Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Oh, I totally agree with you. Educating children, liberating women, raising living standards (the humanist package 101) always lead to lower reproduction numbers - ironclad demographic correlation. Unsure why Sarah mocks the latter, surely she cannot want to question the former?

Yeah I don't understand either. I'm just bewildered at get objection to the original post which I thought was a fair commentary. Sorry, I hope it didn't seem like I was attacking. I appreciate you providing some possible reasonable.

Her post referred to the US, not global population. As she stated US reproductive rate is below replacement level. So in the future a small number of young people will have to support a large number of old people while the economy struggles. Same in many developed countries.

Sad I had already stated there is much we could do to deal with poverty here before we start adding more people to the problem. Given resources a finite any system which requires continual growth of the population is doomed to fail in the long run

I don't think I argued anywhere technology wasn't helpful or poverty wasn't getting better, but what isn't clear is why does it require continued population growth over sustainability. Given finite resources and AGW, exponential population growth doesn't seem the answer.

If finite resources were the bottleneck, you would not see fewer people living in abject poverty after going from 1 billion to 7 billion. If agricultural productivity had stagnated, you would have. But more humans = more ideas, and more hands carrying them to fruition.

I just don't see this as indefinitely true. And I think we have the ability to make existing people more productive and generate good ideas. We don't need to make more people to do it. Potentially brilliant people who could with many years are dying of malnutrition.