I agree mostly except for the last sentence. Jobs are obviously important but, individually and collectively, people get creative and can find solutions to live on very little money if they have to. It won’t be pretty (look at places like Detroit even within the U.S.) but most people can survive in some fashion.
Potable water is different. If that starts to run out, it can kill in days, incite wars and all kinds of other nasty things like epidemics if people are desperate enough to drink unsafe water. The world isn’t going to run out of potable water all at once but it could easily develop a number of hotspots where water becomes the fuse that lights the stick of dynamite.
I certainly never said that the developed countries will be suffering from famine.
What is going to affect us is the vast migration of refugees, and the spread of disease. Also the moral horror of watching large numbers of people die.
A job shortage isn’t a problem, because nobody actually wants a job. Everyone needs a livelihood, and most people want a vocation, but neither of those are the same thing as jobs, and automation won’t take either of those away.
The answer to the OP is that overpopulation led, intentionally or not, to a degree of passing the buck.
In terms of overpopulation of course the US is sitting pretty: it’s a big, relatively sparsely-populated country.
But in terms of energy use, CO2 footprint etc, the average american is much worse for the planet even than the average european, let alone developing countries.
Or look at it on a somewhat smaller scale. I live in China.
If overpopulation is our primary concern then we can say there is no problem: population is stable now. Perhaps we’d encourage some of the ethnic minorities to have fewer children* and call it a day.
But the actual problem / elephant in the room, is that China is still a rapidly industrializing country, that’s already very wasteful and polluting, per capita, in the more prosperous parts of the country. If China doesn’t move to more sustainable practices now, before hundreds of millions more become middle class, we’re fucked.
They are still allowed to have larger families, though they still account for a minute fraction of china’s population. I’m not saying that trying to get them to have smaller families would be a good idea in any way; I’m saying that kind of them vs us thinking is what often comes out of discussing overpopulation.
Well for better or worse China can unilaterally nationally enforce whatever green energy policies it deems necessary to curb the problem. Hypothetically* if* those polices are rational and effective they are in better position than nations where this sort of action will have to be debated to death.
I was born in 1960. While new technology has made the world a better place for some, myself included, I’ve always felt that there are just too many people. And not enough planet.
Could it be that homosexuality and the beginning of that acceptance (as slow as it is) is a natural curb to population growth?
Perhaps without the need to make babies for farm workers on your 40 acres, and technology the human race is less inclined to create offspring?
Having many children is a rational economic decision for the very poor in rural areas. In a place without Social Security and 401ks, your children are your only safety net. And with a high childhood disease burden, you’ll need to have quite a few to guarantee you’ll have some that live into adulthood. In any case, on farms kids are relatively inexpensive, and return much of that investment in household or farm work.
When people start getting jobs that need education and kids stop dying of disease, the equation changes. Education is expensive, and it becomes more sensible to make a larger investment in a smaller number of kids.
Honestly I don’s see that effecting any county will enough military horsepower to do serious border control if it were deemed a national priority. If it gets to the point tens of millions of starving and diseased people are fleeing famine stricken areas (let’s just say Africa in this case) because the population is too high to be sustained developed nations are just going to close the doors, even if military force is required, and let them die.
Plus threat wise while starving people might have huge numbers I’m not seeing how they are going to pose any real threat to modern armies. If a nation feels there is an existential threat at the door respect for human rights and due process etc etc will be thrown in the trash so fast it will make your head spin. Witness 9-11.
There is already a big curb to population growth: wealth. As countries become wealthier their birth rate drops. It’s projected to go below replacement levels for many developed countries.
Unfortunately though, as wealth increases the environmental footprint of each citizen tends to increase.
So again this goes back to the OP’s question. A country that’s becoming wealthy, but not making any attempt to use green energy, recycle, protect their waterways etc, is probably on the right side of the overpopulation problem but is worse for the planet. Hence why we moved the emphasis.
A macro* water issue is a food issue. Only a tiny % of water is directly consumed by humans. Agricultural use dwarfs that, as does use that’s neither (industrial, watering lawns, washing machines, bathing etc).
