48 ms·

The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

93 points by mellowhype 6y ago

adevx 6y ago
"The myth, as is commonly told, tells the story of a mid-twentieth century world headed for disaster. There were too many people being born and not enough food being produced. This combination of forces would lead inexorably to famine, unchecked migration, conflict and other calamities. However, thanks to the inventiveness of Western scientists more food was produced, Armageddon was avoided, and the world did not experience a population crisis." Maybe we do have a population crisis. Our climate issues are in large due to overpopulation and subsequent increasing demand for resources. Sure we can cut down even more of the Amazon rainforest to supply food for more people, but not attributing any of this to population growth seems dishonest.
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  Bangladesh has some struggles. It is the most densely populated (large) country on earth. They have major floods often which cause big problems. But they manage to survive. Thus there isn't really a threat to anyone else. There's enough food to feed everyone, and the only problem remaining is political and with distribution. It would not be difficult or expensive to end world hunger, cents a person.
  - paganel 6y ago
    > Bangladesh has some struggles. It is the most densely populated (large) country on earth. They have major floods often which cause big problems. But they manage to survive Countries like Denmark and Norway are a lot more detrimental to the planet's ecosystem because they consume a lot, lot more per capita compared to what Bangladesh does (and they consume lots of bad things that Bangladeshi people do not consume).
    - liaukovv 6y ago
      But if you look at this from country abstraction level, what does it matter how much they consume per capita? All that matters is absolute number
      - magicalhippo 6y ago
        If every country had the population of Norway, the globe would host just over 1 billion people. So then, would 1 billion Norweigans be better or worse than our current situation?
        liaukovv 6y ago
        Who knows, considering developed countries produce science at higher rates the climate change might have already been solved.
      - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
        So countries like Luxembourg can continue to pollute because at an absolute level it doesn't matter but countries like India or China can't have any development because at an absolute level their emissions are huge. I can't see poorer countries accepting that argument.
    - bildung 6y ago
      Why do single out exactly these two countries and not the dozens with higher footprint per capita? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecological_footprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecologica...
      - thefz 6y ago
        To conveniently leave out North America.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      I'm always curious about this. Cambodia (for example) has a terrible rubbish problem. They burn their trash, and vast amounts of it get thrown in the Mekong river and washed out to sea. There's also a big problem with unlicensed forest logging, and all sorts of environmental concerns. This is, primarily, because poor people are too busy with immediate survival concerns to worry about their environment. Norway (for example) has a higher per-person consumption of resources, but also looks after its countryside and environment. What's the relative damage being done to the global environment? Is there an argument that raising people out of poverty will actually reduce their impact on the environment even though it increases their resource consumption?
      - samvher 6y ago
        Norway looks after its own countryside and environment. But it imports lots of stuff meaning it effectively has a pretty large footprint elsewhere. Also while Norway looks clean, that doesn't mean it's not affecting the environment negatively (e.g. greenhouse gases). Of course none of this is specific to Norway.
      - h0l0cube 6y ago
        It's pretty well known that when you look at individual consumptions habits, which account for overseas production emissions, there's a clear correlation between income and greenhouse gas emissions. Though it has been shown that some countries are beginning to reduce emissions while increasing GDP. Much of that shift could be explained by a global shift to renewables as they become the cheapest form of power, but this is a tide that lifts all boats, and the correlation remains. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions#co2-embedded-in-trade https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
        marcus_holmes 6y ago
        Yeah but emissions are only one part of the equation - logging a forest will produce more net atmospheric carbon than taking a long-haul plane trip, even though cutting down trees doesn't emit anything. The biggest carbon sink is the ocean, so doing things that damage the ocean (like dumping trash into a river) are more of a concern. There's also other environmental concerns than CO2 and climate change. Damaging jungle and ocean ecosystems creates other effects that we need to be concerned about (not least biodiversity losses from loss of habitat and population).
    - greenwich26 6y ago
      Bangladeshis spent the second half of the twentieth century having about 6 kids each, while Danes and Norwegians were having less than 2. Why is that factor excluded from your assignment of which country is "more detrimental to the ecosystem"? The Bangladeshi behaviour of having 6 kids each from 1950-1990 is overall far more detrimental than the Norwegian behaviour of consuming a lot per capita.
      - g8oz 6y ago
        Per capita resource consumption dominates raw population to a surprisingly large extent. Bangladesh vs Denmark + Norway seems like a contrived example doesn't it? A population of 163 million for the former vs a combined 11 million for the latter. And yet total consumption based CO2 emissions are about equivalent. It's even worse when you look at production based emissions. Bangladesh emits less than half the total of CO2 vs Norway + Denmark. Take a look at this page and do the math: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
      - watwut 6y ago
        > Bangladeshis spent the second half of the twentieth century having about 6 kids each This is not true. That was true in 1950, started to drop in 1970. Now it is 2.04 kid per woman. And when you compare contemporary consumption of Danes, you have to compare it with contemporary consumption of Bangladeshis. Currently, the fertility rates are 1.73 vs 2.04 kid per woman. Which is much smaller difference.
  - lupire 6y ago
    This is silly. If it only cost cents to feed a person, food wouldn't cost dollars.
    - i_haz_rabies 6y ago
      A cup of rice and dry chickpeas will feed a person for cents.
      - watwut 6y ago
        You cant subsist on these only.
        i_haz_rabies 6y ago
        You could survive for a long time on this, and if you add cheap produce like carrots and beets for a few cents more you could survive indefinitely.
        watwut 6y ago
        No, you would not.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  In the context of the environment and more specifically climate change, it's not overpopulation per se but a growing middle class. The middle class, drives cars, have larger homes (to heat, cool and furnish) and so on. A million people in poverty is not the same as a million living a traditional middle class lifestyle.
  - Fricken 6y ago
    It's either middle class people consuming huge amounts of resources per person, or it's subsistence dwellers cranking out 5 kids for every fertile woman.
    - TulliusCicero 6y ago
      The latter seems to be solving itself, as birth rates are steadily on the decline. Though it tends to happen in conjunction with development (and thus more intensive energy usage).
    - Phenomenit 6y ago
      Then we should find the optimal point of socio-economic development with regards to co2 emissions? Or is upward mobility impossible to remove from the system?
      - Fricken 6y ago
        I don't think finding that optimum is a hard problem. Convincing the world to abide by it is.
    - chiefalchemist 6y ago
      In general...where there are 5+ children there is very little hope; there is extreme poverty (read: little consumption); and so on. Children don't survive in those environments. Higher birthrates is a family's / culture's answer to that. It's playing the odds. Put another way, if there was consumption to Western middle class levels, there would be no need to have 5+ children. This is why, as a middle class grows, birth rates fall.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > This combination of forces would lead inexorably to famine, unchecked migration, conflict and other calamities. ... and.. it does ? https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories
  - 0-_-0 6y ago
    No mention of famine
    - yorwba 6y ago
      If you just grep the list of articles for "famine", you'll miss the "malnourished children" and "hunger" mentioned in the articles.
  - simonh 6y ago
