Where are all the pro-depopulation people?

[AngryChris]

It's funny how I see people bring up population on a pretty regular basis on some things that I follow.  They speak openly (on facebook) about how we have too many people and we need less people on the Earth.  I don't agree with this idea but it's funny how they are all about reducing the population but when a virus comes by that is supposedly going to kill xxx amount of people, the same people suddenly get upset because "too many people are dying".  What's up with that?

[The Mage]

They usually want to sterilize and abort. What I usually hear is something along the lines of limiting parents to a single child, like China did. But recently China has relaxed the rule. Especially with their severe imbalance of males to females. In 2017 they had over 33 million more males than females.

Pretty much the myth comes from people seeing exponential growth and not realizing it is the left side of a bell curve. Right now, it is so easy to debunk.

There is something called Demographic Transition. It is 4 stages that countries go through as they develop.

Stage 1: Pre-transition

High child mortality rate, and high birth rate. If people want to have a child make it to adulthood, they need to have 4-6 to have 2 make it to adulthood.

Stage 2: Early-transition

Death rate begins to fall, but birth rates remain high. The result is rapid population expansion.

Stage 3: Late transition

People adjust and birth rates decline. Population growth decelerates.

Stage 4: Post transition

Low birth rates and low death rates. Population doesn’t grow, and often declines.

Europe and the US have both gone through this and if it wasn’t for immigration there wouldn’t be any population growth, and in fact a decline.

The world population growth hit the peak in 1968-9 with a 2.09% growth rate.

1999 it was down to 1.71%, 2010 it was down to 1.22%, and at the beginning of this year it hit 1.05%.

This is both good and bad news. The population is getting older, and fewer young people are going to be there to take care of older people. Although technology is improving especially in health care, so older people may end up being healthier for longer.

Recently a popular scare tactic is that robots are going to be taking our jobs. It’s mostly BS, but the truth is we need robots and automation to do jobs because there will not be enough people. The trucking industry is short between 50K and 100K employees. They are thinking of automated trucks, not because they want to replace the drivers, but because they can’t find enough.

Right now, the world is getting richer. Abject poverty was 44% of the world population in 1980. (World Bank.) That was actually a massive improvement at the time, but by 2015 it had dropped to 9.6%. By 2018 it was down to 8.3%.

2018 was also the year that 50% of the population hit middle class or better. (Defined as $11 - $110 a day.) Brookings institute predicts that this will climb to 2/3 of the population by 2030.

I may have written all this before. Though now the world had a little “hiccup”, but many people will be surprised at how quickly things bounce back.

I believe there is a 5th stage that will be coming up as technology explodes, and abundance becomes the norm.