The Population Bomb Has Been Defused | Hacker News Reader

The Population Bomb Has Been Defused

bloomberg.com

136 pointssethbannon172 comments

Some of the most spectacularly wrong predictions in history have been made by those who claim that overpopulation is going to swamp the planet. Thomas Malthus, a British economist writing in the late 1700s, is the most famous of these. Extrapolating past trends into the future, he predicted that population growth would inevitably swamp available food resources, leading to mass starvation. That didn’t happen - we continued to develop new technologies that let us stay ahead of the reaper.

Why are people so eager to point out that Malthus was wrong all the time? As far as I can tell he was not. He said if population growth continued as in the past, then we would starve, not that we necessarily will. I also think it is wrong to say we engineered us out of starvation, at best it bought us some time to get the fertility rate down. As the article admits, exponential population growth can never be finally solved by technology.

I think the problem is, no one predicted that educated women, the accessibility of family planning aids, and economies developing [1] would be so effective at reducing fertility rates (with that said, it would've been convenient if this occurred earlier in the 20th century; we're going to hit 11 billion people before the population decline is in full swing, and that's going to challenge the carrying capacity of the planet).

Were these unintended consequences? In most countries, yes. Humanity keeps turning up lucky in this regard (the above mentioned outcome, solar and wind becoming cheap enough we might be able to go carbon neutral for energy consumption, etc).

[1] PDF: http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/ecoch1...

I admittedly did not read »An Essay on the Principle of Population« in its entirety, but that may actually be the point where he was the most wrong. He could not imagine the fertility rate to fall as much as it eventually did and therefore did not really expect that disaster could be avoided. But I still think it is rather misleading to turn this lack of imagination on his side for the evolution of this - of course extremely important - one factor into calling his work wrong and disproven.

I don't believe his work was wrong. He made the best prediction possible with the data available at the time.

I did not want to imply that you called him wrong, this was still aimed at the often repeated narrative that history has proven him wrong.

But his conclusions turn out to be flat-out wrong.

Forecasting is not always accurate.

Economies can also undevelop, leading to inceased fertility rates.

There’s less evidence for this; once fertility rates drop, they mostly seem to stay dropped. A notable example is the former Soviet Union.

Because he believed that population would be limited only by resources, and that fertility rate was nearly invariant. These have both proved to be wrong. The popular imagination of the Mathusian prediction of inevitable mass starvation (which is not really that mis-characterized) was also wrong. So classifying him as wrong seems fair.

Well, he got wrong how the fertility rate would evolve, but that does not invalidate the model he developed. And he would probably have been pretty spot on with his predictions if the fertility rate had not drastically decreased.

> And he would probably have been pretty spot on with his predictions if the fertility rate had not drastically decreased.

If I went around saying, "well, I would have been right if that one part of my theory hadn't become invalidated by events on the ground" people would think me impossible to reason with.

Not if your theory became a meme that influenced people's behavior.

Consider if we were to somehow diffuse the climate change bomb thanks to policies put in place based on current models. Our collective behavior would influence the outcome, but it doesn't invalidate the predictions.

In fairness, it would have been very hard for him to predict the decrease in fertility; it relies on both technological (birth control) and social (womens’ rights, pensions systems, and various others) innovations that would not have been reasonably predictable at the time.

And yet, the specter of a possible Malthusian catastrophe may have helped motivate us to prevent it. I don't really call that being wrong.

The specter of a Malthusian catastrophe was what motivated Adolf Hitler.

The factors that ended up defusing the Malthusian catastrophe were not influenced by Malthus at all. We did not go about educating women because of Malthus.

Good Godwin.

Simply mentioning Hitler or the Nazis is not a reason to invoke Godwin's law.

Godwin's law simply states that Nazis will eventually be mentioned (with probability approaching 1).

Also, he's completely wrong. Hitler's reasoning was not to avoid a malthusian catastrophe. Pretty surprised people here bought that.

The goal of the Nazis was to conquer eastern Europe, remove most of the existing population, and resettle it with German colonists. The rationale was to feed and support a growing population, which is an idea at least reminiscent of Malthus.

The rationale was that their own ethnic group deserved to prosper at the expense of others. The idea that germany might be in danger of running out of food via population growth was not present. If by "reminiscent" you mean "has something to do with population" then sure, it's reminiscent.

Population remains limited by resources. How could it not be? We've been adept over the years at finding new resources or extending old ones (the expansion of ranching and farming in the Americas in the 19th century, which greatly increased the global food supply, or the invention of artificial fertilizer, for instance), but it is a bit of hubris to say that this is a solved problem for all time.

Population is not only limited by resources. There are many places where humans reproduce at a rate well below what resources can support.

It is a ceiling, but there are so many signals prior to hitting that ceiling that the simplification of the Malthusian growth model does not seem to have any utility.

Take for example US population density west of the Mississippi. No one needs to explicitly die of thirst. If water is the limiting factor, the cost of water is invisibly incorporated into nearly every cost people experience. If there were limitless water, the influence of other constraints would simply rearrange.

After reading the comments here it probably boils down on what you focus. If you see the entire work pointing out the unsustainability of exponential population growth that will come to an halt either by positive or preventive checks, then you will probably not call him wrong. If you focus on his view that people will probably not be able to get the fertility rate down to sustainable levels and that a Malthusian catastrophe is therefore probably inevitable, then you will most likely call him wrong. But as I said before, I didn't read much of his work and therefore I might have a misconception about what points he actually stressed the most.

Population remains limited by resources.

No, it's not, and that's what's so surprising. As nations become wealthier, the birth rate goes down, not up. And it goes down by a lot; more than 50%. All the way down below replacement rate.

The US passed "peak baby" in 2007. Outside of Africa, all the major world regions are past "peak baby".[1] Population seems likely to level off around 2050.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

> it goes down by a lot; more than 50%. All the way down below replacement rate.

Some quick systems-level analysis shows that this state of affairs cannot possibly be stable. Societies reproducing at below replacement rate are quickly replaced by societies reproducing above replacement rate. What will happen then?

Counting on societies to hold their birth rate down that far is fundamentally at odds with the theory of evolution. It's not a good basis for predictions of the future.

Societies reproducing at below replacement rate are quickly replaced by societies reproducing above replacement rate. What will happen then?

By then, the robots will be ready to take over.

> Counting on societies to hold their birth rate down that far is fundamentally at odds with the theory of evolution.

Why?

Because anything reproducing at below replacement rate goes extinct. If you e.g. look around at any given point, and take a sample -- by any method -- of living things that come to your attention, none of those things will have gone extinct.

