How does that quote go? Something like: the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
I agree with this, but I still feel there are too many people. Like we don’t need 8.5 billion. We could use so much less stuff if we just stopped fucking so much. We could REDUCE the size of our grid significantly. That seems like a good goal.
Btw genocide is a dumb way to achieve this. Plenty easy to just let people live to death since you can provide for 3x the number of people.
Edit: I thought I made it clear with the above line, but I’m not suggesting fucking eugenics. How do you get that from what I said…? I literally specified the fucking opposite. Unless people view any form of population controls in any sense to be eugenics. Which is just fucking braindead.
The most effective way of population control is education, curbing of religious influences and raising of living standards. Just look up “demographic change”. In the 1880, German fertility rates were between 5.5 and 5. That’s on par with modern day Niger and Mali, some of the most fertile nations in the world. As soon as the mortality rates of German children dropped and a social net was established, rates fell. And this has happened all over the world. Unless we get taken in by abrahamic fertility cults again, a healthier, better educated and equal society will stabilize the world’s population at around 9 billion. And we can easily support them, if we work towards it. No need for pseudoeugenics or other population control mechanisms.
Providing people with high standard of living lowers birth rates. It’s a well established effect, every single country with high standard of living has low birthrates. Providing people with sexual education and sexual health also lowers birth rates. Educated people that have easy access to birth control will have fewer children.
Provide people with education and things they need and overpopulation is an issue that fixes itself.
That sounds like a great way to reduce the population. I don’t understand why when I say that we should have less people, everyone assumes I mean like next year. Fucking generations away we will have less people. That’s good. We don’t have to abuse or hurt or even cajole people into it.
I think im the only one who agrees with you…we don’t need this many people, and no one asks to be born. This doesn’t mean we kill off people already here at all. Just stop feeling like kids are a requirement to live, or adopt.
Think about it. One person. Has 4 kids. Each kid wants their own house. Then each of those kids has kids that want their own house. None of that is sustainable. We wouldn’t have to all live in 1 bedroom apartments if there were less people.
I agree. The earth’s population has nearly doubled since I was a kid, with no particular planning or preparation, and now that food and housing shortages have gotten unbearably bad, we’re told that we can’t go back to having less people or everything will collapse, as though the planet is a MLM company.
You can’t just declare that there are too many people and then expect some other faceless masses to go do the dying somewhere else. If you actually want to lower birth rates, you need to invest in public education and healthcare, and you need to have a plan to care for the unbalanced number of elderly retirees.
Did I say we don’t fucking do that? Did I say that I expect some faceless group to be shot in the hills? Or was that your first thought as to the only solution possible?
Really it just speaks to your own mind.
We already don’t care for our aging population well at all. Reducing population requires way more planning and resources than you think. Nations that are actually losing population are really struggling with this reality.
I agree, they are struggling under capitalism. But a shrinking population doesn’t necessitate suffering. At least not any more, where we could provide for our elderly with great efficiency if we were inclined to do so. It would not turn a profit, but some things are important in life.
No, but I didn’t say that either. You did say to just people die from living. Old people need young people to support them. If everyone just stops fucking, as you suggested, society would collapse under the weight of all the suffering of old people. Those will be your grandparents and then your parents and then you, and probably your kids, too, because that sort of disaster lasts a long time.
I meant we let people live out their lives, and eventually die. Not cut off their medicine. Jesus dude…
It’s got most of the same issues as eugenics - yeah, it’d be nice if nobody had to suffer obvious and objective genetic diseases but it consistently immediately turns into “well but I think being a red head is a genetic disease”. You have to consider how a solution can be achieved to really weigh its benefit versus alternatives.
We can feed everybody by Luigi-ing a rounding error’s worth of billionaires. Or we can reduce global population by a factor of 10, which is almost certainly going to disproportionately favor rich white dudes, do nothing to that handful of sociopaths, and they’ll still burn the planet to the ground.
Ok but I never said anything about eugenics or a specific peoples. I said “we should have less people.” And everyone got upset assuming I want to genocide the undesirables.
I literally just don’t think we need 8 billion people. In no way did I suggest that we do it in a specific way or targeting specific people. Just a general 25-40% reduction in population over a few generations.
Literally all that needs to happen is more birth control for everyone. Not forced.
Idk why everyone gets so incensed by this.
The issue is people have gone down this line of thinking dozens of times and it always ends the same way. Your inability to see that is how we get there.
Population is dropping in developed countries. Nothing needs to be done but let nature take its course. That’s not anyone deciding anything.
“Raise the standard of living for everyone and population will level out” is a perfectly reasonable angle. Just say that, because it’s dangerous to leave open ended.
The OP specifically said “just stop fucking so much”
No one said or even implied eugenics.
