> 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.

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.

- Imagine you dug a hole 1 mile deep and 1 mile wide. How many humans do you think you could fit into it? The answer is about 60 billion, many times the current global population.

- 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.'

Climate change being caused by too many people is oversimplifying. We have had 40 years of inaction by most world leaders with the power to do something. The global economy is run by terrible, cynical, self-interested people. We could be powered by solar, wind and nuclear by now.

> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population

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.

Also relevant for this discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend

Naive or not depends a lot on the subjective view of the reader So you shouldn’t worry. I like your response.

I am worried in terms of "holy shit, humanity is literally going extinct".

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.

Framing the issue of elder care in population decline as a financial one misses the mark, I think. I think it'll be more about not having enough people wanting to work in elder care.

> I try to understand this worrying 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.

Which people do you propose should not exist?

The issue is not so much the decreasing population but that fact that its aging too fast and the proportion of productive working age people will continue to shrink.

> But we can!

Unless we get robots to replace nurses etc. in retirement homes no we can't...

I don't think there has ever been a period of time when economic growth has been decoupled from population growth. If you look at the curves, they're basically the same. So that's a bit of a problem.

1. Wars are fewer than before, we are killing fewer people per capita

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.

Edit: more lore on Paul Ehrlich: he had a bet with an economist Julian Simon that the price of metals would go up because of scarcity. His logic was that the population would increase with limited supply of raw metals. Simon OTOH bet that it would go down because of technological progress - more people would have more intelligence combined and find better ways to extract metal. Simon won btw.

> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population

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!

> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population

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.

Your logic about solving the second problem also applies to the first.

Quality of life was far worse for the average person when we had far fewer people than today.

> Essentially all of our problems are caused by excessive population

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.

> Worried in economic terms though

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.

How does a declining population where one worker has to support multiple retirees solve any of that, though? All these degrowth arguments fail to address the age pyramid question, which is the fundamental reason economists are warning against population decline.

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").

>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

I mean, yeah. If there were no people, there would be no wars.

Very aptly put wrt population. It boils down to misplaced values. A lot of decisions like led lights have to do with ignoring the value of human wellness. Even near sight is a privilege and a luxury, yet it's abused by small font on paper for the non trivial literature.

> Worried in economic terms though, because the foundation of that is an assumption of continuing growth?

Our society is based on the promise to our children that they will be better off than what we were.

That requires growth.

Earth is going to have a different climate there is no doubt about it. More akin to the times where Greenland was actually green.

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 got a bit longer vegetation period and less rain.

It's a boon for the northern hemisphere countries, now we start to get all these vineyards that were previously thought to be a mediterranean luxury. Winters are milder and more tolerable. Summers are luxuriously tropical. Palm trees can be grown in the backyard and olives.

More often than not when I look upon the weather radar, I pray for it to get warmer just a little bit more. There are still too many cold, merciless nights but it is getting better, albeit slowly.