But have you thought about whether lower birth rate is good or bad from a longtermist / x-risk perspective? It’s not clear to me that it’s bad, at least.
I haven’t thought incredibly carefully about this. My guess is that a high birth rate accelerates basically everything but elderly care, and so the first-order question is whether you think humanity is pushing in roughly the right or wrong direction—I’d say it’s going in the right direction. That being said, there’s also a trickier factor of whether you’d rather have all your cognition be in serial or in parallel, and if you want it to be in serial, then low birth rates look good.
A couple of considerations in the “lower birth rate is good for longtermism” direction:
Lower birth rate makes war less likely. (Less perceived need to grab other people’s resources. Parents are loathe to lose their only children in war.)
Increased parental investment and inheritance which shifts up average per-capita human and non-human capital, which is probably helpful for increasing understanding of x-risk and ability/opportunity to work on it. (Although this depends on the details of how the parental investment is done, since some kinds, e.g., helicopter parenting, can be counterproductive. Home/unschooling seems likely to be good in this regard though.)
One factor here that is big in my mind: I expect per-capita wealth to be lower in worlds with lower populations, since fewer people means fewer ideas that enrich everyone. I think that this makes 2 go in the opposite direction, but it’s not obvious to me what it does for 1.
It’s not clear that positive-sum innovation is linear (or even monotonically positive) with total population. There almost certainly exist levels at which marginal mouths to feed drive unpleasant and non-productive behaviors more than they do the growth-driving shared innovations.
Whether we’re in a downward-sloping portion of the curve, and whether it slopes up again in the next few generations, are both debatable. And they should be debated.
My sense is that on average, more population means more growth (see this study on the question). But certainly at some point probably you run out of ideas for how to make material more valuable and growth just becomes making more people with the same consumption per capita.
Whether we’re in a downward-sloping portion of the curve, and whether it slopes up again in the next few generations, are both debatable. And they should be debated.
I find this comment kind of irksome, because (a) neither I nor anybody else said that they weren’t proper subjects for debate and (b) you’ve exhorted debate on the topic but haven’t contributed anything other than the theoretical possibility that the effect could go the other way. So I see this as trying to advance some kind of point illegitimately. If you make another such comment that I find irksome in the same way, I’ll delete it, as per my commenting guidelines.
I haven’t thought incredibly carefully about this. My guess is that a high birth rate accelerates basically everything but elderly care, and so the first-order question is whether you think humanity is pushing in roughly the right or wrong direction—I’d say it’s going in the right direction. That being said, there’s also a trickier factor of whether you’d rather have all your cognition be in serial or in parallel, and if you want it to be in serial, then low birth rates look good.
A couple of considerations in the “lower birth rate is good for longtermism” direction:
Lower birth rate makes war less likely. (Less perceived need to grab other people’s resources. Parents are loathe to lose their only children in war.)
Increased parental investment and inheritance which shifts up average per-capita human and non-human capital, which is probably helpful for increasing understanding of x-risk and ability/opportunity to work on it. (Although this depends on the details of how the parental investment is done, since some kinds, e.g., helicopter parenting, can be counterproductive. Home/unschooling seems likely to be good in this regard though.)
One factor here that is big in my mind: I expect per-capita wealth to be lower in worlds with lower populations, since fewer people means fewer ideas that enrich everyone. I think that this makes 2 go in the opposite direction, but it’s not obvious to me what it does for 1.
It’s not clear that positive-sum innovation is linear (or even monotonically positive) with total population. There almost certainly exist levels at which marginal mouths to feed drive unpleasant and non-productive behaviors more than they do the growth-driving shared innovations.
Whether we’re in a downward-sloping portion of the curve, and whether it slopes up again in the next few generations, are both debatable. And they should be debated.
My sense is that on average, more population means more growth (see this study on the question). But certainly at some point probably you run out of ideas for how to make material more valuable and growth just becomes making more people with the same consumption per capita.
I find this comment kind of irksome, because (a) neither I nor anybody else said that they weren’t proper subjects for debate and (b) you’ve exhorted debate on the topic but haven’t contributed anything other than the theoretical possibility that the effect could go the other way. So I see this as trying to advance some kind of point illegitimately. If you make another such comment that I find irksome in the same way, I’ll delete it, as per my commenting guidelines.