Contra that shitty graph at the top of the article, population diverged from the historical trend of exponential growth in the 1950s. Worldwide birth rates have peaked. The largest cohort of babies the world has ever seen was in the 80s. The population is now growing solely due to increased lifespans.

Much to the disappointment of everyone waiting gleefully for mankind to suffer for its many sins, the Malthusian crisis has not happened, and will not ever happen.

Crop failures haven't stopped happening, populations have risen quite a bit since the 19th century, but mass starvation still happens or doesn't happen entirely due to policy not a literal shortage of food.

1% of the world's then population passed away in the Irish famine. Ireland's population is now 5 million and Britain's around 60. Ireland's population was extraordinarily large compared to the subsistence farmer's yields in 1845. Here's a chart:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IrelandEuropePopulation17...

Ireland may have been a net exporter of food during the famine, but I would hope you agree that policy can bring about a very literal shortage of food.

There was no surplus to fall back on, not because the population was so large that it overwhelmed reserves, but because the surplus wealth of Ireland was being systematically extracted so no such reserves could be built.

The size of the population in Ireland was enabled by subsistence farming of the potato. The powers that were, did not have a control on the number of children per family. The spurt in population was risky and had Malthus' projections been heeded, population based checks on resource limits working as a preventive measure would have limited population growth rather than the death rate doing so.

Plots of land were handed down by subdivision among the male children in a family[0]. The population increased, but the land available to them remained the same.

Crop loss was estimated at one third to one half [1].

So to refute your point, if there was a smaller population, the land occupied by the total population would arguably have remained the same, and one third to one half of a crop loss could have been sustained without starvation and famine.

I am still convinced that it was a real life Malthusian crisis, aided and abetted by systematic exploitation. I do not think it's a stretch to say exploitation has not been eradicated. It's a certainty that children are still brought in to the world without a guarantee that they can be provided for.

We can argue for resource redistribution to prevent crises arising, however Malthusian 'prophecy' is predictive, and the Irish Famine was predictable without resource redistribution. I would argue we have already had a Malthusian crisis. I would further argue it's hubris to say that another is impossible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_famine#Tenants.2C_subdiv... This paragraph only alludes to the process of subdivision, with only a small amount of research, you will see that it resulted in population exceeding the carrying capacity of the land they occupied in 1845. "Following the famine, reforms were implemented making it illegal to further divide land holdings."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_famine#Blight_in_Ireland (look for "Crop loss in 1845")

Obviously a scientist talking -- or is it "astrologer"?

Avoid making ignorant predictions, especially about the future. :)

The broader answer is that it upends economic expectations. Say I'm thinking of building an office tower. If I know there will be fewer workers in 10 years, instead of more, I'm less likely to build it. If I'm pricing stock in a company, and I know there will be fewer customers in 10 years, instead of more, then I'm going to value that stock lower. What happens to the value of Facebook stock if we realize that there will be fewer and fewer teenagers as time goes on? The economy of the present is hugely dependent on expectations about the future.

Finally, though I don't think any European country is in danger of facing this yet, you need a certain critical mass of people to build a truly world-class city with world class arts, culture, etc. Cities smaller than about a million people don't have the consumer base or the tax base to really offer world class amenities. Now, this is admittedly a matter of aesthetics, but if you look at a place like Detroit, which went from 1.8 million to less than half that, you can see that the city is not just a smaller version of itself, but something lesser entirely.

And it's not just because of Detroit's poverty. Nobody wants to invest in a city that's shrinking. Contrast Detroit to Philadelphia. Philadelphia is one of the poorest major cities in the country, but it's population very slowly inched up during the 2000's. And while it's not the site of a high-end construction boom like say Toronto, it's a flourishing city. People are opening up new restaurants, new shops, etc, and reshaping downtown to be a much more livable place than it was just ten years ago.

If we didn't have a pyramid scheme underlying the basic economic system, growth wouldn't be such a determining factor in city attractiveness and population increase wouldn't be a significant fuel that drives the growth.

Okay but back to reality: I now see how population decline could lead to a crisis while things adjust (eg: some cities collapse like detroit, some flourish). Thanks for the detailed reply. This is a complicated topic and I expect some people have much more thought out alternatives to our current predicament than I would come up with here.

I realize you addressed this in your second paragraph, so as I said this comment isn't adding much, but I think it's worth spelling out: anyone who wants to have a dream of retiring before they die, better pray that the "overpopulation crisis" actually materializes as severely as possible.