It's the same reason there are no societies which abstain entirely from giving birth. There have been a few, over the course of history, but they disappear for the incredibly obvious reason. At a steady state, such societies don't exist because they can't exist.

It sounds to me as if you are simply taking the Malthusian fallacy and reversing it to make another fallacy. Certainly, a population that continues indefinitely below replacement rate will go extinct. That's not terribly likely though.

What did I write that you're responding to? It looks like you're agreeing with everything I've said.

As countries develop both their birth rates and death rates decrease, but below replacement rate is a pretty strong statement. Population growth like this is modeled in the Demographic Transition Model and consists of 5 stages. Most developed nations fall in the fourth stage, with stable birth and death rates. The 5th stage is often debated, but a pretty good example would be Japan - a country with an aging population and low birth rates (learned about this in school several years ago though, not too sure how up to date)

In Germany there is not a single(!) district with above-replacement rate. Only certain demographics (migration background) have (much) higher rates.

> Societies reproducing at below replacement rate are quickly replaced by societies reproducing above replacement rate.

“Societies” are about memes, not genes, and humans are powerful imitators of things that visibly are associated with success.

You could model a "society" after early modern France, following these stylized facts:

- "Society" is divided into two cultural subgroups, Catholic and Protestant.

- Protestants reproduce below the replacement rate.

- Catholics reproduce well above the replacement rate.

- Protestants nevertheless persist in the population, because the children of Catholics are relabeled Protestant at very high rates.

However, for this to work, note that the reproduction rate of all France, including the Catholics and the Protestants, must be above replacement.

(I will note that I have no opinion on whether, in the real France, Protestants actually reproduced below replacement or just below the level of Catholics. The usual question you see accompanying these facts is "how could there be a significant number of Protestants in France?", not "how could there be people in France at all?")

Fine, but the future still belongs to those who show up. Evolution need not be about DNA. Memes (such as religion) will do the job just fine. Those who think "success" involves low reproduction are taking the evolutionary off-ramp to extinction. Those who do otherwise are selected for. They have the correct memes, or genes, or whatever -- the mechanism doesn't matter.

> "the mechanism doesn't matter"

Makes me think about this old article in ForeignPolicy I read. I could interpret his provocative statements about the success of patriarchy as a sort of "correct meme" to borrow your terminology. Interesting thought. http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/20/the-return-of-patriarchy...

Except of course that the meme that is "currently showing up" is that lower human population is not a bad thing".

It's basically a race: will infertile memes infect fertile cultures before fertile cultures outbreed infertile cultures?

It's too early to call a winner. If you want to see some early hints, you might want to focus on populations that have very high fertility but are otherwise well-integrated into the prosperous, developed cultures that are experiencing low fertility overall. Mormons, for instance.

> Societies reproducing at below replacement rate are quickly replaced by societies reproducing above replacement rate.

Yes, and it is already something that is setting of early warning signals around the world. Countries like Japan and Sweden are looking at major catastrophes in the coming decades if they can't get their populations to increase their birthrates. Its a large part of why Sweden has some of the best benefits for new parents on the planet.

Additionally, some see the collapse of stores like Toys R Us as the first wave of economic effects resulting from the declining birth rate in the US (note that Toys R Us also owns Babies R Us). Obviously, there are lots of factors at play, and retail in general is doomed, but a greatly reduced market for babies and children's products is indicative of a potentially greatly reduced market of everything else in the coming decades.

> Additionally, some see the collapse of stores like Toys R Us as the first wave of economic effects resulting from the declining birth rate in the US (note that Toys R Us also owns Babies R Us).

Toys R Us's collapse was mostly caused by a leveraged buyout in 2005.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-toys-r-us-leveraged-bu...

Exponential growth must always come to an end, but if your biggest resource is people than more people can overcome other resource limitations by invention and culture.

~9 generations hence it's hardly safe to say those predictions are bunk. We may have found some short-term patches, but conventional food production today is deleterious to soil stocks. We're hardly secure from the possibility of famine this century.

People are uncomfortable with Malthusian conclusions when applying his model to other systems. Malthus highlighted a tension between the relative sizes of populations in certain resource-allocation games wherein a population both wants more members but also wants more resources per member.

Nature abhors a true exponential nearly as much as it abhors a vacuum.

All the world's a sigmoid.

I think he was simply bad at functional analysis compared to current understandings. The output of growth functions with multiple inputs tends to look like a logistic function when inputs change and the output shifts to a new equilibrium. The front part of a logistic function looks like an exponential function.

World population is probably ten times what it was at the time his growth model was proposed 220 years ago. That is so far below the rate that humans could multiply their numbers, that it doesn't make any sense that people have argued that we were saved by technological advances. Technology seems to change carrying capacity, then human population approaches that carrying capacity rather than catastrophically hitting a barrier and suffering famines.

Because he was wrong.

It's true that if human population on Earth grew to the point where there was no room for one more human on Earth, then we'd have huge problems. But this is a) very bloody obvious, b) exceedingly simplified, and c) misses the whole point of what actually happened and what others predicted would happen: that population would stabilize (and even fall, perhaps dramatically) long before we might starve from lack of room to make food in.

First of all, there have been huge advancements in food production technology in all the years since Malthus. Second of all, there are huge advancements in the pipeline (basically indoors vegetables growing with minimal food waste and extreme space-efficiency, and lab printing of meat). Third, we clearly want fewer children when infant mortality is low and life expectancy high. Malthus could not have foreseen all of this, but he certainly lacked imagination, and worse: malthusians in the last 100+ years really didn't need that imagination, just normal powers of observation, and STILL they have all missed how wrong malthusianism was.

"But still, he was right!" No, he wasn't. We could grow and grow and grow if we get off the Earth -- hard to imagine that at this time, but maybe not in a few hundred years. "But we could run out of habitable planets in the Milky Way!" Well, yes, we sure could, but I think that's just not something we should worry about today and for thousands of years yet.

Q: Why are there any malthusians? A1: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist. A2: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist, which means that cynical people / psychopaths can take advantage of the rest of us. Doesn't make Malthus right.

> First of all, there have been huge advancements in food production technology in all the years since Malthus. Second of all, there are huge advancements in the pipeline (basically indoors vegetables growing with minimal food waste and extreme space-efficiency, and lab printing of meat).

These are not good counter-Malthusian points. There were huge advancements in food production technology all throughout history (ploughs / iron ploughs / crop rotation / plants from the new world... the list really is endless), but things were in a much more Malthusian state.