    The top 7 regions creating refugees are Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, Somalia or Democratic Republic of Congo. None of them do so due to overpopulation, or even environmental or ecological crisis. They're all political issues.
    - orwin 6y ago
      South-eastern Mediterranean situation was caused by repeating drought since 2006 collapsing their agricultural production. A drought in 2010 in Russia reduced their grain production by 30% and doubled the price of grain during the winter 2010-2011: it was basically a death sentence to already famished people in some African countries (Centrafrique, but also Sudan at the time), but what wasn't expected was the price of oil declining sharply, making Syria, Lybia, Tunisia and Egypt and Algeria less solvent. Algeria managed, but other countries less so. What do you think these countries have in common?
      - kspacewalk2 6y ago
        Again, these famines are also entirely a socioeconomic crisis, not actual lack of food. If Sudan wasn't a terribly run place at war with itself on two fronts, it would not have food shortages. If Somalia had a functioning government at any point in the preceding two decades, it would not have food shortages. Supply chain disruptions occur all the time in the global food market, but in non-basketcase countries there's enough resiliency for this to never reach anywhere near "death sentence" territory. >What do you think these countries have in common? Terrible authoritarian governments that buy off its impoverished populaces with a mirage of huge food subsidies, while stealing most of the wealth of their nations for themselves.
- drewcoo 6y ago
  > Our climate issues are in large due to overpopulation and subsequent increasing demand for resources Industrialization, not population is to blame. Maybe we have an industrialization crisis. But it's difficult to blame that on "developing nations" so it probably won't get much press. Then again, things like the Paris Agreement provide incentives to move polluting industry to China, so nationalist anti-Chinese media may eventually lay the blame on industrialization.
  - lupire 6y ago
    Another way to frame it is we have a developed-world population crisis. I agree that still makes "8billion+" a false alarm. But another way to say it that if we are to lift the materialistic standard of living for the other 4 billion people, there needs to be same or less population of them.
- jonnycomputer 6y ago
  But in many ways the situation described was true, until artificial nitrogen fertilizer was invented. It is apparent that we've been pretty good at improving productivity and efficiency. But use of fertilizer has caused other problems.
- rmrfrmrf 6y ago
  This is incorrect. The richest 10% of the population causes 49% of climate change. The poorest 50% of the population causes 10%.
  - andrew_ 6y ago
    Please cite sources for statistics like these.
amriksohata 6y ago
The sheer ignorance of this statement: "The myth, as is commonly told, tells the story of a mid-twentieth century world headed for disaster. There were too many people being born and not enough food being produced. This combination of forces would lead inexorably to famine, unchecked migration, conflict and other calamities. However, thanks to the inventiveness of Western scientists more food was produced, Armageddon was avoided, and the world did not experience a population crisis." But also thanks to the green revolution we have pesticides and fertilisers that made this happen, that are causing cancer all over Punjab and created massive wealth disparities. Not to mention we never needed all this food, if the population was in control. But the population exploded because of Western invasions that resulted in mass poverty! Thanks "western" scientists!
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  The article agrees with you. It was all a ruse to satisfy US domestic political concerns. As were/are a lot of the 20th Century world "problems", it is becoming apparent.
  - liaukovv 6y ago
    Really makes you think
- jansan 6y ago
  > But the population exploded because of Western invasions that resulted in mass poverty! I disagree. IMO it exploded because improvements in medical care resulted in a dramatic reduction in child deaths, but people kept having the same number of children.
  - amriksohata 6y ago
    The Indian population went from 50 million to 300 million under British rule, then tripled again after 20-30 years when most did not have access to that medical care.
- throwaway210222 6y ago
roenxi 6y ago
I think a mindset has developed in some circles that runs "well, in the 1960s it looked like we were all doomed and we did fine without a plan. So if it looks like we're all doomed now we can just rush in head first and we'll be fine". Planning to be pleasantly surprised is not a clever plan. The fact that the world didn't end from 1960-2020 in defiance of the evidence of 3,000BCE through 1960AD is not that comforting. There will also be doomsayers, but there will also always be resource constraints.
jansan 6y ago
I never fails to puzzle me that a potential rising of the sea level of 50cm by 2050 resulting in 11% loss of land in Bangladesh is seen as a major threat, while at the same time its population growth that will roughly double in the same period is brushed off as nothing. Also, news tell us that in Syria climate change has resulted in food shortage in recent years. But having to feed twice as many people from the same land compared to 1985 sure cannot be the reason, right?
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  A quick googling suggests that Bangladesh's current fertility rate is around 2 births per woman, which is actually just under replacement rate. The birth rate across the globe has been steadily on the decline for some time, there aren't many more places left where rapid doublings are still possible.
  - greenwich26 6y ago
    There's almost nowhere in Asia with high fertility anymore. All 21st century population growth will be African, specifically sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates are stubbornly holding around 4 to 4.5 births per woman. And the worst countries, like Somalia and Niger, are still well above 6 births per woman, declining by much less than 1 birth per woman per decade.
    - chub500 6y ago
      Worst? You mean _highest_? These people will be caring for your kids in their nursing home.
  - ericmay 6y ago
    Sure, but I’d argue that the replacement rate itself is at an unsustainable level. Climate change and the loss of species and such is one manifestation of overpopulation. Covid-19 could be viewed as another, in my opinion. Obviously this is all rich coming from an American living in the suburbs (I don’t really see what my alternatives are), but I can’t help but think we can only sustain around a billion people without destroying the planet (speculation). We live in a golden age of cheap energy and consumption. People get in gasoline powered cars and drive a mile down the road to get a snack. That’s impossible to maintain. Not only do we have overpopulation, but we built unsustainable cities, predicated on infinite cheap energy ($2.50 gas). Electric cars won’t fix this, although they’ll help.
jojobas 6y ago
There are way more people on Earth than Earth can sustain in what we consider a life worth living. As bloodthirsty capitalism pulls more and more people out of poverty we discover that putting a steak on everyone's table and a fresh car in everyone's garage is too taxing on the atmosphere, wildlife, forests and what not. We seem to have to choose between a smaller luxurious population and billions and billions of people living in pods eating synthetic food.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > There are way to many people on Earth than Earth can sustain in what we consider a life worth living This point of view comes up a lot in connection with climate change, and I always find it incredibly offensive. My dad was reminiscing the other day about his happy childhood growing up in a village in Bangladesh in the 1950s. This was back when 1 in 3 kids didn’t live to the age of 5. Even an RCP 8.5 scenario isn’t going to turn the developed world into Bangladesh circus 1950. Hell it won’t turn Bangladesh into Bangladesh in 1950. People will still have a standard of living that makes life incredibly worthwhile, because we as human beings were designed to need little to find life worthwhile. That’s not an argument against investing in renewables or whatever. But the Malthusian arguments about climate change are quite misanthropic. Trump got in trouble for calling places “shithole countries.” But nobody blinks and eye when someone casually implies that people in those countries would have been better off never having been born.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    One may be happy in a mud hut eating nothing but corn, but generally not after getting used to proper construction, sanitation, food etc. Recent history shows that there's no holding previously backwards countries from advancing their consumption. As Russians joke, the global famine will come when the Chinese start using forks. China, India and SE Asia are quickly upping their per-capita production and consumption of carbon-heavy goods. Brazil doesn't destroy Amazon out of spite. We have no moral right to say "Nonono, you can't do what we did in the 20th century and live like us!".
