LogFAQs > #902633653

zebatov posted...

1. Fewer people, less pollution, fewer need for GMOs... Only so much land can grow food naturally.

There's literally nothing wrong with GMOs. In fact, they have the potential to be far healthier than their normal counterparts depending on what genes are introduced. And, no matter how few people you have, the population benefits from GMOs.

zebatov posted...

2. It should have been a conscious choice. The fact that it's happening tells me that all of the human race is brainless and never thought it could happen, or liberal and never thought or fought to restrict it.

Outside of fascist, brutally repressive regimes (which is a brainless thing to advocate), there's no centralized way to forcibly control a population's reproduction patterns. And, quite honestly, there's less wrong with the current model than you think.

Not to mention that, for almost all of recorded history, there were strong benefits to having large families because it ensured that you would be taken care of in old age and your bloodline would continue. It was generally a pretty smart thing to do, especially given the mortality rates (and, by the way, high mortality rates still exist in some nations).

zebatov posted...

Smaller populations worldwide = decreased need for natural resources = longer lasting resources = lower demand = lower supply = lower cost... On and on it goes. A smaller population carries the same benefits at a lower necessity.

Quite a few problems with those assessments:

1) The nature of natural resources. Many resources people consume replenish naturally over time and, if we handled it more consciously, could replenish better. Likewise, without a suitable population, you can't adequately distribute many of those resources anyway.

2) Lower demand and lower supply would mean the same cost, not a lower cost >_> Same supply, lower demand might mean a lower cost but that's not even guaranteed since you also have to take infrastructure costs into account where a large number of consumers collectively bear the burden of those costs, thus lowering the costs for each participant. Fewer participants would mean higher infrastructure costs per participant and therefore likely higher costs.

Take a restaurant, for example. It needs to make a certain amount of gross profit to cover its costs. If it needed to make $1000/day, that could be spread $1 across 1,000 customers, $10 across 100 customers, or $100 across 10 customers. As a result, the menu prices would need to increase or decrease to reflect that margin. And sure, there are added costs when you have more customers but the added expense doesn't scale at the same rate and the fixed costs (ie, rent, lighting, etc) don't change regardless.

3) No, a smaller population absolutely does not confer all of the benefits of a larger population. Division of labor benefits under larger populations because so many things are incremental. Things don't just scale up and down evenly. And the more people you have, the more potential there is for innovation. The more people you have, the more likely you are to have meaningful diversity (ie, such as diversity of thought). When you have fewer people, the percentage of individuals required just to maintain the necessities goes up and therefore you have fewer people to work on the cool stuff that makes life fun.
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