The non-Malthusian state of affairs we enjoy today is entirely a function of people choosing not to have children, not a function of better technology. People who were so inclined could easily wipe out (per capita) the gains from productivity, by increasing the number of capita.

Most of the tech improvements came well before population growth curve flattening. It's quite clear that we develop realistic technology that we need. It's also true that if we didn't naturally (i.e., without force) reduce population growth by now that we'd be in trouble (there would be no getting off the planet fast enough to prevent collapse), but the tech came first, not the other way around.

> There were huge advancements in food production technology all throughout history

The current world population could not be fed without Nitrogen fixation and synthetic fertilizers. The Haber-Bosch process is a huge counter-Malthusian point by itself.

No, it isn't, because it's a productivity technology and those are not relevant to the Malthus dynamic. You know what had a massively larger impact than the Haber-Bosch process? Agriculture.

But the development of agriculture made the world more Malthusian, not less.

In contrast, the Black Plague made Europe much less Malthusian by the simple expedient of killing maybe one person in three. This made everyone more productive without any accompanying technology gains. But the point isn't the productivity gain - it's the population drop.

>It's true that if human population on Earth grew to the point where there was no room for one more human on Earth, then we'd have huge problems. But this is a) very bloody obvious

And also a strawman. We can have huge starvation crises, and struggles for power, migration etc with much much less population, even 2x the current number can yield catastrophic power struggles.

>Q: Why are there any malthusians? A1: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist. A2: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist, which means that cynical people / psychopaths can take advantage of the rest of us. Doesn't make Malthus right

Actually you've got it backwards. We're wired to be pessimistic and alarmist so that fewer cynical people / psychopaths can take advantage of the rest of us.

If we were optimistic / eager to believe we'd be far worse.

>If we were optimistic / eager to believe we'd be far worse.

That is an awesome thought, I always like how there's almost a bias in things we consider which always center around, I'm not sure how to articulate it, but center around things that have been demonstrated.

Consider something like gun deaths, a very tangible concrete easy to measure indisputable thing. Yet the possible outcomes from alternatives that have not yet been demonstrated is always a complex hypothetical thing. In the gun example how many folks have been saved because of guns, etc. That's not an easy metric to measure by any means because where do you draw the line and what examples to include, etc.

Exciting stuff to consider what a system would be like out of tune from the current backdrop of being tuned a certain way that we take for granted and maybe never even notice. Definitely welcome anyone to comment and develop these thoughts or share some formal concepts in this space.

I feel you just described a core reason that many people are conservative. Even if they don't know it. The risks of the hypotheticals outweigh the potential benefits.

No, being pessimistic means being vulnerable to those who preach that the sky is falling. Not always, obviously. For example, Churchill spent the 30s isolated and ostracized for doing just that, but he was right. Appeasement in the 30s is a bit of a special case though: to believe the sky was falling was to believe that war was needed, and no one in Allied countries wanted war after the Great War -- there was a greater pessimism about war than there was about Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Malthusianism has been wrong for centuries, and people still buy that garbage. This is because people are born every day and want to believe the sky is falling. Most eventually grow up.

Only people in first world countries who have not experienced difficulties due to overpopulation , poverty etc. claim that Malthus is wrong, everything would improve etc.

Having been brought up in an average Indian family and looking at the future where we have a population which is sky high and even though the fertility rate is significantly lower today, you can see the problems first hand. There are no easy solutions now, that time is gone. Only crazy future looking practical things like what the Chinese did with 1 child policy when it was needed long time back would've had helped.

People should get out of their Western bubble, live in overpopulated cities in Bangladesh/India, travel in their public transit, try to find a job as a local without connections and then report back whether overpopulation is not an issue.

European cities in the 1600s were massively over-populated for much of the same reasons non-Western cities are massively over-populated now: The rise of industrialization, a lack of available housing, poor infrastructure, and massive population growth coupled with rapid urbanization of a traditionally agricultural workforce.

London, as just one example, was an ugly, disgusting, miserable place until the mid 20th century, so it takes time to sort these things out. Cities in India might be a mess today but once their population growth simmers down and the cities can get better organized they'll be much less crowded.

As filthy and disgusting as the slums of some cities in India are, London was worse. The Thames was so polluted with sewage that paddle boats would churn it into this vile froth, like bath bubbles from hell. People who fell overboard from boats would drown because they couldn't be seen through all the foam. Even though the Parliament buildings are right on the river, and the smell in the summer was absolutely unbearable, it took decades for a proper sanitation system to be built because of a lack of political will.

Better infrastructure means you can even out the population density better. India, like many other industrializing countries, is way behind the curve. China is one of the few that's been building infrastructure like its going out of style. It's not the one child policy, but aggressive city engineering that's keeping a lid on the problem.

> As the article admits, exponential population growth can never be finally solved by technology.

Only in the sense that maintaining a population in the first place can never be finally solved by technology. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the universe has more than enough energy and matter to support as many meatbags as we could ever want.

...if we can get through the next 20-30 years. Peak danger for societies isn't when there's a bulge in birth rates, or when the population starts to fall. It's when there's a bulge in the rates of young, unmarried men who don't have the wherewithal to marry and pass on their genes. That's when you tend to get an increase in crime, violence, warlike behavior, and other things that tend to rip a society apart.

Particularly when those young men feel disempowered, usually through unemployment or under-employment. Consequently, their well-being and the well-being of society in general are no longer neatly aligned, and their rational self-interest does not allow them to support the status quo.

It’s worth noting that “driver” is the most common job for white American males, and the United States can’t be too many years from full automation of vehicles. If the benefits accruing to the broader society from this automation are not redistributed in such a way to alleviate the strain placed on the workers displaced from their roles, I fear it will be the moment this pot boils over.

That "most common job" was debunked. It's an artifact of where you draw arbitrary taxonomy lines.

I’d assume even those with a generous definition are too conservative by far. We rapidly approach a future where no human will operate any heavy machine that accomplishes a discrete task. That task might be to transport goods or people across the country, to lift a steel beam into place, or to assemble ingredients into finished products. Once the cost curve flips over to the other side, the whole thing accelerates.

Even worse if the harmed group is a smaller concentrated minority; they have no legitimate recourse through democratic expression.

"Peak danger for societies ... [is] when there's a bulge in the rates of young, unmarried men"

Could you provide a source for that? There are more unmarried men per capita now than almost any time over the last 100 years [1], yet violent crime has been declining steadily - most people can't seem to agree why, though. [2]

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/23/144-y...

[2] - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/what-ca...

