The Global Population Crisis That Never Was (opens in new tab)

Those are good things.

We don’t want 12-14 billion humans. The biosphere is already under enormous stress.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11018

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?

Picking something unlikely but possible, imagine if water becomes scarce enough that half the population of India can't afford market price and must do without.

That thought is pretty much enough to refute the refutation. The idea that a resource can't run out because "economics happens" is simply a non-sequitur. Economics is perfectly comfortable with optimising a bunch of humans out of the system because they can't produce enough to justify their resource consumption. That is what a Malthusian collapse would look like economically speaking.

All of Malthus’ predictions have come true. They just did so in his past, not future. Malthusian model is the standard one to describe evolution of human populations up until 17th century or so. If you are familiar with scientific literature, with economic history, with population genetics etc, the Malthusian model is pretty much the consensus view these days. See, for example Gregory Clark’s “Farewell to Alms” or Shennan’s “First Farmers of Europe”.

The biggest fail of Malthus was that he made his argument at exactly the worst possible time, when the growth in productive capacity has for the first time in history exceeded the growth in population. However, since at his time, the past was much more of a mystery than it is now, predicting the past was almost as difficult back then as predicting the future. Since his predictions have been completely validated by the historical and archeological record we have since then recovered, this must be credited to him.

People always say this, but it isn't true. Malthus lived in a time of quickly increasing productivity, he of course knew crop yields, etc. would likely increase. But he also knew there were eventual limits to that increase, the Earth only gets so many watts of solar energy, only has so much land area to cultivate, etc. So he thought that the exponential growth of human pop. would necessarily eventually hit those limits.

Indeed, Malthus actually ages better then he's given credit for. His solution to the problem he poses is pretty close to the modern one, that a more educated and well-off population will decrease their fertility, so that eventually population growth will level off. (Malthus's actual view of the mechanism here is pretty Victorian, he talks a lot about "Public Morality" and I don't think he mentions "birth-control" in any form, but his basic idea is correct)

In computing we say that all problems are O(1) in the limit, because there is a practical limit to the available resources.

The devil is in the details, and escaping the trap once isn't a permanent solution. Feeding us more efficiently now by poisoning our environment isn't a long term solution.

The problem with that refutation is, population growth is O(2^n), available space is O(1) and available food is limited by available space and energy. Maybe there will be advances in science, increasing food production. However, to keep up with O(2^n) we need to double food production in constant time intervals, around 40 years. Otherwise, there will be overpopulation. There is no escaping it, except if exponential population growth is stopped and prevented in the future.

And food production following an O(2^n) curve is highly improbable, the best we can imho do is something polynomial or linear.

That's why Malthuus might have been a little wrong back then, but basic mathematics or computer science knowledge instantly proves him right, just not back then, because humanity got lucky.

Being prepared for emergencies is prudent. And most contingencies require the same basic preparations and planning. A store of non perishables, water and a way to purify more, a good rifle and ammo, clothes for adverse conditions, perhaps a generator etc are all good to keep on hand.

But the number of times in human history the world has "ended" can be counted on one hand. That time 10k years ago when the human population had a big bottleneck, maybe a super volcano. The bronze age collapse is another. The fall of the western roman empire. That's about it.

But there are many more smaller events that still warrant emergency preparedness. Catastrophic weather, civil unrest and war count.

An even more rational approach is think about it in terms of classes of scenarios to prepare for – many threats can be averted and/or mitigated through common preparations. Seed stores, distributed infrastructure, general survival training, and so on. But given how remote many scenarios seem to most people making decisions, the extra effort for long term benefits over short term gains tends to favor the latter over the former.

Nice Heller/Kobain reference.

"Kids these days":

> The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

― Socrates (~470BC - 399BC)

Climate change ? I don't doubt it's happening but the doom scenarios seem in line with all those predictions

Will be hard to consider humans successful if they don't prevent the human-made climate catastrophe from completely destroying most sustainable life-supporting ecosystems on the planet.

I think the earth is too large to have an Armageddon over a very short period of time (perhaps the span of one life.) Instead, things become worse at local scale. Yemen has been having (and continues to have? I haven't kept up) a nice, local Armageddon. The United States is large, and well resourced. Short of nuclear war, there will be nice places in the US for a long time, even if the overall measure of things becomes objectively worse. It may just be that "disaster" and "Armageddon," as BurningFrog has suggest is a pretty bad heuristic. The climate crisis is quite real, but it won't make the whole earth unlivable in a short period of time. Instead, some places will get worse, and humanity will be squeezed into different locales.

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I do accept that it could become a whole-earth disaster that affects everything, but my point is that this may take generations.

> 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.

No. I have that attitude, and I'm not dismissing either!

I think they're both serious problems that will cause a lot of pain as they're being worked through.

What I disagree with is doomsday scenarios where they'll be the end of human civilization.

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

How do the "Precursors" get around evolution?

I've seen this used as a plot seed for any number of space operas, but as far as I can recall, I haven't seen any that used it and also explained how they were able to somehow instill traits which, over hundreds of millions or billions of years, could not only remain present but unexpressed in the genomes of Nth-generation offspring, but could then, in response to some kind of extremely specific and complex stimulus, be expressed - but only when needed, and in perfect accord with the original intelligent design.

It sounds like I'm making fun here, and I'll admit I picked the phrase "intelligent design" with puckishness aforethought. But it's a serious question, and what I'm really looking for is media recs. Does anyone actually reckon with this, in a way that's plausibly compossible with our current understanding of genomic heredity?

(Introns and pseudogenes don't count, and yes, I remember that hilarious TNG S6 episode that used them as an excuse to give Barclay even more not-very-well-depicted psychological problems. Sure, these regions aren't translated into proteins, but they remain as susceptible to all the ordinary mechanisms of mutation as any other part of the genome. Not only that, being unexpressed, they are if anything less likely to be conserved than exons, so the "alien space magic hidden in non-coding DNA!" thing doesn't fly.)

