The Depopulation Bomb Isn't Ticking, It's Overblown

How many people do we actually need?

NOTE!!! I'm not suggesting that if we figure out we only need X people and X < population(2024) that we try to depopulate to X. I'm just curious at what X would we have enough people to have a nice world, with enough people to do the jobs needed to maintain the world and provide resources to continue improving the world.

Thinking back to around 1985, when the world population was around 60% of what it was today and the US population was around 70% of what it is today, and comparing what life was like then to now, the things that are better now don't seem to be things that inherently needed an increased population in order to happen.

My TV is a lot bigger now. My computer is orders of magnitude faster, with orders of magnitude more memory and storage, with much better peripherals. My phone is a cell phone instead of a land line, and is also a much more powerful computer than my 1985 desktop computer. And of course I've got internet now, whereas back then I had dial-up to CompuServe.

My car then was a Nissan Sentra. A Nissan Sentra today would be more efficient and have a lot more electronics, but it wouldn't really be much better than my car in 1985 when it comes to meeting my transportation needs.

My food and housing then was comparable to my food and housing today. My appliances today are more efficient, but like with the car the ones in 1985 got the job done well enough.

I think I'd be as happy in a 1985-like world with current level electronics, communications, and appliances. The question then is how much of the improvement in those since 1985 depended on the population increasing?

The problem was real. Without the efforts of Henry A Wallace and Norman Borlag to increase grain yields through hybridization, we would have been in serious trouble.

With improved high-density planting and fertilizer, combined with better drought-resistant and pest-resistant high-yield grains we enjoyed a 10X (ten times!) increase in yields per acre.

Don't tell me that didn't make all the difference! All the rest of it balanced on this monumental effort. Spearheaded by two people, one managing agricultural policy and reinventing ag processes and education and the other taking up hybridization to customize crops to regions of the world.

We own them more than we can calculate.

It always felt to me that the people sounding the horn on population collapse just think that not enough of the "desirable" people are being born.

I hate articles that both attempt to reject a premise and then in the very next paragraph say .."and even if the premise is correct, it's a good thing."

Is the bomb "overblown" or are we on track to have 2 billion less people on this planet in 150 years (assuming "replacement level" rates)? (And PS those 6 billion will almost entirely be senior citizens.)

But by all means make arguments about scenarios that your headline are declaring won't happen. That definitely increases credibility.

We can survive an economic collapse more then an environmental.

I’m glad someone is comparing this to overpopulation mania. It’s the same fallacy of assuming that present trends will continue indefinitely.

I can absolutely imagine having big families coming back into fashion. In fact depopulation is likely to cause the conditions for this by making real estate cheap again among other things. Cultural, religious, and ideological shifts could also occur as well as technological advances.

It’d be a lot easier to manage resources if we managed the population down to 500 million. Thanos snap not needed.

The world is in massive massive overpopulation.

1/10 of the current population would be a nice compromise.

The only demographic against such a scenario are ponzi scheme scammers...

I certainly would welcome reduced traffic, more housing options, and not having to eat bugs (eventually).

Here’s what’ll really cook your noodle: in the US fertility is non-uniform by party affiliation. Conservatives tend to have more kids (duh). Think about that next time someone says “demographics is destiny”.

Substack is going the way of medium.

1 billion people is more than enough. The years 1865-1905 were some of the most amazing years in human history, and there were only ~ 1 billion people on the earth.

and all these worries about having too many old people are way overblown. Any problem whatsoever which involves 70+ year old people is a short-term problem.

the irony is supporting depopulation in one area will just reward population increase in another, and supporting population increase somewhere will decrease it somewhere else. not sure the specific rule at play, but it seems to have to do with all things expanding to consume their available capacity.

north america and the West effectively ended teen motherhood and reduced the birthrate to below replacement rate, but populations have still skyrocketed from immigration because that gap made the economic capacity available.

the presumption in not worrying about depopulation is that people globally are interchangeable. Seeing humanity as an undifferentiated, homogeneous mass conflates sophisticated cultures with undeveloped ones and presumes you are somehow both above them all and can manage it, instead of being respectable peers in different and separate cultures. it's a fatal conceit as we are seeing play out in european cities today.

That's the begged question in all this post-national global homogenization stuff. No nations, one humanity, and yet under whose governance and dominion? The thing about global governance is that if there is no alternative, there can be no consent, or even conscience, either. So from the perspective of a member of a tiny global minority with a sub-replacement birthrate, depopulation isn't fine at all, really.