The prevailing theory seemed to be lead but I also remember reading it doesn't explain every drop. I assume like often, it's a mixture of factors and many are quite subtle.

I've read it in several places, but here are a couple articles with charts and references to other studies:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/an...

https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21688587-young...

I should also point out that the sort of violence I'm talking about is things like wars, civil disorder, gangs, terrorism, failed states, anarchy, and other group forms of violence, not individual crimes like premeditated murder. The latter has a lot of conflating factors (a sibling comment mentions lead, and there's also abortion, better policing tactics, economic growth, etc), but to get a critical mass of people who are so disaffected by their current situation in life that they want to burn the whole society down, you usually need some form of major demographic or environmental change.

Seems like "A Clash of Generations" is what the economist is referencing:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-2478....

And does focus on political violence in particular (terrorism, rioting, and one more I couldn't pick out of the abstract). Would be interestig to read the whole thing, but thanks for following up! I wonder if the amount of young men in the US that were swayed by Russian influence operations over the last several years would be in-step with this logic.

Video games and movies and internet and junk food obesity have had a powerful impact on "defanging" people who might otherwise be bored and angry out in the streets. Now the aggression is channelled into shitposting online and only occasionally shooting up an office/mall/school

I would say free widespread online porn has much more of an affect than the other things you listed.

Those are internet movies.

The theory sounds convincing, but if you actually look at countries with the highest rates of young males to females, few, if any, support it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio). China, Portugal, South Korea, Kuwait... these are all countries with far more young men than women, and all are stable.

I know that a country with a high male/female ratio is not necessarily the same thing as a country experiencing a "bulge in the rates of young, unmarried men", but I still couldn't find evidence to backup the claim that it would lead to crime and war. Here is a study which looked at 20 other studies of the number of males and violence and could not find a conclusive trend: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953471...

It's not the m:f ratio that matters, it's the number/fraction of males that are lacking in stable economic prospects.

Here's commentary on that paper from the first author cited within it:

https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2014/04/violent-straw-men-se...

Only the abstract is available from your link so I couldn't look at the paper's data, but the critique's point is that the relationship between violence and sex ratio is U-shaped, with higher violence noted with both too few men and too many. Furthermore, many of the studies cited in your link were studies of inner-city black neighborhoods in the U.S, which feature both high violence and a large overpopulation of females because all the males are dead and incarcerated. Thrown into a linear relationship that's not actually linear, and they'll conflate the data significantly.

The data on current sex ratios could be read one of two ways: either the theory is wrong, or the theory is predictive, and those countries with an overabundance of young males that are currently stable & at peace will not be at peace for long. There's some recent evidence for the latter hypothesis: of the 5 countries with the highest 15-24 sex ratio, Qatar is in the midst of a diplomatic crisis with Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE that may be a prelude to war, and the Maldives just had a coup. I've got friends either living in or with family in China & India that say it's nowhere near as socially stable as is commonly perceived in the West, and that there are a number of social problems that could easily become a powder keg if economic growth dries up.

Reading through what's freely availble I get a sense of causation v. correlation misattribution.

I think it's more likely that the political climate for increased violence also leads to increased imbalance of sexes, particularly because violence against women is more common and violence against men comes in waves in times of war or social strife.

Something that occurred to me (but I don't have data or time to follow up):

I wonder if the U-shaped curve for sex ratio imbalances vs. societal violence reflects both causation and correlation. The dynamics would work like this:

An oversupply of young, unmarried males in a population leads to intense competition for mates and for the resources that attract mates (jobs, money, territory, social status, etc). This triggers instincts in our brains that make us more competitive, and more willing to band together with others to remove potential competition. At some point this reaches a critical mass, populations go to war, and most of the excess males are killed off. This leads to an oversupply of females, but because of social inertia (people don't immediately adjust their behavior after massive depopulation, it takes time to adjust to the new reality), the society remains violent for some time afterwards, even though the sex ratio is now very skewed in favor of women. The data would show a U-shaped curve, but the oversupply of males would be the cause of violence while the oversupply of females would be a consequence of violence.

To verify this hypothesis, there'd need to be a time and historical context attached to each data point, so that in addition to looking at the sex ratio, we'd look at the sex ratio trend before and after the outbreak of violence and on what timeframe violence rates go down. I'm unaware of studies that have done this.

Nuh-uh, the youngin pose no threat. Enter the internet, video-games, social-media, on tap 24/7 porn and endless escapism. (now with more opiates!)

As long as youngins have food and internet, there is no war to be had. Porn is very key in reducing street-level agression. Moreover discourse on the internet is very easy - aand affordable - to control.

Nukes ensure that there are no wars between the big players. Nukes are also probably the best - least scary - way to go as long as it's done right.

We live in a very dystopian world truly. I would not have imagined that things would have turned out this way even as recently as 100 years ago.

Shocker, Noah Smith pens yet another of his "whig history" takes. The reality is just a few short years ago the UN updated its population estimates for the end of the century from less than 9 billion to a more likely 11 billion, and as many as 13 billion people. [1]

Nearly the entirety of that increase is because fertility rates in Africa have not fallen anywhere near what was expected, so the population there is set to quadruple from 1->4 billion people over 100 years. The 4 billion figure assumes fertility will begin to rapidly fall in line with the rest of the developing world - nearly all of the growth is already "baked in the cake" due to the extremely young population, and if TFR doesn't drop the population could well soar significantly higher. The population of Nigeria alone is expected to be more than the entire population of Europe by 2085.

Whether the fertility rate can actually be brought down is very much an unsolved question, with a history of optimistic mistakes Noah Smith is smart enough to be aware of. Combine with climate change, resource depletion, the utterly dysfunctional nation-states where this is occurring and the the meteoric rise of neo-fascists after Europe accepted something like 1/100th of the potential economic migrants/refugees as want to come, and this vapid "forward march of history" perspective looks at best cherry-picked and facile, if not disingenuous in the extreme.

[1] https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/art... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/world-population-...

> The population of Nigeria alone is expected to be more than the entire population of Europe by 2085.

Do you think that's realistic? The population of Niger is expected to be 200 million in 2100 (20 million today)[1]. Have you seen Niger? Its a desert with little natural resources.

1. https://www.populationpyramid.net/niger/2100/

edit: I'm aware Niger and Nigeria are different countries. I'm changing the subject to Niger intentionally. 10x population growth in the Sahara desert.

Maybe that's because it's 2 different countries and the parent comment said nothing about Niger?

You're confused because the names are similar. I'm shifting the topic to Niger intentionally. I don't see how a country could experience 10x population growth in a desert.

That's not how conversations work. It's a complete non-sequitur.

