Any evidence for these assumed causal relationships? Wars have been waged by small numbers of people in the past and today, migration in such general terms has always been inherent to humans, resources are depleted by mass-consumption of a tiny fraction of the global population, and hunger is caused by not distributing available food to those who need it.
These problems are hence mostly political. Again, only a tiny fraction of the global population has any significance in the relevant decisions.
They believe that poverty is the root cause of most human problems. For example, some of the worst despots in history, got there, escaping grinding poverty, in their youth.
When you are skint, your priorities change, and things like labor laws, ecology, and species diversity, are non-starters.
Firstly, political decisions are never made by a single person. Even the most brutal dictator needs to be enabled by his environment.
Secondly, most powerful people have always been as far away from poverty as possible. For dictators, corrupt presidents and oligarchs, growing up in a wealthy environment seems the most unifying factor among the people in such positions. They are also the ones that cause wars, poverty, starvation.
Effective leaders now how to move and sway both groups. If you sway only one group, you offend the other.
There will be a group that yearns to learn, and another that chooses a simpler life.
A group that wishes to push to the sky, and another that wishes to tend to the Earth.
Who is more right? Who should exist? Politics and War....
What happens when someone powerful chooses to give it back to the people? When a King decides to share?
To empower the man plowing the field and elevate his status. Do you think the man that was happy plowing the field will suddenly be happy running a business? If his society crumbles around him, would he still be happy?
Will the once happy plower see the good deed of his King? Or will he look for another leader, one who will return his life to something he considers normal?
Genghis Khan [1: approximately 10 to 15 million deaths during his 1206 to 1227 reign, or roughly 2.5% to 4.2% of the 360 to 400 million global human population] and his family were abandoned by his clan following his father's death by poisoning. Joseph Stalin [2: approximately 6 to 9 million deaths during his 1924 to 1953 rule, or roughly 0.2% to 0.5% of the 2.0 to 2.5 billion global human population] grew up in an impoverished family with an abusive father. Hong Xiuquan [3: approximately 20 to 30 million deaths during his 1850 to 1864 rule, or roughly 1.6% to 2.4% of the 1.25 billion global human population] was raised in a poor peasant family that sacrificed heavily for his education; his repeated failures in the imperial civil service exams triggered a psychological breakdown prior to his path. Adolf Hitler [4: approximately 17 million direct regime murder victims, or 35 to 40 million including all European WWII war deaths during his 1933 to 1945 rule, or roughly 0.7% to 1.7% of the 2.3 billion global human population] grew up lower middle class; his father's death in 1903, his mother's in 1907, and two rejections from Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts left him impoverished by 1909 prior to his pursuits. Pol Pot [5: approximately 1.7 to 2.2 million deaths during his 1975 to 1979 rule, or roughly 0.04% to 0.05% of the 4.1 billion global human population, and 22% to 28% of Cambodia's population] came from a prosperous, royally connected family and lost his government scholarship in Paris after failing his exams. Mao Zedong [6: approximately 30 to 45 million deaths from the Great Leap Forward famine alone during his 1949 to 1976 rule, or roughly 1.0% to 1.5% of the 3.0 billion global human population] grew up in a prosperous farming and grain-dealing household under a strict father who had built the family's wealth from poverty, but who pulled him out of school at about 13 to work the farm and later cut off his allowance.
