Overpopulation FAQs

Once there’s overpopulation, it’s basically game over for civilization. Overpopulation causes civilizations to fight wars over scarce resources, until they finally collapse from decimating each other.

1. Food Shortages: Malnutrition, greater susceptibility to disease, stunted growth, stunted brain power, starvation, etc.
2. Freshwater Shortages: Dehydration, poor water quality, not enough water for crops, freshwater ecosystems, or industrial use, etc.
3. Global Sand Shortages: The particular type of sand that is necessary to build semiconductors is in ever-decreasing supply.
4. Climate Change: Deadly heat waves, hostile crop growing conditions, increasing flooding, runaway greenhouse effect, etc.
5. Environmental Damage: Irreversible pollution, deforestation, extinction of flora and fauna, etc.
6. Economic Strain: Unaffordable housing, inflation, unemployment, decreased living standards, etc.
7. Social Problems: Overcrowding, increased crime, stress, social unrest, political instability, etc.
8. Depletion of Non-Renewable Resources: The lack of fertilizer and other resources needed for manufacturing will kill modern civilization.
9. Total Wars will be fought over scarce natural resources. Food-importing countries with unsustainable populations will emigrate in mass numbers, and the remaining citizens may invade other countries to steal land and food to feed their starving populations, lest they will die from famine. The warfare will further destroy the planet and lead to the irreversible downfall of civilization as we know it.

There are only two ways to regulate populations: 1. mass death, or 2. restrictions on the number of births (population control). Mass death is highly undesirable, and low fertility cannot be voluntarily achieved, so that leaves population control as the most desirable option for regulating populations.

If we don’t regulate reproduction, then we are destined to face the largest, most catastrophic overpopulation event in history, followed by the largest famines and wars ever seen before in human history. Except this time, once the wars end by decimating the world’s population, it won’t be possible to rebuild civilization to the point where 20th or 21st lifestyles are possible once again. Once the world’s fossil fuels are completely exhausted, the necessary energy input for restarting modern civilization will no longer exist in an easily accessible form, so the world be stuck in a permanent Dark Age, similar to 18th century Europe at best. Future generations of humans may never know what it’s like to live the luxurious lifestyles that we live today and take for granted.

There is only one solution for preventing all this. There is precisely one way that we can have long-term prosperity, a complex civilization, and basically have a future. And that is to regulate our reproduction. This is not a radical departure from what we have been doing. It doesn’t require any radically new mechanisms of social control, any radically new technologies, or any new moral principles, or even a big change in our values. Most people already value human existence, value our civilization, and don’t want billions of people to die. And don’t want to go back to the Dark Ages. Most people don’t want those things.

Slowing population growth takes time unless we resort to drastic, ugly, highly unpopular solutions.

The problem with the “time will tell” attitude towards overpopulation is that it assumes that it’s okay to risk overpopulation happening and all the serious consequences that will result from that. That is insane. Who on Earth thinks that it’s a good idea to risk the possibility of billions of people dying from war and famine just to test if Neo-Malthusianism is a legitimate concern? It’s more reasonable to predict the future, and figure out what should be done to have the best future possible.

It’s helpful to distinguish between two types of Overpopulation:

1. When the population increases faster than the carrying capacity.
2. When the carrying capacity falls faster than the population can fall.

Type #2 tends to be caused by unexpected scenarios that give the population less time to prepare. Most people don’t realize that it’s possible for overpopulation to happen both instantly and unpredictably if a major catastrophe happens, just like the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849). Once the potato was introduced to Ireland, the country had a population explosion since the crop increased the number of available calories and nutrition to the population.

Video: Why Ireland Has Fewer People Than 200 Years Ago.

Nobody would’ve predicted in 1843 or 1844 that the island would be infected with a blight within the next year that would cause a massive famine where a million people die and another million have to emigrate. One year, the island was not overpopulated because it had enough resources for everybody. The next year, it was facing famine and mass exodus. That’s how quickly overpopulation could potentially happen, if the catastrophe causing it is severe enough.

It’s true that government policies like the Corn Laws were partially responsible for the Irish Potato Famine. But even if political changes and factors could have been made to mitigate the effects of the famine, it’s still possible for another catastrophe to happen that cannot be resolved by better policies and efforts, especially since it will be happening on a global scale the next time it happens.

The key to causing overpopulation is to have improved living standards (i.e. a new staple crop or technology that causes a population boom), followed by some event which disables the resources that were responsible for the population boom. The population growth leading up to an overpopulation event might happen gradually, but the catastrophe that leads to the overpopulation happens instantly and unpredictably. All it takes is a major unprecendented catastrophe, and everything changes. Ideally, we should always be prepared against a potential overpopulation crisis, since it’s always possible for an unpredictable colossal catastrophe to happen.

Besides the Irish Potato Famine, there’s many other historical examples of overpopulation:

• Ancient Mesopotamia: The civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, such as Sumer and Akkad, experienced overpopulation as a result of their success in developing irrigation systems to farm the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This led to issues such as soil degradation, deforestation, and a dependence on a single food source.
• The Indus Valley Civilization: The Indus Valley Civilization experienced overpopulation as a result of their success in developing advanced agricultural systems. This led to issues such as land scarcity, deforestation, and soil erosion.
• Ancient Rome: The population of Rome grew rapidly in the first century AD, and by the second century AD, the city had a population of over one million people. The city struggled to provide housing, food, and clean water for its citizens, which led to overcrowding, disease, and poverty.
• Medieval Europe: During the medieval period, Europe experienced overpopulation as a result of an increase in food production due to advancements in agriculture. This led to issues such as land scarcity, deforestation, and soil erosion, until the Black Death occurred.
• Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica: The civilizations of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, such as the Maya, experienced overpopulation as a result of their success in developing advanced agricultural systems. This led to issues such as land scarcity, deforestation, and soil erosion.
• The Ming and Qing dynasties in China: The Ming and Qing dynasties in China experienced overpopulation as a result of a population boom and a lack of resources to support the growing population. This led to issues such as land scarcity, food shortages, and environmental degradation.

