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.
Failed Scholar
A very good summation, @GM. The push is for ever more people, no matter what, because the economic system needs new bodies to pay those ever growing loans that keeps the bankster ‘elite’ in charge. It becomes an ideological mantra and obsession (I like the term GDPcels from the morons over on twitter, “Line Go Up”, etc). Here in Canada the growth mantra was so ingrained into people’s heads, they only started questioning it when their housing prices shot up to the moon and quality of life went into the crapper because of the insane immigration/pro infinite population growth strategy the Trudeau gov undertook (and turbocharged after Covid). And not just the Trudeau gov to be fair, you can see the ideology at work with our whining provincial premiers wanting more control over immigration themselves ( https://nowtoronto.com/news/doug-ford-other-premiers-call-for-more-provincial-control-on-immigration/ ). Only now do I finally see people asking themselves “why?” when our overlords try to sell us on ever more numbers to placate the GeeDeePee gods.
The rather ironic thing is that the most advanced capitalist/industrialized countries seem to get the lowest birth rates of all (see: Asia), so it seems to be a self defeating strategy (in addition to destroying the planet obviously) ultimately unless you can backstop the native declines with infinity foreigners. And surprise surprise, that’s exactly the bedrock of most PMC culture. Imagine that.
Joan
I am surely preaching to the choir here, but the gentle and compassionate way to decrease in population is to allow women access to birth control so that they can choose whether they become mothers and how many children they have.
marku52
“allow women access to birth control so that they can choose whether they become mothers and how many children they have.”
Sorry. that interferes with “Line Go Up” and “Moar Groaf.”
Not allowed.
/s of course.
GM
And what happens if:
1) They choose to have 3 kids each?
2) There is a drastic overpopulation crisis already?
China would be at two billion or more now if it wasn’t for the 1-child policy.
There are decisions that cannot be left to the individual because we all live together and completely dependent on the ecosystems and resource base of the only planet that we have. How many kids to have is one of those decisions.
The understanding of the demographic transition is a classic example of confusing correlation with causation. A whole lot of things happened all at the same time, but people picked the most optimistic version of which factors caused what and ran with it, i.e. that “as people get rich they have fewer kids” and that “given access to birth control women chose to have few kids”.
Sounds very appealing because it implies we don’t have to do anything but further promote our current model.
But that’s not really what is happening.
The fundamental evolutionary mandate is maximization of inclusive fitness. However, evolution has not directly wired human brains for that. Because even today less than 0.1% of the population has any clue what “inclusive fitness” is, only sometihng like 0.001% actualy understand it, and historically that percentage has been exactly zero until the second half of the 20th century.
What evolution has wired human brains for instead is the pursuit of what has on evolutionary time scales been very good proxies for inclusive fitness. Us being social primates, social status is one of those very good proxies, and this is what people pursue.
So it happens that in conditions of urban industrialized society having a dozen kids is a serious drag on maximizing one’s personal social status and the status of those kids (which parents also have to think about), because the resource investment necessary to achieve, maintain and improve social status is so huge. That required resource investment also tends to grow as the society becomes richer, and to grow much faster as “people get wealthier” than actual incomes for average people do (in no small part because average people get much less of that growth than those on top, but it is those on top with the highest status that everybody else is chasing).
There is no guarantee that will last though, because cultural factors can override it and we are due for a total economic collapse due to resource depletion anyway. What happens when the process of urbanization and industrialization goes in reverse or if certain cultural factors go in the direction of social status being again maximized by having a lot of kids?
The post-Soviet experience shows that a certain type of collapse depresses birth rates even more, but it doesn’t have to always be exactly like that, and those societies remained urban and industrialized.
TFRs dropping has not always been a strictly monotonous process — Egypt was the poster child for that a decade ago, though more recently it dropped again.
Plus the most important issue, which is that right now there are at least 10x as many people as there should be on this planet, that number will not decrease until the end of the century, and is not projected to ever get down to what it should be without a planetary catastrophe (which is what we are trying to avoid and what is guaranteed by global population remaining too high).
The time scales simply don’t match here even if we project the current levels of fertility depression for centuries to come — we are in deep overshoot now, we don’t have time for the natural processes to take care of the problem.
GM
Actually it doesn’t, which is why it is the standard line on the issue you hear parroted by the same people who tell you the line must go up. Something it seems you have not noticed or thought about.
A China-style one-child policy, with forced abortions, sterilizations and even infanticide, on the other hand, does interfere, which is why China was demonized for doing the right thing and something like this is completely outside the realm of acceptable discourse in the West.
