[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.