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Because population growth is expected to decline over the next century already, and because population is not really the problem anyway. We have the ability to improve the carrying capacity of the earth and we have done so repeatedly over time.

Dire predictions of the negative consequences of overpopulation, ever since Malthus, have turned out wrong. The population doomsayers didn't even anticipate the real problem we face today: climate change.

Climate change is not caused by overpopulation, but rather by the industrial output of developed countries. These countries, except for China, are not densely populated and have lower rates of population growth than the rest of the world because obtaining contraception is legal and convenient.

On top of that, regulating reproduction is a violation of the most basic human freedoms.

> population is not really the problem anyway.

> Dire predictions

Those are not only predictions, but existing examples. I invite you to visit the slums of developing/"third-world" countries, or even just see images/videos of them.

> regulating reproduction is a violating of the most basic human freedoms.

We regulate MANY things that are also basic human freedoms.

> They are not predictions. I invite you to visit the slums of developing/"third-world" countries, or even just see images/videos of them.

Slums are not caused by overpopulation. They are caused by poverty and lack of opportunity, often abetted by bad government policy. Tiny countries with small populations have slums.

There are entire cities, one after the other, that are like one big slum. You can see for yourself on Google Earth etc.

Many of their problems are caused by overcrowdedness, and there are few ways to fix that without stealing even more space from nature and other species.

As for poverty and lack of opportunity, what do you propose would fix that? Honest question, because this will lead to more problems that need to be pointed out.

> We have the ability to improve the carrying capacity of the earth and we have done so repeatedly over time.

At the expense of causing massive climate change, it is worth noting. The era of our ability to "increase the world's carrying capacity" may be coming to an end.

I really, really hope I'm wrong and we're able to get Climate Change under control, but we are heading in the exact opposite direction right now.

"developed countries. These countries, except for China, are not densely populated"

Not all developed countries are densely populated, but many are. Netherland and South Korea rank among the most densely populated countries in the world.

'why are we resisting laws against "Making babies whenever you want"'

We already have a fairly effective way to curb population growth: education. Highly educated people tend to have less children than people with little or no education. In fact, education gives plenty of ROI in many areas, so we can tackle this and other issues by investing in better education without explicitly having to ban anything.

That said, I think some mandatory "how to raise kids" training could do a lot of people a lot of good.

It’s a pretty well documented observation that the birth rate in prosperous nations tends to level out without intervention. Additionally, prosperous nations are responsible for orders of magnitude more per capita carbon emissions than the “global south.”

Is your plan to depopulate the wealthy countries responsible for CO2 emissions who already have a replacement level birthrate?

Or is it to artificially prevent population growth and economic development in undeveloped countries? It would be morally unacceptable for the global north to extract wealth from the global south for 500 years, use the wealth to build highly industrialized economies, then prevent the rest of the world from catching up economically.

Morals, meet realpolitik. I'm not writing this to justify the latter, just to point out that morals often come second to raw pursuit of power.

I completely agree with you. Firstly, it's inevitable that those in developing countries are going to aspire to western lifestyles and that corporations will seek to exploit these markets, thus any argument about the solution being mainly about changing the developed world is flawed. Secondly, we are told that those in the developing world will suffer most from climate change, and thus by not moderating fertility in the developing world we are actually by default causing more suffering. Unless that is, we let them all migrate to the developed world, where they will all adopt western lifestyles, and so we are back to the same problem. It's difficult to take the moral argument against controlling fertility in the developing world seriously (and not think ulterior motives are at play) when said argument falls apart under even a simple analysis. (Supposed) moralists apparently care little about either people or the planet.

Any attempt to discuss population control will be met with accusations of eugenics and genocide. So what you do instead is promote women’s rights, education about contraception and birth control, health care for children, immunisations, etc.

It turn out that education and empowerment of this kind (especially where you can show women that their children will survive and that everyone can get an education and a job) will naturally lead to lower fertility rates. Apparently women aren’t all hormone driven baby factories (who knew?) and given a voice in the matter will generally prefer fewer children (and more time to pursue life outside raising babies).