In a zero-sum biological environment, resources are finite and cannot be created or destroyed because the ecosystem has reached its carrying capacity. Therefore, for one organism to survive, it must consume resources that would otherwise be available to other organisms. This means that the survival and growth of one organism can only come at the cost of other organisms.

Overpopulation depends on much more than the number of people:

1. The population is still increasing, just more slowly.
2. The death rate has decreased because more people are living longer than ever.
3. Newer technologies may prolong human lifespans even further, further increasing the population.
4. As the developing world transitions towards more developed, first-world lifestyles, that will put further strain on the world’s resources, even if the world population were to stay the same and not grow at all.
5. Increasing the world’s living standards would increase the world’s fertility levels, if it wasn’t for the wide availability of contraception that tends to correlate with wealthier societies.
6. Once evolution finishes selecting for people who don’t use contraception, the world’s fertility levels will continue to rise ever more.
7. Overpopulation can happen instantly and unpredictably.

To answer the question: no.

Our theory of population dynamics has a better, alternative explanation for why some countries’ populations are not currently rising towards infinity that is consistent with our claim that all populations eventually increase towards infinity. Russia, Japan, and other countries are experiencing declining populations because every population of organisms goes down when it is introduced to a new selectionary pressure that it is unadapted to (birth control and expensive post-industrial cost of living, in this case). As soon as enough selection occurs to make the population well adapted to its new environment (i.e. organisms with higher fertility rates¹ are selected for), the populations will rise until they breach the carrying capacity once more. We just have to wait for evolution to catch up. Evolution doesn’t happen overnight. Neither does advanced technology cause evolution to stop.

Additionally, one of the biggest reasons why many contemporary countries have extremely low birth rates (and thus declining populations) in the first place is because it’s simply too expensive for many couples for children. As we have shown here₁ and here₂, improving economic conditions would cause birth rates to increase because more people would be able to afford to have (more) children.

Raising living standards would make overpopulation worse, not better. Raising living standards in developing countries might (temporarily) slow down the population growth of those countries, but higher living standards require more resources and are more taxing on the environment, thus increasing the risk for overpopulation. Overpopulation depends on much more than than the number of humans. Most of the world currently does not live a first-world lifestyle, and if all of the 8+ billion people living on Earth were to live such an environmentally taxing lifestyle today, we would undoubtedly face overpopulation and ever-exacerbated pollution and climate change as soon as that happens. Even if the population were to stop growing, that doesn’t mean that overpopulation ceases to be a threat.

Rising living standards also cause people to live longer lives, which further contributes to overpopulation by causing more people to live on the planet simultaneously.

No. Not only do rising living standards exacerbate overpopulation by increasing resource consumption, but they also increase population growth. There are countless historical examples, including but not limited to:

• The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution: The development of agriculture around 10,000 years ago led to a significant increase in food production, which in turn led to a population boom.
• The Columbian Exchange: The introduction of corn, potatoes, and other crops to the Old World caused populations to increase around the World, and is responsible for most of the world’s population growth between 1500 and 1804, when the world population is estimated to have reached 1 billion people for the first time in human history. This includes the rapid increase of the Irish population after the introduction of potatoes to Ireland.
• The Colonization and Settlement of the Old World: French and English settlers in the Americas adapted to conditions of abundance by increasing their fertility. Women married younger and had more children, and the population of Europeans in the Americas expanded rapidly. Until fairly recently, families with 10 or more children were common in Quebec.
• The Industrial Revolution: The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries led to increased wealth, improved living conditions, and a rise in life expectancy, resulting in a population boom. The greatest economic revolution in history led to the largest population boom in history.
• The Green Revolution: The Green Revolution of the 20th century led to an increase in food production through the use of new technologies such as pesticides, fertilizers, and irrigation, which in turn led to a population boom in many developing countries.
• The Great Depression and the Post-World War II Baby Boom: Birthrates dropped during the Great Depression due to the poor economic conditions. After World War II, many countries experienced a period of economic prosperity and increased wealth, which led to a significant increase in population.
• The Effects of China’s Economy on Its Birth Rates: China’s birth rates dropped significantly during the Great Chinese Famine from 1959 to 1961, and the birth rates more than doubled when the famine ended and economic conditions improved. Note that China definitely would have had a population boom during the Chinese Economic Miracle, if it weren’t for the implementation of the One Child Policy in 1980. Source
• Even though there was a general decline in fertility across the developed world in the 20th century, fertility rates fell faster and went lower in the Communist Soviet Union than they did in the much wealthier United States.
• In the 21st century, the Great Recession caused birthrates to fall.
• The COVID-19 Recession caused birthrates to fall, and birthrates went back up as soon as the economy started recovering in early 2021.

The idea that increased wealth causes decreased fertility¹ is not consistent with historical evidence. Abundant food causes population growth, not population stability or decline. When increased wealth correlates with decreased fertility rates, the better explanation is that decreased fertility rates (temporarily) increase wealth.

Correlation does not imply causation. Exhaustive historical evidence, polling statistics, and straight-forward reasoning conclude that increasing wealth causes fertilty rates to increase.

