I think that you can make a pretty good case that global scale isnt necessary for modern quality of life, and the world would be more efficient with 10 or 1% of the current population. Innovation would suffer, but 80 million is sufficient for a diversified modern economy.
Natural resources are still the primary constraint on human prosperity: food, energy, land, metals, ect. In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same, but they are working with only the best inputs. You might have the same number of fishermen per capita, but they are fishing the best 1% of fishing grounds without competition. If you drill for oil, it is now in the top 1% in terms of ease of extraction. If you build a dam for power, you have more site capacity per capita. If China had 1% the population, the three gorges dam would supply enough power for entire country two times over.
People learn about economies of scale and high school econ, but there are also ineconomies of scale. At some point there is no more efficiency and gain from increasing the size of your widget factory. However, it might be more expensive to import power and metal from further and further away
>Innovation would suffer, but 80 million is sufficient for a diversified modern economy.
This is laughably naive. Not only would "innovation suffer", but it's pretty doubtful that current technology could be maintained with a population as small as that. Humans are a (weak) hivemind intelligence, and everything we have now is only capable with a population as high as we have it currently. Sure, there might be some inefficiency going on, but it's tens of percent, not hundreds of percent.
>In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same,
In a depopulated world, we don't have double digits of one-in-a-billion geniuses. We don't have 1% of the population doing agriculture work, because they can't spare 500,000 people to build and maintain agricultural mechanization. Because they can't do that, they'll actually need to employ even more people doing it with less automation and more manual labor. These things don't scale linearly. (Even if they somehow caught on that the ag mechanization paid dividends, their version of John Deere can't do the same thing because all of the other industries that make John Deere possible don't exist). Regressing back to lesser forms doesn't work, because back when John Deere was making 50,000 small tractors a year, there was demand for small tractors.
And that's before we even get to the part where if those 80 million have the same demographics that we have now, with an excess of old geezers...
I suspect strongly that if we could somehow go do the Star Trek thing and visit countless alien worlds that show a variety of (human-like) aliens, their technology level strongly correlates with their global population, and that in instances where global population somehow declined, so too did their ability to retain that technology.
This was more my understanding. That even with todays population slowdown/shrinking, there is already worry that we wont be able to staff the jobs to keep society functioning. Suddenly you have a factory that makes pumps, it can't meet demand, so the factory that makes tractors doesn't meet demand, so farmers can't plant. We end up back with Oxen pulled plows. It seems that "The Peripheral" kind of skipped how they got to the automated economy that didn't need humans. Especially after the catastrophes that occurred that wiped out the population.
If the world lost half it's people, it would be 1970s level population with modern technology. I think you and the parent poster are underestimating the amount of redundancy that exists in most every industry.
Another way to think about it is the USA population is 3.5% of the world population and trade (both ways) makes up 20% of the USA GDP. If the rest of the world were walled off, we wouldn't go back to the stone age.
If everyone else in the world fell over dead and the resources were available, the US would be massively better off than now.
>If the world lost half it's people, it would be 1970s level population with modern technology.
Sure, but with modern technology that they can't easily replace or repair. How long does the technology last? Is anything we make today made for longevity?
>I think you and the parent poster are underestimating the amount of redundancy
Redundancy is inefficient and costs money. We live in a world without warehouses, because just-in-time shipping is cheaper. We live in a world where every 6 months the soda can you get out of the vending machine has a little less aluminum in it than half a year ago because someone figured out how to shave a bit more off of that without it rupturing in transit. There's less redundancy in this world than you imagine, because reducing the redundancy cut costs and the stock price got a boost a few years ago. Why have spare parts on hand, when there will be even better parts manufactured next year?
>If the rest of the world were walled off, we wouldn't go back to the stone age.
Yeh, we would. It wouldn't happen instantly, but it would happen within decades. That would be true even if the population reduction were the only problem.
>If everyone else in the world fell over dead and the resources were available, the US would be massively better off than now.
