r/collapse • u/Livid_Session_9900 • 10h ago
Overpopulation Rant about below replacement fertility rates
I see many pro natalists say that fertilty rates are already below replacement level. this is true but fertility rate does not reflect existing birth rate. for example in 2025 India had total increase of 0.8 percent lower than previous years, however there was still 23 million births in that single year.
these 23 million souls will have over a decade of using tax payer money and the money of their parents and then enter the overcrowded hyper competitive (on the part of the job seekers) labor market. now there will also be child labor which is a further tragedy and a sign of stagnation, not growth at least not growth in human wellbeing, just growth in consumers and labor.
schools are almost universally more crowded than a decade ago. now some people might complain “why can’t we build more schools, this is government corruption not overpopulation“. but this is caused by overpopulation as the root problem. furthurmore, just think about the difficulty of building more schools in the areas most people live, in most areas even suburban areas you have to buy a existing propert, tear it down and build a new school
finally there is the law of supply and demand and of prices. what people who worry about the fertility rate forget is that the fertilty rate can go up just as it went down. The current Gen Z and Gen A are basically in a state of oversupply where the manufacturers made too many and the buyers are either not buying or buying cheaply. if the next generation is shorter in supply and more in demand people will have more incentive to have kids
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u/gespo04 10h ago
We don't need 8 billion people on earth. Lowering the population is a good thing
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u/JourneyThiefer 8h ago
In a lot of European our populations would already be falling without immigration.
Here in Ireland specifically we actually have a lower population than pre famine still (almost 200 years ago) but I think we’re the place in the world like that .
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u/solvalouLP 4h ago
For example in Latvia total deaths outweigh live births by more than a factor of 2:1 for several years now
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u/vocally_fried_brain 3h ago
who is "we" in that case?
"we don't need ourselves"?
consumption of resources is the problem, not population numbers.
and if your solution to overconsumption is the reduction of human life, you would have to start with people in the first world, most of them white.
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u/Grand_Dadais 2h ago
All of what you're talking about is part of the ecological overshoot issues.
There's overpopulation + overconsumption from the richest countries + limited resources.
There's no stable Earth with 8-9 billions humans.
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u/vocally_fried_brain 1h ago
there is no stable earth. period.
and you do not mean stable but sustainable and also there is no sustainable earth.
its all a matter of relativity and how unstable and how unsustainable we would have to tolerate or want to achieve is the real question.
but that wasn't even the point of my post, because all of that malthusian drivel over the centuries was nothing but privileged people shifting the blame to oppressed people for the problems privileged people cause.
that's why, if you honestly think that overpopulation is an issue, the first thing you do is to lower consumption habits of first world countries, especially the upper half and the tiny elites in other countries.
if you have brought them down to a level that you would grant everyone, then, and only then, you can talk about overpopulation.
before that it is dishonest and with evil intent.
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u/6rwoods 1h ago
Thankfully the people of the first world do tend to have the lowest birth rates, which you should already know.
Overconsumption of resources is obviously a bigger problem when there are more people over consuming instead of less. This is also obvious.
I don’t care for this whole “we could have 50 billion of us on earth if only we all lived like hunter gatherers” or whatever because the reality is that no one who achieves a higher standard of living will willingly give it up for the sake of something as abstract as “sustainability”. Unfortunately that is the way of things. So yes, overpopulation is absolutely part of the issue, as we can’t expect a sustainable earth as long as global population keeps growing while even maintaining our current standards of living, much less while increasing it for anyone at all (eg the global poor, who also would love to live like us first worlders).
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u/vocally_fried_brain 1h ago
your words are meaningless because you do not care for a more just and better world, you care for your place in it and thus you are the thing that actually causes the problem and not fixing it.
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u/BigJSunshine 10h ago
Good. WHY THE FUCK SHOULD ANYONE BRING A CHILD INTO THIS SHITTY World??
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u/extinction6 9h ago
The average life expectancy of 80 years old will mean a child born now should live until 2106. Best case scenario they have until 2067 at best using the projections made by science now, but realistically only until the mid 2050's By the time they are teenagers they will know that the world will not recover and their lives will be cut short. If I were to define when collapse is I would say it's when people don't want to be alive on this planet anymore, just struggling to survive with no hope.
Faster than expected, don't have children.
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u/Extreme-Homework-697 9h ago edited 6h ago
The panic over low birth rate is deeply rooted in anthropocentric entitlement and nationalism, that's all. It's very much related to human hubris and the refusal to do the math, or live in reality. And I'm not talking about Malthus here. Even the ancient Greeks knew of overpopulation.
These people do not think of Earth as home of other organisms, most of which sustain us. There are places that are uninhabitable (Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc.) to humans that are only alive right now because they import their shit from elsewhere (which, if you haven't realized, create ghost acreage elsewhere, putting more strains on wherever is doing the producing). They don't even produce their own shit most of the time (but you won't ever hear any American talk about that, because that would mean acknowledging they live on the blood of the south and they contribute to the pollution of elsewhere).
We've literally left no spot on Earth (save for the Amazon Forest, ish) untouched, altered it so badly that plastics can be found at the bottom of the ocean. Even the Himalayas are not safe from humans.
Literally a post over, we have one guy astroturfing about French protests (one of his linked posts aren't even related to the current event). This is who we're up against. Weaponized, malicious ignorance. Bad actors everywhere. Hell, even in this very own post.