Evidence & Sources via latest Gemini model then grounded with Fable
1. Genghis Khan [Active Rule: 1206 to 1227]: Isolating Genghis Khan's personal campaigns [Northern China against the Jin, Western Xia, and Central Asia or Khwarazmia] from later 13th century conquests under Ögedei, Hulagu, and Kublai Khan suggests a rough estimate of 10 to 15 million deaths [an approximation drawing on census comparisons by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones in Atlas of World Population History, 1978, and historian John Man's Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection, 2004] out of a global population of approximately 360 to 400 million. 2. Joseph Stalin [Active Rule: 1924 to 1953]: Post-Soviet archival studies by historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010) and demographic historian Stephen Wheatcroft support 6 to 9 million direct and policy-induced deaths [executions, Gulag mortality, forced deportations, and the 1932 to 1933 Soviet famines] within his tenure, against a global population of approximately 2.0 to 2.5 billion [per U.S. Census Bureau historical estimates]. Older, pre-archival estimates run higher. 3. Hong Xiuquan [Active Rule: 1850 to 1864]: Sinologists Jonathan Spence (God's Chinese Son, 1996) and Ho Ping-ti estimate 20 to 30 million war, disease, and famine deaths during the Taiping Rebellion up to Hong's death and the fall of Nanjing in 1864, out of a global population of approximately 1.25 billion. 4. Adolf Hitler [Active Rule: 1933 to 1945]: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates total approximately 17 million civilians and prisoners of war murdered by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Including European theater WWII military and civilian war deaths up to Germany's surrender in May 1945 brings the total to approximately 35 to 40 million out of the 2.3 billion global population in 1940. 5. Pol Pot [Active Rule: 1975 to 1979]: Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program estimates about 1.7 million deaths from execution, starvation, and forced labor during the Khmer Rouge's 1975 to 1979 rule, and most scholarly estimates fall between 1.7 and 2.2 million. Demographer Patrick Heuveline's reconstructions allow a wider range of roughly 1.2 to 3.4 million excess deaths. This is out of a 4.1 billion global population in 1976 [roughly 22% to 28% of Cambodia's 7.8 million population]. 6. Mao Zedong [Active Rule: 1949 to 1976]: Demographic reconstructions of the Great Leap Forward famine [1958 to 1962] by demographer Judith Banister [30 million], journalist Yang Jisheng (Tombstone, 2012, 36 million), and historian Frank Dikötter (Mao's Great Famine, 2010, at least 45 million) place famine excess deaths at 30 to 45 million out of a 3.0 billion global population in 1960. Deaths from the early 1950s campaigns and the Cultural Revolution [1966 to 1976] would add several million more. The account of his father's treatment comes largely from Mao's own 1936 interviews with journalist Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China, 1937).
You aren't doing the error bars on that quantity justice. There is not sufficient information from that era to get an accurate death toll. It could be 3 million or 30 million.
Probably comes from the only real solutions to poverty, are transferring portions of wealth from richer people, to poorer.
That type of discussion won't really happen, in the Halls of Power, because...
...those folks are richer, so they look for any solution that doesn't involve them, having to divest anything.
What a strange conclusion. Why is that the only real solution? How much wealth was transferred from rich to poor during 1870 to 1950 in the US (when most of the US population was freed from poverty)? What was the mechanism that transferred the wealth? Where and when did this wealth transfer reduce poverty, what are the historical examples of this solution working?
The issue is not with resource transfer, but of resource hogging.
History also shows a fairly regular cadence of what happens, when an elite minority starts accumulating all the resources for themselves, to the detriment of most.
And pretending its people that idolize musk is pure cope. At least get it right, and watch some Milton Friedan if you want to understand where many of us get our views from. You prioritize signaling that you are virtuous ("heartless comments") versus actually doing good. I hope that one day you use a rational, scientific rigor to actually examine do your family's preferred solutions do good or just feel good. I give to charities that actually deal with the root causes of poverty in the US, and I have first hand interactions with the people that it helps.
Have a great day!
When and where? I gave a specific example of when and where poverty was actually reduced in a significant way. 1850 - 1950 US is probably one of the most objective examples of free markets in history. Of course there were super rich (robber barrons) that concentrated wealth, but there was also huge amounts of people being pulled out of poverty. That's how capitalism works. What resources did super rich hog in a free market society that hurt everyone else? (btw resource hogging is a different problem than poverty. You are goal shifting, unless you can prove that resource hogging causes poverty)
> The leaders of a nation won't start a war if they think they could lose it
The Industrial Revolution forced huge numbers of people into awful conditions at the same time as increasing the wealth of those in power. Powerful landowners and factory owners had all the power in the supposedly free market and did their level best to keep both the power and the rewards of industry.
It was only government regulation that prevented further abuse and raised those poor people out of poverty.
> It was only government regulation that prevented further abuse and raised those poor people out of poverty.