People *are the resource*. Everything else is just rocks in the ground. You can have a million square miles of old growth forest, but it's not timber unless there are people who can do the lumberjack thing. You can have a trillion barrels of oil in the ground 200ft down, but it's not fuel and plastic unless there are people to pump it out and refine it. So on and so on. People were always the resource, and while not all people are effectively utilized all the time, the more you have the more resources you have. And there's this absurd network effect where two people are more than twice as useful as one person, and so on, so that when you have truly large numbers of people you have absurd amounts of resources.
Quite possibly, the only thing for which this effect isn't true is real estate. That's sort of a fixed supply.
>The logs per person of one team with a million square miles to work with is
When they have logging trucks and chainsaws and GPS. The logs per person of one team when they're using technology circa 1905 is modest, at best, the logs per person when they're using iron axes and shitty leather boots cobbled together is pathetic.
>They get to pick the very best.
Human nature gets in the way of that. They'll pick whoever couldn't schmooze enough to get a better job.
>>Human nature gets in the way of that. They'll pick whoever couldn't schmooze enough to get a better job.
You missed my intent. They get to pick the best trees. if there is one team instead of 100, they get to log giant old growth trees next to the lumber mill instead of driving 1000 miles to some crappy new growth Forrest.
Their spot would be at least as good as the best location available the 100 teams.
As discussed elsewhere, I dont think you need 8 billion people to manufacture a modern chainsaw.
I never said hundreds of percent, that's all your imagination. If I were to guess, I would ballpark 25% more efficiency if population were 1% and no growth.
I think we are well into the linear and decreasing scale for most industries.
How many parallel factories do you think there are around the world building tractors. How many independent factories making cars and trucks?
Also, consider how much labor is spent on R&D, investment, and growth.
I think you are drifting back into innovation when you are talking about geniuses.
There are a lot more single threaded supply chain factories that you'd think.
When they start falling apart, it all starts falling apart. We got a dry run of this in covid with chips. One small part of chip making, think some substrate, was in short supply, and shut down the automakers
And even the Hurricane that hit NC, took out one of the single factories making high end quartz for chips.
Chip making is one of the most concentrated industries in the world, and in no way representative the whole. Even then, a huge amount of the chipmaking industry aside from the bleeding edge is parallelized.
Let me ask you a question. How much efficiency do you think would be saved with zero population growth and zero innovation?
What percent of the world do you think works in Chip making? It is tiny.
During Covid the lack of even a few types of parts, derailed huge projects.
So you could have a project going in worth millions, with thousands of parts. But the whole thing gets delayed because of a single 100$ part that could not be sourced.
It really seemed stark how the global supply chain could just start crumbling. And I was extrapolating to people, if we aren't staffing, and those parts aren't being made, then the whole thing starts to collapse.
That is an entirely separate problem. You are mistaking the topic and risks of globalization and supply concentration with scale.
Needing a widget from China doesn't mean that it needs to come from a mega factory in China and can't be produced in a smaller one. All of China shutting down doesn't prove it can't be done smaller
Then the only problem is time frame, rate of change.
Can the global supply chain, re-configure itself to only run factories where there is still enough population to staff.
It would take years to move factories to concentrate where there is still people.
And I'd say most disaster scenarios happen a lot faster. Then it's Mad Max again. But guess, even in Mad Max there was an oil refinery, they had a factory, and some cars running. But didn't look sustainable.
Sure, transition is a very real problem. If 90% of people died overnight, there would mayhem and most of the remainder would starve.
The fact that 10% population is viable doesn't mean all paths from A to B are valid. Some are catastrophic. That's the current challenge with birthrates. Even slow decreases over decades is a huge financial and productive problem.
Like falling out of an airplane. Ground level is perfectly safe. It is the transition that kills you.
Natural resources are still the primary constraint on human prosperity: food, energy, land, metals, ect. In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same, but they are working with only the best inputs. You might have the same number of fishermen per capita, but they are fishing the best 1% of fishing grounds without competition. If you drill for oil, it is now in the top 1% in terms of ease of extraction. If you build a dam for power, you have more site capacity per capita. If China had 1% the population, the three gorges dam would supply enough power for entire country two times over.
People learn about economies of scale and high school econ, but there are also ineconomies of scale. At some point there is no more efficiency and gain from increasing the size of your widget factory. However, it might be more expensive to import power and metal from further and further away