You wouldn’t believe some of the stupidity that I don’t let thru into comments. (Well, perhaps you would.) A recent bit suggested that I shouldn’t object to Gaza genocide because after all, I think human population should be lower, and this is lowering it!
After a bout of derisive laughter, I thought about it a bit and figured we need a bit of exploration of the overall issue. The original moron won’t understand, but others will.
Let’s lay it out simply. In population overshoot, a species winds up at numbers higher than what the environment can support long term. It’s not hard to understand this. If you need a breeding population of 1,000 deer to sustainably feed one wolf pack, and there are two packs, the wolves can eat into the 1,000 deer. They breed less, and enter a population death spiral and when there aren’t enough left to feed two packs, the wolves die in droves, or leave.
We, Musk’s fantasies aside, cannot leave, not in any time span that will be useful in the current crisis. Space might have helped a lot, not for colonization, but for resources, but after the moon landing America decided to starve the space program and the Soviets were entering their decline. Serious space exploration and any chance of space exploitation entered an over forty year hiatus and has only recovered in the last decade. Jingoism aside if space is truly exploited, it will be done by the Chinese, not by America or Europe.
If we were not in overshoot, the environment would not be degrading so severely: massive loss of insects, mammals, acidifying oceans, climate change, rain water that isn’t safe to drink, etc, etc… We’re eating into the carrying capacity of the Earth, producing more than the Earth can sustainably produce, and damaging the Earth in ways which will take ages to fix. Some of them, like loss of biodiversity, are not fixable on any human lifespan.
So, since we can’t leave, and since we can’t get enough resources from space to matter, and since we’re destroying environment that makes our survival possible along with drawing down resources at a ferocious rate, we’re in overshoot.
So, our population is going to go down one way or the other. Now if you read the media or spend time reading political or economic social media you’ve heard a ton about the replacement rate crisis. Virtually every country’s birth rate is lower than is required to keep up the population.
This graphic from Pew makes the point:
This is good. China having a population over 1.4 billion people is TOO MANY PEOPLE.
The transition will be difficult, because a smaller number of young people will have to support a larger number of old people. This is the actual use case for robots and “AI”, to care for people as they get older and make up the age gap. In a sane society, there would be no worry about “losing jobs” to AI because we wouldn’t distribute resources to people based on jobs. We would be happy to work less, to let people who want to not work at all to do other things, and to reduce hours and share jobs that still need to be done by humans. And if a human wanted to do a job that is mostly roboticized, unless they completely sucked, that’d be fine because the economy exists to serve humans, if you’re sane, not the other way around.
Both China and Japan have been moving hard to “gerontorobotics” (not sure if that’s a word yet.) They know there won’t be enough care workers, so they’re moving to robots which can help people live who are still mostly OK but just old, and they’re also working on robots that can help invalids and semi-invalids, including getting them into and out of bed, helping them bathe and use the washroom and so on.
Now, to go back to the original moron, all efforts to reverse the birth rate decrease are stupid at this point. The BEST way to lose population is to simply have people age out. Among major countries the only one which might reasonably make a case that it isn’t overpopulated is Russia. Among middle countries, perhaps Canada, though as a Canadian I don’t want more people. I like wilderness, this is fine.
Population needs to be decreased, yes, that does not mean we need to start mass murdering. Further, if we did want to eliminate any group of people it would be the top .1%, because they produce vastly more pollution and use up vastly more resources than others. (Not saying we should, but if eliminationism is your goal, radically reducing elites is where you would start if your motivation was actually to help the world.)
Get out of the way, and let reproduction rates keep falling. If we fall to two billion or so and they’re still too low, then feel free to panic. Right now, it’s a good thing.
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Clonal Antibody
I fear that US is not adopting the Chinese or the Indian way. It is well on the way to adopting the Israeli way – in other words genocide coupled with eugenics and race purity tests.
India had a lost generation in the 1970’s, when Indira Gandhi’s son embarked on a program for mass sterilization aimed at the northern states. This caused a widespread backlash in those states, and IMO, the major reason why fertility rates are higher there.
From: https://www.google.com/search?q=decline+in+Indian+fertility+rates+graph
India’s total fertility rate (TFR), which measures the average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime, has significantly declined in recent decades. From a high of around 6 in the 1950s, it has dropped to approximately 2, and is projected to fall further. This decline is a global trend, but India’s rapid decrease is noteworthy.
The Declining Fertility Rate of India (2001 vs 2021) : r/MapPorn
Here’s a more detailed look:
Historical Context:
India’s TFR was around 6 in the 1950s.
Recent Trends:
By 2023, the TFR was 1.98. Macrotrends reports that India’s fertility rate for 2025 is projected to be 2.11.
Below Replacement Level:
The current TFR is below the replacement level of 2.1, which means that the population is no longer naturally replacing itself.
Regional Variations:
While the decline is widespread, there are regional differences, with southern states achieving replacement-level fertility earlier than northern states.
Reasons for Decline:
The decline is attributed to a combination of factors including:
Socio-economic changes: Increased female literacy, workforce participation, and empowerment of women have played a significant role.
Changing attitudes: Delaying marriage and childbirth, and a shift in societal views on family size, have also contributed.
Infertility: Increased cases of infertility in both men and women are also a factor.
Future Projections:
Projections indicate a continued decline, with some estimates suggesting a TFR of 1.29 by 2050.
mago
There’s an oft repeated argument that it’s distribution and management of resources that’s the problem and not over population. I don’t know.
It’s safe to say we’ve reached critical tipping points—enough to push our world system over the cliff and into the abyss. But who knows? Nothing is fixed and solid in this illusory world.
Nuclear destruction? Death by a thousand cuts? Could happen any old way, any old time.
