I prefer not to mention politics here because I’m one-half an outrageously extreme right-winger, and one half an outrageously extreme left-winger. In other words, I believe in maximal freedom, both the economic freedom that left-wingers hate and the moral freedom that right-wingers hate, so highly likely to arouse dislike in people I want to be friends with. However, like everyone who reads the papers or watches news programs on television, I’m getting saturated with the views of the Republicans fighting it out for the presidential nomination, and commentators’ analysis thereof, and finally can’t keep from responding to one idiocy that particularly annoys me, the right-wing belief that we need to continue increasing our population because our gross domestic product will shrink if we don’t. My thoughts, not yet well-organized or complete:
(1) I don’t care about the gross domestic product; I care about the gross cultural product. Here’s an example showing what I mean by this: Smith writes a bad novel that sells ten million copies in 2011, which adds $20,000,000 to the gdp, but only 20 cultural units to the gcp, because it only gives a tiny measure of short-term pleasure to its readers while taking shelf space in bookstores away from much better books, which has a negative effect on the gcp; meanwhile, Jones composes 10 mathemaku that I post on the Internet, that only 100 people find enjoyable, but 20 of them get a relatively large measure of long-term pleasure from, which includes the pleasure they get from composing poems inspired by Jones’s, so the ten mathemaku add 1000 cultural units to 2011′s gcp. Note, a cultural unit is worth $1,000,000 to the intelligent few, but nothing to the unintelligent many–until many years later when the work the latter enjoy is finally exploiting the innovations in works like mathemaku.
(2) Increased population will probably increase the number of valuable culturateurs (the Joneses), but–as I will show–will probably severely reduce their effectiveness.
(3) A sane goal for any country would be to reduce the number of workers needed to provide the country’s population with a happy, meaningful life. Our country is unconsciously doing this via automation, and the fewer workers we have available, the more it will do this, because it has to.
(4) Negative population growth will give us more wilderness, which is an unacknowledged need of human beings, particularly superior human beings. Places to get away from others, which are as necessary as places to get together with others. Places to get away from human products, too. Places to enlargingly be with other species, too.
(5) Increased wilderness and fewer people will make pollution more difficult–for example, there will be fewer cars emitting poison gases into the sky.
(6) Increased wilderness will be a boon for wildlife; it will mean less highways for raccoons to get killed on, for one thing. It will make it less likely that dangerous creatures will invade areas inhabited by human beings, too.
(7) Decreased populations will make wars for land less likely.
(8) Decreased populations will decrease the over-stimulation I consider a major problem for Westerners at this time. Most of us have many too many others to relate to, and many too many ideas to try to understand. Why, I wonder, must we continue to advance culturally a hundred times faster than we did a thousand years ago?
(9) I may be about the only one in the world for whom this is a problem, but I do not like thinking of myself as one human being in a population of seven billion. How can I possibly think whether I live or die is meaningful when there are 6,999,999,999 others who will carry on after I die? Even if I’m among the top hundred innovators of my time, it’s pretty clear that someone else would have done what I’ve done had I not existed, if maybe a year or two later than I.
(10) I wonder if cultural progress has reached or will soon reach a time of too many cooks spoiling the broth.
