Overpop Redemption

The world's many current problems are consistent with a state of overpopulation. The Reverend Malthus laid them out for us long ago: ⚔️🦠💀

• The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

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Chapter 7, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798

T. R. Malthus

Nowadays (2020), we may add global climate change and global pandemics to the list. 

Clearly, people must change their ways. Governments can help, but direct actions consisting of just passing new coercive laws were tried in China and were eventually abandoned. Moreover, "The best government is that which governs least." (motto of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, founded by John O'Sullivan). By a parsimony principle I am fond of, what we want, then, is the minimum adequate response to Overpop. 

My suggestion is: Estateism.

Your "estate" is basically your net worth from all sources minus liabilities, usually considered at the time of death. By "estateism," I mean a life plan focussed on enriching your estate for the benefit of your nearest relatives after your death, as an emotional substitute for raising your own family. Is such a life plan necessarily "thin gruel," emotionally speaking? Not if you know no better--then it is sufficient, as I can testify. 

Governments can help lead the way by lifting all estate taxes from those who die childless and giving proportionate estate-tax breaks to those who die with fewer direct descendants than the national average. If near relatives young enough to reproduce are named as beneficiaries, they would pay no inheritance tax. 

The theory of kin selection by W. D. Hamilton suggests that this lifestyle makes evolutionary sense. Those who adopt it could represent the way of the future, termed "eusociality" by biologists. Many biological precedents for the workability of this idea are known, some of them in mammals. Estateists would be formally like the non-reproducing worker bees in a bee colony, but humans who adopt estateism cannot turn into insects. If you think that they can, tell me how that would happen, exactly; and no hand-waving, please. 

An estateist is free of the oppressive burdens of raising a family and need suffer no sleep deprivation due to the crying of some colicky infant. There is no attempt to balance work and family, which should make for a highly effective worker more than able to enrich his or her estate. The theory of kin selection, which seems to find an echo in the human "heart," is the intellectual anchor for such a life and suffices to give it meaning. 

03-19-2020: An objection can be raised to the foregoing that the inheritors of Estateist benefits will be tempted to expand the size of their families as a direct result, thereby offsetting the reproductive self-restraint of their Estateist relatives in fine Malthusian style. However, I doubt that human reproduction is as elastic as this scenario assumes, but the matter can be decided by mathematical modelling and computer simulations. In the event of bad news from the simulations, the effectiveness of Estateism as population control could be enhanced by testamentary stipulations on the uses to which the inherited wealth can be put, which would aim to prevent its use to support an abnormally large family instead of better nurturing of a normal-sized family. (The biological precedent for this is called "K-selection," an aspect of Life History Theory.) In that event, permitted uses of an Estateist inheritance would be such things as education, training, insurance, medical expenses, rehabilitation, and relocation.

04-14-2020: To this list I should add lawyer's fees--the sting of the Estateist.

Why Don't We Cover the Sidewalks?

1-09-2018

I live in Ottawa, Canada, a place known for its harsh winters, and so far, the present winter has been the worst yet (or maybe I have never been so old before). In December, we got end-of-January weather a month in advance, and if this is Canadian-style extreme weather, indirectly related to climate change, then there is more and worse to come.

I am a public transit user with no personal car, and I found conditions imprisoning. You can only cocoon for so long, and then you need to go and buy groceries. In my case, this involved a fifteen minute walk, under conditions that made a fifteen-minute walk onerous. This collective ordeal lasted for a full week at least, without a break.

Sheltering in the lobby of a restaurant with my bags of groceries and looking out the window, I watched the bundled-up young people go by on the sidewalk with looks of outright pain on their frost-punished faces. Not a good advertisement for old Ottawa.

Why don't we cover the sidewalks?

Cover them, and heat the resulting enclosed spaces in the winter and air-condition them in the summer. Don't ask me how; I'm not a civil engineer. To aid in the execution phase, we have the creative, young minds at Algonquin College. They have a Center for Construction Excellence right there.

Make the project a multi-generational effort, to be advanced incrementally as cash flow permits, like the way they built the great cathedrals of Europe. The many benefits would likewise increase incrementally; you wouldn't need to wait for some distant completion date to begin enjoying them. Begin building at the main transitway stations where there are already predictable crowds of people predictably exposed to the elements with no car. Build the network of covered sidewalks radially and progressively outward from these stations until the whole city is served by the new infrastructure. As a practical matter, each house or workplace would also have a covered passageway connecting it to the sidewalk.

1-13-2018

Such a system could also be viewed as a network of large air ducts that could be used to distribute centrally heated/cooled air to local homes and businesses, resulting in economies of scale. Therefore, individual homes and businesses would need much smaller furnaces and air conditioners, just sufficient to make up the difference between personal preferences and the publicly available temperatures. An all-purpose Peltier-effect device in each building might be sufficient.

1-14-2018

The system would have to be built through people's back yards, rather than their front yards, to avoid interference with garbage pickup and garage access. Where there are no back yards, such as downtown, it would have to be built above-grade, with access via the second stories of buildings. The system could be called CHAPP, for "central heating, air-conditioning, and pedestrian plan," and would be paid for mostly by subscriber fees, like any other utility.

1-19-2018
A windowless but sky lighted version of the duct/via system could also provide the privacy between adjacent lots now provided by the backyard hedge. Just build it where the hedges are now.

11-21-2020

When the Rideau street mall was built, it soon became a haven for homeless people and people with addictions looking for a warm place to sleep, and several businesses allegedly failed as a result. The city's response was to tear down the covered mall, at great expense. Will the same thing happen to the system proposed here? Where was the problem with Rideau street, exactly? You figure it out. This will be your homework assignment.

1-09-2018

Leadership will be required. Expect people to object to the city-borne part of the costs, such as expropriation of rights-of-way, preferring to just endure the hardships; right now, they know no better. Mayor Jim, I'm talking to you: Will you step up to the promotion and oversight of this great enterprise in its formative years and go down in history as one of the great mayors of Ottawa?

• Then the sidewalks will not have to be shoveled and salted in the winters.
• Then our old people will no longer break their bones slipping on ice that no amount of sanding and salting could have prevented.
• Then the city can finally begin to get people to leave their cars at home, relieving downtown congestion and the madness of rush hour.
• Then there will be fewer vehicles on the road, there will be less air pollution and less consumption of gasoline, resulting in healthier Ottawans and a reduced carbon footprint for the city.
• Then people will walk way more, again resulting in healthier Ottawans.
• Then Ottawa will be even more of a magnet for tourists in the winter.

A highly pedestrian population may even be a mellower population, if my theories of human dispersal are correct (See "The Pilgrim and the Whale" in my theory blog, "Theoretician's Progress," at https://mmmtheory.blogspot.com), leading to less crime and a higher quality of life.