So if you support zero or negative population growth, you can do a lot worse than donating to Plan International and other charities specialising in education and support of women in developing nations.

You can empower people (especially women, a commonly oppressed class), save the world from overpopulation, uncover the next generation of genius-entrepreneur, and do this all without being labelled a villain.

Our unchecked population growth has already caused/contributed to the genocide of many species in the last 50 years alone – in just one person's lifetime!

That is not a excuse for imposing mandatory birth control or sterilisation, and will become less and less pertinent as we pass through this extinction event and all the humans end up dead anyway.

As the environmental disaster gets worse, we will end up sacrificing more species in the pursuit of safety for our own. We might mourn the necessary sacrifice in passing, but ultimately the surviving humans will justify everything in the name of one more day.

Among many other points, more than half the laws you mention are terrible. We shouldn't be banning people in need from taking food or shelter when there's an extreme excess of both, or loving who they want.

Because it’s a delicate subject. Giving someone the power to decide who is and is not allowed/able/encouraged to have babies is scary stuff for many people.

We already have a LOT of laws decide who is and is not allowed/able/encouraged to have a LOT of other very basic rights:

Food, shelter, healthcare, education, sex.

Yes... that’s right. Good luck doing that with procreation in anything but a dictatorship type government.

Other than the last one, those are entitlements requiring the government provide you with things, not rights.

Maybe putting the point in different words will resonate better:

There are already numerous examples of authority stepping in to “save people from themselves.”

What motivates your desire to control other people?

In the end it costs me money, time, and grief to fix your screwups. Example: people who don’t vaccinate can cause problems for the rest as diseases spread more quickly and with greater impact than otherwise. Clear?

Limiting who is allowed to reproduce? I mean what could possibly go wrong!

We already limit many things that people are allowed to do.

The fact that we limit some things is not a valid argument that we should be able to limit any thing. That's Billy Madison levels of wrong.

Because it goes very much against the constant growth required by the economy?

Growth of the economy to what end? What is the endgame?

What will conjure up the constant resources and space required for the constant growth required by the economy?

>What will conjure up the constant resources

Probably the sun and small scale fusion for at least the next thousand years or so. Eventually other stars/large scale fusion/some type of energy production we haven't discovered yet.

>and space

There is enormous amounts of room left on earth. Everyone on earth could have an acre of land to themselves with 10x the current population, and that completely ignores multi-level construction (either above or below the surface). But long term there is a lot of space outside of earth.

> There is enormous amounts of room left on earth.

Bonkers - if we are to believe the environmental lobby (and I generally do), we are already destroying much of the biosphere. You can't have it both ways! Either things get worse for everyone, or humanity starts to control itself.

Oh, the space is not going anywhere. It might not be useful, but it'll be there.

>Either things get worse for everyone, or humanity starts to control itself.

Controlling itself doesn't have to mean population control. It just has to mean taking care of our environment in a sustainable way. The number of people we have been able to support in a sustainable way has increased by several orders of magnitude over the past tens of thousands of years and I don't see a compelling reason that trend needs to stop. Climate change isn't tied to population, it's tied to greenhouse gas emissions. We already have the technology demonstrating that we don't need to emit greenhouse gasses.

> Climate change isn't tied to population, it's tied to greenhouse gas emissions.

Extinction of other species is also tied to deforestation, mining, pollution (chemical, light and noise) as well as hunting and accidents. All of that only increases as our population grows.

To what end, though? What is the point in endless expansion? I think at this point we're just expanding out of some basic evolutionary urge, but like other such urges that have outlived their usefulness, I feel like we need to revisit this one.

China is a place to look for an example of what happens when you do this. Primarily, too many elderly. Here is an interesting discussion about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5jJDywBHwA

Rape or murder are not natural instincts. In fact people have pretty good safeguards against killing others - seeing the oponent bleeding usually makes even a furious man cool off.

And regarding limiting population growth, what solution could possible be there that would be acceptable in a liberal democracy (i.e. does not require authoritarian regime controlling your every move, or the biggest genocide in history of mankind)?

It is generally thought that increasing women's education level is the most effective route to reducing population growth...