When people "save for retirement" they put money in a 401k, they don't fill a cellar with creamed corn and MREs. Those investments are nothing more than earmarks on future production. The value of a stock is ultimately built on the right to receive a share of profits from the labor of the working generation. The same is true for bonds and other financial instruments.

No matter how you structure the retirement system, the physical reality is that the retired generation gets a cut of the goods and services produced by the working generation. As the latter gets smaller relative to the former, you have problems.

Yes, but that system is unsustainable -- it requires constant growth, something the finite-sized earth cannot tolerate. It would be like nature creating a strategy that, to survive, requires the parent organism to have cancer.

The problem is that, instead of accepting and creating sustainable methods, we accommodate unsustainable growth rates by creating unsustainable social institutions.

Modern social institutions are a large-scale Ponzi scheme, a fraud that cannot go on forever.

* the % of people capable of highly intellectual work is quite low * as time goes on, more fields of activity require those people * you need a growing population to provide that supply

They cited Russia as an example (population has been declining since the collapse of the USSR) - basically, to have e.g. a competitive aerospace industry in the 21st century, Russian population would have to increase by about 25%.

This is just one example.

Most of our social institutions rely on having an increasing or at least stable population. We need young people to support retirees, etc.

Besides....I heard there are plans to regreen entire city blocks.

Sperm count is unlikely to affect the population growth anyway, what we need is to get people out of poverty and proper family planning with access to proper birth control. Then we can "control" the population.

I am concerned, though, that the temporary lull in overpopulation will be broken by belief systems that encourage large families; by definition, those with a genetic or memetic instinct to have many children will out-populate those without that instinct. (I have a soft spot for the Mormons, but they come to mind here.)

For example, it is completely plausible to advance the argument that children in large families decide to have fewer offspring due to their own childhood experiences. I'm not saying that this is definitively the case or that I have any evidence for it, but it is just as plausible as the conjecture that a propensity for a large number of offspring is perfectly inheritable.

Moreover, I would suggest that genetics do influence tendencies for adopting some memes over others, especially as regarding the instinct to spread genetic material, which is very ancient. I can't cite any scientific support for this idea, but the likelihood seems very strong.

Because it's demonstrably successful at curbing population growth rate? Because during periods of the most aggressive enforcement of the one-child policy, China had its highest growth rate in recent history, 2-2.5x that of the US?

And now, during its period of least aggressive enforcement, but with a rapid pace of industrialization and wealth injection, the growth rate has fallen dramatically?

http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=24&c=ja&l=en

Or perhaps we want to look at Japan, which without forced abortions, property confiscation, and brutal acts of repression have managed to achieve a negative growth rate?

No matter which way you slice the data, the trend is clear: industrialization, wealth, and stability decrease growth rates, and do so far better than any number of guns and Bibles you can point at people.

The fact that China would think to enforce such a policy should give one pause.

Look at Japan where there are fewer and fewer supporting more and more. It is kinda working for now but what will happen in 20 years? Who knows.

Relevant TED lecture by Steven Pinker:

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

[Citation needed].

Define current period and define peaceful? We haven't had a global conflict in 60-odd years (and yay for that), but we had two global conflicts in the last hundred years. We almost had a third (US vs PRC)and forth one (US vs CCCP) but it appears that nuclear war let cooler heads prevail. In the past two hundred years there is almost no place of human habitation that has been untouched by war.

In fairness most of the civilized world has, with a few rare exceptions, always been in a state of perpetual war.

For bonus points how many wars is did the US fight during the year 2012?

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/07/143285836/war-and-violence-on-...

It doesn't much matter what you choose as "current period", because war and violence has been on the decline for quite a long time.

It's pretty annoying to try to have a factual discussion and get replies that are nothing but handwaving and anecdotes. Listing off the violent conflicts in the past century without offering any comparison to wars further in the past is completely useless to this discussion.

>"GOLDSTEIN: Well, no, because the past 100 years were - there was a big explosion of violence in the early part of the 20th century, but the 17th century was no picnic either. The Thirty Years' War destroyed a third of the population of Germany, and back through history there have been terrible wars much of the time."

>"And even in prehistoric times, as many as a quarter of the men in a society not infrequently died in wars. So it's actually a new thing and something that's developed in the least 60 years and especially the last 20 years. And we can talk about why it is, and Steven Pinker will have more to say about that also, but the big change is that people are finding other ways to solve their problems, not through war, and we're seeing an actual shrinking in the number of people killed worldwide."