    - 6y ago
nahuel0x 6y ago
Now take in account the ecosystems destroyed and the picture is very different. We must leave behind the humans-only perspective.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  Return to monke.
- kiba 6y ago
  Human-only perspective? That is assuming we can thrive if not not without an ecosystem.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  We should always value humans over other species, and if you disagree you're an enemy of our species.
  - namdnay 6y ago
    You can value humans over other species without assigning a nil value to the latter
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      What does that mean concretely? Would you have something like an exchange rate where 2000 chicken lives = 1 human life?
      - iterati 6y ago
        More like "if all the bugs die because we use too many pesticides, the systems that support life on this planet will collapse."
        BurningFrog 6y ago
        Which is exactly how someone caring only about human lives would reason.
Barrin92 6y ago
the dismissal of Malthus seems itself ideological. It's not due to any necessary reason that Malthusianism itself is wrong, quite obviously putting population pressure on restrained resources is an actual disaster. What was wrong with Malthus or the food scare talked about in the article is simply that they made their argument about the wrong thing and at the wrong time, the rebuttal is based on contingent facts. There may very well come the point, and as others have pointed out climate is already maybe one such issue, where we run into a situation where the right technical solution or political fix does not exist. Locally of course there have been countless of Malthusian examples, put a city under siege, or a country (see Yemen's blockade) and you will see how Malthusian the world is pretty quickly. Of course some of the conclusions Malthus drew (the mentioned culling of the sick) in the article are inhumane and reprehensible, but nobody today really argues for any of that stuff. But what Malthus today is still useful for is provide an antidote to the 'perpetual growth' mindset that has no other answer to anything than to grow yourself out of every problem.
- oilbagz 6y ago
  >nobody today really argues for any of that stuff ahem https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/themes/population-policies https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/themes/population-pol... https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/20140918-PDR-pop.html https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/20140918-PDR-pop.htm... https://blog.iiasa.ac.at/2014/02/27/what-is-the-optimal-fertility-rate/ https://blog.iiasa.ac.at/2014/02/27/what-is-the-optimal-fert... https://www.ined.fr/en/glossary/population-policy/ https://www.ined.fr/en/glossary/population-policy/ Malthus should be targeted by the time-travellers for culling as soon as convenient ..
  - lupire 6y ago
    Those pages promote birth control (with a focus on avoiding forced reproduction/birth) not culling the sick. Are you making a handwaving argument about supposed genocide via birth control?
    - oilbagz 6y ago
tonetheman 6y ago
Maybe there is not a population crisis. But if you interrupt the supply chain where I live in the smallest bit (as we have seen) then there is not enough food for every person. Perhaps that is not a population crisis but as we add more people it will only get worse. Maybe enough people are dying that it evens out.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
74B5 6y ago
Poluation x Goods/Services x Energy/Resource demand x Waste production = Human impact on earth It seems fairly common to picture the earth heading to an unstable overpopulation but imo this is only a comfortably narrowed down perspective on large scale problems. Especially for western countries, it is tempting to focus on the global population issue because this is primarily a phenomenon of rural, poor regions, so not their own. The other three mayor factors at play here would unfortunately require to rethink basic economics and this would reach deep down into societies. I suspect some sort of psychological "the others fault" self defense emerging in large. I have to be honest here, i fell for it too at first. Even if the overpopulation would be the only factor we face, its solution would still be large scale and system questioning because either you throw away any moral standards or you end up creating and distributing wealth in a sustainable way. No, simply the delivery of contraception is no solutions only good healthcare and especially the education of girls/women.
- saddlerustle 6y ago
  It's possible to generate energy, harvest resources and store waste with minimal impact to other life on earth.
  - foobiekr 6y ago
    This is a “no true Scotsman” argument. We quite obviously have not demonstrated this is an actual possibility.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    So why do we pollute and kill? It is possible for you and me to climb Mt. Everest. In all likelihood, neither of us is going to spend several years and all his savings towards this goal. Possible does not mean practical.
m0llusk 6y ago
This is interesting political analysis, but the fact remains that the global population is topping out at several billion with almost all arable land already being farmed and ecological impacts accumulating. All these related problems may have solutions, but reframing the situation doesn't really address potential for improvement.
- jonnycomputer 6y ago
  Yes. Problems like this one: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution.html https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution.... are an unintended consequence of scale. I don't have good solutions, and the way our economies are set up discourage population degrowth (see the panic in Europe), and there are many bad, immoral ways to go about it, but so many of our problems are not a problem with technologies employed, but the scale at which they are employed.
- saddlerustle 6y ago
  If we were running low on resources for food production you'd expect to see food prices increasing. But broadly, food is cheaper than ever.
  - slothtrop 6y ago
    Ecological damage and collapses occur well before we'd run out of resources. Just because we can encroach on more and more land, at the expense of the environment, doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
    - majani 6y ago
      Increasing agricultural productivity nowadays doesn't involve encroaching more land. And the developing nations, where the populations are booming, are still on the lower end of agricultural productivity. Combine that with the fact that populations appear to top off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll realize that we'll be just fine.
BurningFrog 6y ago
As I've gotten older and seen predicted doomsdays come and go, I've started to think that expecting armageddon is an innate part of human psychology. I'm not aware of any era or place where many people have not expected the world to meet disaster soon. It's a part of all major religions.
- jaegerpicker 6y ago
  Sure and I agree with that but that doesn't mean that armageddon isn't coming either. For example Climate Change and the Covid19 pandemic, both are examples of very real problems with the potential to severally harm/kill large numbers but both are dismissed with that attitude. I'm not sayin that the sky is falling in either case, though with Climate Change I can't imagine not thinking that, but if we continue to ignore them it's very likely that we will make human kinds worst nightmares come true.
  - frockington1 6y ago
    There have been doomsday Climate predictions as long you can go back. Historically, look at the flood stories and you can see climate worry in biblical times. More recently Miami Beach is always going to be underwater 5 years from the prediction date. It's a serious problem, but there has always been a cult like following to climate change. Personally, I think it's best to ignore the hysterical predictions and focus on your own impact and responsibilities
    - ta988 6y ago
      That's assuming that only controlling our own impact is sufficient to limit the problems.
      - marshmallow_12 6y ago
        periods of global cooling and warming have always happened (ice age). The fear is our activities are accelerating the change, not that it causes it
  - 6y ago
fallingfrog 6y ago
The population bomb thesis was reasonable, up until about the 1970’s. But it turns out, if you give women access to education and birth control, the problem mostly goes away. I don’t know if I really fault people before then for worrying about it, perhaps the worrying was partly responsible for the solution. People say the same thing about nuclear war: all those marches were useless because the war never happened. How do you know the marches weren’t the reason the war never happened? People are definitely going to say the same thing about climate change, if we manage to mitigate it: see, nothing bad happened, you wasted your time. No, the fact that we acted will have been why nothing bad happened.