A more plausible explanation for the negative correlation between wealth and fertility rates is that low fertility (temporarily) increases wealth. Having fewer children per family means that people can invest more energy into creating capital, instead of raising children. This is consistent with historical examples where lower fertility rates likely led to an increase in the production of wealth. To quote from Demography and Destiny:

Low fertility might have played a role in the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Western Europeans had lower fertility than most other people around the world, due to the Western European marriage pattern. In Western Europe, women would often delay marriage and children until their mid twenties. The result was lower fertility, and more energy to invest in the creation of capital. Capital increases the efficiency of labor, which allows for more investment in capital, but only if the population does not expand to consume the additional production. The Industrial Revolution was one of the few times in human history when economic growth outpaced population growth, leading to prosperity.

(You can think of the IR as having two phases. The first phase was characterized by increased production, the second phase is characterized by decreased reproduction.)

The recent Chinese economic boom might also be partly due to lower fertility. There was a large decline in the Chinese fertility rate after the communist revolution. Roughly a generation later, the Chinese had a huge economic boom due to industrialization. This boom is usually explained solely in terms of a shift to a more open market economy. I believe that the shift to an open market is only part of the explanation for China’s rapid industrialization and economic growth. I think it was also partly due to low fertility, which shifted energy and labor from the creation of human beings to the creation of capital. – Blithering Genius

We have to re-emphasize that periods of lower fertility can only cause temporary increases in economic output. Economic growth is slowing down in developed, low-fertility countries, since their populations are aging and fewer children are being born. This leads to lower economic growth. Just as infinite population growth can’t occur indefinitely, infinite economic growth can’t occur indefinitely either.

The second factor is that wealthier countries tend to have greater access to birth control, which causes lifestyle changes that lead to lower fertility rates (note that these changes in the fertility rates are temporary in the long-term).

First, let’s re-emphasize that the increased wealth seen in modern times is not the cause of the world’s declining birth rates at all.

The declining birth rates that have occurred worldwide since the 1960s are caused by the rising availability of birth control and its encouraged use. If all the birth control and contraception were to be eliminated, then the birth rates around the world would not have declined as they have in the past several decades. As of today (the 2020s), birth control is the primary selectionary pressure on the human genome, which selects people who consciously choose to have children. Once the human population adapts to resist the limiting effects that birth control has on the human population, an unstoppable population explosion will happen, unless breaching the carrying capacity causes war, disease, and famine, or mass death.

Improved access to birth control and increased family planning methods have also made it possible for women to delay having children in order to pursue careers, higher education, and other forms of personal fulfillment, rather than starting a family. These societal changes and ideologies like Feminism and Humanism have precipitated in a cultural feedback loop where it has become increasingly more socially acceptable for people to have fewer children or no children at all if they so choose. But we should clarify that none of these cultural and societal changes ever would’ve happen in the first place if it weren’t for birth control. If children are born, people will have to care for them, instead of spending time on furthering their careers, education, and hobbies. Birth control “liberated” people from the responsibility of having to care for children, so it is the ultimate factor in explaining why fertility rates have declined since the 1960s.

Some people have argued that reducing wealth inequality will reduce fertility rates since greater wealth equality correlates with lower fertility rates, but this is wrong for the same reason why it’s wrong to conclude that raising living standards would lower fertility rates. There are better explanations why lower wealth inequality sometimes correlates with lower fertility rates.

People have fewer kids when they can expect 100% of their kids to survive past the age of 5.

That’s true for many people, but not for other groups. For instance, the Amish, Orthodox Jews, Fundamentalist Muslims, etc all still have lots of children and fertility rates that are as high as 6-8+ children per woman. This is in large part because those groups don’t use birth control. This further illustrates our point that birth control is what’s actually responsible for the world’s record low fertility rates, not better living standards.

The better question is: Why wouldn’t this happen? Cultures that view contraception and abortion as being taboo have higher fertility rates, and evolution always selects for organisms that have higher fertility rates, as well as genes and memetic traditions that promote higher fertility rates. It’s important to understand that genes and memes work together.

There’s plenty of evidence that genes affect political differences and behavioral patterns, socially conservative people tend to have more children than socially liberal people, and different races have different fertility rates within developed countries, so there are no good reasons to assume that genes can’t also affect how many children a person is inclined to have. If there’s genetic variation among a population, and some genes promote higher reproductive success than others, then we can conclude that evolution will select for genes that increase reproductive fitness.

It’s also possible that mutational load could be partially behind the cause of declining birth rates. If trends in recent decades have been dysgenic, then this could turn out to be self-correcting. The global decline in birth rates may be part of such a process. It’s possible that the people who are having larger families in developed countries have fewer harmful mutations on average, so dysgenics may reverse in future generations.

But no specific genes have been identified that are scientifically shown to cause higher fertility.

We don’t need to identify specific genes to know fertility rates are affected by genetics. Geneticists can’t even figure out which specific genes cause differences in height and intelligence. Everybody knows that height is ~80% determined by genetics, but no one says that you need to specifically identify which genes cause height differences to prove that height is genetic. It is sufficient to figure out that fertility (as well as height and intelligence) are affected by genetics with empirical evidence.

Birth control causes lower fertility rates, and even if a majority of the population favored lower fertility for the sake of avoiding overpopulation, there is no way to guarantee that every single person is going to value low fertility and choose a low-fertility lifestyle for the sake of avoiding overpopulation. Overpopulation is a free-rider problem. No biological species will ever be able to transcend evolution.

If the world population ever reaches 11-12 billion people (assuming it can go that high without destroying and plummeting itself first), the United Nations will probably just raise the population ceiling of their “prediction”, instead of dropping the theory altogether. Mostly likely, the UN will never admit that Demographic Transition Theory is wrong because it would destroy their credibility. They will never create a population theory that has predictive power until they bother to understand bio-evolutionary reasoning and its principles.

