(March 30, 2019 at 6:48 pm)Yonadav Wrote:(March 30, 2019 at 6:04 pm)Smaug Wrote: I get your point although I'm not sure it's correct to compare China and the U.S. head on in this respect. While China is one of the leading economies it still has much larger percentage of poor population with very low quality of life than the U. S. does. India is even poorer. I doubt that hardly anyone from Western world would want to live in Indian suburbs. It's not about excess but about basic commodities to live a healthy live - clear water, good nutrition etc.
In the more distant past the population growth was more limited by epidemics, lack of basic medicine and other such factors influence of which has since been reduced with the help of science and technology.
My point is that most people would naturally like to live longer and safer lives. I doubt that anyone who knows better would enjoy a life of a Medieval peasant where one could rather easily end up dead by catching a flu or having a light wound. But providing high-standard life conditions to ever-growing population would inevitably become a problem even if 95% lives 'eco-friendly' lives. Since 'natural' ways of population control are not an option it's only philosophy, ideology or legislation that is left. I wonder how this can be carried out without plunging into a dictatorial dystopia. Knowing that human societies tend to only learn from great catastrophes it's very interesting how handle all this in a reasonable way.
In a neo-luddite world like I am talking about, people wouldn't be living like medieval peasants. They wouldn't want for any of the necessities of life. They would have plenty of food, modern medicine, and they wouldn't live completely without technology. They would have access to digital libraries. They would have electric lights and refrigeration. And yes, there would be serious potential for it to become a dictatorial dystopia. It would have to be authoritarian. Probably not ruled by a single individual, but probably by a council that has a pretty firm grasp its objectives. They couldn't be elected officials. They would have to be chosen through some type of well regulated meritocracy.
Population can't increase that much from longer lives. If everyone is limited to two children, then there will be a gradual reduction in population once we pass through equilibrium and then deaths start to very slightly outnumber births. Here's an interesting TED lecture about why the population of the earth is unlikely to become greater than 11 billion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
The thing is, with our current economic ideology being predicated on continuous economic growth, we develop more and more of the undeveloped world. With global warming being an imminent threat, we can't possibly have billions more people living the way that we do. But that's exactly what our economic model is pushing us to do. Since everyone can't live like us, we probably need to live more like them. We live lives that the rest of the world aspires to, but the world can't take that kind of growth in consumerism. But since we do set the standard that others aspire to, then we should live our lives in a way that would be possible for all.
So it basically has to be something like Federation from 'Starship Troopers'. Meritocracy is very problematic though. I can't name a single country that truly had it. I wonder what is a practical way to make this society work.
The Authoritarian regimes have a major problem - they are fundamentally unregulated. Even if we consider that such a society starts off with the best of the best in the ruling class, it's highly possible that in several generations the elites become hedonistic, abusive and generally corrupted to the core.