Go back to reddit please
Scholars, the real deal, are rare for a reason - few people choose knowledge over wealth and power. There lies the crux of the matter, since anyone who pursues the other two paths would be the antithesis of the system so designed.
It’s a nice model, but it runs too counter to human nature to work; and there is precious little (if anything) that can change the nature of a species as expansive as humanity.
This somehow completely disregards the most critical side-effect of overpolulation esepcially when you calculate in dying oceans and trees.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
The sustainable capacity was calculated to be around 2 billion. This is not affected by food output.
So farm less cattle and get away from fossil fuels.
So what you’re saying is that earth under 8-9 billion people isn’t sustainable and we need to start sacrificing our cars and meat due to overpolulation?
I mean those are good decisions anyway, I would 1000% rather take 30 minute nap on a train/bys or ride a bike/electric motorcycle on the way to work than sit in traffic for an hour. As for meat, I’m not vegan, but I could be if seiten was more common.
There is almost no public transport outside cities. I don’t remember the last time I had the opportunity to use one.
As for meat, I’m not vegan, but I could be if seiten was more common.
It’s not just meat. Milk, cheese and related products (pizza?), clothing, oils, gas production, ectera ectera. Even fertilizer for crops. I’d rather have sustainable earth population than give up things that make me happy
so you rather genocide billions of people than give up minor comforts ?
(hyperbole)
on a different note there are a lot of things that can and have to be changed to live sustainably but these changes have to be addressed systematically
How about “we should regulate our birth rates and constant population growth for your capitalist machine is not a healthy way forward for this planet for literally anyone living here except for the rich” instead of your “so you want a genocide?”
My capitalist machiene?
Well, yes. But that’d require fair, sensible distribution and use of available resources, and then how would we be able to support the ability of a handful of billionaires to subvert our democracies for their own gain? /s
“I have a magical reality-changing glove. Should I change the nature of beings to want to share for the benefit of all? Nah, I’m gonna remove a random half of them from existence. It’s clearly the ONLY thing I could possibly do to solve the problem! I’m so smart and awesome!”
Changing people to share wouldn’t stop environmental collapse caused by overpopulation.
He wanted people to see the improvement and freely choose to not repeat the problem.
Fine, then he can change it so people only need half the resources. There are innumerable other options that don’t involve killing people when you have a reality altering glove.
What are “Decent Living Standards?”
I’d bet that they’re at least one step down from what the usual Westerner is accustomed to.
That’s exactly what the article proposed:
'Drawing on recent empirical evidence, we show that ending poverty and ensuring decent living standards (DLS) for all, with a full range of necessary goods and services (a standard that approximately 80% of the world population presently does not achieve) can be provisioned for a projected population of 8.5 billion people in 2050 with around 30% of existing productive capacity, depending on our assumptions about distribution and technological deployment. "
So if you and everyone are willing to live on 30% less “money”, worldwide poverty would be eliminated.
That is definitely not what is presented in what you quoted.
Out of our current productive capabilities (how much money is “created” if you want), we would only need 30% of it to get 8.5 billion people to a “decent living standard”.
That isnt a 30% reduction, it’s only needing to make 30% of what we already are doing.
That’s the same thing. The paper is arguing against the need to increase production vs redistribution of what is currently produced.
That isnt a 30% reduction, it’s only needing to make 30% of what we already are doing.
Where does that 30% come from? They are explicitly saying that their analysis isn’t about increasing production of anything. Redistribution means taking away from the rich developed population to give to the poor. They said take 30% and redistribute it. If you are on Lemmy, that includes you.
That is not my interpretation on the paper. It’s not taking 30% and spreading it. It’s we only ever needed to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed for everyone to reach those standards.
“Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments.”
It’s not taking 30% and spreading it. It’s we only ever needed to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed for everyone to reach those standards.
I don’t understand what you mean by those two sentences. They seem to be in conflict with each other.
You have 100 coins. To say we need to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed means you now have only 70 coins.
"leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments.”
You had 100 coins and now you have 70. You can still buy luxuries but 30% less than what you had before it was redistributed.
I think my sticking point is that it’s not 30 of your coins, necessarily. This is probably where I’m going wrong, but I might only have 100 coins, but there’s a multitude of people that have 1,000 coins, and some still that have 10,000 coins.
I feel like I’m muddling up production/living standards and just plain wealth, but not every individual would need to give 30%. There would be a total amount equaling 30% that is re-allocated.
The article was about production, not wealth. While Bezos certainly uses 1000x the production compared to a regular person, he doesn’t use the 1Billion times that his wealth represents. He doesn’t eat 1B cheeseburgers every day. So while you’d get more out of the 30% of extremely wealthy, it wouldn’t be proportional to their wealth and there’s only .1% of the population that’s in that category.