That is to say that the source you found is making the claim that the reduction has happened in the last 20-60 years. Read that again: "So it's actually a new thing and something that's developed in the least 60 years and especially the last 20 years." Is that not the same thing I said: "We haven't had a global conflict in 60-odd years (and yay for that), but we had two global conflicts in the last hundred years." In fact what is said in this interview is pretty much what I said in my post.

>It doesn't much matter what you choose as "current period", because war and violence has been on the decline for quite a long time.

Yes it does, it really matters what you choose as your current period. Your own source backs me up on this.

>It's pretty annoying to try to have a factual discussion and get replies that are nothing but hand waving and anecdotes.

Large scale violence like WW2 is not really an anecdote but in fact a large chunk of data. I assumed that you were aware that most historians accepted that WW2 claimed the largest number of lives in human history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_...

Largest number, but not largest proportion. A human alive during WWII was far more likely to survive that war than a human alive during the Mongol conquests or the An Lushan rebellion was to survive those. The Mongol conquests were about as deadly as WWII, yet happened in a world with only 1/5th of the population. Those two events killed 5-10% of the total world population, while WWII "only" killed about 3%.

This business where literally everyone who replies to disagree with me only looks at absolute numbers is getting pretty irritating. It just makes no sense.

This is a learning moment. Other people are using different assumptions about war and how to measure it maybe they have something to offer you in perspective.

For example a war is not merely summed up by number of peoples killed nor is it understood by the chance that a single person at that time period might be killed or the total world population killed. In fact the level of war or numbers of wars could increase dramatically without any increase in violence by merely varying the culture, technology and other circumstances.

You did not address the fact that the source you cited for your argument supported my claims and not yours. Have you cast Pinker and Goldstein aside? If you still agree with Pinker and Goldstein then you agree with the claim I put forward and I'm not sure we have much more to talk about. If you don't agree with Pinker and Goldstein, why not?

Expressing how irritating or annoying you find the people with whom you are having a discussion is rude. Why do you think such statements are a good strategy?

Right, right. I'm supposed to sit back and think about why people are saying this stuff, while you're free to make idiotic statements about my ignorance of history. Did you ever stop to think that maybe I had some other reasoning behind my statement beyond ignorance of the death toll of WWII?

Regarding the claims, the only important one is whether we are headed toward perpetual war or not. The trend is against it. Specific timeframes are just bikeshedding.

> Expressing how irritating or annoying you find the people with whom you are having a discussion is rude. Why do you think such statements are a good strategy?

I'm hoping that it would cause people writing without thinking to take a moment before replying. No, it doesn't appear to be working well.

Let's look at the evidence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_military_confli...

The only reason we aren't aware of the number of military conflicts taking place is because they aren't on the evening news.

And yes, by any objective measure, this is a more warlike time than any in prior history, simply because there are more people available and willing to fight.

I found this talk very interesting on a similar topic: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

You may be right about absolute numbers, but absolute numbers are pointless here. From what I've seen before, in terms of the relative number of people killed in war compared to the overall population, this is the most peaceful time known. If 2x as many people get killed in wars, but there are 4x as many people alive, that world is more peaceful, not less.

That's a little unfair. They're rarely covered on submission/popularity-driven news sites, either. People tend not to care unless it figures into their usual political arguments. I notice this a lot with terrorism: people in the US seem to think it's mythical because it doesn't happen to them very often, even if it's unfortunately common globally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents,_Ja...

By the way, there's a lovely book on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Who-Hates-Whom-Well-Armed-Intractable/...

So while humans may be fine at our current population, the earth and its other tenants are not fine. Humans are the most destructive force in nature, and the less of them there are the better, for our own survival as well as the rest of the planet.

Add the impending climate change into the mix (once again, our fault), which will most likely bring droughts and famine, and your resource-to-person ratio drops significantly, making the human population as it is now dangerously high.

I really think dropping human population is a good thing. It will mean less conflicts and resource contention in the next 300 years as deserts spread and oceans rise.

Sperm count falling by one third in 25 years is much scarier, suggests a horrible trend for us. As for overpopulation, people usually had /have a lot of kids because of high mortality rates.

By the way, who is going to work so that pension check gets to you ;) ?