Population

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All environmental and sustainability issues are impacted by population. Even the most wasteful and polluting industrial processes would have minimal environmental impact if the population were small enough. Unfortunately this sensitive topic does not get the attention it needs.

Population is Self-Correcting

All evidence shows that education, especially women's education, low infant mortality, and access to birth control naturally result in a declining population. It is a self-correcting problem.

We just need to avoid creating economic systems that rely on an increasing population to fund things like retirement pensions and growth for growth sake economics. And ignore people with outsized platforms who promote natalism to support these systems.

Population Control is Not Genocide

When you say "overpopulation", many people only hear "Thanos was right". Or at least they did in 2018. But this is a problem that can easily solve itself without resorting to genocide or authoritarian limits on births. Yes, overpopulation has the taint of its past support by eugenicists, the CCP, and other racists. But is population control racist just because some racists have taken up the cause to promote anti-immigration policies? Is it racist to make birth control and family planning education available to everyone? You can oppose racist population control policies without abandoning the goal of reducing the global birth rate through voluntary action.

The solution is likely to support programs that provide easy global access to family planning without ever talking about overpopulation in order to avoid being called a racist genocidal white savior. Focus on the issue of women's empowerment and equality instead. Hopefully the problem will sort itself out and we won't have to address it directly because people are a bit touchy about the subject.

The Racists are Pronatalists not Eugenicists

Today, we find most racists are part of the pronatalism movement. They understand that saying we should have less "bad people" is taboo, so they promote having more "good people." This means the idea that overpopulation concerns are racist is out of step with modern reality. It is important that this meme be subverted, which will require an approach that avoids the Paul Ehrlich chicken little label, as well as the racist eugenicist label.

The manosphere is obsessed with pronatalism, partly due to the implicit misogyny. Women who have a lot of children will need to become tradwives by default. They won't have time to work.

Baby Bust: Why Conservatives are Obsessed with Birth Rates Now

Who Will Think About the Economy?

It is also important to understand why people with monetary addictions and economic fixations promote pronatalism. The wealthiest people in the world are some of the loudest voices in this movement. This is not because they are super-smart and concerned about humanity's future. This is due to their Quantity of Life perspective and the incentives of growth-based capitalism, which are more salient to those with monetary addiction than to anyone else. Climate change seems less likely to severely impact their portfolio during their lifetime than worker shortages and the need to provide healthcare to an aging population.

The economic pronatalists are dismissive of concerns about resource usage, environmental degradation, or quality of life. This section will dismiss their concerns with equal treatment.

Aging Population, Elder Care, and Social Security

The current social safety net depends on a larger working population to provide the tax base to pay for the care of retirees. With declining birth rates, the ratio of retirees to working people becomes untenable. These discussions usually paper over several possible ways to mitigate this problem.

  1. Wealth tax. Many old people are lifelong money addicts and have enough money to support many of their fellow olds.
  2. Robots. This seems like a great opportunity for an industrious money addict to get ridiculously high by inventing robots that can aid with elder care.
  3. Maybe we should rethink whether 30-40 non-working years is viable or desirable? Nobody wants to increase the retirement age, but there is a crisis of meaning in retirees who no longer feel useful. In an information based economy, where old people were taught technology when they were young, there are many jobs that people in their 60s, 70s, or even 80s can perform. It shouldn't be necessary for survival. Even if it isn't, better health and longer retirements will lead many to return to work just to feel useful and alleviate boredom.

More People, More Smart People, More Innovation

The argument goes that the bigger the population, the bigger our information processing network, the more geniuses we can produce, and this will result in faster development of new technological innovations that we need to solve problems. If we allow the population to decline, the genius who will solve climate change won't be born in time.

This argument places a lot of certainty on the possibility that we can develop technology that overcomes the resource strain of a larger population, and that the accelerated timeframe for that development will be more than the decreased timeframe for environmental disaster caused by the extra people.

We cannot be certain that future innovation will allow us to sustainably support a larger population, but we can be certain that a lower population could be sustained with technology we already have. What should we bet on?

I Thought You Were the AI and Robot People

Many of the loudest voices in the pronatalism movement are the same tech oligarchs who are promising artificial intelligence so smart it causes a singularity. If AI is going to be infinitely smart, it should be smart enough to invent a robot that can do elder care, or automate most of the manual labor jobs so humans are freed up to focus on education, art, and family. Instead, they have automated the art.

