[UncleMeat]

It's amazing that we had oodles of "population growth will cause mass-starvation, we need global policy to limit the population to the current size" worries on the run up from 2B to 8B and now we've got "population decline will cause mass-starvation, we need global policy to limit the population to the current size" worries.

And the global population isn't falling. Birth rates are only below replacement among certain groups.

[shadowgovt]

Good news, unfortunately, rarely radiates with the power or urgency of bad news.

The mass-starvation concerns of the '70s-'80s were resolved by an army of agriculture and biological scientists developing revolutionary breakthroughs in staple food crops and farming techniques. These fundamentally staved off the "cold equations" starvation risk (most starvation in the modern era is logistical error; the food exists, it isn't where people are).

Unfortunately, key pieces of the solutions involved practices we know aren't sustainable indefinitely (fertilizer production is fossil-fuel heavy), so there's more work to be done (and some non-zero benefit if we were to discover that the global human population was falling without some mass-tragedy causing it).

[viridian]

birth rates are below replacement in the majority of countries now. Global birth rate is down to 2.24 this year, and 2.11 is the baseline for maintaining the population. I'd bet a tremendous amount of money that we cross the threshold by 2030.

[UncleMeat]

Really is amazing to me how the second derivative of population can be used to argue in this way. Mass starvation. Doomed civilization. While the population continues to grow.

[viridian]

People are capable of looking past their nose, and I've never claimed the outcome will be mass starvation or a doomed civilization. Societies will just have to change, in a way that is without precedent.

And I think you are being playful, but it's worth remembering that the second derivative of position is what kills you in a car accident, and the third derivative gives you whiplash. We also just had an election where a top issue was both the derivative and second derivative of the value of a dollar.

[UncleMeat]

The comment I responded to said "displacements of whole populations, mass-starvation, and likely brutal war."

[viridian]

True. And I agree with it in terms of cardinality (bad stuff incoming), just not magnitude.

The starvation thing that appears throughout this larger thread is exceptionally odd to me, how does a planet where food is mostly harvested mechanically, encounter food shortages in the face of decreased population? Even if the labor force plummets, the machines sow, tend, and harvest most of the food, and the amount of required food is also going to down as the population does.