Obviously population growth will be higher in areas with bigger resource abundances.

The conversation you are reading is obviously different from the one I'm writing. Talking about the growth rate of a country is not a non-sequitur when the conversation centers on growth rates in general. Comparing or discussing the growth rate of a neighboring country not mentioned by the original poster is not a non-sequitur.

To be clear, the OP suggested that Nigeria's population growing to 752 million people was a realistic expectation. I view it as absurd. To illustrate the absurdity, I showed the population growth of a neighboring country (in the same data set) that displays a truly absurd amount of population growth. I'm calling into question their source but even so I'm not doing so aggressively or in a debating-context. I was just asking a question hoping to gain more insight into the OP's opinions.

Niger's populations has doubled from 11 to 22 million over just the last 10 years. The population today is about 10x the 2.5 million it was in 1950, and the growth rate is higher now that it was decades ago - near an all-time high it only first reached in 2010. That's some progress! [1]

The median age in Niger is 15 years old, Niger has the highest fertility rate on earth at 7 children/piece, but despite that "women and men alike in Niger say they want more children than they actually have – women want an average of nine, while men say they want 11." [2]

Obviously there are going to be massive strains in trying to deal with a skyrocketing population like this, but that's exactly my point. I'm not putting a lot of weight into you flatly stating that it's "absurd" compared to the actual facts & trends and the UN's projection. And frankly the scenarios wherein these projections don't come to pass ... most likely would look pretty Malthusian.

[1] http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/niger-populati... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

In case anyone else was curious about the statistics quoted in this post, they do not match the references cited by the post itself (nor other sources). For example:

> Niger's populations has doubled from 11 to 22 million over just the last 10 years.

Niger's population has doubled from 11 to 22 million over just the last 18 or 19 years.

Ehh, apologies, that one reference was wrong. I don't think the others or conclusion is?

The word "alone" in "The population of Nigeria alone" implies that the conversation involves other countries. Are you sure you're not confused because the names are similar?

That would be Nigeria, not Niger.

Two different countries.

I'm aware. I'm changing the subject to a different country.

The bulk of Niger's population is in the Sahel, not the Sahara.

> The reality is just a few short years ago the UN updated its population estimates for the end of the century from less than 9 billion to a more likely 11 billion, and as many as 13 billion people.

The surface area of the Earth is about 510072000 km^2. 13 billion people gives a population density of about 25 people per km^2. By comparison, the U.S. has a population density of about 33 people per km^2. The U.K has a population density of about 255. So, there's plenty of room (heck, much of the U.S. is still essentially unpopulated, particularly in the western states).

> resource depletion

What "resource" is being "depleted"? Not energy, that's for sure. There's enough uranium to keep our civilization going at the current level for millions of years, assuming breeder reactors are used. That's without requiring any new technology. If we get fusion, then you can up the millions to billions.

We're not actually running out of anything vital. Sorry.

> history of optimistic mistakes

Not to be confused with the history of pessimistic mistakes, running from Malthus, down through the "population bomb" scare of the 1970s, right up to the present day.

> The surface area of the Earth is about 510072000 km^2

Of which 70% is water.

> So, there's plenty of room

Sure, there's plenty of room. But I think you'll agree that most people don't want to live in a desert, or Antartica, or on top of a mountain. The amount of land that people actually want to live on is much, much smaller than the figure you're quoting.

> We're not actually running out of anything vital. Sorry.

Maybe nutrient-rich soil? Clean water?

> Of which 70% is water.

That would put the population density per square kilometer with 13 billion people up to 68, roughly that of Ireland (which has lots of rural areas and farms).

> But I think you'll agree that most people don't want to live in a desert, or Antartica, or on top of a mountain.

The United States has plenty of mountains and deserts, but many parts of it still have vastly higher population density that the number the alarmists are worried about. The population density of California (which has deserts and mountains all over the place) is about 93. The population density of New York State (which still has quite a large amount of farms and woodlands) is about 159.

Heck, the population density of Indiana, which to a first approximation is just a big corn field, is about 71 per square kilometer. That's still less than the 68 per square km that's being touted as a doomsday scenario.

> Maybe nutrient-rich soil? Clean water?

Wrong, and wrong. Modern farming doesn't require "nutrient-rich soil", and water shortages are a regional thing, not a world-wide thing.

Also, the main bottleneck for those issues is plain old energy. If tokamaks end up being the way to go, by the end of the century, we will have orders of magnitude more energy than we could possibly need to desalinate the oceans, extract nitrogen from the air to make fertilizer, and even reprocess CO2 and water back into synthetic hydrocarbons. 11 billion people is outright tiny for a near-Kardashev-1 civilization.

> We're not actually running out of anything vital. Sorry.

You're absolutely correct and it's a shame you're being downvoted. I have lived in the third world and I can confidently declare than people in the west have much bigger ecological footprints (by any metric you can think of :energy usage, pollution, weight of garbage thrown out, etc). Contrast this with the low-productivity of third world farming (per unit area, relatively) as well as massive unrealized potential for hydro-electrical and other renewable energy. I'm going to say there is plenty of capacity for accommodating population growth.

Not long ago, a significant proportion of the scientific establishment - along with a number of celebrities and policymakers - believed that the "population bomb" is an inevitable, imminent, and apocalyptic threat. There was talk of "point of no return", calls for worldwide China-style fertility restrictions, and so forth.

Instead, what happened over the past several decades is not just a drop in birth rates, but also dramatic improvements in our ability to grow cheap food at a scale (something that the article doesn't really talk about).

So it is a very interesting take to claim that the population bomb has been "defused" - since this implies it wasn't an episode of pathological science flirting with mysticism (with frequent allusions to the pristine "natural" order contrasted with the evils of Man), but just some sound science that turned out to be a bit off.

(Please don't read into this as a critique of any contemporary scientific debates; that's not my point, but I think we should be more willing to recognize our past mistakes.)

> but also dramatic improvements in our ability to grow cheap food at a scale

Are those improvements sustainable? Agriculture that is generating high yields from converting very fertile natural ecosystems into deserts and then moving on is almost like eating through fossil resources, only that the timescale for replenishment is a few orders of magnitude closer to being relevant for humanity (but still far or of reach). Failure ecosystems that have been farmed out of existence in antiquity are still as barren as thousand years ago. If you ignore the yields of unsustainable farming, our ability to feed billions looks a lot less rosy.

"Are those improvements sustainable?"

Available evidence suggests yes.

http://plantsci.missouri.edu/grains/corn/graphs/USA-corn-yie...

