deucedbi9 said:
It is unarguable that we have outgrown our planets natural tolerance to our species, and so, a means of 'whittling' our number down is required. Since the natural checks to our over population, disease and war, are no longer enough to control our numbers, it seems the only alternative is to use logic.
Okay, but people have fewer children pretty much across the board when their needs are met and they are occupied with things other than plot farming and other types of labor which require multiple hands to make survivability possible. The vast majority of population increases in the last 50 years come from the parts of the world where those conditions haven't been met yet. Most growth over the next 25 years will come from a small group of countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia. These are the places where child mortality is still high, many people still farm for a living, women have the least access to school and contraception, and having kids is your retirement plan because nothing else will be. Everywhere else, fertility is already at or below replacement.
The "logical" answer isn't whittling anyone down violently. It's speeding up what already happens on its own: educate your population including women, cut child mortality, make family planning available, and give people some security in old age. Every one of those steps lowers birth rates and makes people's lives better. Culling does neither.
It's also worth asking what outgrowing the planet's tolerance actually entails. The richest 10% of the world (of which many of us are part of) are responsible for roughly half of consumption emissions. The poorest half are responsible for around a tenth. So ironically, the fastest-growing populations have the smallest footprints. If the real problem is how much we use, “whittling” the fastest growing groups of people would barely move the needle.
Every time someone with the means to address it has decided the world has too many people, the "excess" almost always turns out to be poor, foreign, disabled, or the wrong ethnicity, never the person making the argument who is likely themselves consuming a more significant chunk of said resources. We already know how to bring population down without hurting anyone. Choosing an approach that requires someone in a suit deciding who gets removed isn't logic.
deucedbi9 said:
TPTB (The Powers That Be) have probably crunched the numbers and know that our best hope for continued survival, as a species, is a major reduction in our numbers. Lets face it. Non of us are going to be here in 100 years, so a massive population reset every x number of years to 'blow away the cobwebs' until such a time as we have mastered interstellar travel, enabling us to outlive our planet and star, is our next best bet of not disappearing up our own fundament before we have a chance to move on to the next.
Hard to say that there is a broad consensus among the powers that be. Some may believe that, but others appear to push and promote the opposite. The public facing powers that be - the ones running key sectors of the economy, the ones embedded in the governments around the world, the ones with disproportional decision making power in matters of social direction, war, education, etc. - all seem to be obsessed with the idea that there is a population crisis (that people aren’t having enough babies), which is more or less the opposite of an explicit ideal to reduce the numbers.
There is a pretty simple reason for the public position of adopting a population crisis stance. To people in positions of economic power, population is labor on the other end of each generation. Every kid born today is a worker, taxpayer, renter and soldier in 20 years. As long as each generation is bigger than the last, labor stays cheap. When it comes in smaller, labor gets scarce, wages go up, and workers get picky. That's a crisis to someone who's business model relies on cheap labor - not that humanity is disappearing, but that the supply of cheap hands is.
The things that lower birth rates are exactly the things that make life better for most, so anyone who depends on a growing supply of workers is at odds with improving quality of life whether they'd say so or not. Which is why the push is never "let's make raising a kid affordable" and always "let's make it harder not to have one," while housing, childcare, healthcare and education get more expensive every year.
There's also what happens to a large population once new or novel technology has offset its labor. Every time a society offloads work away from it's civilian population - onto slaves, colonies, engines, synthetic fertilizer, now automation - and has nowhere to put the surplus of unemployed people, that surplus then inevitably belongs to whoever has the power to direct it, and historically it gets directed into militarization or hard labor, even into recent eras this appears to be true. A large population that doesn't need to work, living on a check or bread doll from the state, is available labor to do whatever labor nobody would normally do voluntarily. And whoever has the power to direct it is incentivized to do so, because that same pool of labor can likewise be hijacked to rebel against whoever has the incentive.
We also know what a rapid population decline looks like. The Black Death killed ~1/3rd of Europe, and the survivors ended up with more land, tools, infrastructure, housing than they had people. Labor got scarce, peasants could name their price or just walk off to another lord's land for a better deal, and the extra money let people specialize in things like livestock, beer, cheese, wine. Archaeologists can literally see the improvement in the bones of people buried after the plague compared to before it. England passed the Statute of Labourers in 1351, which fixed wages at pre-plague levels and made it an offense to refuse work or leave your employer to try and resist it, but there wasn't enough in place to actually enforce people from leaving. The Renaissance Period started across Europe shortly after the plague, largely as a result of people doing things and moving around on their own volition, which generally concentrated people to larger cities and allowed for more specialized directions of labor.
I'd argue that a sudden drop in population is about the worst thing that can happen to 'the powers that be'. What people in positions of power currently, who assume that they will control things in 20 years as well, have crunched is that every smaller generation hands more leverage to the people in it, which is why every billionaire and head of state is suddenly worried about birth rates.
Edited by PatrickKn (10/12/26 12:16 PM)
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