Which regulations and when? If you look at the estimated poverty graphs, I bet the poverty reduction started well before any of your example regulations. The regulations take awhile to take effect, and probably contributed to the leveling off of the poverty reduction decrease in the 1960s. You need evidence if you are going to try and rewrite history.
For myself, I have been a member of an organization for over 46 years, where it's all about helping folks that no one else wants to help.
To me it feels like their most rapid period of innovation was post World War II as the population was growing very rapidly.
Often easier to consider this in terms of competitive sports, though you could check seshatdb or something to see if it holds at scale. For example, YouTube really changed a lot with sports.
Honestly, population growth has, if anything, correlated to increasingly equal and egalitarian societies.
> has, if anything, correlated
To be clear, I am agreeing with you.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of human motivation. We could do the more economical thing right now but we don't. We could have done it decades ago when there were much fewer people on the planet but we didn't. No change in the population level will alter this.
- The U.S. nuclear arsenal peaked at 31,000 warheads in the same year 1967
Why did we need more bombs when there were less people? Why was there a greater perceived threat when there were less people in the world to fight over resources? Why would reducing our population level by half cause a change in our behaviour when these factors seem to be independent?
Bombs don't really scale with #people do they? I'm not a military expert of any kind but I would expect the number of bombs required to end humanity is really more a function of how much landmass people occupy?
Eg if you have a nuclear bomb that levels a city block it does not matter if 100 people live there or 10000, it pretty much just kills everyone there?
And its pretty obvious that the amount of oil necessary to run an economy is population dependent.
So one is a constant and the other is a function with positive slope. The lines cross at some point. To the left of that point you get investment in renewables, to the right of it you get war. Therefore whether or not war occurs is population dependent, since its a choice between the two.
I mean, this is all given some totally awful blend of shortsightedness and cruelty. But that does seem to be the blend our leaders are using these days.
2. Climate change won't end humanity itself, by all probability, people will be better off in 100 years even if we don't do anything about emissions. Better off in terms of life expectancy, poverty etc
3. Water scarcity and hunger have reduced over the last 100 years and will continue reducing thanks to technological progress
In fact, I'd say contrary to you that a lot of problems are solved because of over population - we have more people, more intelligence and more technology created thereby.
There's a guy called Paul Ehrlich who prophesied end of days in very similar ways to you. He mainly blamed overpopulation and resource use and predicted something similar to a world catastrophe in 2000's. Many times. Nothing happened.
Unless we have an AI x-risk event, I assure you that people will be more prosperous 100 years from now and you'd prefer to live then than today.
I'm also very wary of this rhetoric that population is the cause of all problems. This rhetoric is very popular in certain circles and is anti-human inherently.
I'm reasonably extrapolating much like most economists would.
Also here's my other bet: even the WORST areas in the planet would see prosperity and better living conditions in 100 years compared to today. That's how it has always been, unless you come up with tail risks due to climate change which I don't personally buy.
Trad econ has as much predictive value as fantasy football.
even if the tail risks do happen like ice sheet melting, it is over 1000s of years before it truly makes an impact. And even then the impact is minor in grand scale of things.
You could always find some looney model that predicts the world would end if we don’t control emission. Agree to disagree on that.
2) Development of internal combustion motors and their application in agricolture.
Overall maybe, even if 2 or 3 C more in the average temperature can be hard to bear in summer in some places or require much more energy to cool us, which means that we won't be as adapted to those places as we used to be.
In some spots of the world, tough luck. I would like to see (actually I don't) what happens if the sea rises a few meters. Will the people in the north east of Italy and China build coastal dams and raise river beds or let those regions go underwater and migrate somewhere else? There are certainly some areas of the USA that will go underwater too (Florida? NYC?)
And what if the Gulf Stream really stops and Western Europe gets the same climate of the regions of the USA and Canada at the same latitudes?
In 100 years our technology would be so advanced that people would be much much more prosperous. Ok sure a few cities drown but people move and adapt.
I still hold ground on the fact that people will be more prosperous in 100 years with sea level rising - in the sense that a person would prefer to live then rather than now
The point of view changes according to the sets of people one belongs to while still being alive, eg living in a warming Denver or attempting not drown in NYC?