"Agriculture that is generating high yields from converting very fertile natural ecosystems into deserts"

Iowa didn't look much like a desert the last time I was there.

"Failure ecosystems that have been farmed out of existence in antiquity are still as barren as thousand years ago"

Yeah, that's why you don't want to rely on "organic" farming. Good thing we don't do that any more.

> Iowa didn't look much like a desert the last time I was there.

I don't know the specifics of Iowa, but European soil can only keep up with the rising yields thanks to the dung of a rising headcount of livestock that is fed with imported feed that is at least in part from slash-and-burn farming or from depopulating the oceans. If those animals consume more than the local yields could supply, the farming is still unsustainable despite local soils not depleting.

I'm not saying that there are no improvements (three certainly are), but that they might be much smaller than we think.

> slash-and-burn farming

Slash-and-burn farming is a "traditional", "organic" method.

They don't do slash-and-burn in Iowa.

In what ways were Malthus' predictions rooted in "mysticism"?

The population is so high we need to stop having kids, and the population is so low we need to import low skilled workers, and the job of the future will be fully automated.

Modern policy is a cognitive dissonance minefield.

6 billion people burning coal to keep their refrigerators running is not what I would call defused.

Not mentioned besides the ecological footprint- there is with high density, a high chance for infectious disease to wipe out great parts of this humanity.

Another aspect is, that liberal society is only kept as "guest" for bribes- as long as capitalism delivers continously improvements and sedates the population with trinkets- it is accepted- the moment that wanes, anti-liberal sentiments come back with full force from all sides.

Thus interesting at the moment is not what great archievments the west accomplishes, but wether science, free debate and education can exist on in decaying societs like North Korea (extreme end) or Turkey/ Russia (at the start).

Can a scientist work in a country in the middle east or mexico. If that is the "default" state of humanity, that is where our interest should be.

There will be no city on mars, but there might be a secret society, doing fusion research in a slum filled with racists and relgious fanatic luddites - condemning us as the decadent golden past.

And what are the consequences of that? I would guess significantly milder than the predictions of mass starvation that we managed to avert.

Nobody knows, the destruction of the entire planet most likely.

The earth is dying, you can see it everywhere you look if you open your eyes.

Agreed. If the bomb has been defused then it's only because it has already gone off.

The scientists do indeed know. The scientific consensus is that sea levels will rise by a meter or 2 over the next 200 years, and cause damages measured in the couple trillions of dollars. This is all laid out in the IPCC report. Thats a lower cost than an Iraq war.

That is the scientific consensus of the IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change. And the scientific consensus is that the world is definitely not going to end, nor is it even going to come close. Listen to the science and the scientific consensus!

You're taking the mean consensus prediction as gospel. There is a smaller but still very much possible chance of much more catastrophic consequences than that. It would be irresponsible for the IPCC to present only the most dire predictions, but I think it's also unwise for us to ignore them.

The earth isn't dying. It may become uninhabitable for humans, but that is quite different than the earth being dead.

Read between the lines. Nobody is that dumb to literally say that the earth is dying.

> Nobody knows, the destruction of the entire planet most likely.

Entire planet? False.

> The earth is dying, you can see it everywhere you look if you open your eyes.

All I see when I "open my eyes" is people with your disposition making alarmist predictions based on either faulty reasoning, and/or ignorance, and/or out of fear.

How is how you and other extreme pessimists like you behave not equivalent to yelling 'fire!' in a crowded theatre? If the Earth is our crowded theatre then you're being socially irresponsible with your doom and gloom scenarios, and the Earth is humanity's crowded theatre.

My religious father used to predict the end of times, the end of the world as we know it, every few years. When the date came and went rather than revise his beliefs he'd move the date forward a couple of years. That is bonkers. Belief and identity are humanity's worst enemy: not birth-rates, not nukes, not CO2 emissions, not A(G)I, not any of these things but our own crappy cognitive mechanisms.

The consequences could include things like forced mass migrations, wars over water rights, and an increase in territorial disputes among nations as land becomes more scarce than it already is. In addition, the byproducts of coal burning cause cancers and death, regardless of whether the previous stuff I mentioned actually happens (hint: it's already starting to happen).

Don't worry, it will be solar panels soon enough. Simply because it will be cheaper.

If solar can manage to maintain even 10% of its performance growth per annum it has had in the last decade coal will be obsolete completely everywhere except in the most geographically extreme environments by 2030.

People are very much underestimating the momentum of something cheap and with minimal side effects can have on an economic status quo. Or more particularly, is already having - solar as a percentage of global energy production doubled from 1 to 2% in the last three years, and if we keep adding almost 100GW of solar per year (and cheaper / more efficient panels just accelerate that adoption, and nothing can really slow it down unless the prices regress) the planet will be 10% solar by 2025. And thats the pessimistic status quo figure.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-g...

This article is incorrectly using the current rate of growth of solar, in CONSTANT terms, and not in percentage terms.

Solar panel is growing in percentage rates, as it has been doing so for the last 3 decades. IE, it increases by X% every year. When something doubles every Y years, it quickly overwhelms everything.

Today we are adding 100 gigawatts of solar per year. And in 2-3 years that rate of change is now 200 gigawatts ADDED every year, and then its 400 gigawatts per year.

The original author shouldn't have done linear calculations but exponential.

That said: the longer that it takes to get that exponential; the more there is in the atmosphere.

I wonder how those curves compare to linear and where break even is...

Look at the chart, the numbers are correct, everything grows (in large amounts). We are about to double the amount of fossil fueled cars in the next 10-15 years. It will not matter how much solar we install if we keep increasing our fossil burning (as we will). In fact, we use other sources of energy than oil to extract and refine the oil.

We are terribly addicted to oil. One could say we sold our mother (Earth) for a shot of hubris. It took us to the Moon and the stars. It gives and it takes lives, one could think we are dealing with the Devil.

For each day we do not decrease our fossil fuel use nothing will make a difference, the fact is that the Earth is becoming a worse place for each of those days. Our culture is not only addicted to oil, there is a bigger picture. Our culture is dependent on growth, hence the addiction to energy, all kinds of energy. We will go on this way, no matter what, for as long as we can.

"the fact is that the Earth is becoming a worse place for each of those days

There is absolutely no evidence of this.

The average person today, whether in the First World or the Third, lives a life that is better than almost every respect than a comparable person a hundred years ago.

At the same time, environmental quality in the First World has improved dramatically.

"At the same time, environmental quality in the First World has improved dramatically."

I do not know where to begin, but i am facing the tongue of our mother culture. I am facing not only your arguments, i am facing an operating system. It is high time we clean our disks.

