't do it unless it's perfect right?

good luck with that.

At a certain point sufficient warming could trigger a cascade. So far we haven't done that, but it's incorrect to say there's been no release of stored CO2.

Humans are presumably always going to want babies. There's nothing to really replace them.

On the other hand, coal/oil/pollution all seem highly likely to be a transient phase of industrialization. There's no reason to think we should ever go back to burning coal or oil once we have renewables.

Oil is tricky in that we do like plastic and there's no obvious alternate material, but the amount of oil needed for plastic will be minuscule compared to the amount of oil burned as we bootstrap to renewable energy sources.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-13/earths-population-rea...

What can be said with confidence is that the Earth currently grows enough food to support 10 billion people, when some people back in the 60s and 70s predicted massive starvation and shortages would have happened long before that.

But unlimited growth is always on the menu for startups and companies! Investors, am I right?!

/s

If you look at the actual statistics on the growth of ultra-Orthodox Jews in the US and Israel, and Old Order Amish in the US, the actual figures are inconsistent with “net result 0”

Wait, what? How could we have possible done all this without fossil fuels? Our modern life takes immense amounts of energy and fossil fuels are basically free energy we can suck out of the ground.

And I'm the first one here to critique the profit motive, but fossil fuels are profitable because they are a really easy to use, dense, transportable energy source.

I mean the term quite broadly and inclusively, since many of the big divides within American society (ethnicity, race, politics, class) make a relatively modest difference to fertility rates, and those differences appear to be shrinking over time

The sci-fi dystopias about overpopulation never really come up with a mechanism by which the birth rate remains high despite low infant and child mortality and low economic need for human labor. It always seems to boil down to "people are controlled by irrational instincts".

There are multiple grave markers listing children that died under the age of 10. Like a family had a 4 year old die, then had a baby 2 years later and then 3 years later buried that baby in the same grave as their older sibling.

That is half-lives work.

That aside, fifty years ago was when the dangers of increasing atmospheric insulation was raised as a serious potential issue in the UN, and fifty years ago was when the think tank ecology surrounding fossil fuel producers started churning articles on ice ages, Climate, who really knows?, killing public transport initiatives, etc.

Hindsight is famously 20|20 but it serves us well to remember past playbooks; it wasn't just pure stupidty, there were people who knew better actively promoting larger cars and greater per capita consumption rather than looking to lower total emissions.

With this realisation alone you might be in the top percentiles of the population.

> I'm sure someday the future will look brighter but it sure as heck isn't today, or any time in the next 50 years.

And yet it still might be better than at least 99.98% of human history (50 out of 300k+ years).

But consider, I dunno, salt? A little built of salt in the environment is normal. But a whole lot of it is pollution.

I think it mostly has to do with increasing desires for a high standard of living when it becomes possible and the pressure of high density cities making lots of kids an unattractive prospect.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/four-western-provocations-le...

That being said, this is the wrong forum for this both in terms of audience and topic. Awaiting the mass downvotes for an argument that holds merit but is difficult to swallow for the US public.

The main ways it might not happen would be if either (1) they (gradually or suddenly) abandon their current culture for a less fertile one, (2) mainstream society persecutes them sufficiently. Both are entirely possible, but neither is anywhere near certain.

The situation for the (Old Order) Amish is more difficult, since – unlike ultra-Orthodox Jews – they'll run out of enough land to sustain their agrarian lifestyle, and will have to transition to a more urban one. While the more urban lifestyle of ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrates it is possible for insular high fertility religious minorities to exist in an urban setting, there is a real risk that they might lose their fertility and/or their insularity in the process.

Also, people often bring up the problem Israel has with many ultra-Orthodox Jews not working and relying on government subsidies to live. That is much less of a problem in the US than it is in Israel, so the sustainability of that lifestyle is less of a barrier to future growth in the US than it is in Israel. Furthermore, the fact they manage to grow so much in the US without doing that, means being forced to stop doing that isn't necessarily going to stop their growth in Israel either.

In 2023, Israel contained over 1.28 million ultra-Orthodox Jews, 13.5% of Israel’s population. It is estimated that by the end of this decade, it will be over 16%. [0] By shortly after 2065, it is estimated that 50% of Israeli children will be Haredi. [1] I think this is counterevidence to your claim - the social indoctrination processes necessary to maintain Israeli ultra-Orthodox Judaism have already scaled to over 1 million people, and are projected to scale much further than that

[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/haredim-are-fastest-growing-po...

[1] https://archive.md/lYYgK

That area of the US has some of the most newly unaffordable areas in the country

Steady state population should be the long term goal, at least until we start moving into orbital colonies or something. But unfortunately that's an anathema to growth oriented economies which makes it the bad guy in economics and politics.

The escalation in 2022 was an attempt to complete the war started in 2014; Ukraine had abandoned efforts to join NATO years before Russia started the war and only returned to them after the invasion in which Russia directly occupied a large portion of the country and used proxy, mercenary, and regular forces under false flags to contest another large portion.

