As women have far fewer babies, the U.S. and the world face unprecedented challenges
As women have far fewer babies, the U.S. and the world face unprecedented challenges
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45 comments
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For decades, we've been fed this narrative that overpopulation is eventually going to destroy the world. But, now that birthrates are declining...a shrinking population is suddenly the problem.
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They were maintaining the idea that we don't live post scarcity. That there aren't enough homes or food for the current population, so there can't be enough for a large population. The rich will never give up being the elite class and will perpetuate artificial scarcity until they die.
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Both have their problems. A steadily and slowly increasing or stagnant population would probably be best
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Pretty much the only reason why humans have had a population explosion over the last 120~ years is because of technology and oil. Prior to the industrial revolution the human population grew very slowly and would suffer significant declines from time to time. Greed is pretty much what got us here today.
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we've been fed this narrative that overpopulation is eventually going to destroy the world
It's always been wrong, and some of us have been arguing against that kind of neo-Mathusian worldview this entire time.
Note that the same view also leads to the incorrect conclusion that population shrinkage will be good for resource management, pollution, etc. If one believes that a large and growing population will deplete the world's resources and destroy the environment, one might conclude that a shrinking population will help conserve the world's resources and preserve the environment.
But look at how things actually play out. The countries with the shrinking populations are still increasing their resource consumption, and the slowdown in population growth hasn't slowed down resource depletion in large part because humans don't all use the same amount of resources. If the population of India shrinks to the size of the population of the United States, but then increases its greenhouse emissions to match that of the United States, that would be bad for the environment despite the population reduction.
A shrinking population isn't really a problem in itself, but an aging population is. That's the concern about birth rates, is the worry that unproductive old people will have their lives cut short rather than enjoying a reasonable retirement.
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I get this, but we can't have an infinitely expanding population, at some point it will have to stabilize, and there has to be the glut of old people at the beginning of that. People are aging more slowly than in the past, at least, even if living longer more of those years are good and can be productive.
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I don't think it's an insurmountable challenge. Just that the ratio is what matters, which means abrupt changes to birth rates might be more problematic than the magnitude of the change over time.
But I also don't think that a stable population size solves the climate crisis or resource depletion. It might be the case that 8 billion people in 2075 end up consuming way more energy and natural resources in an even less sustainable way than the 8 billion people of 2025.
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Could be, sure. But also might not. That's not really something we can know now, but I think we can know that a pyramid scheme is unsustainable. The price of less polluting renewable energy is falling fast, for one thing. I personally don't think the big population is all bad, so many people means more good people too. So much technological progress.
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45 comments