Seriously, until we don't reach 100% of well-fed educated people, demographic growth will be more of a problem than a solution to anything.
- What do you consider a bullshit job?
- What level of education would you prefer everyone in the world have? Basic literacy, high school, college?
- What problem will be solved once everyone is educated (at the aforementioned level)?
The level education people should have is the one that allows them to become useful problem solvers. Depends on character and domain of problems considered.
I am not saying reaching 100% education will solve a problem. I am saying that before that point, population growth will feed more problem making than problem solving
In Bullshit Jobs, American anthropologist David Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, because of "bullshit jobs": workers who pretend that their role isn't as pointless or harmful as they know it to be. Graeber contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
- flunkies, who serve to make others feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants
- goons, who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations
- duct tapers, who fix problems that shouldn't exist, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code
- box tickers, e.g., performance managers, in-house magazine journalists, leisure coordinators
- taskmasters, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
Graeber argues that these jobs are largely in the private sector despite the idea that market competition would root out such inefficiencies. In companies, he credits "managerial feudalism" as employers need underlings to feel important.
In society, he credits the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labor of capitalism into religious duty: that workers did not reap advances in productivity as a reduced workday because, as a societal norm, they believe that work determines their self-worth, even as they find that work pointless. Graeber describes this cycle as "profound psychological violence".
Graeber holds that work as a source of virtue is a recent idea, that work was disdained by the aristocracy in classical times, but inverted as virtuous through radical philosophers like John Locke. The Puritan idea of virtue through suffering justified the toil of the working classes as noble.
As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income, a livable benefit paid to all without qualification, which would let people work at their leisure
If we're allocating a portion of production to all people, but have finite energy resources (e.g. current state), then there exists a range of population (and demographics therein) where this is practical.
In that in non-communist allocation systems, if one does not produce value (somewhat arbitrarily defined, but usually semi-attached to actual value) then neither one nor one's children eat.
UBI fundamentally changes this, in that hypothetically people could do nothing (and reproduce), thereby eventually exhausting available energy resources.
If your point is that everything has an absolute carrying capacity, then agreed. But here I'm assuming UBI is implemented before resource scarcity is truly eliminated by technological progress.
Thereby leaving the equation in an "It balances, but only if these percentage of people work, age demographics don't get too out of whack, and population growth falls in range" state.
"Fundamentally," perhaps. In all other cases, not so much. Having more people in my house or even in the city where I live would be a bad thing.
I really appreciate this perspective. More people is fundamentally a good thing. Some would vehemently argue otherwise, but I believe the problems they bring up come down to a calculus that depends first on other things, like profit vs. environmental stewardship, etc., not primarily the birth and death rates.