As always reactionaries get the bullet.

  • greensontoast [none/use name]
    hexagon
    ·
    3 years ago

    A nonmalthusian example of combating overpopulation would be the one child policy. I don't think antinatalism=malthusianism. I think it would be beneficial to the human race if contraceptive was available freely and the average age of a mother was higher and the amount of kids lower. It would mean more resources for the next generation. There's a very fine line between this and eugenics, so long as the state isn't enforcing any preference on who breeds and just enforces a limit it's fine. Plus there are many regions of the world that are considered overpopulated, the American south west for example needs to loose population or it's going to run out of water. It simply cannot sustain the amount of agriculture it does and that's gonna require migration.

    • mr_world [they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      You got banned as I was reading but what does overpopulation even mean? What's the baseline? How do you calculate what population we're supposed to have? Overpopulated compared to what? What is it based on? Okay so we produce this much food and have this many homes and this many hospitals. So all that can support this many people. Therefore we're overpopulated if we're above that number? How does that make sense? We know how and why everything in our society is produced, for profit. So basing how many people there are supposed to be off that seems weird. Density? Well we know our cities are planned around cars not people so that's no help.

      If the answer is some modified ecological model, then what's the methodology there? Numbers don't gain more meaning just because someone with a PhD adds them up. What else on earth has a comparable (in a non spherical-cows way) way of life as us? We can literally just choose not to let people starve. We're not following some kind of predator-prey model of population here.

      • CrimsonSage [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Overpopulation is a thing in biology for when a given animal population is too great for a specific environments carrying capacity. Thing is that this is a theoretical thing that is based on animal behavior and the environment being held static. Now this can be a thing for more simple organisms, but humans can both adapt their behavior as well as their environment so it really doesnt apply. Also the concept of overpopulation in this sense is also dubious because it is usually applied in cases where an environment has been destabilized some way to remove natural checks on population which can lead to rapid abnormal growth and then crashes (See Link below). So yeah overpopulation is a thing best left for theoretical models and not applied to questions on how we want to structure our society.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Matthew_Island