[nine_k]

Meat, especially beef, is an utterly inefficient way to produce food.

People die from hunger not because the world is not producing enough food, and even not because the world is not trying to feed people in distress. It happens mostly because local politicians or warlords tend to steal or grab the humanitarian aid, or straight out not let it in, in order to preserve their power structures, and themselves on top. They don't mind killing some compatriots for that, with guns, or with hunger, no matter.

[satvikpendem]

All food is not fungible, people eat meat because they want to eat meat, not other foods. Given that as a constant, find more efficient ways to make the same end product, because that is much less work than convincing whole swathes of people to want a different end product. Hence, lab-grown meat or plant-based meat have been way more effective at convincing people than decades of campaigning by those who want people to eat less meat.

[assimpleaspossi]

I think the real problem is there are too many people.

[nine_k]

No, not this, to my mind.

When the world was much smaller, the same problems persisted. The Great Famine of 1845 in Ireland happened not just because crops failed in Ireland. England had enough crops, and the world was ready to sell more, but the British government kept Irish ports closed for imports of foods, and English Protestant farmers were not very keen to sell to Irish Catholics (fun: both considered themselves Christians). Estimated world population at the time was about 1 billion.

Man-made famines are a really common thing all along the human history; just consider the medieval sieges of cities, and routine deliberate destruction of enemy crops. This was happening when the world had merely 300-400M people.

It's not too many people. It's too little wisdom, and too much cruelty, per person.

[briansm]

Then again, if you believe that it's not 'too many people' and you also concede that population will continue growing as it has for the last 650+ years and the planet obviously isn't growing then surely you must also concede that at some point it has to become 'too many people', the only question is when.

[nine_k]

Population growth slows down literally everywhere, and in most countries it's below replacement level.

We are living through the peak Earth population right now; it will likely be degreasing in 50 years.

[antisthenes]

Population growth slowing down is literally collective agreement on "there are too many people".

[dotnet00]

No, population growth slowing down has nothing to do with a collective agreement on their being too many people.

It's simply that people in developed countries don't want to deal with the trouble of raising more than 1 or 2 kids because raising kids is difficult and expensive. You need 2 kids to replace the 2 adults, but then you add in other mortality factors and it drops below replacement.

Most of those people aren't agreeing that there are too many people, hell in cases like Japan, even their governments want them to have more children, they're just focusing on what strikes a balance for their comfort.

[vidarh]

The population is demonstrably not continuing to grow at the same rates - all but sub-Saharan Africa is at below replacement fertility (and sub-Saharan Africa is also dropping fast), and much of the world today only experiences population growth due to immigration. With China likely now having slipped into decline net of migration, and India having dropped below fertility replacement rates and so only a couple of decades away from population decline, we're 50-100 years away from global population decline without drastic steps.

[ajuc]

According to our best estimates we're already past the "peak children". World population growth has been slowing down for decades at this point, it will become negative in second half of this century.

World hunger is not caused by too many people, it's entirely caused by our priorities. World produces more food than it needs and that production grows faster than the population.

[p-e-w]

The elephant in the room that any discussion about social issues will bend over backwards to avoid mentioning.

Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.

Yet directly addressing that fundamental problem is almost always the very last thing proposed, or even talked about.

[wbazant]

Sure, these conflicts are caused by people, but 'there' s just too many of us' isn't a suppressed thought, just a bad one that we have since moved on from. Overpopulation was a trendy idea in the 70s that inspired many ugly policies, like sterilisation of ethnic minorities.

[ajuc]

Poplation growth is slowing down everywhere, in the developed world (which uses the most energy and resources) it's been negative for some time.

Currently there's about 8 billion people, and estimates predict it will stop at 10 billion people and start to derease in the second half of this century.

So you're calling a temporary increase by 25% "elephant in the room", meanwhile the difference between resource consumption in USA (14 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) and the world average (4 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) is over 300%.

[zemvpferreira]

Because the base of our moral system is a right to human life.

Strangely I see more people volunteer the lives of others than their own to fix the planet. Never much initiative there.

[p-e-w]

Birth control is not "volunteering the lives of others". What utter nonsense.

[zztop44]

“Directly addressing that fundamental problem”… what did you have in mind?

[flir]

Raise living standards, decrease child mortality and wait two generations.

It worked for the first world.

