[pps43]

> we were taught about the idea of overpopulation in school

That's a problem with school education. They give the wrong models. Exponential growth is impossible in nature because at some point it runs out of steam and fizzles out. Logistic curve or probit is a much better abstraction.

[neckardt]

I think the assumption was that humans would continue growing exponentially until they reach the carrying capacity where they're all fighting for the same resources. Then the population stops increasing because there's not enough food/water/shelter to go around.

What actually happened is people in rich countries have plenty of food/water/shelter to continue reproducing... if they wanted to. The thing the models didn't account for is that people would choose to have fewer children based on standard of living.

To me it seems this had nothing to do with the standard limits of nature, but based on individuals' choices. Given those models' assumptions, I think they were valid. I would have made the same assumption based on past data as well.

[stkdump]

I recently heard about a survey where people on average said that they do want to have 2.something (lets say 2.4, but I don't remember the exact number) kids. I guess it is easier to prevent overshooting, but sometimes life circumstances prevent them from having as many as they wanted. That can be as simple reasons as not finding the right partner, etc. What you see less often though, is people that want to have 4 or 5 kids, which I think is stigmatized, but it could even out those that don't have kids.

[jolmg]

> What you see less often though, is people that want to have 4 or 5 kids, which I think is stigmatized

That might vary by culture, but I can't think of a time when I've seen it be stigmatized. I imagine that current generations chose to have less than 4 kids for economic and quality of life reasons, not because they see having many kids as somehow wrong.

[pps43]

That's not a new idea. Walter Greiling projected back in the 1950s that world population would reach a peak of about nine billion, in the 21st century, and then stop growing [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...