I’m guessing it will be attrition through decreased procreation, although given accelerating degeneration on all fronts, I’m making no bets.
Cozy up to the one you love and use a condom.
jrkrideau
@ Clonal Antibody
India’s total fertility rate (TFR), which measures the average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime, has significantly declined in recent decades. From a high of around 6 in the 1950s, it has dropped to approximately 2, and is projected to fall further.
I’ve been looking at fertility rates in a number of countries and India was shocking. I went bacd a couple of times to see if I was making a mistake. No, that linear trend looks correct!
I’ll have to see what I can track down in population projections by qualified demographers but my casual amateur impression in that population growth is slowing almost to a stop.
Jerren
Depopulation is baked in. My personal future is planned with unprecedented turbulence in the medium-term firmly in mind.
This depopulated future is a lens environmentalists should keep their eyes on. Conspicuous consumption might be a smaller problem than an uncontrolled demolition of capitalism. Solar punk might become increasingly viable in a balkanized future America. Construction projects should be built with the understanding that maintenance/replacement costs will go up instead of down. McMansions might be replaced with more modest brick for example.
I’m not saying I am an optimist, but in my community I get a lot more traction with these ideas than my primary advice, which is usually some version of ‘invest in a bunker and don’t rely on big institutions’.
Eric Anderson
Great read from Crooked Timber here:
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/07/27/a-billion-people-would-be-plenty-to-sustain-civilisation/
“with likely declines in fertility the world population will decline by half each century after 2100, reaching one billion around 2400.”
“In the second half of 20th century, the modern economy consisted of the member countries of the Organization For Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) … the OECD, taken as a whole, was self-sufficient in nearly everything required for a modern economy. So, the population of the OECD in the second half of last century provides an upper bound to the number of humans needed to sustain such an economy. That number did not reach one billion until 1980.”
Pretty good argument for 1 billion people as I’ve maintained on here before.
The pro-natalists? It’s just capitalist propaganda noise to support their profit margins/ It’s pretty well hammered down by economists these days that ALL of the economic growth occurring in the Western world are attributable to population growth.
Yeah … capitalism and population decline are not comfortable bedfellows. Anticipate the billionaire propaganda machine to start ramping up to 11.
GM
Even Russia is likely overpopulated, because the proper definition of overpopulation should be against what can be indefinitely sustained without fossil fuels.
Now Russia will have enough fossil fuels to feed its own people for quite some time into the future, and they are also investing heavily in advanced nuclear energy tech, so they might be able to ride it out for a long time at current levels. But without fossil fuel and other nonrenewable inputs it will not be possible to feed 145M people on that territory, even with global warming. Historically it supported 20-30M at most without such inputs. Maybe you can double that due to warmer weather, but not much more.
Their bigger short term problem is that other countries are already in such a bad situation that they are about to to war with Russia in order to get their hands on Russian resources. As in doing an Operation Barbarossa 2.0. And a Generalplan Ost 2.0.
Which was always expected to happen, but a couple decades ago I thought we had more time than this. I was wrong I guess.
And that is also because not only do we have an overpopulation problem, we have a socioeconomic system problem. Right now the situation where the current elites stay in their position without doing any downwards redistribution can only be sustained with indefinite growth, because indefinite growth is what pays the interest on all the loans issued, and being in the position to issue those loans is the key mechanism that makes the current elites what they are.
China did the unthinkable with the one-child policy, and managed to escape the overpopulation trap at least to some extent (look at India for what the opposite scenario looks like). That also laid the foundation for their current success in many ways that people don’t like to acknowledge.
But can they do something else unthinkable and move to a system that does not require growth?
If they are true communists, they could. But even the USSR, which never moved to a market economy the way China did, could not escape the growth dependence trap.
Even though it didn’t have to fall in it. Another overlooked aspect of the situation is that in a Soviet-style command economy there is no requirement for growth. Because it is not a bunch of bankers issuing loans out of thin air that run everything, the state does and the state cares about material balance, not a complex tangled mess of debts. Which is one reason why the USSR never had a recession, let alone depression between the mid-1920s and the late 1980s. But when you go back to those years, all the talk was about growth. More coal production, more iron production, more, more, more, and never did anyone raise their hand and ask “But what good does more of that do us?”. Somehow they never had that discussion, for whatever reason.
Again, that was the USSR. Can current capitalist China make an even more dramatic break with dogma? Kind of doubtful…
canopy
An interesting possibility is that, among those who manage to survive the impending carnage may be societies that have learned how to harmonize old matriarchal traditions with more recent patriarchal systems. To the extent that unchecked patriarchal dominion will be understood to have been a factor leading to the excesses that caused global civilizational collapse, the ethos that emerges among the survivors may prioritize balance and flexibility while regarding excess and domination as dangerously antiquated and barbaric.
Given the way that declining birth rates seem to correlate with improved conditions for women, those who survive to see the long future might conclude that the best way for our species to live in balance with the natural world and avoid the mistakes that led to the great global collapse, will be for maternal and paternal traditions to coexist in flexible balance.
Source for these speculations is the book titled Beyond the Second Sex, New Directions in the Anthropology of Gender. In particular, the chapter Androcentric and Matrifocal Gender Representations in Minangkabau Ideology, explains how this Indonesian community has balanced their matriarchal traditions with the patriarchal rules of Islam.
Although I don’t have any books on it, anecdotal hints I have picked up here and there suggest that some of the indigenous cultures in the Americas have matriarchal traditions. An old friend who was from a tribe that was part of the Abenaki federation, located in Maine and parts of southeastern Canada, explained that when her brother married, he moved to the village his wife came from, since their tribe is matrilocal. She joked that it took his wife longer to realize he was a jerk because she remained among her own relatives after they married.