Blade Runner is a very interesting exception, while depopulation has become common in speculative fiction these days having it as part of something from the 80s was pretty rare. I don't know when the overpopulation/depopulation switch flipped in fiction, but I think it was pretty recently.

Blade Runner the movie looks anything except depopulated. Well, excluding the vast empty building where Deckard lives. The city is enormous and literally blowing up gigantic amounts of energy and pollution; the streets are packed with people, languages, and clutter of all types (a PKD obsession). In some ways it is fully within the overpopulation zeitgeist of the times.

It's just LA to be honest.

Busy everywhere but also downtown is full of empty buildings and you still need to commute from Glendale even if you're an LA detective running down replicants.

Ads are talking up off world colonies in Texas.

No traffic though, so that's where it's fiction.

Isaac Asimov's Daneel Olivaw series of books had the overpopulated Earth alright, but it also had spacer colonies on distant planets that very much kept their populations at a sensible level and were magnificently wealthy in comparison because of it (and robots).

there's a short story, which i think is Asimov's, about a probe reaching earth. and it only detects two life forms in a fully automated planetary extraction mechanism. And those two are forever occupied trying to struggle the remaining half from one another.

Logans Run too

I recently read Niven's ringworld (1970). All the intelligent species had overpopulation problems, dealing with it in different ways. It was just a given that it was an inevitable consequence of an advanced species.

It was really jarring to consider it. I'm old enough to remember the (now recognised as disastrous) one child policy of China but even so the way it was presented as "of course there have to be population controls" actually took me out of the narrative.

> If you haven't watched it, Soylent Green with Edward G Robinson and Charlton Heston is an illustration of this (no spoilers please!)

If you wish to avoid spoilers, do not watch the trailer. I remember talking to my kids about the movie and then watching the trailer, and it gives away pretty much 100% of the movie.

These "academics" willingly distorted the issue by treating humanity as one lump.

The West was in no way contributing to "overpopulation". It was other areas of the globe that were causing problems.

> Blade Runner where Earth's population is declining because of off-world colonization and replicants are created for labor

The Expanse series (James SA Corey) makes a rather different prediction about the effects of plentiful (or at least mostly sufficient) food coupled with a decreased need for human labor.

In that story, in the future there are far more people than jobs (only on Earth--not generally true for off-world settlements). As a result, most Earthers are effectively on welfare, including many people who want to have a job. With little or nothing else to do, they start having more children, which results in the population of Earth increasing to ~30 billion.

I like the explanation here by Hans Rosling - We'll settle around 11 billion people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI

TLDW: People in the past had more kids more often because of high mortality rate and having a care-taker (mother) at home.

With child mortality being lower, plus women entering the workforce and enjoying a higher standard of living, most people won't want to have more than ~2 children. They want to spend their money on having a higher quality life rather than subsistance and survival.

So big it seems it resonated so well well into the 21st century and in everyone that cannot or refuses to procreate. I'm quite sure not so many became anti-natalist overnight, so it must've been some other reason to restrain so good as to have so many nation's population decline. Cannot be only the theory that lux brings reduction of babies born.