While attending the HPMOR Wrap party outside the Valley Life Sciences Building this past weekend, CFAR Executive Director and Cofounder Anna Salamon, encouraged a group of UC-Berkeley students and others (myself included) to write more under the premise that anything you convert into a physical artifact provides a natural extension of your memory and is therefore beneficial. So, despite the tradeoffs inherent in recording my thoughts and experiences - particularly for all to see, an aspect which Anna wasn't necessarily considering in her comments - here I am.
Rather than discuss the fun and revelry of the HPMOR gathering though, I'm here to inscribe some thoughts I've had regarding human population management policies dating back originally to sometime in college, between 2006 and 2010, though I think mostly originating in early 2007. The original idea, as I recall, comes from ideating remedies to human overpopulation of Earth while also reading about cap and trade regimes as an effort to regulate carbon emissions. The natural juxtaposition of these concepts led to a policy conception of a cap and trade system on human life, which remains to this day my favorite systemic mechanism for directly addressing the root cause of overpopulation. Please keep in mind, there are many other policies for which I would advocate first or under the most dire circumstances, in addition to human population caps, which would attempt to manage population growth.
For now, I'm going to ignore the various benefits and downsides of having an active human population management policy and simply focus on my preferred the designed proposal for human population management, its benefits and its drawbacks. Perhaps in a later post I'll return to comment on other policies and on why a human population management policy is or is not beneficial to have in the first place. Let's begin with a brief description of why I'm choosing to discuss population management in the first place: because as humans have come to control the evolution of their own species from sociological, technological and, likely soon to be, biological standpoints, population size with respect to our environment and with respect to our goals for own evolution are impacted in a large way by the size of our population. This one aspect of humanity is perhaps the simplest and most direct way to control our own evolution as a species.
As such, the root of any human population management strategy should be to facilitate the desired evolution of humanity while maintaining and advancing the quality of life for the species as a whole and for the individuals thereof. Rather than propose goals for humanity or its evolution, I will focus on the impacts of population on quality of life while trying to avoid assumptions about which futures of our species are most or least desirable. The discussion can be broken up along several spectra, of which we will examine effects on individuals and effects on the whole population and on severity of the effects.
Work in progress (which is also true of the above, just a bit less so)...
First, let's look at the effects of population size on the quality of life provided to an individual. If you have too few people, you likely end up with a relatively less fulfilling life in the sense that one would expect a lower average quality of relationship fulfillment. This is predominately due to the relative lack of other humans with whom to interact, which restricts your choices and lowers the expected quality of interaction that results.
Next, let's look at the effects of population size on the species as a whole. If you have too few people, you face in the extreme, the existential risk of an extinction vortex, and in general, you face reduced robustness due to external pressures. If you have too many people, you face in the extreme, risk of societal collapse due to resource mismanagement.
Having a greater number of people with whom to interact will presumably increase one's quality of life to some point, and it will require the resources of the system to be split among more individuals, requiring each individual to have a smaller allocation of resources available to oneself. So presumably, there is some optimal number of people that should exist in any system with finite resources (e.g. Earth). Since the optimal number is dependent on a myriad, perhaps infinite number of variables, I'll refrain from trying to come up with a specific target or upper bound. As a lower bound, let's say that humans don't want humans to go extinct (I know that some individual humans argue for human extinction, but this is not a commonly held belief) and therefore, we need enough genetic variation in our population to prevent an extinction vortex.
