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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 mo

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.

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.