The problem with assuming that overpopulation can be solved by most people choosing to have fewer children is that many people will choose not to have less children. The people with the highest fertility levels while everybody else has a below-replacement fertility create a free-rider problem. They benefit from having a higher reproductive success and their children benefit from having more resources available for them to exploit since everybody else chose to have fewer children. Everybody else is negatively affected because they had lower reproductive success and fewer resources available for them since the high-fertility people left behind fewer resources for everybody else. Every existing organism can only exist at the cost of another.

It’s true that most people in developed societies choose to have few or no children. That doesn’t mean that most people in the future will have low fertility. Why? Because people in the future have to be born, and more of them will be born to people with high fertility than low fertility. Even if almost everyone chooses low fertility, those with higher fertility will simply outbreed them in a few generations. The Amish alone could replace the entire world population in less than 300 years, at their current rate of growth. As another example, consider the high birth rates of Orthdox Jews in places like Kiryas Joel.

Whether we like it or not, the only way to prevent overpopulation is to mandatorily impose population control on everybody. If most people are trying to maintain a low fertility population, but a few do not, then population growth is a Free-Rider Problem. On the other hand, if everybody is trying to reproduce as much as possible, and there is no population control to prevent the population from exceeding the carrying capacity, than population growth is a Tragedy of the Commons. Over time, population growth will transition from being a Free Rider Problem (as it currently is) to becoming a Tragedy of the Commons. Either way, population growth is a game theoretic problem. And since the purpose of Government is to solve game-theoretic problems, government is the perfect (and only) solution to solving overpopulation.

Relevant Satirical Article: We Must Preserve The Earth’s Dwindling Resources For My Five Children.

No, and for several reasons. For one, we’ve addressed earlier why it makes sense to believe that genes can affect fertility rates, even if no memes are involved.

Second, statistics consistently show that less educated, less intelligent, and more religious people tend to have more children than people who are more educated, more intelligent, and atheist. Intelligence is well-documented to be a polygenic trait with an estimated 0.8 heritability. The world has become more educated and more atheist in the last few decades, but there’s no reason to assume that the world will continue to become increasingly more educated and more atheist when those people have fewer children than people who are less educated and more religious. It follows that the world will become more religious and more uneducated since those memes increase fertility and will result in a feedback loop. Studies have repeatedly shown that the vast majority of people stay within the religion they were born into.

Third, genes and memes work together, so if memes like religion are currently causing religious people to have more children, then the genes that are associated with higher religious beliefs are going to be reproduced with greater frequency than genes that make people more likely to be Atheist and such. Even if our reasoning is evaluating the effects of memes instead of genes, we still have to consider genes due to Adaptive Coherence.

Fourth, memes can be reasonably categorized into “Traditions” and “Fashions or Cults”. Religions would be categorized as “Traditions” because they propagate from parent to child and tend to increase reproductive success, whereas memes like Feminism and Antinatalism would be categorized as fashions because they tend to propagate between peers, not from parents to children. Fashions like Feminism and Antinatalism may be temporarily increasing in popularity now, but neither of them promotes reproductive success, so they are both destined to decline in their numbers of believers, given enough generations passing by. Traditions encourage reproductive success, whereas Fashions do not. Fashions tend to be temporary phenomena, whereas Traditions tend to be stable, long-term phenomena.

Fifth, populations cannot be thought of as conglomerates because different segments of the population have the potential to grow exponentially. Consider the following quoted paragraphs from the essay Demography and Destiny:

For example, Islam is expanding rapidly due to population growth. That is because Muslims, and especially fundamentalist Muslims, have higher average fertility. They keep women in the home making babies. The Muslim world has grown more fundamentalist in the last 50 years, mainly because fundamentalists had more children than secularists and moderates in Muslim societies. Islam is now spreading to the West, due to population pressure. Muslims are replacing the declining native population of Europe, which has very low fertility.

There are other examples of religions that promote fertility. Take the Amish for example. Their current rate of population growth corresponds to doubling every 20 years. That is almost entirely due to reproduction – there is very little conversion into the Amish community. At their current rate of growth, the Amish population would exceed the current world population in less than 300 years, starting from its current size of 250,000. If everyone else went through the demographic transition except the Amish, then after 300 years the global population would be almost entirely Amish.

In spite of being anti-modern, the Muslims and the Amish are adapted to modernity. They reproduce their genes and their memes. As time goes on, other adaptations will emerge. One thing is certain: humanity will not settle into a stable pattern of low fertility unless we impose it on ourselves. – Blithering Genius

It’s hard to say since that’s decades into the future, but we can make some predictions. It’s possible that the world population could peak at 12 billion around 2060 or so and start to decline after that, but it’s unlikely because that prediction relies on a lot of assumptions, many of which are rather fallacious.

• As covered, populations are not self-regulating. DTT makes false assumptions about biology, evolution, and fertility. A major unknown question is how fast natural selection can occur and what its effects may be.
• DTT doesn’t acknowledge that there are other factors that could cause overpopulation, besides just birth rates.
• The DTT models for 2060 all assume that overpopulation won’t occur before then. It is far from guaranteed that the Earth’s global supply chains will continue to stay stable for the coming decades. We have to recall that overpopulation can happen instantly and unpredictably, especially if all the infrastructure, systems, and/or technology that sustain such a high population were to fail for one reason or another.
• Even if the world population miraculously declines for multiple decades after 2060, it won’t last once the population adapts to resist the effects of birth control and modernity. It’s simply not true that the world population will naturally stabilize at a flat rate without population control, unless there’s either a large collapse and humanity returns to being limited war, disease, and famine.

There too many unknowns about the future, but if humanity is rational enough, we can eliminate a majority of these unknowns by taking control of our destiny and implementing safeguards that prevent the worst possible scenarios from happening. Population control via reproduction licenses is probably the most important safeguard for limiting the future’s unpredictability and preventing unprecedented catastrophe, but Georgism and other solutions for raising the carrying capacity are important as well.