Revelo
Evolution applies both to genes and memes. Genes/memes which lead to population growth will always crowd out all other genes/memes. Maximum carrying capacity (considered broadly) is always the only long term stable population.l number.
In the past, there was no need for culture to inculcate desire for children for their own sake in young women, because: young women desired marriage because fate of unwed women was miserable; married women were forced to accommodate husband’s sex drive; no birth control other than infanticide. Put everything together, and all any culture had to do to guarantee population growth was outlaw infanticide and even that not necessary in rural areas where children were economically valuable (free labor, retirement plan, sons and sons in law as free security guards). Remove incentives for young women to marry, add birth control, eliminate economic value of children, and traditional cultures can’t cope and so birth rate collapses.
But alternative cultures are possible, and exist now, which do inculcate desire for children for their own sake in young women. Such cultures will eventually dominate everywhere, and so population will eventually start rising again.
Maximum human population is probably based on total solar energy hitting the earth, and so is easily 100 billion. Those humans would live in dense city and eat mostly vegetarian diets supplemented by insects and small sea fish, with a small amount of animal meat, but otherwise they might have a very high standard of living, with much less impact on the environment than currently. 100 billion humans sounds big, but there are already plenty of life species with populations above 100 billion, or even above 100 trillion in the case of bacteria. It’s just a matter of reducing the impact of each individual in the environment.
GM
There are very few contenders for a more idiotic statement ever made.
Look at the pre-human populations of large terrestrial vertebrates of simialr or larger size.
Which of them ever reached even hundreds of millions? None.
Well, their past numbers are what can be supported based on solar energy flows indefinitely. Anything in the billions is only possible with non-renewable inputs and by wrecking the planet.
And those vertebrates only used the energy they directly ate, no fire, no technology of any sort. It is a 100x footprint for a modern human living a comfortable lifestyle.
Revelo
@GM: “Population concern, then, is as much a pretext for mass murder as climate change. The underlying motive is as old as oligarchy itself: fear and hatred of the common people, and a desire to get rid of them at the earliest possible opportunity; that is, as soon as they are no longer needed to supply the needs of the oligarchy. And that moment is now: as robotics and artificial intelligence take over all human roles, the economic value of the human being falls to less than zero. It’s not about saving the planet — it’s about preserving for all time the dominant position of the oligarchy.”—Lethal Text substack.
Large grass eaters (bison in North America, zebras and other such animals in Africa, whatever roamed Argentina prior to humans, etc) most certainly reached multiple billions worldwide. And solar energy was never the limiting factor for mammal or other life. Limiting factor was typically water, nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus or some other element to support plant growth. Humans can use essentially unlimited supplies of solar energy to terraform the earth to supply missing plant nutrients. For example, oceans can be fertilized to produce vast amounts of algae and/or small fishes, seawater can be converted to fresh and then pumped uphill to irrigate deserts, etc.
Terraforming is a long term process, and population will likely crash in this century due to climate change before any major terraforming, but I am quite confident surviving humanity will pick up the pieces after the wreckage and 100 billion population will be reached by year 10000 at the latest. As noted in my previous post, those who don’t value high human population will inevitably be outbred into oblivion by those who see high human population as a good thing for it’s own sake. This is the iron law of evolution.
Also, riding around in automobiles instead of walking is not a comfortable lifestyle but rather a very unnatural and unhealthy lifestyle forced on modern humans by the way we structured our modern habitat. And likewise for other resource intensive aspects of “developed” (read: dehumanizing) economy lifestyles. Truly high standard of living primarily consists in lots of leisure time combined with good health. Leisure and maintaining existing good health does not imply any use of natural resources, while fixing bad health (i.e. medical care) does not need to be expensive in terms of natural resources.
GM
No, they didn’t. Bison population at its peak was at 60 million in North America.
And, of course, the human ecological niche is not that of a grass eater, it is a supercharged apex predator, who consumes way more per capita than even something as large as a Tyranousaurus back in the days would have.
Of course it is the limiting factor, it is a fixed flux.
It is the height of idiocy to use the words “unlimited supplies” and “solar energy” together. It is a severely limited and very low-grade resources.
And it is something even worse to consider it both feasible and desirable to convert the whole planet into a giant feeding lot for humans.
That is correct and it is the core of our tragedy.
Because those who “see high human population as a good thing for it’s own sake” and will outbreed others into oblivion are dooming both themselves and everyone else to extinction.
They win in the short term, that is indeed the iron law of evolution, but in the long term they are suicidal morons.
There will be no picking of any pieces because once this civilization collapses it will have dissipated and depleted the concentrated resources on which it built itself up, making it largely impossible for another one to arise.
This is a one-and-done affair for the next 50-100 million years, maybe even longer.