Look at America/Trump right now with economic immigrants alone. This caused half the country to go "Yea, locking up people in cages and letting losers with guns shoot whoever they want while supporting an authoritarian regime is perfectly ok". Just what do you think it's going to look like when the numbers are 10x that from inside the country alone (a huge amount of the population lives close to the ocean).
Advanced technology has nothing to do with wealth equality and with the costs of making said technology it may be even further reverse correlated in the future.
I think directionally Ehrlich was quite wrong, given that he expected widespread and crippling shortages before 2000, with a much lower population than we actually have, and there's no sign of such shortages being inevitable. In particular, we are opening new extractable oil sources and switching to solar fast enough that pure market actions seem on track to where we'll be leaving cheap oil in the ground in a couple decades absent AI X-risk, and this is after we politically killed the previous tech that would have produced this result earlier: widespread fission.
I really don't understand how after these last 30 years were the Internet freedom dream became as well an en-masse surveillance and mind-control nightmare, there are still people with such a blind faith in technology and technologists that will save us all. I mean, in general I think we move 1.3 steps forward and 1 step back, so we do advance, but if we were just a bit let careless we could move the whole 1.3 steps forward without going back.
If more people meant more technology why didn't China/India bring out the industrial revolution? I'm not even a believer that general intelligence brings out more technology creation, we've had rising university attendance in the west since the 70s but actual tech disruption was way bigger in the late 19th century.
I do agree that some of the overpopulation rhetoric is anti-human but at the same time there's some things caused by overpopulation leading to worse quality of life e.g. countries like Netherlands/South Korea/Israel where a home with a nice yard is basically unaffordable. There's also some goods which have become increasingly expensive because of a higher population like hardwood where technology can do only so much (of course there's ersatz goods). If somehow the whole world were to live more like Americans and the population would grow even more you would increasingly see more products where tech can only do so much (e.g. copper, real red meat, fish ...).
This is the case almost everywhere in the world.
On the topic of why China or India didn’t bring many innovations: I fundamentally don’t believe in blank slate theory. But I do believe that China is better off with higher population. I also hear that China regrets its one child policy. Good to understand the reason behind this
There is a case to be made that the opposite is true. Labour scarcity in Western Europe meant significantly higher wages than in China which made investment into automation more profitable.
This sounds like asking: 'Why did I get heads when I flipped a coin? Why didn’t I get tails?'. Innovation happened everywhere (examples: printing technologies developed way before in China than in Europe, Arab numerals and others)
> but actual tech disruption was way bigger in the late 19th century.
Not sure anybody can make an honest comparison. Sure, maybe that’s your opinion, but without some thorough analysis, I think it’s just an opinion.
England had high population density concentrated in towns, trade with different cultures, high demand for labor after they banned slavery, a tradition of craftsmanship and invention, and a class of people who had a secure income but couldn't grow it easily. All of these factors came together at a time when modern science was becoming established.
India at the time had a rigid social hierarchy where it just wasn't possible to move up no matter how rich you got, and everyone was used to that so there was no real attempt to change things. China's population was high but too evenly distributed and they never had as much cultural diversity as Europe.
> there's some things caused by overpopulation leading to worse quality of life e.g. countries ... where a home with a nice yard is basically unaffordable
Worse quality of life for you. I would take a cramped studio in the most notorious neighborhood over a nice house in a village where nothing ever happens. Boredom would kill me. If it was up to me I would have everyone live in cities and leave the countryside for agriculture with workers coming there on month long shifts as needed. And I think there are more like us.
As Prof. Bartlet wondered, would you base US energy policy on the plan to go and get another Star and drag it back to the Solar system?
Talk: Arithmetic, Population and Energy from 20+ years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY
What makes you think this? Even in the worst case scenarios, I can imagine a smaller global population surviving in what remains.
>smaller global population surviving
This is just an unfound assumption on your part. Passenger pigeons went from billions of birds to extinct in less than a century. There are hundreds of different scenarios around climate change and disease evolution alone that could wipe us pretty quickly and a rapidly falling population would make it worse quickly as things like new medicines could not be developed quickly enough, or more technology couldn't be created fast enough (unless we have full AGI working on itself, but then you have alignment being its own problem).
