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Fukitol's avatar

Yeah here's the thing. I *hate* cities. The noise, the crowding, the traffic, the lights, the endless stretches of asphalt and concrete. I don't even like visiting for more than a few hours. Overnight stay and I am done.

No problem, I can live rurally, right?

Well assume that a sizable portion of the population, say 20%, is like me (I think this is a generously low estimate given how many people choose to live rurally right now in developed countries, despite the "benefits" of cities). That's 20 billion people who want to live at a population density around 400/sqkm on average. You need 50 million sqkm to keep them comfortable and happy. Mind you most don't want to live in deserts or on glaciers.

This isn't going to happen. When it doesn't happen, you're going to get more conflict than you're expecting.

It's not this simple.

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Jeffrey Quackenbush's avatar

Most of the benefits you cite here in your first section are a result of technologies and some new social practices associated with industrialization. However, those technologies and social practices have now been invented and can be used henceforth -- like vaccines and antibiotics won't become uninvented if the world's population reverts back to the levels where they were originally invented. So the argument you're making is facile and doesn't do enough to disentangle different factors or explain how they may be organized in the future.

Also, there was WAY MORE foundational intellectual innovation in the world before the earth's population hit 2 billion. The intellectual advances of the last hundred years have largely been in engineering disciplines, not fundamental knowledge frameworks.

What is the threshold world population for maintaining a robust industrial base? If you can't give a number or a function based on resource factors (and I suspect nobody really can determine a definitive answer to this question at this time), you're just speculating. Which is fine (nothing wrong with speculating), but you're making these arguments with a level of unreasonable level of certainty.

These are complicated questions that require more than a short Substack post, if you're serious about understanding the reality of your topic.

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