That could only be temporary solution at best. Managing our resources better would indeed raise the carrying capacity of the Earth, but rising living standards consistently lead to population booms throughout human history. It is also a biological fact that populations always reproduce up to their carrying capacities, so raising the carrying capacity of the Earth is not a permanent solution for preventing overpopulation.

The only way to permanently prevent overpopulation from ever occurring is to have a top-down authority that enforces mandatory population control, since since overpopulation is a free-rider problem that can only be resolved by government.

As humans consume resources, then those resources will become more expensive, thus leading profit-seekers to find new ways to get more utility out of the existing resources, find previously undiscovered resources, or create substitutes. If the price of the resource goes up, then people will consume less of it.

That is a terrible idea. It’s not possible for humanity to continue finding “previously undiscovered resources” for eternity, nor is it possible that humanity will invent new methods that will increase the utility and/or efficiency of our resources forever. Humanity has already exhausted most of the entire world’s oil supply, mining efficiency has been dropping every decade for the last century, and humanity has already reached Peak Technology for the most part. In particular, if the world’s supply of fossil fuels are completely exhausted, then modern civilization will probably never rise again if it falls. If humanity followed this Libertarian proposal, then the world would eventually be on the brink of death and everybody start to kill each other in attempts to steal food and resources.

Rational economics would never recommend exhausting the world’s supply of non-renewable resources until there’s nothing left to use. Non-renewable resources are incredibly valuable, and once they’re gone, they’ll be gone forever. So we can’t afford to waste them for some rich man’s gain. Instead, it would be immensely more beneficial for humanity to utilize the supplies of non-renewable resources at a rational society’s discretion, rather than at an individual’s discretion. Econ 101 would support Georgism.

And once again, this argument ignores that overpopulation can not be resolved via voluntarily low fertility. Regardless of how the Earth’s resources are managed, it’ll never be possible to sustain infinite growth with a finite supply.

Technology can increase carrying capacities, but this argument ignores that the most technologically advanced countries in the world consume the most resources per capita. The rate at which most developed countries consume resources is not sustainable for the planet. If every human on Earth lived a first-world lifestyle, the Earth would easily be overpopulated.

Advancing technology always leads to increases in resources and energy demands in the long run, not decreases. There was no demand for energy for cars until the invention of the car. It’s obvious that there was no demand for energy for flying until the invention of the airplane. There’s no demand for energy to make computers work until the invention of the computer and the proliferation of computing. Global computing today uses more energy than global aviation. In terms of resource consumption, modern civilization is comparable to a runaway forest fire that looks for more fuel as it expands. The idea that humans won’t invent new reasons to consume more resources and energy in the future is naive.

Technology is responsible for causing climate change, rising sea levels, and record temperatures around the world. As of the 2020s, advancing technology has only made climate change worse, and there are no clear signs that technology will reverse the climate change before it becomes too late. Climate change and overpopulation both exacerbate each other.

Most of technology’s ability to increase the carrying capacity in previous centuries is based on increases in the food supply, GMOs, industrial logistics, vaccinations, and medical care. There may still be marginal room for similar technologies to increase the carrying capacity, but it’s unlikely that technology could expand it to the same extent as before since humanity is already pretty close to peak technology. Infinite growth is impossible, whether that be for populations or for economics. Since humanity will have to decrease its population and economic growth at some point, the complexity of humanity’s technology will also have to decline as well since technological complexity depends on the scale of civilization.

Furthermore, most of the future potential increases to the Earth’s carrying capacity pertain to improved social and political policies that use the Earth’s resources more efficiently, rather than new technologies (e.g. Georgism, preventing planned obsolescence, more environmentally sustainable diets, etc), but even those policies won’t be enough to prevent overpopulation in the long-term. If human ingenuity is supposed to solve overpopulation, then perhaps social policies for using our resources more efficiently that have never been tried before are the true solutions we should be looking to try.

Having a more efficient way of life create surpluses, and in the absence of top-down control, surpluses are converted into excess fertility. So in the long run, you simply end up with more people, not a sustainable civilization. It increases the carrying capacity of the environment through decreasing the individual requirements for survival. There is still a ceiling, and our numbers are still shooting up towards it.

Populations naturally reproduce to infinity, so technological advancements are not a viable solution to overpopulation, even if they increase the carrying capacity. Right now, the primary selectionary pressure on the human genome is birth control, which selects people who consciously choose to have children. Once the human population adapts to resist the limiting effects that birth control has on the human population, an unstoppable population explosion will happen, unless the carrying capacity is breached and causes war, disease, and famine, or mass death.

Generally speaking, technology has had many negative effects on society, and it has arguably made society worse off by backfiring in many cases.

Adding more people to the planet means that there will be more workers whose labor can increase the carrying capacity of the Earth.

This argument ignores that greater wealth enables longer lifespans. If there are more retired people who are living longer and not working at all, then this means that the population increased, without adding additional labor to raise the carrying capacity, so the world obviously can’t depend on a larger labor supply to significantly raise the carrying capacity. The increased labor supply argument is not a valid argument for Cornucopianism since the Earth’s projected demographics are going to be more elderly, and thus don’t match its premise (i.e. a large working population that increases proportionally compared to the total population).

Also, Sub-Saharan Africans and other relatively less productive races are projected to have their populations increase the most compared to the Earth’s other races. This may be a taboo topic that most people don’t want to admit, but the fact is that the genes of most (not all) Sub-Saharan Africans aren’t ideal for high economic productivity, compared to Europeans or East Asians. Sub-Saharan Africans are unlikely to produce as much labor, ingenuity, and political regulations to support their populations as Europeans or East Asians could.