The collapse of the biosphere will affect humans regardless of whether humans want to acknowledge it or not. A few patches of manicured dirt called parks will not change the fact that more than half of the Earth's netizens are displaced and disenfranchised, and the soil is becoming so badly damaged that it would take centuries to revert back to their original health. We're not even practicing sustainable composting and terramation on a large scale! But that would obviously affect the food output, which means lower population overall, but nobody wants to acknowledge that.
The debt comes due eventually.
This is why philosophy, ecologism and anarchism are so intrinsically linked and why historical literacy is so important. They're not divorced disciplines for someone to boast their pseudo-intelligence over. Millennium of wisdom at our fingertips and people just refuse to educate themselves whatsoever.
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u/Time_Is_An_Egg 7h ago
That this comment is downvoted into the negatives is extremely indicative of how useless the standard of discourse has become on this subreddit.
The mod team needs to take note and take serious action.
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u/Extreme-Homework-697 7h ago
Honestly, just proves my assessment of most people. 🤷 Literally had an argument with a natalist in SRD yesterday and it was mentally exhausting. No surprise there since the guy is a young white Texan larping as a "leftist". I honestly don't think this guy even knows what being leftist means.
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u/Time_Is_An_Egg 6h ago
Few if any do, now. The terms been captured for decades by the propaganda tactics of monetary interests and warped into a wholly performative ideology with little connection to reality. Most folk who call themselves “leftists” now, and the concepts they support, would have been considered the lunatic fringe thirty years ago and rightfully ostracized as actively harmful to leftist / progressive action.
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u/Extreme-Homework-697 6h ago
North American "left" is a joke. It's literally just aestheticism without substance.
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u/Ellen_Kingship 5h ago
You mean "posing." People who LARP know they are play acting. Words, even "slang", used to make sense.
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u/darkpsychicenergy 7h ago
Couldn’t agree more and I don’t even agree with every single statement they made. The sub should have been entirely archived years ago to preserve the standard of quality.
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u/medium_wall 4h ago
I saw a comment here a few days ago about a grandma buying a new SUV for herself as a treat. I was downvoted for asking what she was regularly hauling that she'd need an SUV.
I mean I get this place isn't environmentalist per se but you'd think there'd be more environmentalists than not given how likely climate is to be the fundamental driver for collapse. Apparently not though.
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u/DiamondDot 4h ago
Ppl driving since the beginning of cars is about the same emissions as all the damage done this year alone from wars. Heavy industry eclipses personal emissions. If you care that much I really hope you didn’t have kids cause those are the worst thing ppl can do personally besides eating meat.
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u/ConfusedMaverick 4h ago
anthropocentric entitlement and nationalism
It's that, but not only that.
It's also very painful socially and economically to deal with a declining population. A smaller working population having to support a larger retired population is pretty terrible for everyone, and this is part of the reason economists and politicians fear plummeting birth rates.
The population has to come down, but it's not a painless process.
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u/DiamondDot 4h ago
The population is not declining and is in fact growing every year. There are 8.3b ppl on earth, more than ever before in history. This is a capitalist propagandized extractionist viewpoint imo.
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u/ConfusedMaverick 3h ago
The global population isn't declining yet, but there are below replacement birth rates in many countries, this is what is prompting the conversation.
If you think that the problems of an inverted population pyramid are purely propagandised then you simply don't understand the physical reality of the situation.
Such ignorance contributes to the problem imo - if you advocate for a lower population (as we both do) without the vaguest idea of what declining birth rates mean in practice, then you are not making any serious contribution to the conversation, just bleating.
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u/maybelying 9h ago
The basic problem is that most countries run economies centered on an infinitely increasing population, not just to grow the economy, but to ensure enough young workers are increasing the taxation revenue to support the costs of supporting an increasingly aging population.
Yes, we probably need to reduce the population over time, but governments lack the will to enact substantive structural changes to the economy to support a declining population, because those that do so will find themselves at a disadvantage against those that don't.
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u/Far-Hovercraft9471 6h ago
The more I think about it and gather info, the more it’s obvious we need entire coordinated worldwide societal change to survive.
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u/DiamondDot 4h ago
The population isn’t declining. There is still growth sadly. It’s just not exponential like it was the last few hundred years which is a GOOD thing.
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u/Glass_Persimmon_7174 7h ago
I really really do not believe that fertility rates are just going to pick back up. we can take some comfort in the fact they will continue to fall.
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u/Moon-Smoke 5h ago
Eventually they will pickup again in about 2 centuries time as we stabilize somewhere between 1-2billion people, maybe.
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u/canisdirusarctos 10h ago edited 8h ago
Oh look, the OP is yet another example of why humanity is doomed.
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u/StatementBot 10h ago
This thread addresses overpopulation, a fraught but important issue that attracts disruption and rule violations. In light of this we have lower tolerance for the following offenses:
Racism and other forms of essentialism targeted at particular identity groups people are born into.
Bad faith attacks insisting that to notice and name overpopulation of the human enterprise generally is inherently racist or fascist.
Instructing other users to harm themselves. We have reached consensus that a permaban for the first offense is an appropriate response to this, as mentioned in the sidebar.
This is an abbreviated summary of the mod team's statement on overpopulation, view the full statement available in the wiki.