Every Conversation about Population is Insane
Across the internet, and even in the real world, conversations about the human population of this planet have a strong tendency to turn absolutely deranged at a moments notice. For some reason, people are perfectly comfortable taking the absolutely most insane takes about the lives, hopes, and dreams of billions of people without a moments hesitation. No ideology, doctrine, religious, political, or social movement is immune to this law of discourse.
Broadly, the population discourse can be boiled down into three conversations: overpopulation and the environment, aging population threatening the economy, and the decline of a countries population as a cultural threat.
This last point can be outright dismissed as reactionary drivel. Every country, from Japan to Russia to Germany to the US has its own version of ‘we need people to continue having kids to preserve our ethnic heritage.’ I don’t find this a point worthy of dissecting. The cultures of aging nations, from South Korea to Sweden, will continue to have a legacy even if the residents of those nations don’t look exactly like they will in the future. And often this rhetoric is weaponized to restrict the rights of women and minorities, and not actually to materially solve an issue.
The more interesting conversations involving the population are around everyone’s favorite topic – resource use!
The environmentalist perspective sees a large and growing human population as a continual threat to the planet. Because humans use a lot of resources, a reduction in the population is necessary to save the planet. This view was born out of the ‘ecological limits’ era of environmental studies and led to a lot of heinous rhetoric.
I once attended a lecture from a leading environmental historian, one of the founders of the field, who introduced the talk by saying “We have to talk about population” and spent the whole hour discussing various proposals for population reduction. While he didn’t outright suggest anything totalitarian, he did make some downright coercive proposals, such as tying international aid dollars to countries implementing aggressive birth control policies. Of course, these policies placed much of the burden on other countries. It’s no surprise the environmental concern with overpopulation led to the creation of FAIR – one of this nation’s most aggressive anti-immigration hate groups.
The other side of this is the pro-population economic growth type. This concern boils down to the fact that as the population pyramid becomes top-heavy, the burden of caring for the elderly falls on fewer shoulders. Financially, the concern is over the long-term viability of Social Security and Medicare, which are steadily approaching insolvency. Labor-wise, the concern is that with fewer and fewer young people, the ability to maintain healthcare, food production, infrastructure, and other essential services for a growing geriatric population will hamstring future generations and suck up numerous resources.
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Both of these takes are garbage.
While there are kernels of truth in both of these concerns, they are so blown out of proportion to be laughable. Ultimately, the solution to the environmental overpopulation and the economic aging population problems is not rooted in the direct management of the population size itself. But instead, just let humans continue to be awesome.
From the environmental perspective, population is not the problem, it is resource use. It’s possible to provide a comfortable quality of life within our available natural resources in a circular manner. Most nonrenewable resources have a renewable alternative. It’s the distribution of resource consumption and wealth, along with wasteful infrastructure and policy choices such as the prioritization of cars and planes over trains or the high consumption of beef over fish, chicken, or plant protein that leads to poor environmental outcomes. We could fulfill our core needs and enjoy recreation and luxury while limiting our environmental footprint within our resource limits. Individual human consumption is not 1 to 1 and can be radically changed depending on the choice environment we have. Managing this environment is key to meeting human needs while restoring the planet, not spending our limited time attempting to drive population numbers down. Additionally, human population numbers are not going to balloon. While the 20th and early 21st centuries are defined by their rapid population growth, by 2100 the population will stabilize to around 10-11 billion people. A size that the planet’s resources can reasonably support sustainably to a decently high average quality of life.
The economic concern is a little more nuanced, but ultimately one that I think will eventually resolve itself. The population is aging and how to support a large geriatric cohort financially and materially with an ever-dwindling pool of young labor will be a challenge. However, just as the labor pool is shrinking, our ability to automate large chunks of the economy is increasing. Despite most consumers’ experience of automation and AI being in the form of low-quality chatbots and digital slop, as we figure out the strengths and weaknesses of these technologies they are likely to play an important role in providing essential goods and services to folks, and if properly regulated can do so in a societally constructive manner. While I doubt we’ll see robot nurses, we may see automation freeing people up from desk jobs to become nurses. Additionally, programs like Social Security can be restored to financial stability with some higher taxes, lifting income caps, and bringing back pensions for private sector workers, taking pressure off the government.
Any issue we have with population is more rooted in how we use resources and technology, and with reform and progress in these areas we’ll solve our “population problems.” The only ethical population policy, in my opinion, is to provide people with the tools to plan how many children they want to have and when to have them and to give parents the resources to care for them. Efforts to either increase or decrease the number of children couples want to have are inherently unethical and, ultimately, unnecessary.
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening too
Trudging Through the Tedious Swamp of Celebrity Brand Deals: An intriguing reflection from a journalist about how stifling brand-oriented interviews with celebrities can be.
Farming for Survival Behind Bars: A thought-provoking interview with a farmer-prisoner about how food sovereignty and a connection to the land can be achieved while incarcerated.
Day with Mei: This is what I love about the internet – a whole account dedicated to discussing and reviewing tinned fish.