- foobiekr 6y ago
  Past performance is no guarantee of future results. It always amazes me that people take the predictions about one trajectory of human population as crazy/fringe but the other prediction as some kind of scientific law. In addition, we are well past the viable population for even a moderate footprint lifestyle. We got to neatly 8B by keeping half the world at 1/10th or less the resource and environmental footprint of the rest. It’s like a king in a massively overpopulated nation of relentlessly constrained citizens looking out at his gardens and saying, “see? No problems, and those fools predicted the country would collapse.”
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Nobody "kept" half the world poor, they did that to themselves. Look at the vast amounts of aid that's been sent to nearly every poor country over the decades. Huge sums. In the end the big success is China, which didn't need such aid. They solved their own problems (well, sort of, economically at least). The poor parts of the world are still poor because they make a lot of bad decisions, it's terrible but when you drill in and study what goes on in those places it's plain to see. The poorer parts of the world would stop having so many babies as they got richer anyway, it seems.
  - fallingfrog 6y ago
    True, there’s a survivorship bias too especially in the case of nuclear war where we probably got through the Cold War more by dumb luck than anything else, but people assume there was no other way that could have turned out. The human population is expected to peak at around 11 billion; I have no idea whether the earth can support that many, certainly not with the way our civilization works right now.
anyonecancode 6y ago
I do think many challenges are painted in worst possible case terms -- like Hollywood blockbusters where the stakes are always the world, of even the galaxy or the entire universe -- but by fixating on how that particular exaggeration is nearly always invariably wrong we miss the fact that, even at lower stakes, predicted catastrophes are often still plenty catastrophic. To give a quick, immediate example, though I'm currently writing from a internet connected, well heated house rather than from a scene from The Stand, 500,000+ and counting deaths in my country and many more worldwide isn't exactly something to shrug at... I wish our collective psychology was able to accept crises as serious without resorting to raising the stakes to cosmic levels or dismissing it as not a real problem if you, personally, come out mainly ok.
subsubzero 6y ago
There are so many catastrophes that have been thrust upon people by the media that never borne out their outcomes. A few of note: -In the mid 80's every newspaper in California was warning of killer bees[1] that were going to invade the state and kill many people, alot of my family members were quite nervous about them and the media made a point about its not a matter of if but when these bees arrive in the state, the coverage was blanket until about the 90's when it died down. - Y2k meltdown - This was also hyped beyond belief by the media and doomsday scenarios were drummed up to an extraordinary frenzy until really nothing bad happened after the new years[2], I remember being at a new years party in menlo park and people were saying that the lights may go out due to the bug. - In the years 2017/2018 the media was drumming up automation of all jobs by AI/robots/self driving cars, people were extremely worried that the most wouldn't have a job in a few years, but in 2019 unemployment hit a 50 year low[3], I'm not saying this won't come to pass, just the media's timeline was totally wrong. The stuff thats been really bad, 9/11, financial crisis of 2008, covid-19 has all come on very suddenly and most people were caught totally off guard. The things people should really worry about are: Lack of water (aquifers that took tens of thousands of years to be filled are close to be drained in many parts of the midwest and west[4] of the US. A large solar storm similar to the Carrington event[5] knocking out all of the electrical grid(and electronics) of a large portion of the planet. A supervolcano/or caldera erupting and cooling the earths climate down dramatically, think crops dying and extreme famine. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem [3] - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/04/jobs-report---september-2019.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/04/jobs-report---september-2019... [4] - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/vanishing-midwest-ogallala-aquifer-drought https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/vanishin... [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
Animats 6y ago
The author has one anecdote about the US and India arguing over food aid, and he projects that into "population growth was not a problem". Why fertility rates declined worldwide is the big question. Worldwide, births per female were about 5 in 1960 and about 2.4 worldwide now. That is a huge, and unexpected, trend. Japan, South Korea, and the EU are in actual decline. Nobody really expected a change that big. It's still not really understood. The usual explanations are contraceptives, more women working, etc. Lower sperm counts, maybe, but probably not. (Not central Africa, though. There, the fertility rate is still around 4.) India population growth - graph.[1] [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/population https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/population
- 8draco8 6y ago
  IMHO education plays huge role. More often people decide to go to collage, then have a career, people also learn what a huge effort have to be put into rising child. On top of that there is so many fantastic things that person can do and have to give up at least to some extend if having a baby. In my opinion those are huge factors. This is a reason why on average successful, well educated people tend to have less children even though they have all the resources to have a lot of them.
  - snarf21 6y ago
    Agreed, the best way to raise the standard of living is to educate women and loan them money. They now have options. They are stuck being baby factories. When this happens, population growth quickly follows.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Citation to back up your comment: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-change-in-the-number-of-children-women-have https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...
- danans 6y ago
  > It's still not really understood. Is it really not that well understood? In countries and regions that are highly industrialized (like the societies you mention), having more than 2-3 children doesn't provide any more economic security like it does for largely agrarian and manual-labor based societies.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
The biggest issue with Malthusian predictions is that humans are Earth’s greatest resources. Nature is very unforgiving. It is human cultivation and exploitation of natural resources that allows for humans to thrive. The more we can educated and develop our population, the higher the chance of breakthroughs that enable us to support even more people with the same amount of raw resources.
firebaze 6y ago
Humans are bad in estimating exponential growth (like, totally - we're good in suppressing bad news, and _very_ bad in accepting ideas we don't like) Still, we're depending on exponential growth (be it pension funding, companies, inflation, you name it). We're lying to ourselves regarding population. Ok, too many people - we'll resort to a vegetarian diet - oh wait, that's not sustainable, too many people. Well, we'll be vegans! Oh wait, not sustainable also, we'll need gene editing (bad, but we'll accept that reaching a certain threshold). Well, then let's grow our food in vertical farms! Seems sustainable, until we reach the next (last?) limit. This expands to anything (ICE vs EE, flying vs train travel). Unless we accept this inherent flaw and restrict us accordingly, we'll outgrow anything. Oh well, then let's just ... ? Go to mars :) (I truly believe this is the only mid-term sustainable¹ option, since we'll never be able to have at most only 2 children as a population - and I'd love to gain as much hate for this statement as possible if I were proven false). ¹ Mars will not be enough in just a few centuries, probably even just decades
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  Humans are indeed bad at estimating exponential growth, but you may have fallen into your own trap. We have already vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet in Malthus's time. The reason is exponential growth in technology. Technological progress is dependent on current level of technology, and population. As population grows, so does technology. It's hard to imagine how to effectively feed the theoretical maximum population, but then again it was hard to imagine profitably extracting oil from arctic shale or natural gas from long-tapped reserves in Appalachia. I wouldn't bet against this exponential continuing long into the future.