This is because educated women choose to have fewer kids later.

Luckily this solution is not only effective but is also very much acceptable in a liberal democracy!

It's a combination of education, access to birth control and low infant/mother mortality that does it. Especially the last one - it's shocking how big a killer childbirth is to women without modern medical procedures. Same thing for children: vaccines, hygiene and nutrition make it a rare tragedy instead of a normal part of life.

> It's a combination of education, access to birth control and low infant/mother mortality that does it.

You left out strong social safety net, but that is key: children are literally people's old age and disability support mechanism when there isn't a sufficiently reliable public one.

Population growth is actually slowing worldwide, and we face the very real possibility of a global population decline within the next century. You’re trying to solve a problem that is already “solving” itself.

In this thread you haven't been shut down have you? Lots of carefully thought out arguments.

I am very suspicious of overpopulation arguments because it is a stalking hourse for alt-right style ethno nationalism. Rather than addressing issues it is a veiled attack on "lefties" and liberals. Blaming the entire environmental crisis on our reluctance to adopt authoritarian controls. And playing on perceived inconsistencies in how liberals see the world. Perhaps we have different laws on rape,murder, and consensual sex because they are different things! Your argument only makes sense if you completely ignore any nuance.

I think this is really about fear of immigration and uses climate change as an excuse.

[I've been sampling the right-leaning internet for a few years now to better understand it]

FWIW, the majority of right-leaning folks (at least in the US) are vehemently against things like population controls. Go read some of the articles on Breitbart or InfoWars and this will be clear -- most of their concerns involve the government (which is pictured as an ever-left-leaning entity) overreaching in its restrictions on civil life.

The power of social conservative right wingers has been waning for a decade or so now, c.f. Trump.

Yet the bigger elephant is letting the filthy rich do whatever they want including keeping the poor from education.

I agree. We need to not only stop using polluting vehicles, but also reduce the number of people consuming products.

Honestly, the problem is going to solve itself. We're going to see devastating natural disasters and famines. We're going to see causalities like we've never seen. We're going to see massive die-offs of the poor in countries that are in the direct path- coastal countries, Africa, and middle east.

I know I'm going to get hate for this, but the US and other western countries are going to have to face the realities that they are going to need to lock down their borders as we're going to have massive refugee problems. I don't agree with Trump 90% of the time, but he is putting in place a framework that will be used in the next 10 years to keep the onslaught of refugees. America has it good. We can survive the storm, but most of the world will not be so lucky.

And words cannot express what I feel. This whole thing sucks. It's going to hurt. And it's the kind of thing where we can't save everyone.

Basically if we don't control immigration, the developed world will look like the developing world, and then there will be no more developed world to help out. I think for some this is the intended endgame.

There's no evidence of this. Uncontrolled immigration is what made America great. If there's a problem it causes, it's that it creates a brain drain from the developing world to the developed world; it's often the more talented and enterprising people who leave (though that varies wildly among specific emigrating groups).

> Uncontrolled immigration is what made America great

A massive claim. Care to support it?

As far as I was aware, much of America's success is a simple accident of history, notably: having a massive virtually unoccupied continent with enormous unexploited natural resources, a single unified market with single currency, having no land border with a hostile foreign entity capable of posing a genuine threat, and taking advantage of (or as some argue deliberately creating the circumstances for) the rest of the world being smashed by two world wars.

Yeah, but without immigration during the 19th and early 20th century, the US wouldn't have anyone to work on those resources and the continent would still be virtually unoccupied. The US would have been as empty as Siberia.

So then you admit that immigration was just one part of the puzzle? Or are you asserting that you could take those same immigrants, transplant them anywhere in the world, and have the same outcome?

I'm pointing out that immigration helped rather than hurt the US. The claim that it makes countries poor or underdeveloped is wrong.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Are you saying you have no evidence for your claim, but there's a chance it's true anyway? Sure, it could be. But if it happens, it's more likely a coincidence caused by other factors.

> There's no evidence of this

There's a lot of evidence of this. Look at crime rates in Germany and Sweden before and after their mass immigration import.