The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

the dismissal of Malthus seems itself ideological. It&#x27;s not due to any necessary reason that Malthusianism itself is wrong, quite obviously putting population pressure on restrained resources is an actual disaster.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s blockade) and you will see how Malthusian the world is pretty quickly.<p>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 &#x27;perpetual growth&#x27; mindset that has no other answer to anything than to grow yourself out of every problem.

As I&#x27;ve gotten older and seen predicted doomsdays come and go, I&#x27;ve started to think that expecting armageddon is an innate part of human psychology.<p>I&#x27;m not aware of any era or place where many people have not expected the world to meet disaster soon. It&#x27;s a part of all major religions.

I think a mindset has developed in some circles that runs &quot;well, in the 1960s it looked like we were all doomed and we did fine without a plan. So if it looks like we&#x27;re all doomed now we can just rush in head first and we&#x27;ll be fine&quot;.<p>Planning to be pleasantly surprised is not a clever plan. The fact that the world didn&#x27;t end from 1960-2020 in defiance of the evidence of 3,000BCE through 1960AD is not that comforting.<p>There will also be doomsayers, but there will also always be resource constraints.

The author has one anecdote about the US and India arguing over food aid, and he projects that into &quot;population growth was not a problem&quot;.<p>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&#x27;s still not really understood. The usual explanations are contraceptives, more women working, etc. Lower sperm counts, maybe, but probably not.<p>(Not central Africa, though. There, the fertility rate is still around 4.)<p>India population growth - graph.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrotrends.net&#x2F;countries&#x2F;IND&#x2F;india&#x2F;population" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrotrends.net&#x2F;countries&#x2F;IND&#x2F;india&#x2F;population</a>

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

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&#x27;t really address potential for improvement.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t exactly something to shrug at...<p>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.

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.

Poluation x Goods&#x2F;Services x Energy&#x2F;Resource demand x Waste production = Human impact on earth<p>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 &quot;the others fault&quot; self defense emerging in large. I have to be honest here, i fell for it too at first.<p>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&#x2F;women.

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 <i>reason</i> the war never happened?<p>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 <i>why</i> nothing bad happened.

Humans are bad in estimating exponential growth (like, totally - we&#x27;re good in suppressing bad news, and _very_ bad in accepting ideas we don&#x27;t like)<p>Still, we&#x27;re depending on exponential growth (be it pension funding, companies, inflation, you name it).<p>We&#x27;re lying to ourselves regarding population. Ok, too many people - we&#x27;ll resort to a vegetarian diet - oh wait, that&#x27;s not sustainable, too many people. Well, we&#x27;ll be vegans! Oh wait, not sustainable also, we&#x27;ll need gene editing (bad, but we&#x27;ll accept that reaching a certain threshold). Well, then let&#x27;s grow our food in vertical farms! Seems sustainable, until we reach the next (last?) limit.<p>This expands to anything (ICE vs EE, flying vs train travel). Unless we accept this inherent flaw and restrict us accordingly, we&#x27;ll outgrow anything.<p>Oh well, then let&#x27;s just ... ? Go to mars :) (I truly believe this is the only mid-term sustainable¹ option, since we&#x27;ll never be able to have at most only 2 children as a population - and I&#x27;d love to gain as much hate for this statement as possible if I were proven false).<p>¹ Mars will not be enough in just a few centuries, probably even just decades

There are so many catastrophes that have been thrust upon people by the media that never borne out their outcomes. A few of note:<p>-In the mid 80&#x27;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&#x27;s when it died down.<p>- 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.<p>- In the years 2017&#x2F;2018 the media was drumming up automation of all jobs by AI&#x2F;robots&#x2F;self driving cars, people were extremely worried that the most wouldn&#x27;t have a job in a few years, but in 2019 unemployment hit a 50 year low[3], I&#x27;m not saying this won&#x27;t come to pass, just the media&#x27;s timeline was totally wrong.<p>The stuff thats been really bad, 9&#x2F;11, financial crisis of 2008, covid-19 has all come on very suddenly and most people were caught totally off guard.<p>The things people should really worry about are:<p>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.<p>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.<p>A supervolcano&#x2F;or caldera erupting and cooling the earths climate down dramatically, think crops dying and extreme famine.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Africanized_bee" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Africanized_bee</a> [2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Year_2000_problem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Year_2000_problem</a> [3] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;04&#x2F;jobs-report---september-2019.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;04&#x2F;jobs-report---september-2019...</a> [4] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;article&#x2F;vanishing-midwest-ogallala-aquifer-drought" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;article&#x2F;vanishin...</a> [5] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carrington_Event" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carrington_Event</a>

&quot;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.&quot;<p>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.

There are way more people on Earth than Earth can sustain in what we consider a life worth living.<p>As bloodthirsty capitalism pulls more and more people out of poverty we discover that putting a steak on everyone&#x27;s table and a fresh car in everyone&#x27;s garage is too taxing on the atmosphere, wildlife, forests and what not.<p>We seem to have to choose between a smaller luxurious population and billions and billions of people living in pods eating synthetic food.

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.

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.<p>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?

The sheer ignorance of this statement:<p>&quot;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.&quot;<p>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!<p>Thanks &quot;western&quot; scientists!