I’ve seen this before. Last time I looked, it required that everyone live in cities with good public transportation. It also didn’t factor in modern necessities like air conditioning (which will be actually necessary in many more parts of the world due to global warming).
Basically, for this to work, everyone needs to live in 2-bedroom apartments… Without air conditioning or anything like a desktop PC. You’d have a small refrigerator and heat your food with a microwave (and nothing else because stovetop and ovens use up too much energy).
It also makes huge assumptions about the availability of food, where it can be grown, and that all the necessary nutrients/fertilizer are already present in the soil and that transporting/processing things like grain is super short distance/cheap.
Also, communism. It requires functioning communism. That everyone will be ok with it and there will be no wars over resources/land.
or anything like a desktop PC
gulp
Yes this lowest-common-denominator life we’d all be living would save billions suffering through abject poverty but none of those people are here, reading this right now. Everyone reading this would probably see a lifestyle decline. I always have to laugh when anyone in Europe or the US blab as if they are part of the 90%. We are 10%ers every one of us.
It requires strict rationing. Everyone gets their fair share, and no one gets multiples of what other people get.
Not only that, but all 8.5 billion would also need to be willing to stop any “lifestyle inflation”. It’s not just about accepting it for a day, it’s about adjusting to that being the norm for themselves and for their kids into the foreseeable future.
A question that I frequently ask when presented this is “what would you personally be willing to give up?” Of course it is important to realize that some of it is systemic and not within the average person’s control (e.g. car-centric infrastructure)
Right. I think there are a lot of people who would be happy to give up something, but would need big societal changes first. Like, giving up driving a car, but would need cities to be designed more like Europe where it’s possible to get by without a car. Or, living in a more efficient high-rise apartment building vs. a less efficient detached house, but would need building codes and standards to be better so they weren’t constantly being annoyed by a noisy neighbour, or having to put up with smells from other apartments.
This is the answer. I have a nonstandard sleep cycle (I worked nights for a decade) and that alone keeps me out of apartments. I refuse to subject a downstairs neighbor to me being most awake at 1am, and I likewise can’t sleep when my neighbors are awake.
Yeah, I have a different sleep schedule too. But, it doesn’t mean that I can’t live in apartment. It just means I can’t live in a poorly built apartment with bad sound isolation between floors.
I’ve been in high quality apartments where you could never hear the neighbours at all. The problem is, there’s no requirement to build them like that, and it’s much cheaper not to, so they don’t tend to do it. If I could be guaranteed not to be disturbed, I’d probably prefer a high-rise. But, I’ve had too many bad experiences with loud neighbours, or with air leakage so I could smell it when my neighbours were smoking.
The only problem is really consent and the propaganda against these goals. E.g. Air conditioning or cooking is rather nitpicking, those are not real issues, technological advances and passive house design would easily solve that. With Kite Power you already have unlimited energy.
And you could build a huge apartment block surrounded by nature, growing food directly around you and sharing infrastructure. Everyone could get a luxurious apartment with high ceilings and a killer view for everyone. If drastically less people need to commute to work, we wouldn’t need to live in a city. You could also have communal kitchens or diners or cafeteria.
The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time. To enjoy life, to study and learn for free, to raise your children in peace. Not consumerism. Let the masses produce VR games if they have too much free time.
I also disagree that it requires full on communism, a UBI or expanded bill of rights for the human necessities to reach a decent living standard (DLS) could work too. You’d just heavily regulate, ban industrial meat production, bad advertising to avoid consumerism etc.
Air conditioning or cooking is rather nitpicking, those are not real issues, technological advances and passive house design would easily solve that.
The entire world doesn’t have the climate of Japan where it’s possible to live in an apartment without AC and heat. No amount of design can ameliorate 38C high humidity.
growing food directly around you
Only a subset of food can be grown locally and that local food is only available seasonally. It’s the system we already have.
You could also have communal kitchens or diners or cafeteria.
That’s not a technological solution to cooking. That’s social which is far harder if not impossible to overcome.
The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time.
That doesn’t follow. The same work needs to be done, if not more because reducing energy means reducing automation so people have to work to make up the difference.
Only a subset of food can be grown locally and that local food is only available seasonally. It’s the system we already have.
We’re probably talking about different things, like “you can’t grow almonds or citrus fruit locally”. But humans can clearly survive on a local diet pretty much everywhere, it’s just a question of population density. Your food staple would simply be what kind of calorie crop grows locally, plus vegetables and greenhouses for exotic fruit.
And yeah, all of this is a social solution through and though. Like you’d want to encourage people to help plant and harvest. But this might differ from of community to community. Some might want to use more automation with robotics. You really don’t want a uniform regime. One man’s utopia is another man’s gulag.