I simply find it unlikely that any amount of climate change (beyond the eventual death of our sun) will result in the complete elimination of humanity.
Yes, there are many likely bad scenarios that would drastically reduce the population.
What sort of non-climate-threat do you suppose will take us out?
That is a very specific version of "better off". There are many versions for which this is quite obviously not true. Anybody who wants to take a walk in pristine nature in Europe or large parts of NA needs to travel far to even have a chance of doing something resembling this. Not important you might say, well, that's your personal value judgement. Liberal democracies might also just be a temporary glitch and we're all back to dictatorships 100 years from now and I don't know how that would make us "better off" necessarily. Though that's not very related to overpopulation necessarily.
Even for your metric, life expectency has been stagnating in substantial areas. It's not a given that tech will solve that.
> 3. Water scarcity and hunger have reduced over the last 100 years
US water aquifers are approaching irreversible depletion, so I'd be careful with such statements.
Building anti-fragile systems is something capitalism has been ignoring for a bit and Covid pointed out quite a bit of that. A lot of things have got better off, or at least cheaper, but at quite a cost of fragility. For example, more high technology created in one place in the world or controlled by a few people. Higher amounts of energy required to extract ever difficult resources. World wide manufacturing pipelines that are ripe to be disrupted.
Two hundred years ago you didn't give much of a shit what happened on the other side of the planet, unless it was a huge volcano it wasn't really going to affect you. Now some dipshit 8000 miles away can cause you to lose your job and send you into bankruptcy.
There should be space for nuance in HN discussions.
I highly doubt that if we don't do ANYTHING about emissions. Much of world's agriculture depends on predictable weather. If world's big bread baskets get disrupted badly enough, food prices will rise so much that starvation becomes a big problem in much of the world. Rich people may be OK, others not so much.
Our society is based on the promise to our children that they will be better off than what we were.
That requires growth.
It’s been assumed because that has been hung overall recent trajectory, but societies decline throughout history.
This phenomenon stopped a long time ago in the USA - with each successive generation since the 1940s, wealth has concentrated further in older generations.
Of course that's largely because the supply of various asset classes (i.e. housing) ceased to grow at their previous rates, so prices have skyrocketed, and the capital gains accumulate to the older generations who own the most property.
People today are MUCH better off on just about every dimension than in the 1940s!
You'd rather go live in the 1940s? Or do you think someone living in the 1940s wouldn't rather live today?
He never said living standards were better in the 40s.
Sure, but that wasn't the premise. Young people (< age 55) today have a far smaller share of current total wealth than young people did of total wealth in 1940.
And until 1940, each generation accumulated a greater share of value than the generation before. Post-1940, each subsequent generation has a smaller and smaller slice of the pie.
Isn't the thing that we should optimize for is human living conditions improve and happiness increases?
I mean, yeah. If there were no people, there would be no wars.
Or are you proposing we make sure all age groups degrow at the same rate? Because that's the one way to make population decline actually work for us (for some values of "us").
Their only practical goal is to give the government more power and to force you to pay more taxes. Don’t try to find any more rationality in it than that.
> But we can!
Unless we get robots to replace nurses etc. in retirement homes no we can't...
Too many kids - big problems.
Too many folks in retirement homes - bigger problems.
I wouldn't be too worried about it, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it and it is over sensationalized.
Just enjoy the warmer winters and more tropical summers. And I definitely wouldn't stop whole economic progress only because Toronto gets a bit more vegetation period and less rain.
grapes absolutely do not require a mediterranean climate, they grow in places as cold as USDA zone 3
It's not just people across the world having less children, all fertility indicators have plummeted in the last 40 years across the world. People simply can not have more children, even if they wanted to.
We have a genuine public health crisis and we don't really know the cause.
Also women's choice and reasoning behind mates tends to be different from the male section algorithm.
Responding that women's emancipation is the cause for very real global health issues was the non-sequitur here.
All the trends correspond directly to women’s emancipation (although men also probably want fewer children).
- If you dropped a human on a random spot on this planet, even if we just assume land, the median number of people within a mile would be exactly 0.
