If we are running out of resources and increasing pollution does a smaller population not help with this? As a species we have shrunk in numbers before and clearly increased again. Really keen to understand more about this.
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Our economy is based on constant growth. It’s not just governments who use this assumption, but all actors in a neoliberal economy – investors, private companies, state-owned companies, unions etc etc – such as the current world economy, are bound by it. The best way to ensure sustained growth of wealth is to have a growing population, because each additional person is expected to contribute a certain amount to the global economy. All investments in the future will fail if not for continued growth, so population growth is pretty essential to the neoliberal economic model.
Ultimately, this is not sustainable, but the architects of the current world economy essentially did not care about sustainability, only generating wealth, which they saw as being equivalent to capital. Ecological wealth was not considered.
You can research the degrowth movement to understand more.
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