Why can't you just invent a decent robot?

Ever since we first imagined artificial intelligence, we dreamed of creating autonomous devices with general intelligence that can automate all of the mundane tasks that take time away from more meaningful pursuits. This was always the goal.

Hey tech geniuses... where are our robots? They told us there would be robots!

Oh, we just need to have more babies and one of those future geniuses will solve the problem? That sounds like something a whiney dumbass that can't invent a robot would say.

Sure, There is Plenty of Food...

Yes, we we grow enough food right now to feed a population nearly 20% larger than our current one. Good for us!

However, food is not the only resource. There are a million things that must be mined, grown, caught, or otherwise removed from the environment to produce all of the things that go into a modern capitalist society. Only so many of these things are renewable, and only so many of the renewables are being used sustainably. We may or may not be able to use technology to find alternatives. We're going to run out of many things faster and have less time to find alternatives the higher the population.

Then there is the value of nature and natural spaces, and the existence of other species besides us and our food. Even if vertical farming allows us to stop turning more and more wild areas into farms, without a stable population the land will be used for housing, transportation, resource mining, or other human purposes, further diminishing the space available for nature.

Eventually some resource is going to run out, or something is going to extinct, that has a real impact on our quality of life or our survival. Or a lot of little things will add up to a big impact. In any case, population reduction will delay all of the non-renewable issues and resolve many renewable ones by making them sustainable. It is a single solution that impacts every environmental problem. To ignore it as a solution because it smells a little like racists despite having no inherent racism is self-defeating and absurd.

Quality of Life Issues

The quality of life issues surrounding population are rarely part of the discussion. There is only so much land available to live on if we still want to have a nature. Everyone wants to obtain the same standard of living now enjoyed by the richest 1%. This cannot be done sustainably with a growing population, or even the current one. And humans will stubbornly resist any attempts to enforce economic changes that reduce their quality of life.

This analysis by Derek Parfit is one of the most referenced articles specifically addressing the quality of life concerns surrounding population. It is also a great demonstration of utilitarian ethical calculus and the problems with counting theoretical people.

Too many environmental organizations give the appearance that to avoid accusations of racism the white, western countries should lower their standard of living to something that would be sustainable if all 8 billion people achieved that standard. While this solution is exceedingly fair, it is also a political impossibility. There are simply too many people who will never voluntarily lower their standard of living. And in this case too many is very nearly everyone. Standard of living either goes up, or you go to war.

Any solution to our environmental and climate change issues must continue the upward trend in quality of life globally. Poorer countries can catch up and richer counties may slow their growth, but the trends must all continue upward to avoid social upheaval. Population reduction enables continued growth in quality of life while still addressing the many issues of sustainability that we face.

Soft Antinatalism

The antinatalism movement often takes the hard view that all procreation is unethical, to the point where some even advocate for the extinction of humanity. The metaculture wiki does not wish to be associated with that. You could describe the position being taken as a sort of "soft antinatalism" where we can be happy about natural trends toward lower birthrates without being misanthropic or feeling outrage when people decide to have families.

Overpopulation Videos

There are a number of good videos online that break down the issues surrounding overpopulation in a very informative and entertaining way. However, they tend to ultimately dismiss the issue of overpopulation as one that will either self-correct or become irrelevant dues to some optimistic future tech. They all use accurate information about the availability and impact of certain resources like food and oil, but rarely address the quality of life issue, or the possibility that some lesser-known resources will cause us problems in the future, or the general collapse of biodiversity we are witnessing.

Why Population is Actually a Problem

This video gives a detailed and nuanced breakdown of the way population issues are approached by mainstream left and right politics, especially how racists have embraced it to support anti-immigration policies. It rightly points out that population trends are already self-correcting, and that fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change. However, this argument focuses on solving climate change to the exclusion of all the other environmental and quality of life issues caused by overpopulation. It also veers into anti-capitalism which is not a great strategy if you want to reach the billions of people who have lived their entire lives being bombarded by pro-capitalist propaganda. But that's a separate issue.

Why Overpopulation is Actually a Problem

Overpopulation Facts

One of the few videos to mention the quality of life issue and it gets about 20 seconds out of an 8 minute speech. Also one of the few that is willing to say that a lower population would be ideal, not just stopping growth.

Overpopulation facts - the problem no one will discuss

Spay and Neuter Your Pets People

Primus - Too Many Puppies


William Shatner - Common People