Population

Room? Sure. Resources? Less sure.

I thought developed countries all seemed to have declining populations and only 3rd world shitholes contribute largely to overpopulation

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>>8260786
>Are we crowded?
>Do we have room?
Those are the wrong questions. Here are some thoughts:

It makes no sense to talk about the world population as "we", because it has no coherent political agency. It is splintered into different nations, tribes, cultures, ideologies, down to the level of individuals, who don't get along very well. If we were the Borg, we'd be underpopulated. Since we're aggressive tribal humans, fewer may well be better.

The second question is how many resources you think everybody should have. I think it's ethically better if everyone has access to electricity, a fridge, warm water, enough food, transportation, even the occasional plane flight. I don't believe increasing the number of people is intrinsically a good thing. I don't even believe most lives are worth living. But there's a huge literature on population ethics, and it's quite complicated.

From a resource perspective, the key question is how labor and ideas can substitute for any specific resource running out, e.g. by inventing more efficient technologies, or by accessing previously unaccessable resources, or by inventing new uses for previously useless resources. And then there's the empirical questions how well these factors of labor and ideas scale with population. Do more people bring more to the table than they subtract? This is a function of their abilities as well as their behavior and interactions, so indirectly it's a function of culture and politics as well.

My personal conclusion is that any reduction of the world population is ethically good, and the ideal long-term goal should be something like 100 million hunter-gatherers spread over the planet with some remnants of modern technology of course. But this is rather radical and people obviously won't agree.

>>8260786
too crowded for me personally, a reduction of at least 80% would be nice.

>>8260842
Consider that people choose to live in cities, even they are more crowded than the countryside.

It's not like we can do anything about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq8e4F2WdW8

>>8260867
hopefully zika can

>>8260872
Of course not.

>>8260877
given the current strains and spread no.

>>8260870
OP Here and this is great