> Across the world we really need to start providing free food at a national level-
This is a terrible idea in my opinion, because you are going to end up subsidizing population growth in areas that aren't naturally capable of supporting that number of people. Thus you'll create a never-ending dependency on free food, which will result in even more human suffering when the free food inevitably goes away for some reason.
> This is a terrible idea in my opinion, because you are going to end up subsidizing population growth in areas that aren't naturally capable of supporting that number of people.
Ethically, this is a really frightening argument. Same argument with different words: We have to have people hungering to death to provide a disincentive for population growth.
Besides, food availability doesn't really affect population growth (upwards of a certain lower bound, of course). The most effective way to lower birthrates is readily available female education.
>Ethically, this is a really frightening argument. Same argument with different words: We have to have people hungering to death to provide a disincentive for population growth.
Not to endorse GP's point, but people move to places with income / food before they start to starve. Like, this scenario plays out a million times a day with old ladies that put a bunch of cat food outside their house, after a couple decades there's 10x as many cats living in a 100 metre radius and the lady dies and then shortly after all the cats die too, of hunger or killed by the municipality. With no old lady to begin with the cats wouldn't have starved, they'd just spread out over a larger area so that they don't have to compete over other sources of food like vermin or trash.
Your analogy is flawed. Or you consider that some people in this world live like stray cats, which is highly insulting.
People who have lots of children usually don't know how to have fewer plus they fear that many of their children will die before adulthood. They also rely on their children to be their "retirement fund". All these aspects are changing across the world.
You have to appease selection pressures. They are facets of reality. You can do it in ways that doesn't involve suffering, or you can allow a natural solution to take hold.
Especially lower child mortality rates. When people are reasonably confident of seeing all of their children grow to adulthood, they just have fewer of them.
I'm sorry but this is just incorrect. Education, specifically the education rates of women, is the leading indicator... all other correlations are merely side effects of this.
I would love to see some research touching upon the finer points of this, I've always assumed child mortality was the leading factor. The education thing I think might be some causal reversal, women have time to study because they have less children to take care of. She can study (as well as invest in daycare) because she is more wealthy? This is just armchair theorizing, haven't bothered to look it up.
We've successfully fought population growth in some areas to the point that we are now making sure to teach folks what to do if they want to have children.
It seems to me that the prudent thing to do would be to extend this stuff to those areas. These things include better sanitation and medical care to lower mortality rates - especially among children - and making sure comprehensive sex education and contraception is both readily available and used.
Assuming free food is actually free (to the providers as well as the consumers) is this bad? Humans are a resource, think of us like a lottery. 99% of us may not be that commercially valuable but the other 1% pay it off.
This is one potential post-scarcity future: Big corporations sponsor whole villages, just on the off chance that a genius is born to that population who will then work for the corporation.
Yuck. In that future, the genius born into that village will have to work for that corporation, by a contract that his/her parents signed. Alternately, the genius will be raised with a sense of being morally obligated to work for that corporation. This is pretty close to dystopian nightmare stuff.
The dystopian nightmare novel probably ends up with the genius resenting their pre-destined career choice and taking out revenge on the corporation in question though ;-)
Unlike the many non-geniuses born over many centuries whose career choices were pre-determined by the social status of the family they grew up in, and the fact neither they nor [later] their parents would have anything to eat if they left the village to seek their fortune elsewhere...
Yeah, if done the wrong way it would be way too slave-y. Maybe instead of the corporation sponsoring the village up front, it could fund some aspect of the village as part of the deal if it hires someone from the village. Basically like an extension of the way health cover works in the U.S. but for the village rather than just the immediate family.
This is a terrible idea in my opinion, because you are going to end up subsidizing population growth in areas that aren't naturally capable of supporting that number of people. Thus you'll create a never-ending dependency on free food, which will result in even more human suffering when the free food inevitably goes away for some reason.