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Overpopulation is not a problem. Maybe in a couple countries. But not for the world, and not for the west and definitely not for America. As the population ha
by mostertoaster 2mo ago
Overpopulation is not a problem.
Maybe in a couple countries. But not for the world, and not for the west and definitely not for America.
As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
- deeviant 2mo agoIt's a huge problem, it's just not a problem to economic model, but the ecological one.
- KPGv2 2mo agoIt's a problem to the economic model, too, but of course no one cares about more than a couple fiscal quarters in the future. The looming ecological disasters will irreversibly destroy the global economy in some of our lifetimes if nothing happens to stop it pretty soon.
- matchbok3 2mo agoPeople have been saying the climate is going to fall apart and kill us all for the past 30 years. It's time for a new approach.
- KPGv2 2mo agoAre you...ignorant of how many of the refugee crises are because of climate change? Like literally right now? In 2024 alone, about 40M people were displaced due to climate change, and that's a doubling from ten years ago.
- throw-the-towel 2mo agoIt is a problem, because all these people want a good standard of living which strains the environment.
- jppittma 2mo agoEach marginal person produces more than they consume. As a whole, everyone is better off for having more people.
- HappySweeney 2mo agoOnly if you average it all out. The over 65 crowd does not produce more than they consume.
- Razengan 2mo ago> The over 65 crowd does not produce more than they consume. So that's the end goal our species should aspire to? Produce™ and Consume™? Eternally without relent?
- KPGv2 2mo agoEach marginal person does not produce more environmental benefits than they consume. It's dramatically the opposite. My butt is not a carbon capture device.
- sph 2mo agoTechnically your mouth is.
- Razengan 2mo ago> Overpopulation is not a problem. That is such a privileged first-world take. You haven't lived in overpopulated places. Just try it for 1 fucking year and then see if you still wish that hell upon anyone. I swear I'm starting to wonder if that's a take pushed by ultracapitalists so they can have an endless supply of labor and consumers, like the bans on abortion etc.
- geye1234 2mo agoNo, corporations want people without children, since they have more disposable income to spend on the pointless tat they want to sell you, and are willing to work longer hours to make rich people even richer.
- Razengan 2mo agoAh but you're forgetting the lucrative Education™ pipeline that conveniently funnels everyone into a lifetime of debt :)
- littlexsparkee 2mo agoI don't think so - children are drivers of consumption and they also reduce the agency of workers by eliminating their financial slack (less ability to jump jobs / take it easy due to higher spending floor e.g. daycare expenses, larger apartment, etc).
- geye1234 2mo agoYep, absolutely right. Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously. Malthus has been proved wrong at every juncture. Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
- epicureanideal 2mo ago> Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard. Could it have an effect like the Black Plague, where labor becomes more expensive?
- geye1234 2mo agoAll things being equal, probably yes. But remember: the uber-rich are allowing millions to immigrate to the rich world, to prevent precisely this. (I'm not commenting here on whether immigration is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, simply noting that large-scale immigration brings wages down, and that the low birthrate is consistently stated as its main driver.) Also, remember that paying for all those unproductive old people will consume enormous amounts of wealth, something that didn't apply during the Black Death.
- jaredklewis 2mo ago> Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard. Why is everyone so sure of this? My own instinct is just that we'll adapt to it and it will be fine. It's just seems like the equivalent of making one of those charts that shows we're going to run out of [some critical resource] by [some date]. They are always wrong, without exception. Because as the resource becomes more scarce, we adapt our societies to become less dependent on it. You can't just extrapolate that trend lines or relationships between statistics like GDP and population continue into the distant future; it almost never works. I don't have my own competing, grand prediction of how the distant future will pan out. But my thinking is that societies are extremely complex systems and when one variable is tweaked, generally all the other variables also adjust to compensate. I'm not against growing populations, just not overly concerned about depopulation either.
- fakedang 2mo ago> As the population has grown poverty has decreased. This is like comparing apples to oranges to find a correlation, and arriving at an incorrect causation. Falling populations are largely due to better education, specifically of women, as well as integration of women into the workforce, which has been one of the bigger drivers in curbing poverty. The latter is so significant in the west and the far east (double income households mean rising costs of living, meaning SAHM households become unviable in the West for the middle class), resulting in a significant population decrease. But in places such as the Middle East or Africa, ever increasing populations have only meant even more financial trouble for those economies. Case in point Pakistan and Egypt. In other economies such as India (which I assume is one of the "couple countries" you mentioned), overall birth rates are falling significantly to near replacement level, and in the few states/regions with high birth rates, poverty is rampant and the people reliant on subsidies from other more prosperous regions. The problem with most of the world is that while we are able to sustain a huge population as a whole globally, most of the population growth is extremely localized, resulting in population sparsity in some comfortable regions (Canada, the US, Central Asia, southern Russia) and population unsustainability in other regions completely unsuited to population growth (sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East).
- xnx 2mo ago> As the population has grown poverty has decreased. True, but not obviously a causal relationship.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Gud 2mo agoIt is a gigantic problem, we are literally destroying the planet.