What about 40 million - would the improvement be 4x?
The solution may ultimately be a one-child policy, as demonstrated successfully by China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_women_of_China
Population control is a very outdated idea, we have enough resources for the population, we just don't know how to distribute them using free market models.
How is this calculated? Are there enough resources for 8B people go to Tahiti or equivalent destinations for their honeymoon?
Because that’s where the conflict comes in. There might be enough resources to feed everyone some basic meals everyday, but is there enough for everyone to have their own single family detached house with a yard and a couple personal vehicles? Is there enough to ensure everyone can fly around the world to see their relatives or vacation? Is there enough desirable land for people to move to from their currently undesirable land (due to weather/accessibility/availability of fruits and good food)?
Basically my argument, since this thread is quite far down now, is that over-population is not robbing the globe of resources in any amount worth worrying about and therefore population control is not going to solve inequality since it's a distribution problem.
Basically, I’d like to see what quality of life we would have if resources were distributed evenly. I imagine it wouldn’t be acceptable to most people who are used to their spoiled due to the inequality.
https://www.smh.com.au/healthcare/the-missing-girls-never-bo...
"mothers within some key migrant communities are recording sons at rates of 122 and 125 for every 100 daughters in later pregnancies."
The solution is for migrant-receiving countries (ie. the West) to place a limit of 49% males from any one country on any type of visa. This will dramatically boost the intake of females (for some visas and countries eg. India, the intake is 75% male) and thus their value to society in their home country.
Alternatively male migration could just be banned altogether from countries which practice systematic sex-selective abortion.
That strikes me as improbable. Globally, you might be right - there is, for example, enough fresh water on the planet for many more people than are alie today.
But moving a lake from thinly populated Canadian wilderness to Niger or Burkina Faso, where the needy populations are, is not technically possible.
And vice versa, Sahara would be a perfect place to generate solar electricity, but the North European populations that would gladly consume it in the winter are too far away.
It turns out that most Chinese couples were allowed 2 children:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
But there's wide reporting of females being scarce, so some families were involved in female infanticide, which will cause long-term demographic issues.
China is currently facing famine, so we'll see how that affects the population. (It turns out that although China is a communist country, they didn't/don't provide welfare for the flood victims, tens of millions of whom are farmers.)
A more regional problem is that China is damming the Himalayan head waters, so the downstream countries (India, Pakistan, etc.) will face drought on a large scale. Usually that leads to war.
Poverty traps are one of the most fundamental concepts in development economics. The contri- bution of this paper has been to provide evidence for their existence using the combination of a randomized asset transfer and an 11 year follow up in rural Bangladesh. Our key finding is that people stay poor because they lack opportunity. It is not their intrinsic characteristics that trap people in poverty but rather their circumstances. This has three implications for how we think about development policy.
The first is that big pushes that enable occupational change will be needed to address the global mass poverty problem. Small pushes will work to elevate consumption but will not get people out of the poverty trap. The magnitude of the transfer needed to achieve occupational change may be much larger than is typical with current interventions though importantly it can be time limited. Therefore the fiscal cost of permanently getting people out of poverty through a large, time limited transfer might actually be lower than relying on continual transfers that raise consumption but have no effect on the occupations of the poor.
The second is that big push policies can have long-lasting effects. Our analysis of long-run dynamics indicates that the asset, occupation and consumption trajectories of above threshold beneficiaries diverge from those of below threshold beneficiaries over time. This finding is impor- tant as it indicates that, by engendering occupational change, one time pushes can have permanent effects.
The third is that poverty traps create mismatches between talent and jobs. We have shown that misallocation of labor is rife amongst the poor in rural Bangladesh. Indeed, we show that the vast majority of the poor in rural Bangladesh are not engaged in the occupations where they would be most productive. They are perfectly capable of taking on the occupations of the richer women but are constrained from doing so by a lack of resources. The value of eliminating misallocation is an order of magnitude larger than the cost of moving all the beneficiaries past the threshold. This is important as it implies that poverty traps are preventing people from making full use of their abilities and indeed it is the mass squandering of people’s abilities that is the key tragedy of mass poverty.