Or a very realistic hypothesis that the trait has been selected due to numerous tribe-ending disasters in prehistoric times.

If humans did nothing, we could expect glaciation in the next 100 years or so. Do people really think what we're doing can prevent that? If so, do they really think we can regulate the planet well enough to avoid both bad outcomes?

From the article:

“The situation in the United States is that to get a response, the need must be somewhat overplayed”

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.

Sure, this sounds reasonable, but it's really not when you look at the magnitudes of our impact over time. It's clear that the actions of the last 50-100 years or so are in extreme excess of what can be stabilised by the global weather and ecological systems. We've gone from about two thirds remaining natural wilderness in the world in the early 1900s to one third remaining today. The continued survival of most species, including ours, is very much in danger if we don't reverse a lot of this.

We don’t, however, have any idea how to keep humans alive after killing of all the other species. We appear to be totally reliant on some part of the natural world continuing to work, and we don’t know what part of it is required. Prudence suggests we be cautious about how much of it we decide to kill off.

You can value humans over other species without assigning a nil value to the latter

Valuing humans over other species at all costs leads to humans collapsing our environment and thus harming humans.

We should always value our family and friends over others, or else you are an enemy of family and friends. Also race, religious and ethnic group...

What's your point?

What if we found a living Neanderthal village. They’re taking up space that an equivalent human village could, should we get rid of them?

The thing everyone always forgets about food production in armchair analysis is that it is not constant. Some years we produce more, some years we produce less. We can smooth across space and time to keep short-term or regional shortfalls from becoming a famine, and we do so most of the time, most places.

In any year, in any place where there is not a famine, we are, by definition, producing more food than anyone wants to consume, in aggregate at least if not for individuals. Whenever you are producing an excess of something, the price will fall.

Famine, if it happens, won't happen as a slow decline of food production, until at a predictable time we cross from producing 100.0000001% of the food the world needs to producing 99.9999999%. It will happen as a slow decline reducing our safety margin until some sort of three-sigma weather event makes for a really bad year -- flooding in some regions kill production here, drought in other regions kills production there, a blight on crops in otherwise fair weather, and the production for the next N months falls below the level of the stockpiles to last.

That is the point at which the market will react and food prices will go crazy. It won't do anything to help production -- some things take time, not money. It will just be the world playing musical chairs to see who gets left without enough food to eat.

Food has two types of cost, market value and ecosystem cost. It always has been this case. It's the very reason that crop rotation was discovered. By improving the ecosystem that you farm in (in this case soil but Tree windbreaks also count etc...) you increase the productivity. The issue is that most ways to improve productivity are terribly short term. Think slash/burn.

So yes food is cheaper than ever to buy but we are burning through environmental capital at dangerous and irresponsible rate IMO. The cost of food will stay cheap until it's too late and the land stops producing at the current level.

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.

The market can stay irrational longer than our biosphere can stay solvent.

It's true in a no-true-Scotsman way. There aren't vast tracts of land that are fertile and have been prepared for farming, but are being neglected, because human economic activity easily expands to fill the space available. So with the exception of some parks, sports facilities, etc, most fields in the world are being used for farming.

On the other hand, there's plenty of land that is nearly suitable for growing sustenance crops but just needs a little preparation. We don't always favour converting that land to agricultural use, e.g. in the Amazon rain forest.

However, the claim misses the point for a different reason. Even if all arable land is being farmed, it's very far from being exploited to its maximum capacity. In terms of calories per hectare per year, much of that land could be improved tenfold or more with a switch of crops or farming methods, if the economics demanded it and potatoes became as expensive as steak.

Well, we are currently removing the last big forests like Amazonas for agriculture. Have the population double again, then it's gone for certain.

African agricultural productivity is at about 1/10 US rates. So lots of headroom for improvement there.

I downvoted you because you used racism and genocide as a thought-stopping cliché.

There is no reason to ignore that countries like Niger will inevitably run into even more problems if they continue reproducing according to contemporary UN models. The projections go to 70 million people for Niger in 2050, and they have actually slightly underestimated African population growth in the past.

Feeding 70 million people in a mostly desert country with no industry to speak of is a real issue and it should not be ignored just because America has developed an allergy on anything that might be construed as racism.

This is a “no true Scotsman” argument. We quite obviously have not demonstrated this is an actual possibility.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No mention of famine

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.

> 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).

This is silly. If it only cost cents to feed a person, food wouldn't cost dollars.

Please cite sources for statistics like these.

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.

I agree with your broader point- one shouldn't tell others that their life isn't worth living. But I'm afraid maybe you're downplaying the struggles a poor Bangladeshi have to go through.

I currently live in Bangladesh. And my father made a off-handed comment few days ago about how there isn't many "thin" people in our village anymore. When he grew up in 60s, a big chunk of our village people didn't have two meals regularly, people dying of hunger wasn't so uncommon. Just two days ago a doctor friend told me hundreds of people die in his hospital every week due to lack of proper equipment. I have several times witnessed the heartbreaking scene in pharmacies where people ask for the price of a medicine, and then turn away without buying anything after hearing the price.

Overpopulation at least partly contributes to this, if not the biggest contributor. It may not be a global problem, but it definitely is a problem for a country like Bangladesh (and maybe India too). I'm not saying this people's life is worthless, but I would definitely not want a new generation of people to go through this.

Population control here is not just the pragmatic and necessary option, it's also the most humane thing to do.

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!".

China is capitalist and imperialist.

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.

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.

Really makes you think

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.

Intensive farming did, to get most out of the soil as pesticides and fertilisters drove all that need for extra water