93 points by mellowhype 6y ago

"The myth, as is commonly told, tells the story of a mid-twentieth century world headed for disaster. There were too many people being born and not enough food being produced. This combination of forces would lead inexorably to famine, unchecked migration, conflict and other calamities. However, thanks to the inventiveness of Western scientists more food was produced, Armageddon was avoided, and the world did not experience a population crisis." Maybe we do have a population crisis. Our climate issues are in large due to overpopulation and subsequent increasing demand for resources. Sure we can cut down even more of the Amazon rainforest to supply food for more people, but not attributing any of this to population growth seems dishonest.

Synaesthesia 6y ago
Bangladesh has some struggles. It is the most densely populated (large) country on earth. They have major floods often which cause big problems. But they manage to survive. Thus there isn't really a threat to anyone else. There's enough food to feed everyone, and the only problem remaining is political and with distribution. It would not be difficult or expensive to end world hunger, cents a person.
- paganel 6y ago
  > Bangladesh has some struggles. It is the most densely populated (large) country on earth. They have major floods often which cause big problems. But they manage to survive Countries like Denmark and Norway are a lot more detrimental to the planet's ecosystem because they consume a lot, lot more per capita compared to what Bangladesh does (and they consume lots of bad things that Bangladeshi people do not consume).
  - liaukovv 6y ago
    But if you look at this from country abstraction level, what does it matter how much they consume per capita? All that matters is absolute number
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      If every country had the population of Norway, the globe would host just over 1 billion people. So then, would 1 billion Norweigans be better or worse than our current situation?
      - liaukovv 6y ago
        Who knows, considering developed countries produce science at higher rates the climate change might have already been solved.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      So countries like Luxembourg can continue to pollute because at an absolute level it doesn't matter but countries like India or China can't have any development because at an absolute level their emissions are huge. I can't see poorer countries accepting that argument.
  - bildung 6y ago
    Why do single out exactly these two countries and not the dozens with higher footprint per capita? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecological_footprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecologica...
    - thefz 6y ago
      To conveniently leave out North America.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    I'm always curious about this. Cambodia (for example) has a terrible rubbish problem. They burn their trash, and vast amounts of it get thrown in the Mekong river and washed out to sea. There's also a big problem with unlicensed forest logging, and all sorts of environmental concerns. This is, primarily, because poor people are too busy with immediate survival concerns to worry about their environment. Norway (for example) has a higher per-person consumption of resources, but also looks after its countryside and environment. What's the relative damage being done to the global environment? Is there an argument that raising people out of poverty will actually reduce their impact on the environment even though it increases their resource consumption?
    - samvher 6y ago
      Norway looks after its own countryside and environment. But it imports lots of stuff meaning it effectively has a pretty large footprint elsewhere. Also while Norway looks clean, that doesn't mean it's not affecting the environment negatively (e.g. greenhouse gases). Of course none of this is specific to Norway.
    - h0l0cube 6y ago
      It's pretty well known that when you look at individual consumptions habits, which account for overseas production emissions, there's a clear correlation between income and greenhouse gas emissions. Though it has been shown that some countries are beginning to reduce emissions while increasing GDP. Much of that shift could be explained by a global shift to renewables as they become the cheapest form of power, but this is a tide that lifts all boats, and the correlation remains. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions#co2-embedded-in-trade https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
      - marcus_holmes 6y ago
        Yeah but emissions are only one part of the equation - logging a forest will produce more net atmospheric carbon than taking a long-haul plane trip, even though cutting down trees doesn't emit anything. The biggest carbon sink is the ocean, so doing things that damage the ocean (like dumping trash into a river) are more of a concern. There's also other environmental concerns than CO2 and climate change. Damaging jungle and ocean ecosystems creates other effects that we need to be concerned about (not least biodiversity losses from loss of habitat and population).
  - greenwich26 6y ago
    Bangladeshis spent the second half of the twentieth century having about 6 kids each, while Danes and Norwegians were having less than 2. Why is that factor excluded from your assignment of which country is "more detrimental to the ecosystem"? The Bangladeshi behaviour of having 6 kids each from 1950-1990 is overall far more detrimental than the Norwegian behaviour of consuming a lot per capita.
    - g8oz 6y ago
      Per capita resource consumption dominates raw population to a surprisingly large extent. Bangladesh vs Denmark + Norway seems like a contrived example doesn't it? A population of 163 million for the former vs a combined 11 million for the latter. And yet total consumption based CO2 emissions are about equivalent. It's even worse when you look at production based emissions. Bangladesh emits less than half the total of CO2 vs Norway + Denmark. Take a look at this page and do the math: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
    - watwut 6y ago
      > Bangladeshis spent the second half of the twentieth century having about 6 kids each This is not true. That was true in 1950, started to drop in 1970. Now it is 2.04 kid per woman. And when you compare contemporary consumption of Danes, you have to compare it with contemporary consumption of Bangladeshis. Currently, the fertility rates are 1.73 vs 2.04 kid per woman. Which is much smaller difference.
- lupire 6y ago
  This is silly. If it only cost cents to feed a person, food wouldn't cost dollars.
  - i_haz_rabies 6y ago
    A cup of rice and dry chickpeas will feed a person for cents.
    - watwut 6y ago
      You cant subsist on these only.
      - i_haz_rabies 6y ago
        You could survive for a long time on this, and if you add cheap produce like carrots and beets for a few cents more you could survive indefinitely.
        watwut 6y ago
        No, you would not.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
In the context of the environment and more specifically climate change, it's not overpopulation per se but a growing middle class. The middle class, drives cars, have larger homes (to heat, cool and furnish) and so on. A million people in poverty is not the same as a million living a traditional middle class lifestyle.
- Fricken 6y ago
  It's either middle class people consuming huge amounts of resources per person, or it's subsistence dwellers cranking out 5 kids for every fertile woman.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    The latter seems to be solving itself, as birth rates are steadily on the decline. Though it tends to happen in conjunction with development (and thus more intensive energy usage).
  - Phenomenit 6y ago
    Then we should find the optimal point of socio-economic development with regards to co2 emissions? Or is upward mobility impossible to remove from the system?
    - Fricken 6y ago
      I don't think finding that optimum is a hard problem. Convincing the world to abide by it is.
  - chiefalchemist 6y ago
    In general...where there are 5+ children there is very little hope; there is extreme poverty (read: little consumption); and so on. Children don't survive in those environments. Higher birthrates is a family's / culture's answer to that. It's playing the odds. Put another way, if there was consumption to Western middle class levels, there would be no need to have 5+ children. This is why, as a middle class grows, birth rates fall.
jcelerier 6y ago
> This combination of forces would lead inexorably to famine, unchecked migration, conflict and other calamities. ... and.. it does ? https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  No mention of famine
  - yorwba 6y ago
    If you just grep the list of articles for "famine", you'll miss the "malnourished children" and "hunger" mentioned in the articles.
- simonh 6y ago
  The top 7 regions creating refugees are Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, Somalia or Democratic Republic of Congo. None of them do so due to overpopulation, or even environmental or ecological crisis. They're all political issues.
  - orwin 6y ago
    South-eastern Mediterranean situation was caused by repeating drought since 2006 collapsing their agricultural production. A drought in 2010 in Russia reduced their grain production by 30% and doubled the price of grain during the winter 2010-2011: it was basically a death sentence to already famished people in some African countries (Centrafrique, but also Sudan at the time), but what wasn't expected was the price of oil declining sharply, making Syria, Lybia, Tunisia and Egypt and Algeria less solvent. Algeria managed, but other countries less so. What do you think these countries have in common?
    - kspacewalk2 6y ago
      Again, these famines are also entirely a socioeconomic crisis, not actual lack of food. If Sudan wasn't a terribly run place at war with itself on two fronts, it would not have food shortages. If Somalia had a functioning government at any point in the preceding two decades, it would not have food shortages. Supply chain disruptions occur all the time in the global food market, but in non-basketcase countries there's enough resiliency for this to never reach anywhere near "death sentence" territory. >What do you think these countries have in common? Terrible authoritarian governments that buy off its impoverished populaces with a mirage of huge food subsidies, while stealing most of the wealth of their nations for themselves.
drewcoo 6y ago
> Our climate issues are in large due to overpopulation and subsequent increasing demand for resources Industrialization, not population is to blame. Maybe we have an industrialization crisis. But it's difficult to blame that on "developing nations" so it probably won't get much press. Then again, things like the Paris Agreement provide incentives to move polluting industry to China, so nationalist anti-Chinese media may eventually lay the blame on industrialization.
- lupire 6y ago
  Another way to frame it is we have a developed-world population crisis. I agree that still makes "8billion+" a false alarm. But another way to say it that if we are to lift the materialistic standard of living for the other 4 billion people, there needs to be same or less population of them.
jonnycomputer 6y ago
But in many ways the situation described was true, until artificial nitrogen fertilizer was invented. It is apparent that we've been pretty good at improving productivity and efficiency. But use of fertilizer has caused other problems.
rmrfrmrf 6y ago
This is incorrect. The richest 10% of the population causes 49% of climate change. The poorest 50% of the population causes 10%.
- andrew_ 6y ago
  Please cite sources for statistics like these.

