I was in a disagreement with a friend about this topic (he thought it was and I didn’t). But we both just don’t know enough about it so I came here for help on the subject. Appreciate it!
Edit: so who is (more) right, me or my friend?
In: Economics
As any country develops, death rates drop and birth rates drop. Death rates tend to drop before birth rates do, so there’s always a couple generations of significant population growth, before it flattens out again. This has been observed pretty much everywhere.
The global population is expected to level out around ~10 billion people by the end of the century. Globally, we already grow enough food for 10 billion people. We can build enough clean power generation, too.
That doesn’t mean that growing populations aren’t a challenge for the countries experiencing them now. By definition, they’re countries that aren’t super rich. And growing enough food *globally* doesn’t mean that that food is distributed to everyone. Same with water, which we can’t just make more of.
But these are problems for the regions that are going through this process right now, they’re not unsolvable, and there is a maximum population that we’ll stabilize at, so it’s not a forever problem either.
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