I think the second thought experiment is quite informative because it's easy to lose track of the reality when we mostly travel from packed city to packed city. But these cities, and the pathways that connect them, make up a negligible percent of the Earth. China is smaller than the US, and has pretty rough geography, yet was food self sufficient with a population upwards of a billion. They only became food dependent as their economy expanded and they replaced farms with iPhone factories, metaphorically speaking at least.
Finally, population growth in the longrun will always be determined by the groups with high fertility. It's never longrun stable unless everybody has the same fertility rate. So for instance the Amish today maintain a fertility rate of around 6. This is why there are now hundreds of thousands of them, and within a few decades they'll number in the millions. As highly educated, highly secular, high income individuals remove themselves from the gene pool, they'll simply be replaced by Amish. And as the former die off, and the latter grow - we'll eventually see population growth resume.
One last point. Fertility rates also determine age ratios within a society. Low fertility = most people are elderly, high fertility = most people are young. So it's not only economic collapse due to fewer people, but you create societies where there's a much greater social cost (due to elderly care), and far fewer people to take care of them. South Korea is a great example of this. If they don't fix their fertility rate, they'll collapse as a nation within the lifespan of some people alive today. 'Breaking News 2094 - North Korea successfully invades South Korea with one tank.'
Previously (centuries ago) most of the people were like the latter group. And things changed. I would not bet that a group can remain completely unchanged in the next tens to hundreds of years. There is of course a chance, but don't think it is as clear cut as you make it sound.
> Fertility rates also determine age ratios within a society
Plus immigration. Some like and accept that, some hate it and don't like it, we will see how it plays out, but there are more things involved than just fertility rates.
There simply are not enough people to replace this sort of decline, even if you just grab anybody regardless of skills, education, or even the ability to speak your language - which is not exactly a great recipe for a healthy country. Like if 60% of the world, by population, is losing 80% of their population over that timeframe, that'd be a global population decline of 48% with only 40% of people in the rest of the world. You'd need all of them and then a good chunk of their babies too, and that's for less than one human lifetime of change.
I'd say immigration is just kicking the can, but it scarcely even counts as that given how little of an effect it can have even at theoretically absurd levels.
Let me put it another way, if a pandemic would reduce the world population by 50%, what do you think birth rates would do?
Now, if your argument is "it will soon be a shitty time to be old and it will last for a while", with that I do fully agree. The old people of today have it much easier than the old people in 30 years. But people in 80 years might have enough (resources, space, etc.) to start making children again at different rates.
I would say we will live and see, but doubt it is the case for that long periods...
There's also the issue that I don't think I'm a snowflake. Fertility has become a big issue for me and is part of the reason I now have children - not as many as I'd like, but infinitely more than I was thinking about having not that long ago. I've come to view it as a core social responsibility since cultures/societies literally cannot exist without people having enough babies, and I think more people are coming to see it this way as well.
Except of course the problems caused by insufficient population. That is: insufficient production of food, lack of infrastructure, scientific research for mitigations of climate change...
Of course these are not really caused by "insufficient population", in just the same way your problems are not really caused by "excessive population". If you push a magic button labelled "give me all the benefits of a small population and none of the downsides" then every problem is going to look like an overpopulation problem!
That does not make much sense as this is a relative limitation. If you have twice as many people you also need twice as much food. If the manpower is the problem of food availability (which it isn't really, but let's say it is) then you need to increase the fraction of people working on it, not just the absolute number.
In contrast, emissions have an absolute effect on the climate. Twice as many people doesn't mean we get to emit twice as much for the same effect. The carbon budget is per planet, not per person.
I agree with your overall point, but this is a bit too simplistic. Even with just 10% of the current population, if we'd build as many AI data centers that we are doing today and beyond and power them all with coal and oil, climate change would not end up much different.
How many we are is a substantial factor, but how we behave also is.
This has nothing to do with "too many people":
> Private jets emitted more climate pollution than all flights departing Heathrow Airport in 2023
https://theicct.org/pr-air-and-ghg-pollution-from-private-je...
or this
> US will rescind policy targeting oil and gas industry methane leaks
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/epa-says-will-soon-...
or this
> Super-polluting plumes were also seen in the US, the largest detected in 2025 occurring in Texas and leaking 5.5 tonnes of methane per hour, equivalent to running about a million fuel-guzzling SUVs.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/revealed...