Lastly, the additional labor generated from an increasing working population probably has diminishing returns for increasing the carrying capacity. It’s more likely that the supply of freshwater or some other valuable natural resources are going to be the bottleneck that causes overpopulation, rather than the supply of labor and energy. If that’s the case, then increasing the supply of labor is unlikely to do anything that will meaningfully increase the carrying capacity.

That is true (for the world’s current rate of energy consumption) and nuclear energy is certainly revolutionary. But seemingly infinite energy isn’t enough to solve the problems of scarce resources. The problem is not that we don’t have potential sources of energy that could power an advanced civilization for a long time. The problem is that we don’t have control over ourselves, and industrial civilization is a runaway growth process, like a forest fire.

Life is not a zero sum game when energy is not a zero sum game.

Even if energy is not a zero-sum game, natural resources on planet Earth (and thus life itself) are still ultimately a zero-sum game. It seems unlikely that the world’s supply of freshwater will be able to keep up with the Earth’s population growth. Helium is also a non-renewable resource, and the type of sand that is necessary for building semiconductors is dwindling in supply. There are similar supply problems for many other natural resources.

Additionally, nuclear energy can only be sufficiently maintained if the population is intelligent enough to know how to maintain it. Dysgenics is a real problem in the modern world. Fortunately, the population control solution that we propose solves that problem too, so it kills two or three birds with one stone.

Nuclear energy also can’t be used to restart modern civilization if it collapses because it’s not easily accessible if the population doesn’t have the technology for acquiring, processing, and using it. If modern civilization collapses, the world won’t be able to use fossil fuels to restart modern civilization (as it did in the 1800s and 1900s) because the world’s fossil fuel supply will have been depleted.

We can’t escape from the Earth’s limits by going into space, because going into space requires a huge amount of energy, and there is nothing worth going into space to get and bring back. There is nowhere else in the solar system that could support human life without complex technology, and so it would be a practical impossibility to colonize anywhere else in the solar system. A colony on Mars would always depend on the Earth. It would never provide any net benefit to the Earth. A colony on Mars would not extend the resources of the Earth. It would be a drain on them. Even if we could get to Mars as easily as we can get to Antarctica, we wouldn’t have anything more than a small scientific outpost there, for the same reason that we only have a small scientific outpost in Antarctica: it’s a shitty place for human beings. Mars is at least ten thousand times harder to get to than Antarctica, and about a billion times shittier.

The laws of physics, our economic realities on earth, and the nature of biology and technology guarantee that humanity is unlikely to ever colonize other planets, not even the Moon nor Mars. Futurist Fantasies by T. K. Van Allen is a 100-page book gives a comprehensive explanation why space colonization is highly unlikely, with mathematical calculations and basic facts to support its reasoning.

Population collapse in indeed a current issue for developed countries for economic and genetic reasons, among others. If the carrying capacity allows it, there are many things that developed countries could do to boost their fertility rates that wouldn’t require increasing government spending. On the other hand, if the carrying capacity doesn’t allow increased fertility, then declining fertility is a good thing and the government should not intervene to stop it.

Our population regulation proposal is flexible enough to avoid causing population collapse or making it worse. If the government aims to increase the population, then it would increase the supply of reproduction licenses. If the supply if higher than the demand, then reproduction won’t be taxed at all. On the other hand, if the government needs to impose population control, it can do so without causing a population collapse in the future, unlike China’s One Child Policy.

It’s also theoretically possible to create an optimal political and economic system that could feasibly minimize all the negative consequences of population collapse so that it wouldn’t need to be a major problem for society at all. Our population regulation proposal is a major part of that, but it’s equally important to re-structure the economic system so that it doesn’t rely on endless growth.

No, and it has many key differences. We very strongly condemn how the One Child Policy was implemented in China. It was inequitable, poorly planned, violently enforced, did not promote eugenics, and unnecessarily authoritarian to a great degree. It also caused many negative social and economic outcomes including but not limited to: widespread female infanticide, 20 million unmarried men, a strong economic decline in China that will take place in the 2020s and 2030s, and a countless number of lives ruined by forced unnecessary medical procedures.

First, we are not proposing that every couple should be limited to only one child. Instead, we are proposing an equitable solution where people can have as many children as they have reproduction licenses for, as according to the supply, demand, and price of reproduction licenses⁴. It also has naturally eugenic effects, which just happens to be a positive, coincidental side effect of the economic reasoning that we used. Since the policy that we are proposing is very flexible, it won’t result in population busts or economic depressions like what China is/will experience during the 2020s and 2030s.

Second, we are opposed to the violent and authoritarian policies that China used to punish people who violated the One Child Policy. Since we oppose fixed quotas on how many children a couple can have, we would never sterilize people after they’ve had a certain number of licensed children. The only people who might get sterilized are murderers, rapists, and felons. If unlicensed children are born, we will always try the least authoritarian approach first. Since we are not in favor of restricting people to having only one child, this also means that our system would require imposing far fewer legal penalties against people who violate the population control laws.

Third, we have outlined several measures that a government can implement that are guaranteed to prevent female infanticide. Over time, cultural factors would further prevent female infanticide.

In order to sustain higher populations, it will be necessary for everybody to adopt lifestyles and technologies that make higher populations possible. Although this list of ideas would raise the Earth’s carrying capacity for humans, these societal changes are insufficient for preventing overpopulation since they do nothing to reduce fertility rates in the long-term.

• Georgism: Higher populations and greater population densities necessitate that land and natural resources be used as efficiently as possible.
• Sustainable Urban Planning: Car-centric urban planning is unsustainable, regardless of what governments might do to improve it. By contrast, high-speed rail is more efficient, more sustainable, costs less for infrastructure, uses less land, and it complements Georgism quite well.
• Insect Agriculture and Aqua-Agriculture: Meat is taxing on the environment to produce. By contrast, insects have many advantages over livestock: they are cheaper, take up less space, are more nutritious, and there are thousands to choose from. The Blue Revolution is also promising for increasing humanity’s future food production.