“They are trying to get help to defend themselves in the war of aggression we started and have been waging continuously for 8 years” may well be the actual reason for the aggressor escalating the forces committed to that war, but its easy enough to stop people from feeling the need to defend themselves from a war of aggression by, you know, not doing them.

Analyzing the Russia-Ukraine war as if it started in 2022 makes as much sense as analyzing the Israel-Palestine war as if it started in 2023.

> If a NATO-like power controlled by Russia was on our doorstep, we would do the same thing.

Well, maybe the US could just not wage long wars of aggression against its neighbors, and then they wouldn't feel the need to turn to this “NATO-like power” (which would never exist, because Russia is a crap ally, as evidenced by their attempt to create a NATO-like alliance with the CSTO.)

Is that fashion going to remain, though? Everything goes out of style eventually. I think we are already seeing some cracks where people are starting to question why having children is so "wrong". Nothing happens overnight, but I'm not so sure the children today will grow up in that same environment.

My hunch is that the people who still decide to reproduce, despite all the reasons people who advocate for not having children talk about, likely have some sort of genetic predisposition for reproduction - a strong innate need.

After all the non-breeders die off, the future belongs to the reproducers.

I often joke to my peers: it doesn't matter what I invest in, my best financial decision was buying a house, my worst financial decision was having kids, the rest is just screwing around in the margin.

Yes, there's also a kind of mandate in the bible to be fruitful and multiply, and the fact that if you grow up in a larger family you tend to have a larger family, but I would bet the other factors matter more.

In that way, the pendulum is already starting to swing the other way in the US with the loosening of child labor laws.

Secularly, though, we’d have to do something to make it not hellishly expensive and inconvenient to have children. The US can’t even extend the child tax credit, much less fix healthcare, housing, education, food deserts, or childcare all at once.

I'm guessing the only thing that will ever reverse this will be the invention of artificial wombs.

For what it's worth, I'm personally on board with having as many children as possible. Life is a cherished miracle. But I also can't bear children and take no risk in this endeavor.

We don't have a few generations until we are beyond the point where we can mathematically recover unless we develop economic mass adult-cloning technology and develop the psycho-social faculties to integrate that into a healthy (enough) society. The world won't end, but let's just say hyper-advanced visions of the future seem unlikely at this point.

In many traditional societies, there is strong social pressure for marriage and children, arranged and semi-arranged marriages, etc - such that a person’s sexual orientation may not make much difference to their odds of heterosexually reproducing. Some people might enjoy heterosexual reproduction and others might endure it but they’ll do it all the same. So that would limit the selective pressure against genes that increase the likelihood of homosexuality

In the mainstream contemporary West, if heterosexual reproduction doesn’t appeal to you, then you just don’t do it-so selective pressure against those genes may exist to a degree that it formerly did not. On the other hand, the new possibilities for non-heterosexual reproduction (such as IVF, sperm/egg donation, surrogacy) might counteract that.

Not to mention the changing political dynamics of having a lot of old people outnumber younger people by 2 or 3 times in the voting booth. The gerontocracy is bad enough now. Imagine it 3x worse.

Kiryas Joel NY, Lakewood NJ, certain parts of Brooklyn. They basically have their own government, and they have far less state government oversight due to politicians not wanting to go against them.

They drive around NYC with vehicles that look like cop cars, acting like cops, which would get most other groups charged with impersonating a government official. They elect themselves to the school board and vote to prioritize funding for their group’s children, and deprioritize funding for any other group’s children. Etc etc.

Not that they are the only group to have done it, but these are your easy to google examples.

Basically, I'm repeating the contention of sociologist Eric Kaufmann's book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth–that in the long-run religious (ultra-)conservatives will dominate due to high birth and retention rates.

It isn't "fearmongering", because that assumes one is presenting a takeover by religious conservatives as negative. One might view it as positive. One might view it as neutral. I'm not presenting any value judgement of it here.

The contention isn't about any religious group in particular, it is about ultra-conservative religious groups in general. Ultra-Orthodox Jews happen to be the clearest example of the phenomenon, but there are other candidates – Old Order Amish, Latin Mass Roman Catholics, Salafist Muslims, etc.

Personally, I doubt ultra-Orthodox Jews will ever single-handedly takeover America, because in the scenario I am talking about, there will likely be other (non-Jewish) ultra-conservative religious groups, with which they'll share power. But I do think it plausible that in 2 or 3 centuries from now, North America will be a much more reliigious and much more conservative place than it is today. Not certain, of course, but plausible.

Economists like to pretend that everything is a continuous function of price, but this very rarely reflects real markets. Most utility functions are step functions; there is some point at which changing your behavior becomes economical, and above it everybody switches, while below it nobody switches. People can either afford to raise a child in the lifestyle they expect, or they can't - and many of the sacrifices in lifestyle don't move the needle in fundamental living costs. For having a child, that point appears to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you make childcare and college free and give 2 years of maternity leave and ensure that you can buy a 3BR+ house on an average income, then sure middle-class people will start having kids again. All the middle class people will start having kids again, because they all face the same economic constraints. And then you'll have fertility > 2 again, and the population will start exponentially growing.

