From: William (williamweb@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Apr 04 2002 - 07:38:48 MST
Extropes,
Certainly, only parts of the world are overpopulated - areas in China, India
and
Japan for instance... also parts of Africa and South America. In the case
of
Japan, the society may be able to deal with the extremely dense and aging
population. The Japanese government is extensively funding android robotics
research so that the aged can have automated help in their current homes.
There
is not enough space for sprawling nursing homes. Japan is the only
overpopulated
society that appears to have the wealth and industrial infrastructure to
deal with
the situation currently.
If the United States became overpopulated wherein the density of people in
California and Florida became very widespread, similar problems will occur.
For a Libertarian, the current Welfare State is a crime and would turn a
mildly
socialist US government into a very massively socialist one like in Sweden.
People should NOT be paid to have kids as is true now and I would strongly
agree with the general vision in the A.I., Artificial Intelligence movie:
reproductive licenses would be an extremely good idea. If the 2 parents
could
not afford to pay for raising the kid that they had, obviously the cost is a
massive
drain on the society at large. Thus, after one irresponsibly conceived and
born kid,
mandatory sterilization should be enforced. Historically, a "marriage
license"
served the function of a "reproductive license" since unwed babies were
tabooed.
Since this implicit regulation is now worthless an explicit license should
be made
mandatory. - Bill.
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2002 13:41:10 +0930
> From: "Emlyn O'regan" <oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au>
> Subject: RE: Was agriculture a mistake?
>
> >
> > Jared Diamond asks whether agriculture was worth it:
> >
> > http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/anthro/learning/lifeways/hg_ag/wors
> > t_mistake.html
> >
>
> I think this is relatively well-worn ground in Sociology & Anthropology.
> Yes, people were way better off in all kinds of ways as hunter-gatherers,
> certainly as compared to the average human possibly even now.
>
> What talk of average standard of living hides, of course, is population
> changes. You can't really compare the average standard of living of people
> in a post-agriculture world to people in a pre-agriculture world; the
> average post-agriculture person would never have existed without
> agriculture.
>
> I think this is an extremely significant point. Many people seem to regret
> the moves to the post-agriculture (and post-industrial, etc etc) society;
> but few of them seem to recognise that they owe their lives to it. Jared
> Diamond doesn't seem to, certainly.
>
> Humanity has a history of these leaps. Hunter-gatherers became
> horticulturalists, horticulturalists became agriculturalists, who became
> industrialised, and on to now. At each stage, we are told that people
traded
> a lower average standard of living for an order of magnitude increase in
> population (except note that there is evidence to suggest that average
> standards of living have increased in the last century, bucking the
trend).
>
> I have this in mind when thinking about the "population problem".
Extropians
> often deny that there is a problem, which is maybe slightly misguided;
> certainly there is a pressure surrounding the world's current population
and
> projected growth. Not as much as many sources might have one believe, I
> think, but still more than nothing.
>
> I wonder whether this comes from an intuitive support by Extropians for
more
> people, which is something I fully support. The more I've read about and
> thought about the "population problem", the less I've been able to find
any
> way to justify restriction of population. Go into the "overpopulated"
future
> and hand-pick 9 of 10 people to remove from existence; that's what a
policy
> of population restriction does by implication (and it's what Jared Diamond
> must be able to do, by extension, in the present, except his ratio is
> something like 99 from 100). I guess if you follow a philosophy derived
from
> humanism, you must come to the conclusion that people (sentients and
> potential sentients) are the primary objects in your philosophy. When can
> your philosophy direct you to limit their numbers (ie: cause some
potential
> people to never exist) to achieve some other end? This is what Eliezer
> refers to as subgoals stomping on supergoals.
>
> When I think of increasing population, I say Bring it on! Population
> pressure drives technological progress, and I do think we may be on the
> verge of technologies that can help us escape this gross-pop vs
> living-standard tradeoff. Oddly enough, I think that the hunter-gatherer
> lifestyle, in an abstract form, would suit libertarians rather well, and
> certainly seems to be highly suited to an individualist philosophy
(although
> bear in mind that hunter-gatherers actually experience a high degree of
> social coercion). Maybe we'll re-achieve the high tech version of a h-g
> lifestyle; space based lifeforms falling across the universe, hunting
matter
> and gathering energy.
>
> I'd love to see a world (universe!) where we could increase population by
> orders of magnitude, and actually increase the average standard of living
as
> well. We (humanity) can probably begin doing that within a present human
> lifespan; astounding!
>
> What a stupid time to be deploring agriculture.
>
> Emlyn
> (the far-flung future pressure for space-based sentients to band together
in
> competition for resources, in a loose analogue of the agricultural
> revolution, is a subject for another post...)
>
>
>
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> ------------------------------
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