People already love to eat or order out. You could have a cafeteria for each apartment block and robots delivering inside the building like a hotel. This would still be drastic reduction, even compared to shopping by car. Going shopping by foot or bike in your local city neighborhood is probably still more, because you don’t have to transport the harvested food using trucks but process it locally.
The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time.
That doesn’t follow. The same work needs to be done
No it doesn’t! We can drastically reduce the amount of work that needs to be done! That is the whole point! You can look at it as capitalism being incredibly inefficient. Or incredibly efficient at creating unequal conditions benefiting those with capital (and vastly inefficient conditions for those without).
A major driver of this is advertising or “brainwashing” people to buy garbage they don’t need. Or the advertising industry itself - think of the stock value of all the social and TV media, it is completely financed by advertising, and all the downstream industry that is fed by it. All that is waste!
Or planned obsolescence, purposefully producing goods and appliances that break within one or two year.
Or things like a byzantine tax code, or complicated laws. Or regulations or land ownership preventing efficient reorganization of cities or infrastructure.
PS: And yeah the obvious impossibility is that those who own and profit from all these inefficiency would never allow this. But we shouldn’t forget or deny it’s possible.
But humans can clearly survive on a local diet pretty much everywhere
That’s subsistence living. No one wants to go back to that. Nor is anyone stopping you from living that way. Land is cheap in the middle of nowhere. Communes exist everywhere.
People already love to eat or order out. You could have a cafeteria
A communal cafeteria isn’t what people do when “going out”. If it was what people wanted, there would be more cafeterias and fewer restaurants.
A major driver of this is advertising or “brainwashing” people to buy garbage they don’t need.
It’s easy to think that everyone is sheep except for yourself. I’ve now come to believe that consumerism is fundamental to human nature, not advertising changing humans. The proof is thousands of years of pre capitalism artifacts from archeology sites. People have always liked unnecessary “stuff”. People have always liked fashion and trends. People are going to be rampant consumers even if advertising and marketing were stopped tomorrow. It’s their nature.
consumerism is fundamental to human nature
I don’t disagree. Like Nietche said: “I shop, therefor I am” haha. Also:
Any argument you make that increases the risk of genocide is wrong.
I agree that hedonism is a fundamental part of human nature, but not exclusively or in this extreme. Lets agree “Extreme Consumerism” on the current level is destructive, genocidal and not healthy for us. People also need a planet to live on, and want a world where their children can grow up without being consumed by advertising, self-marketing or endlessly distracted by tasty nonsense.
Advertising is the primary “infection vector” that makes people think that what they shop is their identity. It also doesn’t require full on socialism to prevent the genocidal effects of unbridled consumerism.
I do believe we can achieve a modest level of hedonism where this “DLS” becomes something more luxurious than our current living standards. Working only 20 hours a week, having a luxury apartment with an awesome look on nature or on a green city. With the current technology, the “one mobile phone and one laptop per person on earth” isn’t more sustainable than a gaming PC.
There are many destructive or abhorrent things that are part of human nature that we as rational individuals want to control in a society. I believe video games or virtual worlds with full “deep dive VR” is where we could explore and satisfy our less savory natures. But we can’t let it influence us like the toxic male teenage gamer culture has by now. The “sheepism” is real, unless you think MAGA is fine. But it’s mostly driven by dire outlook on material conditions.
Fundamentally, we can’t keep going as we have. It doesn’t matter if nobody “wants” the party to stop. It has to. And the study in OP gives us strong evidence that it is possible to achieve at least a decent living standard without exterminating ourselves.
Humans only really need 7 or so fundamental: Food / water, shelter / housing, safety, community, healthcare, communication, education / news. If we can get those with working only very little, living mostly a life of leisure, that’s already luxury. Everything on top of that advanced technology can give us is gravy.
Like building tons of greenhouses to grow food beyond “subsistence farming” locally and using simple farming robots that are not harder to assemble than 3D printers, or genetically engineering food.
What technology can’t give us is a culture where greed and politics doesn’t lead to irrational, undesirable and unequal outcomes. Or maybe our new savior ChatGPT can haha.
We are living in a false-scarcity society when we could be living in a post-scarcity one.
This a thousand times. The world is throwing away resources at an astounding rate while people are sick, homeless and starving because of numbers on digital ledgers. We need to drop the whole idea of money. It’s served its purpose, run its course and has since turned into a life on this planet threatening perversion.
I think money existed well before false-scarcity. It is the wrong enemy. I know close to nothing about economy so I would trust economists like Varoufakis and the like.
That’s true, but it’s served it’s purpose and it’s time has passed.