amriksohata 6y ago

The sheer ignorance of this statement: "The myth, as is commonly told, tells the story of a mid-twentieth century world headed for disaster. There were too many people being born and not enough food being produced. This combination of forces would lead inexorably to famine, unchecked migration, conflict and other calamities. However, thanks to the inventiveness of Western scientists more food was produced, Armageddon was avoided, and the world did not experience a population crisis." But also thanks to the green revolution we have pesticides and fertilisers that made this happen, that are causing cancer all over Punjab and created massive wealth disparities. Not to mention we never needed all this food, if the population was in control. But the population exploded because of Western invasions that resulted in mass poverty! Thanks "western" scientists!

marcus_holmes 6y ago
The article agrees with you. It was all a ruse to satisfy US domestic political concerns. As were/are a lot of the 20th Century world "problems", it is becoming apparent.
- liaukovv 6y ago
  Really makes you think
jansan 6y ago
> But the population exploded because of Western invasions that resulted in mass poverty! I disagree. IMO it exploded because improvements in medical care resulted in a dramatic reduction in child deaths, but people kept having the same number of children.
- amriksohata 6y ago
  The Indian population went from 50 million to 300 million under British rule, then tripled again after 20-30 years when most did not have access to that medical care.
throwaway210222 6y ago

roenxi 6y ago

I think a mindset has developed in some circles that runs "well, in the 1960s it looked like we were all doomed and we did fine without a plan. So if it looks like we're all doomed now we can just rush in head first and we'll be fine". Planning to be pleasantly surprised is not a clever plan. The fact that the world didn't end from 1960-2020 in defiance of the evidence of 3,000BCE through 1960AD is not that comforting. There will also be doomsayers, but there will also always be resource constraints.

jansan 6y ago

I never fails to puzzle me that a potential rising of the sea level of 50cm by 2050 resulting in 11% loss of land in Bangladesh is seen as a major threat, while at the same time its population growth that will roughly double in the same period is brushed off as nothing. Also, news tell us that in Syria climate change has resulted in food shortage in recent years. But having to feed twice as many people from the same land compared to 1985 sure cannot be the reason, right?

TulliusCicero 6y ago
A quick googling suggests that Bangladesh's current fertility rate is around 2 births per woman, which is actually just under replacement rate. The birth rate across the globe has been steadily on the decline for some time, there aren't many more places left where rapid doublings are still possible.
- greenwich26 6y ago
  There's almost nowhere in Asia with high fertility anymore. All 21st century population growth will be African, specifically sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates are stubbornly holding around 4 to 4.5 births per woman. And the worst countries, like Somalia and Niger, are still well above 6 births per woman, declining by much less than 1 birth per woman per decade.
  - chub500 6y ago
    Worst? You mean _highest_? These people will be caring for your kids in their nursing home.
- ericmay 6y ago
  Sure, but I’d argue that the replacement rate itself is at an unsustainable level. Climate change and the loss of species and such is one manifestation of overpopulation. Covid-19 could be viewed as another, in my opinion. Obviously this is all rich coming from an American living in the suburbs (I don’t really see what my alternatives are), but I can’t help but think we can only sustain around a billion people without destroying the planet (speculation). We live in a golden age of cheap energy and consumption. People get in gasoline powered cars and drive a mile down the road to get a snack. That’s impossible to maintain. Not only do we have overpopulation, but we built unsustainable cities, predicated on infinite cheap energy ($2.50 gas). Electric cars won’t fix this, although they’ll help.

jojobas 6y ago

There are way more people on Earth than Earth can sustain in what we consider a life worth living. As bloodthirsty capitalism pulls more and more people out of poverty we discover that putting a steak on everyone's table and a fresh car in everyone's garage is too taxing on the atmosphere, wildlife, forests and what not. We seem to have to choose between a smaller luxurious population and billions and billions of people living in pods eating synthetic food.

rayiner 6y ago
> There are way to many people on Earth than Earth can sustain in what we consider a life worth living This point of view comes up a lot in connection with climate change, and I always find it incredibly offensive. My dad was reminiscing the other day about his happy childhood growing up in a village in Bangladesh in the 1950s. This was back when 1 in 3 kids didn’t live to the age of 5. Even an RCP 8.5 scenario isn’t going to turn the developed world into Bangladesh circus 1950. Hell it won’t turn Bangladesh into Bangladesh in 1950. People will still have a standard of living that makes life incredibly worthwhile, because we as human beings were designed to need little to find life worthwhile. That’s not an argument against investing in renewables or whatever. But the Malthusian arguments about climate change are quite misanthropic. Trump got in trouble for calling places “shithole countries.” But nobody blinks and eye when someone casually implies that people in those countries would have been better off never having been born.
- jojobas 6y ago
  One may be happy in a mud hut eating nothing but corn, but generally not after getting used to proper construction, sanitation, food etc. Recent history shows that there's no holding previously backwards countries from advancing their consumption. As Russians joke, the global famine will come when the Chinese start using forks. China, India and SE Asia are quickly upping their per-capita production and consumption of carbon-heavy goods. Brazil doesn't destroy Amazon out of spite. We have no moral right to say "Nonono, you can't do what we did in the 20th century and live like us!".
  - 6y ago

nahuel0x 6y ago

Now take in account the ecosystems destroyed and the picture is very different. We must leave behind the humans-only perspective.