But it would also cause people to live longer, which would cause the world population to be higher.

• GMOs: GMOs make it possible to produce food in higher quantities with higher nutrition.
• Laws Preventing Planned Obsolescence: Planned Obsolescence reduces a population’s carrying capacity by needlessly increasing resource consumption. This benefits corporations, but it harms consumers and the environment when it’s abused.
• Vaccinations: The more people in contact with one another, the faster diseases spread and the more important herd immunity becomes. Vaccinations can eliminate this concern. Achieving herd-immunity is a free-rider problem.
• Having fewer pets would enable having more humans on the planet, since resources could be directed towards more humans instead of pets.
• Nuclear energy is the most reliable and efficient option for solving the world’s energy needs. It produces no carbon emissions, doesn’t require damming up rivers, nor does it kill birds and animals. However, it does require storing nuclear waste in places where it can remain permanently, can have occasional nuclear accidents, and it requires an intelligent population that knows how to maintain it. All of those problems are fading over time as we figure out better solutions and safer technologies.
• Smart Electrical Meters: More people means more work and money spent for meter readers, so smart meters make more sense. This saves money and redirects meter readers to more productive fields. Privacy may be a concern, but when it comes to population planning, you either get more people or more privacy, not both.

Some people may not like the tradeoffs, but they are the cost to living in a densely populated world. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Since the world population is unlikely to decrease fast enough through human means, it is critical that humanity do whatever it can to raise the carrying capacity to temporarily buy us some time before we can attempt to enforce a permanent, long-lasting solution to overpopulation. Increasing accessibility to contraception around the world will also help massively, but again, that’s only a temporary solution. It won’t work once natural selection reaches a new evolutionary stable state.

Read More: Consume Sustainably - Population Matters.

Once the proposed requirements are legally enforced, the people who decide who gets to have kids and who doesn’t will be the people themselves. If people don’t meet the requirements for whatever reason, then they’ll have to put some minimal effort into meeting the requirements. If people already have children but they still want more, then they’ll just have to work harder (against everybody else) to gain the legal right to have more reproduction licenses.

If this was a problem, there are two things we could do: 1. there could be a quota on the maximum number of reproduction licenses that each person can buy, and 2. the reproduction licenses could be divided up into categories. If we don’t want billionaire CEOs, successful entertainers, etc hogging up all the reproduction licenses from all the middle class folk, we could calculate the percentage of the population that we want them to comprise (or the percentage of the population that they all make up), whether that be anywhere from 2-5%, and have CEOs and successful entertainers compete in separate auctions for reproduction licenses, away from the general population.

Over time, we can expect that assortative mating would cause occupations to run in families, so the justification for dividing reproduction licenses up into different auctions is that a successful eugenics policy cannot benefit people who are suited towards one type of occupation over another, lest the genes of people who work important occupations die out, and society will be destined to fail.

If someone intentionally or accidentally conceives a child, and they refuse to buy a reproduction license to pay for the child’s existence, then the embryo or fetus will have to be aborted as soon as possible. Additionally, any pregnancy that results from a rape must be aborted immediately. The rapist will be automatically disqualified from ever obtaining a reproduction license since rape is a felony. Evolutionary reasoning concludes that aborting fetuses that resulted from rape will select for genes that make people less likely to rape.

In the event that someone manages to hide an unlicensed pregnancy and give birth to children without a reproduction license, three things will happen:

1. It will be a felony for anyone to have children without a reproduction license.
2. Every parent will be forced to take care of any children that they have, legally or illegally. They will be completely responsible for paying for the child’s existence, and paying back society for the incurred costs. This could be done by fining the parents at a fee that is 100% higher than the cost of a reproduction license, so that they will pay for both the child’s existence and an additional punitive cost. If they are unable to pay that, then they will be placed in a debtor’s prison until they pay off their debt to society.
3. Both biological parents will be monitored with regular birth control testing to ensure that they don’t break the law again.

If a meteor was heading towards Earth, would you argue that we shouldn’t destroy or redirect it, merely because it would be “too difficult” to try that? If it is absolutely necessary to enforce population control in order to prevent unprecedented apocalyptic scenarios, then any argument that population control will be too difficult or morally objectionable to enforce does not constitute a valid refutation against population control. The proposed methods for implementing population control on this FAQs page may be undesirable for many people, but we have proposed them nonetheless because we strongly believe that they are less undesirable than the alternative.

It would be more productive for people who are opposed to population control to make sound arguments that it is unnecessary to be cautious about overpopulation. If they can successfully prove this, then we will concede that there is no reason to enforce population control and no reason to debate how population control should be implemented. Until the opposition provides a sound and convincing argument why population control is unnecessary, that is the primary topic to be debated.

But to answer the question: No. Population control would be easier than enforcing many current laws, including traffic regulations and the law against murder. Law against murder can be difficult to enforce because it is difficult to identify the murderers, so some murders go unsolved. No one uses this as an argument that murder should be legal. By contrast, it’s much easier to identify people who have unlicensed children than it currently is to identify murderers. It’s very difficult to conceal a living, breathing child. They will be found eventually. It’s pretty pointless for parents to have children if they’re just going to hide their children in a dark room away from the outside world for their entire lives.

Furthermore, there’s already historical evidence that it’s perfectly possible to enforce population control. China managed to enforce population control from 1979 to 2021, except that it was unnecessarily authoritarian and it had a combination of eugenic and dysgenic effects, rather than purely eugenic effects. If China was able to enforce population control, there’s no reason why eugenic population control can’t be enforced around the world in general, especially if it’s done with comparatively far less authoritarian measures and a worldview that is better informed of population dynamics and evolutionary biology. Singapore also once enforced population control from 1966 to 1986.

