Why Is Population Growth Seldom Discussed?

[The2ndWheel]

13. Civilization and every institution we've built in it is based on more people doing more things

Look at everything we do to stop death from happening. You combine that with freedom of choice, and nobody gets to tell anyone else how to live. We have the ability to sustain 7.2 billion people on the planet, so we will, because, again, we don't want people dying. We can try to give more people more options to have fewer children, but that will require more resources to accomplish. Plus not everyone has enough resources today anyway, which will require more resources to accomplish.

It's a complex issue. We have 4 ways we can go:

1)More people doing more
2)More people doing less
3)Fewer people doing more
4)Fewer people doing less

We have an idea of steady states, but life doesn't work that way. It's always changing, and you have to adapt, but it's very difficult to take every variable into account. So no matter what we do, there will end up being downsides.

Option 1 is what we're doing, as it's the easiest one, because it doesn't require any difficult choices, and probably more importantly, it's built into the biology of life. We can think that humanity can extricate itself from biological drives, but good luck. Options 2 and 3 have those difficult choices attached to them. With option 2, if we're doing less, how do we maintain a functioning society which is based on doing more? With option 3, if there are fewer people, how much does each person have to pay to maintain a functioning society? Of course with option 4, there wouldn't be a society as we know it.