HenryKissinger 6y ago
Return to monke.
kiba 6y ago
Human-only perspective? That is assuming we can thrive if not not without an ecosystem.
BurningFrog 6y ago
We should always value humans over other species, and if you disagree you're an enemy of our species.
- namdnay 6y ago
  You can value humans over other species without assigning a nil value to the latter
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    What does that mean concretely? Would you have something like an exchange rate where 2000 chicken lives = 1 human life?
    - iterati 6y ago
      More like "if all the bugs die because we use too many pesticides, the systems that support life on this planet will collapse."
      - BurningFrog 6y ago
        Which is exactly how someone caring only about human lives would reason.

Barrin92 6y ago

the dismissal of Malthus seems itself ideological. It's not due to any necessary reason that Malthusianism itself is wrong, quite obviously putting population pressure on restrained resources is an actual disaster. What was wrong with Malthus or the food scare talked about in the article is simply that they made their argument about the wrong thing and at the wrong time, the rebuttal is based on contingent facts. There may very well come the point, and as others have pointed out climate is already maybe one such issue, where we run into a situation where the right technical solution or political fix does not exist. Locally of course there have been countless of Malthusian examples, put a city under siege, or a country (see Yemen's blockade) and you will see how Malthusian the world is pretty quickly. Of course some of the conclusions Malthus drew (the mentioned culling of the sick) in the article are inhumane and reprehensible, but nobody today really argues for any of that stuff. But what Malthus today is still useful for is provide an antidote to the 'perpetual growth' mindset that has no other answer to anything than to grow yourself out of every problem.

oilbagz 6y ago
>nobody today really argues for any of that stuff ahem https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/themes/population-policies https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/themes/population-pol... https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/20140918-PDR-pop.html https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/20140918-PDR-pop.htm... https://blog.iiasa.ac.at/2014/02/27/what-is-the-optimal-fertility-rate/ https://blog.iiasa.ac.at/2014/02/27/what-is-the-optimal-fert... https://www.ined.fr/en/glossary/population-policy/ https://www.ined.fr/en/glossary/population-policy/ Malthus should be targeted by the time-travellers for culling as soon as convenient ..
- lupire 6y ago
  Those pages promote birth control (with a focus on avoiding forced reproduction/birth) not culling the sick. Are you making a handwaving argument about supposed genocide via birth control?
  - oilbagz 6y ago

tonetheman 6y ago

Maybe there is not a population crisis. But if you interrupt the supply chain where I live in the smallest bit (as we have seen) then there is not enough food for every person. Perhaps that is not a population crisis but as we add more people it will only get worse. Maybe enough people are dying that it evens out.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

74B5 6y ago

Poluation x Goods/Services x Energy/Resource demand x Waste production = Human impact on earth It seems fairly common to picture the earth heading to an unstable overpopulation but imo this is only a comfortably narrowed down perspective on large scale problems. Especially for western countries, it is tempting to focus on the global population issue because this is primarily a phenomenon of rural, poor regions, so not their own. The other three mayor factors at play here would unfortunately require to rethink basic economics and this would reach deep down into societies. I suspect some sort of psychological "the others fault" self defense emerging in large. I have to be honest here, i fell for it too at first. Even if the overpopulation would be the only factor we face, its solution would still be large scale and system questioning because either you throw away any moral standards or you end up creating and distributing wealth in a sustainable way. No, simply the delivery of contraception is no solutions only good healthcare and especially the education of girls/women.

saddlerustle 6y ago
It's possible to generate energy, harvest resources and store waste with minimal impact to other life on earth.
- foobiekr 6y ago
  This is a “no true Scotsman” argument. We quite obviously have not demonstrated this is an actual possibility.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  So why do we pollute and kill? It is possible for you and me to climb Mt. Everest. In all likelihood, neither of us is going to spend several years and all his savings towards this goal. Possible does not mean practical.

m0llusk 6y ago

This is interesting political analysis, but the fact remains that the global population is topping out at several billion with almost all arable land already being farmed and ecological impacts accumulating. All these related problems may have solutions, but reframing the situation doesn't really address potential for improvement.

jonnycomputer 6y ago
Yes. Problems like this one: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution.html https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution.... are an unintended consequence of scale. I don't have good solutions, and the way our economies are set up discourage population degrowth (see the panic in Europe), and there are many bad, immoral ways to go about it, but so many of our problems are not a problem with technologies employed, but the scale at which they are employed.
saddlerustle 6y ago
If we were running low on resources for food production you'd expect to see food prices increasing. But broadly, food is cheaper than ever.
- slothtrop 6y ago
  Ecological damage and collapses occur well before we'd run out of resources. Just because we can encroach on more and more land, at the expense of the environment, doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
  - majani 6y ago
    Increasing agricultural productivity nowadays doesn't involve encroaching more land. And the developing nations, where the populations are booming, are still on the lower end of agricultural productivity. Combine that with the fact that populations appear to top off at a certain level of prosperity, and you'll realize that we'll be just fine.

BurningFrog 6y ago

As I've gotten older and seen predicted doomsdays come and go, I've started to think that expecting armageddon is an innate part of human psychology. I'm not aware of any era or place where many people have not expected the world to meet disaster soon. It's a part of all major religions.

jaegerpicker 6y ago
Sure and I agree with that but that doesn't mean that armageddon isn't coming either. For example Climate Change and the Covid19 pandemic, both are examples of very real problems with the potential to severally harm/kill large numbers but both are dismissed with that attitude. I'm not sayin that the sky is falling in either case, though with Climate Change I can't imagine not thinking that, but if we continue to ignore them it's very likely that we will make human kinds worst nightmares come true.
- frockington1 6y ago
  There have been doomsday Climate predictions as long you can go back. Historically, look at the flood stories and you can see climate worry in biblical times. More recently Miami Beach is always going to be underwater 5 years from the prediction date. It's a serious problem, but there has always been a cult like following to climate change. Personally, I think it's best to ignore the hysterical predictions and focus on your own impact and responsibilities
  - ta988 6y ago
    That's assuming that only controlling our own impact is sufficient to limit the problems.
    - marshmallow_12 6y ago
      periods of global cooling and warming have always happened (ice age). The fear is our activities are accelerating the change, not that it causes it
- 6y ago

fallingfrog 6y ago

The population bomb thesis was reasonable, up until about the 1970’s. But it turns out, if you give women access to education and birth control, the problem mostly goes away. I don’t know if I really fault people before then for worrying about it, perhaps the worrying was partly responsible for the solution. People say the same thing about nuclear war: all those marches were useless because the war never happened. How do you know the marches weren’t the reason the war never happened? People are definitely going to say the same thing about climate change, if we manage to mitigate it: see, nothing bad happened, you wasted your time. No, the fact that we acted will have been why nothing bad happened.