(This is, as I understand it, a very basic summary of Bill Gates' approach).

[vidarh]

It's working everywhere. India dropped below replacement fertility a couple of years ago. The only part of the world left with above replacement growth is sub-Saharan Africa, and even the very highest, like Niger, has seen substantial drops in fertility rates.

If anything we're a few decades away from a rising panic about increasing them again.

[p-e-w]

Umm... promoting family planning instead of stigmatizing it? It's not exactly rocket science.

[astrange]

> Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.

Totally false, CO2 emissions coming from the US have fallen as the population has risen. No, that's not because of offshoring.

These things are caused by economic structure and government policy (independent of population) and technology efficiency (which gets better with more people, not worse). Examples being whether or not you're allowed to build apartments or beef is subsidized.

[p-e-w]

> Totally false, CO2 emissions coming from the US have fallen as the population has risen.

That doesn't change the fact that all else being equal, half as many people emit half the amount of CO2.

[astrange]

All else is not equal and can't be.

You're going to kill half the country and keep average household size, age, income structure and ability to build nuclear power plants the same?

[yvely]

This is a common sentiment, but I have yet to hear any reasonable proposal for solutions. It certainly is talked about a lot in my experience.

It is so easy to complain about overpopulation. But how would you solve it?

1 child policy? Didn't work out great in China. Some can have children, others can't? Doesn't exactly seem right. Culling? Yeah, no-one wants genocide.

It's a very complex problem and people are very fast to complain about it, without thinking much about what actually to do.

[astrange]

It's a completely fake problem invented in the 70s by the book "The Population Bomb", and if it was true the things in that book would already have happened.

However, the West's strategy of writing moral panic books like this and then not actually reading them did allow us to defeat China (who read the book, actually did it and now has a demographic crisis) so that's something.

[nine_k]

It worked so well in China that they have a birth rate well below replacement level 20 or so years after the one-child policy was repealed.

[vidarh]

The cause and effect is not so clear. China's wealth has also risen substantially, and with it comes fertility decline. E.g. India reached below replacement fertility a couple of years ago without it.

I think it's likely the one child policy contributed a bit, but a substantial part of the decline is clearly also due to economic development.

[giantg2]

The solution is talked about and is reasonable - creating western-like living environments in the remaining high fertility rate areas. Higher standard of living and more individual freedom leads to fertility rates near or even below replacement rate.

[Roark66]

No, the real problem is there isn't enough people. If one Einstein is born per 1bln people, imagine what kind of progress in culture efficiency, technology, and ideas in general we would make as a species if there was 1T people (tera as in trilion).

[Earw0rm]

None. At our current efficiency levels, 1T of us would destroy our home planet's ability to support ourselves in a week.

If we want to go multiplanetary and support populations of that kind of size, we have to get much better at optimising our footprint. Which probably requires ethical/philosophical innovation as well as hard science/technology. What we have now is too wasteful and inefficient to scale up in that way, indeed so much so that it risks poisoning itself before it's able to develop those capabilities.

[lupusreal]

You're presuming that Einsteins are born and destined to greatness regardless of their environmental conditions. What if Einsteins require particularly social/environmental conditions to reach their full potential and furthermore, what if those particular conditions cannot arise when people are packed together like sardines in a can?

[giantg2]

This statement ignores a ton of other factors, and provides a particularly poor example. What did Einstein do to alleviate hunger? Most of his contributions remain theoretical or applied to things that don't directly help the population (or haven't paid off yet).

Even if you have someone who is intelligent, will their contributions actually make life better for people? Or will their ideas become commercially corrupted and be used for greed (Edison commercialization vs Tesla gifting)? Will they complicate our lives or provide harm along with some benefit (social media, TV, etc)? At such a small rate of the population (using your 1/1 billion), would a truly good idea gain traction? Maybe the idea to eliminate or restrict meat is theoretically a good one. But are you going to convince all the people to support it? Then how much impact will it actually have?

There is no magic solution nor hyper intelligent person that will save us.

[fragmede]

GPS has helped a whole helluva lot of people!

[giantg2]

But has it helped with living conditions like food and shelter? Sure it's made life easier, even for stuff like tractor positioning for field planting. But I don't see it having a real impact on those sorts of issues. I guess it has made many munitions more accurate and reduced collateral damage.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Getting vital supplies to remote areas is no small thing.