So one can argue about a global sustainability problem wrt water, mindful of all the predictions of past resource limits of various kinds which have proven false, though also mindful that past false alarms don’t mean that all alarms will always be false. But the result of widespread water shortages would be lack of food. If the issue was food prices rose to price some people out of eating, and no collective action was taken to counter that, while water for lawns etc. remained practically free, that would be a local political problem not a true water shortage. A global catastrophe is where wise policies to efficiently develop, distribute and correctly price water resources are not enough, and that ‘not enough’ would manifest itself as not enough food. Unfortunately in many respects the world is very far from distributing and pricing water efficiently on the whole. OTOH that’s good news in that a lot more ‘sustainability’ could be achieved by doing that and it’s not nearly as daunting a political undertaking as the impossible (IMO) idea that countries would drastically reduce their living standard to greatly cut CO2 emissions.
‘Jobs’ are not a ‘resource’ except in a colloquial/political terms. The issue of employment is social/economical, a human problem like crime, potentially serious but basically different in kind than the whole planet running out of a resource it can’t substitute for.
*as opposed to a micro water issue like contaminated drinking water in particular locations and people too poor to remediate it. That’s a lack of application of resources which do exist, just like the issue of some people without enough food. That problem also exists right now, always has and perhaps always will to some degree.
How the hell can an economy of any kind provide food if there were not enough usable land/water to grow enough ? People ate before markets, and will when markets are dead: markets are a complete non sequitur as far as produce is concerned.
Many posters have cited increasing prosperity=lower birth rates as a factor that somewhat mitigates concerns that there are too many babies being born. But shouldn’t the real concern be with over-consumption? If the population were halved but the remaining half consumes twice as much aren’t the potential “problems” the same?
That goes way too far in the opposite direction from the post you responded to, though it was also too absolute IMO. There’s potentially a situation where an efficient market in agriculture can’t produce food at a price everyone globally can afford, even with a sustainable redistribution of income/wealth aside from agriculture (food aid). There’s no immutable law saying that couldn’t happen, I agree.
However it’s way too much to say markets are a non sequitur to producing food. Famines have repeatedly occurred in places without well functioning markets where we know the same people with a market economy could either produce enough food or enough other goods to pay for food from other places (eg. N v. S Korea as the just the most extreme).
The inhibitions to functioning free markets in agriculture in very poor countries from corruption, civil unrest, lack of clear property rights (for farmers to borrow against land) and general lack of the rule of law are major obstacles to getting out from under the shadow of population eventually outstripping food production capacity*. And these problems are very difficult to address from the outside. But if one were for example to ignore this aspect in Africa, the place in the world now mainly with significant organic population growth, it would be very mistaken. It’s very very far from a non sequitur.
*from both sides, high fertility rate characteristic of poor societies and growth in food production.
Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses. How could that be irrelevant to the question of how we will utilize scarce resources to feed people?
Focusing on land for just a moment, it works like this:
Step 1: As the supply of food starts becoming inadequate, the price of food goes up.
Step 2: As the price of food goes up, the potential gain for food producers with food to sell goes up.
Step 3: As the potential gain goes up, the motivation for those producers to produce more food goes up.
Step 4: Thus more food is produced, and soon there is enough for everyone to eat.
In old times, if someone wanted to produce more food, they generally needed to till more land. That is no longer true. In the USA, for instance, we produce many times more food today than we did 50 years ago, while actually using less farmland, and thus allowing millions of acres to return to nature. This happened because of technology: genetically engineered crops and animals, better pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, and better storage and distribution networks that waste less. The market motivates inventors to create the technologies, and motivates farmers to put them into use as quickly as possible.
Actually a number of people have been saying exactly this, including me, twice. In detail.
It’s not that overpopulation is not a problem. It that it’s a level removed from the real issues of our use of resources and damage to the environment, and these things are not as strongly-coupled as some seem to assume.
Africa’s population is projected to increase a great deal in the next 20 years, but I can confidently say the effect on the environment will be minimal compared to, say, China’s middle class doubling in size. And the latter has nothing to do with population.
Overpopulation is a way of framing our problems that Americans like, because it makes them feel like the good guys for living in a relatively sparsely-populated country.
Perhaps not but our response to drought is. Los Angeles couldn’t by itself supply anywhere near enough water to suit its current population, yet they have green lawns and active agriculture.