If you were on the Titanic and heading towards an incoming iceberg, would you argue that we shouldn’t redirect the ship’s route, merely because that could potentially have “unintended consequences”? This argument could be applied to literally anything, and if taken to its logical conclusion, that would mean that we should never try or do anything out of the fear that even the slightest risk never makes any action worthwhile. One might as well never get out of bed at that point.

Even if there are some unintended consequences, they couldn’t possibly be worse than the known consequences of not enforcing population control. The known consequences of not enforcing population control are global civilizational collapse, billions of deaths, and a permanent Dark Age. It’s extremely difficult to imagine unintended consequences that would be worse than that. Blanket arguments like these are just arguments for caution when it comes to changing things that have to be fixed that people don’t want to fix, but they’re not arguments against action. We still have to act in the world.

In this particular situation, the predictable consequences of having no population control are much worse than the hypothetical consequences of having even a sloppily designed one.

There are many protections and safeguards that can be used to prevent population control from having unintended consequences. One is to use a licensing system, instead of setting a quota for every person (as it was done in China). Another is to meticulously calculate the conditions that govern the carrying capacity. And so forth.

Population control is no more authoritarian, totalitarian, or tyrannical than limiting the freedom to drive, limiting the freedom to kill other people, or forcing people to pay their taxes. Reproduction has serious consequences that can be harmful to others, so the imposition of social constraints on reproduction is justified for the same reason that social constraints on other behaviors are justified. Reproduction licenses are the simplest, most practical, and least authoritarian solution to save the world from the war and famine that will result from overpopulation.

Even if the question’s concern might be true, but it doesn’t refute how overpopulation is a serious issue that we will have to deal with later in the 21st century, whether we like it or not. We can deal with this preemptively via population-control, or we can choose to do nothing and suffer the consequences of that. Overpopulation is a free-rider problem, so government laws are the only way how overpopulation could be conceivably prevented without war, disease, or famine.

Additionally, higher population densities necessarily lead to more constraints on individual freedom, so population control could make a society less authoritarian by causing fewer conflicts.

Lastly, there are fair and reasonable ways to enforce eugenics, and it will certainly yield better results if plenty of reasonable safeguards are implemented.

The known consequences of not enforcing population control are global civilizational collapse, billions of deaths, and a permanent Dark Age. Unless anyone is actually insane enough to be in favor of this apocalyptic scenario, then the ends do justify the means.

It would be more productive for people who are opposed to population control to make sound arguments that it is unnecessary to be cautious about overpopulation (and dysgenics). If they can successfully prove this, then we will concede that there is no reason to enforce population control and no reason to debate how population control should be implemented. Until the opposition provides a sound and convincing argument why population control is unnecessary, that is the primary topic to be debated.

Life is intrinsically violent. Force is built into the nature of life, and the only way to escape violence within a society is to impose the threat of violence if the laws are not followed. In this case, we can either choose between violence in the form of famine and war caused by unregulated overpopulation, or the more peaceful and sustainable option of enforcing population control laws. We might as well apply force on society in a controlled way that eventually leads to less violence over time, as genes that cause higher crime rates are removed from the gene pool via this proposed selectionary process.

Lastly, there are plenty of reasons why population control protects more human rights than it violates.

To help prevent the reproduction licensing system from becoming an abuse of power, the state shall be required to display a public list of anyone who is barred from obtaining reproduction licenses, with the reason(s) stated why and the law(s) that they broke, if any. Anybody who is banned from obtaining a reproduction license can appeal their ban.

The prices at which every person purchased a reproduction license and the number of licenses that every person has purchased will be public information, in order to increase transparency and reduce corruption. Every efficient economy is supposed to display market prices publicly anyway.

Although modern civilization has enabled the highest carrying capacity of any other time in human history, the world’s carrying capacity is currently declining due to our exhaustion of the Earth’s scarce resources. We can also predict that if any node of the interconnected systems that enable us to live our current lifestyles were to fail (destruction of critical infrastructure, labor strikes, closure of trade routes, the depletion of fossil fuel reserves, warfare, etc), that would jeopardize our lifestyles and cause the carrying capacity to fall.

Hence, it makes sense to calculate multiple theoretical carrying capacities for each region, each given a different set of conditions. For example, we could predict carrying capacities for the following societal structures:

• Hunter-gatherer society
• Neolithic, agricultural society
• Pre-Industrial 17-18th century society
• Industrial 19-20th century society, with global free trade and globalization
• Modern, first-world 21st century society
• Modern 21st century society with Georgism and other economic solutions for raising the carrying capacity to the furthest extent possible

The purpose of calculating how these different conditions would change the carrying capacity of the environment would be to theorize what we should set the new LMPL to be if modern civilization were to collapse, so that we can prepare for a collapse (if it’s predictable).

The LMPL would be determined by the carrying capacity whose conditions we think are the most probable for the future.

PBS: Population Buffer Space

When in doubt, more buffer space is better than less buffer space since it gives the government more options and flexibility if the future seems particularly uncertain.

Over time, data from previous decisions, events, and effects pertaining to the carrying capacity and population control would accumulate and provide the government of the current time period with more data for making better decisions on how to estimate the carrying capacity, and how to determine what the LMPL and PBS between the carrying capacity should be.

See: Why it is reasonable to create a global government?

Population control would be administered on the national and local levels, since a larger scale of government isn’t necessary to enforce it. So, most of the influence that a global government might have on population control would be applied indirectly (e.g. regulating each jurisdiction’s carbon emissions and natural resource taxation). Aside from that, most of the laws concerning population control, such as reproduction licenses would probably be enforced on a local or national level, so it’s not necessary to enforce them with a global government.