EA - Assessing the case for population growth as a priority by Charlotte

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Assessing the case for population growth as a priority, published by Charlotte on November 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We are assessing the case for population growth as a priority. Here is the Google Docs version if you prefer to read it as a document. Charlotte Siegmann and Luis MotaSummaryRecently, population growth as a cause area has been receiving more attention (MacAskill, 2022, PWI, Jones, 2022a, Bricker and Ibbitson, 2019). We outline and discuss arguments making that case, and argue that population growth falls short of being a top cause area under the longtermism paradigm. But our main contribution may be to just outline and explain all considerations and arguments.We consider three value propositions of population growth, and argue that:Long-run population size is likely determined by factors apart from biological population growth rates. MoreBiological reproduction will be replaced if the future is to be large, which should nullify the effects of population growth in timescales larger than a thousand years.Assuming biological reproduction continues, long-run population size is only influenced by current population growth in particular scenarios.Population size may impact economic growth, but its long-run effects are comparatively small. MorePopulation is one of the current drivers of economic growth.We argue that the probability and long-term harms of economic stagnation, such as moral regress, are overstated.We argue that the effects of economic growth on extinction risk are small.Population size has negligible effects on humanity’s resilience to catastrophes. MoreWe think that the most compelling case for intervening on population growth comes from its effects on economic growth. Overall, while we think that increasing population growth rates is positive, the scale of its benefits appears to be orders of magnitude smaller than those of top cause areas.IntroductionToday is the Day of Eight Billion, a day projected by the UN to be roughly the one in which the world human population reaches 8 billion people. The last time the world population increased by a round billion was 11 years ago, and the UN projection suggests that the world population will reach the 9 billion mark in 2037, and the 10 billion mark in the mid-2050s. This projection never gets to 11 billion, as it peaks at 10.4 billion during the 2080s and slowly declines throughout the last decades of this century. Other population projections predict an even earlier peak in the human population, which would happen before there are 10 billion of us (Lutz et al. 2018, Vollset et al. 2020).There is a reasonable amount of uncertainty about whether the peak will happen by the end of this century. In the UN projection, with a 5% probability, the population size will be larger than 12 billion by 2100. But fertility trends indicate that a peak will eventually happen. The world fertility rate has been declining since the 1960s and is expected to decline to the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman by the mid-century. Once it is below that point, growth would only be due to population momentum. This transition to below replacement levels of fertility is already on its way, as more than half of the world population lives in a country where fertility is already below the replacement rate.The expectation of a population decline raises the question: should population growth be a priority for actors wanting to do the most good? For one, a higher population might be desirable on its own. For example, according to the total view in population ethics, creating lives with positive wellbeing is good, all else equal. Moreover, population growth may also affect other variables of moral importance, such as economic growth (Jones, 2022b) and social and political norms (MacAskill 2022,...