> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans (time and costs as much as anything else).

> And seems to think it can just import people from other, far, away places.

That seems fundamentally OK? The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources. We can't unlimit resources. There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children. The remarkably low birthrate is an amazing outcome of a superficially intractable problem.

If the Africans catch up with everyone else and stop having too many children, the only thing that needs to happen is better education and the situation is actually good. We're on a reasonable trend with AI and robots. People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.

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ben_w 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources.

It really isn't. The raw materials in our lives are a tiny fraction of our living costs in the west. 200 tons of concrete, steel, and plastic etc. in appropriate proportions is enough for a very nice house, yet it would cost less than a tenth of the sale price of that house: what you need to turn it into a nice house is expensive human labour.

The raw materials are cheap because we have machines to help extract them; before we invented them, those materials were also expensive.

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JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources

Not particularly. We've ridden massive increases in both quality of life and population (at both the per-country and global scales) over the last two centuries.

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roenxi 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In the sense that the global median income crept from about $0 to $10,000 sure over a few centuries. That's a big achievement but it isn't exactly the best case scenario. We want a world where everyone can live at least a 6- or 7- figure salary.

	▲	ben_w 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> the global median income crept from about $0 to $10,000 sure over a few centuries The floor is 2-300 USD equivalent, because that's what subsistence farming is, and it took two centuries to go from $1500 to $18811: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-ca... > We want a world where everyone can live at least a 6- or 7- figure salary. that's a massive shift of goalposts from "not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources".
	▲	JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> That's a big achievement but it isn't exactly the best case scenario. We want a world where everyone can live at least a 6- or 7- figure salary I actually agree with this vision. But I wouldn't say every human not being a millionaire is "the #1 problem" today.

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mytailorisrich 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And we have brought the planet to its knees in the process...

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modo_mario 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources. We can't unlimit resources. There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children.

>People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.

It sounds like one of those not very nice ways you describe more so than an active societywide choice. People aren't exactly choosing in the wide sense of the word. Their states population keeps going up despite often many decades of below replacement birthrates (thus aleviating pressure in places that retain higher birthrates) whilst they feel like they struggle with housing, childcare, pressure on their wages trough migration (and other things) and leave the parental nest at historically late times.

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swiftcoder 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Their states population keeps going up

What states, exactly? The EU as a whole has a population growth rate of 0.3% according to the world bank - that's as close to flat as makes no difference (and that's accounting for immigration!)

The only EU countries with a >1% growth rate are Ireland and Portugal.

	▲	modo_mario 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Mine for example. Belgium. The population has not shrunk a single year since the world wars but the natality has been below replacement since the start of the 70's if you take the colloquial replacement natality rate and since the world wars if you take the more realistic one. I think just about every surrounding country is similar. That growth is indeed slowing down but that has more to do with the natality continuing to drop. There are indeed eastern european countries with far less migration which saw declines pulling the average down.

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Levitz 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't see how any of this makes sense.

>The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources.

Taking this as true (it very evidently isn't), then since Europe already has declining birth rates, the logic step would be to prevent migration no? An influx of people would hurt.

>There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children. The remarkably low birthrate is an amazing outcome of a superficially intractable problem.

You say this as if this "amazing outcome" came out of nowhere, magically. People are forced into this because finances make it hard. That is not very nice.

>If the Africans catch up with everyone else and stop having too many children

Why would this happen? From your comment, it doesn't seem to be something to expect?

By the way

>People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.

This sentence is so extremely out of touch as to be insulting.