You could have a large per-child subsidy and cap at 2, but this also is a lot harder to generate the desired effect than expected. Accidental pregnancies are a thing. Twins are a thing. Infertility is a thing. Careers are a thing. People who want to remain childfree regardless of cost are a thing. If you cap at 2, you'll get a fertility rate under 2 because of all these other considerations.

And this is what's playing out empirically across many countries right now. A lot of European countries have generous subsidies for childbearing; they still find that they can't raise the fertility rate above 1.5 or so. China lifted its one-child only policy, moving it to 2 children in 2016 and 3 children in 2021, and finds that fertility still collapsed (even after instituting subsidies) and they can't convince people to have babies. There are significant non-monetary costs to parenthood; it's a whole other lifestyle, and the money involved needs to be pretty large to alter that.

Compared to what? Where do you draw the line of the "pre" technology? Technology has been as part of human society since before we invented history.

Do you have a specific point after which you think technology became a net negative? Do you think thinks were fine pre-industrial revolution, but after we invented the steam engine things when to shit? Perhaps it was the domestication of bananas that really took us away from living in harmony with nature rather than twisting it to our own ends.

I don't think it really makes a sense to draw a line in history and say everything after this point is bad. The only sensible way to draw a rational technophobic line is to look at specific technologies and their effects and decide if your life will be better or worse with each.

Small tangent, I just want to point out that all of the issues you've pointed out in first world countries are maybe a problem in the cities, but not so outside of them. To wit, where I live in small town Iowa, USA, there's no pollution; there's a strong sense of community; plenty of beautiful species; and if I wanted a "meaningful" non-tech job I could easily get hired working on any number of farms in the area.

This is basically pure anecdote.

I suspect it was downvoted because that line suggests dismissal or contempt for people who don't have children.

There are many people across all generations who haven't had children (either by choice or because they were unable for various reasons), and their lifespans and social contributions are no more or less on average compared to people that do have children.

I think how the question is phrased really matters.

How much do you value your life? Or how much would someone have to pay you to kill yourself?

Are these even different questions?

> No matter how often I may be told, "You cannot understand the meaning of life so do not think about it, but live," I can no longer do it: I have already done it too long. I cannot now help seeing day and night going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that alone is true. All else is false. The two drops of honey which diverted my eyes from the cruel truth longer than the rest: my love of family, and of writing -- art as I called it -- were no longer sweet to me. "Family"... said I to myself. But my family -- wife and children -- are also human. They are placed just as I am: they must either live in a lie or see the terrible truth. Why should they live? Why should I love them, guard them, bring them up, or watch them? That they may come to the despair that I feel, or else be stupid? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them: each step in knowledge leads them to the truth. And the truth is death.”

Housing and transportation continue to dominate American household budget.

Now, I did read that somebody suggesting that it's not cost but density that reduces population fertility. I would wonder if that just means we need to provide more spaces for families within cities.

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.

It’s not the number of humans, it’s the age distribution of those humans + where they live.

Put another way: you can “feel” like the world needs fewer people, but you’re probably not going to like what your world looks like when that desire comes true.

Pensions is a big one, another one is care for elders.

It's not a problem if we had eased up to say 1 billion and stayed there, but the rate of change is quite abrupt.

Assuming we only get this planet though, I suppose it couldn't've gone like this forever haha.

To be fair, that does appear to be happening, if slowly. The largest financial drain on young people, college, has shown decline over the past several years. There is still a lot of social entrenchment to overcome, though; like trying to convince marriage hopefuls that they don't need to buy an expensive diamond.

The real problem is the transition period where there are more unproductive people than not, because the stock of existing people is still here. That's why a crashing population is bad.

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.

Economics never prevents having children. As before, only the rich even get the luxury of choosing to not have children. But the rich could have children too if they so choose. Their fear of children making them look poor under the whims of today's fashion is an entirely self-imposed limitation.

Good for them if that's what they want to do. No judgment on anyone's personal life choices. But I maintain that an increasing number of people are starting to question if that is what is right for them. I agree that what is right for an individual is not universal. Some people will truly not want children, but many more feel pressured to not have children due to the prevailing fashion trends. I see change afoot among the latter group. Having children is slowly starting to become "cool" again.

Similarly higher population isn't a good in of itself. It seems to me that there's much less evidence that there's something that needs higher population.

I don't see how higher population necessarily makes humanity as a collective organism more human. That seems like saying that an individual human is more human if they weigh more.

In your world governments forceably breed humans like chickens in massive factory farms churning out people to the carrying capacity of the planet. I don't want to live there and I sure as hell don't find it moral.