Which people do you propose should not exist?
The techbros who publicly fret about population decline are worried about white population decline. Population decline in the West is easily managed by letting more non-Western people in. It's not like Germany/UK/US/France have a monopoly on intelligence and hard work.
Globally small economies outside the West don't depend on continuous growth, and a "soft landing" where population declines but gradually and possibly asymptotically is not a threat to the economy.
Absolutely not. We have the technology to feed multiples of the population, house everybody, and give all modern comforts to everybody. The reason why it is not happening is that the economic system needs to induce artificial scarcity to profit.
Except they aren't. This is the old Malthusian claim and it has been debunked time and again.
> Wars
Historically, war has been on a downward trajectory for a long time, certainly when measured by the violence and death any given person is likely to experience. Most war is not about the scarcity of resources. It is usually about power, the desire to dominate others, greed, and other intangibles, and of course defending oneself from such actors.
> migration
Like war, this claim is reducible to the one about limited resources, because "overpopulation" (whatever that means) per se is not a cause of anything. People generally migrate because somewhere else looks better in some way, usually because the destination is economically better developed and have better institutions. This has nothing to do with absolute resources, but with the standard of living in their home country relative to the standard elsewhere. Refugees and so on are a very small percentage of any global migration.
> resource depletion
This claim begins with a current understanding of the available resources. What we have found instead is that with more people, we have more resourcefulness and discovery. Farming is an excellent example. Innovation in agriculture tracks population growth. Today, we have more food than any of our ancestors would have dreamed of. We waste enormous amounts of food.
> hunger, water scarcity
Famine is nonexistent in the developed world and almost completely absent everywhere else. Most hunger is a matter of resource misallocation, not because there isn't enough to go around.
> we can finally see a way to a possible future without scarcity
This misunderstands scarcity, as if it were some fixed piece of pie on the table before us. According to this simplistic understanding, yeah, sure, you'll have to slice up that pie into thinner and thinner pieces until eventually everyone gets close to nothing. But this is not how things work. In practice, the more people there are, the more labor and ingenuity there is that scales non-linearly (including those caused by agglomeration effects and specialization). People will not only find new pies, but they will find things other than pies, or ways to replenish the supply in a renewable way.
> The economic engine will never be more powerful than it is now
Bold claim. History does not support it. Population contraction doesn't have to last forever and we can't know how economies will unfold.
> where growth isn't purely consumptive
I will say here that consumerism is a real problem, because it is not only wasteful in a number of ways, but it entrenches a habit of thinking that consumption is the purpose of life rather than a means to support it. Look at where the most consumption and waste occurs and you'll find it doesn't align with population density as a simplistic account of human beings would suggest.
What population contraction might achieve in the interim is that it may force a course correction. People are very stubborn and easily attached to bad habits, to the point that entire economic and political orders are reshaped and become dependent on those bad habits to function, entering into a vicious cycle that entrenches these very habits and bakes them into a common cultural sensibility of what is normative. We have refused to wean ourselves off the drug of consumerism, which I claim is one of the primary, fundamental, and underlying ideological and cultural causes and drivers of population contraction because the imperatives of consumption conflict with having children. As a result, we suffer the self-destructive consequences, and these consequences may very well force us into abandoning consumerism because it will have been made impossible to sustain. Time will tell.
I try to understand this mindset but it still seems like short-term thinking. Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population - climate change is caused by energy usage which is too high because there are too many people. Wars, migration, resource depletion, hunger, water scarcity, all of it. So we (as in, human civilization) short-term think our way into rationalizing that it'll be ok because technology will provide a solution and we don't need to make any real changes.
Now the population trend looks like it's about to reverse and we can finally see a way to a possible future without scarcity, and we short-term think that into being a problem because we might find it difficult to afford to care for our elderly anymore. But we can! The economic engine will never be more powerful than it is now: so exploit it, use it to solve the pain of population contraction while we adjust our economic and productive structures so they can serve us effectively in a world where growth isn't purely consumptive.
I'm sure this is all hopelessly naive.