By IkmoIkmo
Hans Rosling has a documentary about it, check it out via Google, it’s on youtube of vimeo or something.
It’s not so much that overpopulation isn’t an issue, of course it is (that’s why it’s called ‘over’ population), but rather that the trend line is that population growth is very rapidly slowing, that people tend to overestimate population growth, are unaware of big population centres that are shrinking, that the average worldwide children per woman rate is 5 just 50 years ago) and that population will likely decline after we add a few billion more.
That’s not to say that it isn’t an issue, but traditionally we held some really weird views about overpopulation. Basically we looked at this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Po…
and extrapolated the exponential growth, and ended up with scenarios of doom, war etc. Food shortages for example are consistently predicted, but food production growth has outstripped population growth substantially and food security is better than any time in the past (yet far from perfect).
Obviously there are huge sustainability concerns, but the biggest source is our level of consumption levels and patterns, not our population numbers, which comes in second.
Read more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470621
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