To mention a few, we now get microplastics from our tap water [1], and bottled water [2]. Reports of substantial insects loss from all over the world [3][4].

Study shows that the oceans will be dead if we continue as we do [5]. Life loses 150-200 species a day, we are currently living in the Sixth mass extinction [6], i was about to write "the planet loses", but the planet simply does care, only life do. Our way of farming is killing the soils [7], it is fake, all fake. We kill the soils and we depend on a limited supply of chemical fertilizer. People have the idea that the soils are made for this, one of the greatest lies.

How can you say that the life is better when were at 407 PPM of CO2 and counting, and we have no clue about what is about to happen. The limits in the glacial/interglacial system we've been in for the past million years are 180-280 PPM.

I could go on an on but to put it simply. All the problems we've solved are problems of our culture, that said, we have not solved any other problem and we have not solved all our problems. Our problem is that we can't stop our growth. Event if we stopped the population growth all the other charts would point straight up!

Why did 20,000 scientists give a dire warning in their 'letter to humanity'? [8] It is us, we keeps this going, we all need more stuff, more energy to take us to new highs of 'humanity'.

Far better life, yes, we work and we feed and we Netflix™. Far better than what? There was a life before domestication by, for and in our culture. We've been Homo for three million years and we've been Homo Sapiens Sapiens for three hundred thousand. Being born today is a roulette spin, there is no guarantees that your genes will match this system. Our current culture is so far off from what our bodies, minds and that small process which we call 'me' are made for.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/06/plastic-... [2] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43388870 [3] https://www.news-leader.com/story/sports/outdoors/2017/08/30... [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/world/europe/krefeld-germ... [5] https://www.theinertia.com/environment/the-oceans-could-be-d... [6] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/16/nature-e... [7] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-... [8] http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/letter-to-humanity-...

> To mention a few, we now get microplastics from our tap water

There is no evidence that "microplastics" (which are just the latest entry in a long, long, history of things that are going to KILL US NOW) pose any health risks.

> How can you say that the life is better when were at 407 PPM of CO2 and counting

There is no evidence that current CO2 levels are harmful to animal life, and plenty of evidence that higher CO2 levels are beneficial to plant life.

> Our way of farming is killing the soils

Nonsense.

https://plantsciences.missouri.edu/grains/corn/graphs/USA-co...

> There was a life before domestication by, for and in our culture.

Yes. It was nasty, brutish, and short.

not in subsaharan africa. nigeria alone is set to hit ~1 billion by the end of the century, even if current birthrates slow dramatically. if china is the centerpiece of the 21st century, africa is the stage for the 22nd:

https://i.imgur.com/9obArWa.png

140K in 2006, 185K in 2016. 1B in 2100? That seems a big jump.

Africa does need an economic super power however to avoid hundreds of millions of economic migrants moving to China, the EU and the US.

Directly extrapolating that 32% in 10 years would predict over 2B in 2106.

> 140K in 2006, 185K in 2016.

If those are supposed to be the population of Nigeria, you've missed a factor of 1000 somewhere.

i believe those numbers are meant to have an ‘m’ instead of a ‘k’? lagos alone has over 20m.

the US had a population of ~76m in 1900, and severely restricted immigration for much of the 20th c

I feel like all these estimates of "overpopulation" are massively overblown. These issues are almost entirely political/social.

The capacity for Earth to hold humans is massive.

Currently only a tiny sliver of the surface has people on it and if that becomes a problem we can build vertically (up and down).

We're barely capturing relatively free energy such as sunlight, wind, geothermal, and tidal. Think of how much of the Sahara isn't a solar energy production plant.

If the labor of 1 human can feed at least 2 people you can have a society. With technology 1 human can work to feed thousands if not millions with increased automation. Food production can be fully automated with the ambition to.

The only real bound of food production if you consider vertical hydroponic farming alongside nuclear and freeish energy, is the amount of nutrients plants and insects require to produce adequate amounts of human nutrition. Virtually all plant nutrients have evolved to be highly recyclable through natural processes, most of which can by accelerated with technology.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-many-people-can-the-earth...

Tldr?

He's a, or the, highly definitive source. L. R.

As worldwide population increases, resources become increasingly stretched and per capita income goes down (relative to the cost of living). This, in first world countries will probably result in a decline in the birthrate.

You only need to look towards CA to see where this is already happening. CA with it's excessive regulations has decreased the prosperity of it's people to the point of where it now has x3 times the number of poor people per capita than the national average (that's living cost adjusted ~ mostly due to housing cost and excessive energy costs and countless other regulations that increase living costs). I suspect this has played a roll in the decline of the birth rate in CA, now at the lowest its ever been since the great depression (it's been going down for the last 3 decades). As life becomes increasingly harsh, people have less babies - it's kinda hard to have a kid when your sharing a room in your parent's house, or live 6 to an apartment.

Another reason why California has 3x the homeless people is because it is friendly to homeless people - weather and services inside big cities.

>the ultimate, final victory

Famous last words. What happens evolutionary is that genes that make it more likely to have children in the industrialized society setting - whatever they are - are getting an enormous boost.

> What happens evolutionary is that genes that make it more likely to have children in the industrialized society setting - whatever they are - are getting an enormous boost.

No, whatever makes it more likely to have children that survive to reproduce, not just tomhave children, would be getting the boost, but the environment is probably shifting faster than can give a consistent boost to anything.

We know exactly what those genes are - or more accurately their phenotype.

What is the phenotype of the genes that increase chances of having children in industrialized society?

Terrible title. "Population bomb" is not defused, only "birth rate" is decreasing. There are already too many people on Earth. It's big problem in developing countries.

> "Population bomb" is not defused, only "birth rate" is decreasing.

This is all that needed to be said about the article. The author doesn't (want to) understand the difference between a number "getting smaller" and the number "increasing less quickly".

When someone gains 10 kg in January and then gains 9 kg in February, we don't say that they are losing weight.

One of the reasons that is not tracked here is the fact that in developing countries as more and more people get educated. They tend to have 1 or 2 children and they try to ensure their kids have good education and upbringing. These parents realize that if they have more children they might not have enough resources and money to push them through higher education.

There's significantly less randomness now. Less disease, more economic mobility, higher standard of living, and more safety nets then 150 years ago.

The only way to succeed when the odds are disadvantageous and out of your control is to make many attempts.

> eventually, population growth will overwhelm the Earth’s ability to provide calories.