foobiekr 6y ago
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. It always amazes me that people take the predictions about one trajectory of human population as crazy/fringe but the other prediction as some kind of scientific law. In addition, we are well past the viable population for even a moderate footprint lifestyle. We got to neatly 8B by keeping half the world at 1/10th or less the resource and environmental footprint of the rest. It’s like a king in a massively overpopulated nation of relentlessly constrained citizens looking out at his gardens and saying, “see? No problems, and those fools predicted the country would collapse.”
- thu2111 6y ago
  Nobody "kept" half the world poor, they did that to themselves. Look at the vast amounts of aid that's been sent to nearly every poor country over the decades. Huge sums. In the end the big success is China, which didn't need such aid. They solved their own problems (well, sort of, economically at least). The poor parts of the world are still poor because they make a lot of bad decisions, it's terrible but when you drill in and study what goes on in those places it's plain to see. The poorer parts of the world would stop having so many babies as they got richer anyway, it seems.
- fallingfrog 6y ago
  True, there’s a survivorship bias too especially in the case of nuclear war where we probably got through the Cold War more by dumb luck than anything else, but people assume there was no other way that could have turned out. The human population is expected to peak at around 11 billion; I have no idea whether the earth can support that many, certainly not with the way our civilization works right now.

anyonecancode 6y ago

I do think many challenges are painted in worst possible case terms -- like Hollywood blockbusters where the stakes are always the world, of even the galaxy or the entire universe -- but by fixating on how that particular exaggeration is nearly always invariably wrong we miss the fact that, even at lower stakes, predicted catastrophes are often still plenty catastrophic. To give a quick, immediate example, though I'm currently writing from a internet connected, well heated house rather than from a scene from The Stand, 500,000+ and counting deaths in my country and many more worldwide isn't exactly something to shrug at... I wish our collective psychology was able to accept crises as serious without resorting to raising the stakes to cosmic levels or dismissing it as not a real problem if you, personally, come out mainly ok.

subsubzero 6y ago

There are so many catastrophes that have been thrust upon people by the media that never borne out their outcomes. A few of note: -In the mid 80's every newspaper in California was warning of killer bees[1] that were going to invade the state and kill many people, alot of my family members were quite nervous about them and the media made a point about its not a matter of if but when these bees arrive in the state, the coverage was blanket until about the 90's when it died down. - Y2k meltdown - This was also hyped beyond belief by the media and doomsday scenarios were drummed up to an extraordinary frenzy until really nothing bad happened after the new years[2], I remember being at a new years party in menlo park and people were saying that the lights may go out due to the bug. - In the years 2017/2018 the media was drumming up automation of all jobs by AI/robots/self driving cars, people were extremely worried that the most wouldn't have a job in a few years, but in 2019 unemployment hit a 50 year low[3], I'm not saying this won't come to pass, just the media's timeline was totally wrong. The stuff thats been really bad, 9/11, financial crisis of 2008, covid-19 has all come on very suddenly and most people were caught totally off guard. The things people should really worry about are: Lack of water (aquifers that took tens of thousands of years to be filled are close to be drained in many parts of the midwest and west[4] of the US. A large solar storm similar to the Carrington event[5] knocking out all of the electrical grid(and electronics) of a large portion of the planet. A supervolcano/or caldera erupting and cooling the earths climate down dramatically, think crops dying and extreme famine. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem [3] - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/04/jobs-report---september-2019.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/04/jobs-report---september-2019... [4] - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/vanishing-midwest-ogallala-aquifer-drought https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/vanishin... [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

Animats 6y ago

The author has one anecdote about the US and India arguing over food aid, and he projects that into "population growth was not a problem". Why fertility rates declined worldwide is the big question. Worldwide, births per female were about 5 in 1960 and about 2.4 worldwide now. That is a huge, and unexpected, trend. Japan, South Korea, and the EU are in actual decline. Nobody really expected a change that big. It's still not really understood. The usual explanations are contraceptives, more women working, etc. Lower sperm counts, maybe, but probably not. (Not central Africa, though. There, the fertility rate is still around 4.) India population growth - graph.[1] [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/population https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/population

8draco8 6y ago
IMHO education plays huge role. More often people decide to go to collage, then have a career, people also learn what a huge effort have to be put into rising child. On top of that there is so many fantastic things that person can do and have to give up at least to some extend if having a baby. In my opinion those are huge factors. This is a reason why on average successful, well educated people tend to have less children even though they have all the resources to have a lot of them.
- snarf21 6y ago
  Agreed, the best way to raise the standard of living is to educate women and loan them money. They now have options. They are stuck being baby factories. When this happens, population growth quickly follows.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Citation to back up your comment: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-change-in-the-number-of-children-women-have https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...
danans 6y ago
> It's still not really understood. Is it really not that well understood? In countries and regions that are highly industrialized (like the societies you mention), having more than 2-3 children doesn't provide any more economic security like it does for largely agrarian and manual-labor based societies.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

The biggest issue with Malthusian predictions is that humans are Earth’s greatest resources. Nature is very unforgiving. It is human cultivation and exploitation of natural resources that allows for humans to thrive. The more we can educated and develop our population, the higher the chance of breakthroughs that enable us to support even more people with the same amount of raw resources.

firebaze 6y ago

Humans are bad in estimating exponential growth (like, totally - we're good in suppressing bad news, and _very_ bad in accepting ideas we don't like) Still, we're depending on exponential growth (be it pension funding, companies, inflation, you name it). We're lying to ourselves regarding population. Ok, too many people - we'll resort to a vegetarian diet - oh wait, that's not sustainable, too many people. Well, we'll be vegans! Oh wait, not sustainable also, we'll need gene editing (bad, but we'll accept that reaching a certain threshold). Well, then let's grow our food in vertical farms! Seems sustainable, until we reach the next (last?) limit. This expands to anything (ICE vs EE, flying vs train travel). Unless we accept this inherent flaw and restrict us accordingly, we'll outgrow anything. Oh well, then let's just ... ? Go to mars :) (I truly believe this is the only mid-term sustainable¹ option, since we'll never be able to have at most only 2 children as a population - and I'd love to gain as much hate for this statement as possible if I were proven false). ¹ Mars will not be enough in just a few centuries, probably even just decades

ravi-delia 6y ago
Humans are indeed bad at estimating exponential growth, but you may have fallen into your own trap. We have already vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet in Malthus's time. The reason is exponential growth in technology. Technological progress is dependent on current level of technology, and population. As population grows, so does technology. It's hard to imagine how to effectively feed the theoretical maximum population, but then again it was hard to imagine profitably extracting oil from arctic shale or natural gas from long-tapped reserves in Appalachia. I wouldn't bet against this exponential continuing long into the future.