Really? When? And how? Because I don't see how a planet that can support at least a factor of 10 times our population size currently is going to realistically start running out of calories, short of moronic political decisions, some of which are perpetuated by statements like that.

Where are these calories going? They're evaporating into the ether, never to be reclaimed?

Or is it possible that we're losing out on massive amounts of human capital because, like NIMBY activists that argue against new housing development, we're trying to maintain a status quo out of fear?

So, in the next 30 years, we’re adding about 2 billion more people (net) to the planet.

The odds that it goes smoothly is small. First, 30 years is a long time to not have a big population event. Second, 2 billion people will strain resources considerably (its a 25% increase over today).

The impacts on disease, pollution, war, etc., are significant even if food supply can handle it. And what about climate change, or increasing algae blooms (due to pesticide use)?

There are so many things that’s ave to work to not have a population event, that it’s a pretty scary proposition. Sure, the birth rate has declined dramatically, but Malthus may yet be proven correct.

It is interesting to contrast the decline in fertility rates in China and India. Would China have had a similar dropoff if not for the One Child policy? Will we see the number increase again given enough time after the 2013 easing of that policy? I'd be curious to see these numbers again ten years from now.

It’s unlikely that numbers will change dramatically in China. They have dramatically eroded their agrarian culture, which is the main demographic engine pretty much anywhere. It is unlikely that well-paid industrial workers and urban professionals will start cranking out children above and beyond replacement rates.

I'm sure I remember reading that fertility rates had already declined significantly before the one child policy was introduced.

Indeed -- you just need to take a look at the graph in the original article for further confirmation (the one-child policy was instituted in 1978, and fertility rate was in definite decline by that point).

India had a population of approx 79million in 1000 CE

https://i.stack.imgur.com/2928N.png

After successive invasions, by the Mughals, Dutch, Portuguese and British it shot up to over 300 million, a much bigger rise say compared to other countries. Largely due to the poverty it was left in, people ended up having more kids to make sure they survived. Anyhow I agree it has been refused as the poverty levels are now being tackled and mass education programmes in place.

"After successive invasions..."

You draw this clear line between invasions and population growth for India... but India doesn't look a whole lot different than others (considering it started off with a higher base than other countries also): http://visualeconsite.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/po...

It was the 2nd largest by population even in 1000 CE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...

India, like every other country, was affected by vaccines and other developments that reduced the death rate and caused population to explode.

My point is the rate of growth rather than the baseline, were these vaccines you mention available in 1700? To the general poorer population? Highly unlikely.

India was the worlds 2nd largest population in 1000 (60m), 2nd largest in 1500 (90m), the 2nd largest in 1700 (160m), the 2nd largest in 1900 (330m), and the 2nd largest today.

It had 19% of the population in 1000; 20% in 1500; and 17.5% today.

And you say that last part is someone elses fault. What surprise that the worlds 2nd largest population for over 1000 years would be the 2nd largest today... with nearly exactly the same percent of the world population it had over 1000 years ago. Clearly some outside force has caused India to grow from 2nd largest in the world a 1000 years ago all the way up to 2nd largest today. What else could explain it? /s

Do you realize that the US from 1900 to today has had a higher growth rate than India? 428% vs 401%

You didnt answer the vaccine question, nor the rate of growth topic, look at the chart again, it looks more exponential than linear:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/2928N.png

The late (and quirky) Julian Simon wrote on this topic, and on the related notion of ostensibly limited resources. Worth checking out if you are not already familiar with his viewpoint:

The Ultimate Resource, 1981, Princeton University Press, ISBN 069109389X.

The Ultimate Resource 2, 1996, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0691042691. http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

For anyone that wants a deeper look Charles C Mann's recent publication The Wizard and the Prophet covers the figures behind over population concerns & modern environmentalism as well as the figures behind the green revolution which played a large role in pushing famine and food insecurity down to the level that exists at today, even with a growing population.

A few other taboo "bombs": water wars and climate change.

Same basic mistake, assuming nothing will change.

For example, for water wars: desalination using solar power (see Israel)

For climate change: carbon sequestring strategies or market pressures - CO2 credits, reputational risk (being "green"), ...

Has anyone else here made an active decision to not reproduce? Even with low birth rates in my country and small families being the norm, I still find myself being pressured to have children, as if my genetic code was critical to the survival of the species.

The species will be fine. Its your phylo-genetic tree you have to worry about.

Your decision not to reproduce on Malthusian grounds amounts to nothing more than a selection effect against people who care against overpopulation. If you're happier without kids, by all means, enjoy it, but don't imagine you're saving anyone.

good luck finding wife with same attitude

Already done.

The article is very happy to point out that the trend changed 50 years ago. Then shown a graph with a 100 years forecast, based on that changed trend.

Sure, from now on the fertilization will play nicely along.

Did you read the supporting arguments for why the rates have historically not gone back up?

I never understood this logic, population growth is 100% dependent on the amount of resources the system is able to produce, not the other way around. Resources are the precursor to growth. It is not possible to grow unabated then one day realize we're 50% short on resources. Population necessarily has to stabilize at around 100% resource utilization.

And when resources are depleted? That's the bomb.

Resources don't plummet to zero. Prices rise gradually and people change their behaviors gradually. That's not a bomb.

1) Prices don't rise gradually on supply demand mismatch. They can rise as much as somebody can pay

2) People will not really change behavior.

Say a country of 1 billion people can only grow food for 600 million people due to a draught. Maybe the food can be stretched to 700 million, but don't expect it to be enough for 1 billion people. In this case, hundreds of millions will die of starvation and the remaining 700-800 million will pay hand over foot for food. That is the "bomb".

What would get depleted?

Core strategic resources.

A set of 14: http://i.imgur.com/L5qWNN9.jpg

Rainforests, coral reefs, ag land, coal, oil, gas, aluminium, phosphorus, tantalum, titanium, copper, silver, indium, antimony.

Sources:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120618-global-resources-st...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/future/BBCF_infoData_stock_chec...

A list of six: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2011/oct/31/six...

Longer general discussion: http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/G01035.pdf

We've actually driven Atlantic cod near the US/Canada close to extinction by overfishing recently in the 90's and had to curtail fishing for a long time to allow it to come back. Japanese freshwater eels are endangered from the popularity in sushi and put on a conservation list just four years ago. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/unagi-en... Chart of most popular fish stocks, what happens when popular fish get overfished: https://priceonomics.com/the-invention-of-the-chilean-sea-ba...

Here's the non-AMP link, for anyone not viewing on mobile:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-16/decline-i...

Changed to that above.

Better link (non amp version): https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-16/decline-i...

Changed to that.

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