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
No. Overpopulation isn’t an issue. Over concentration of people in certain areas is. If anything, we should be concerned about the declining fertility rates, as many places are not producing enough people to replace the dying which will cause major major issues. We need to expand the areas people are living in. There’s so much land and so much habitable space available that’s just not being utilized.
Lot’s of people don’t agree on this.
I think that it isn’t worrying. So far it has helped us massively. The more people we have, the more efficient we get. We can have more people in “luxury” jobs like research that propel us forward and have given us amazing technologies.
These technologies allow us to sustain more people.
No. The reverse is far more likely at this point in human history. For the first time, that we know of, population is projected to decline by largely human choice. [Lancet article](https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30677-2/fulltext).
As access to healthcare and education for women increase birthrates decline. By century’s end projections have countries like China falling in population while Nigeria goes through the roof. But, in the whole we are an older people. Nothing has been shown to reverse this trend.
Here is an interesting site that plots out population estimates. The global population is expected to peek in the next few decades and then drop slightly. So the hot new things to be concerned about are low birth rates and effects of under-population.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/
It’s interesting because when I was young, that was one of the larger concerns.
However, no one seemed to mention it, but male/female fertility has gone down. It might have someone to do with microplastics or other chemicals that surround us.
Anyhow, with that and the growing disparity of wealth, many people choose not to have children. It may all just level off and may soon become harder and harder to have large families.
It’s actually a loaded question because not all people burn though the earths resources at the same rate.
People in the global ‘North’ are an order of magnitude more of a drain on the earth than people in the global ‘South’. If everyone lived as spartan an existence as the poorest among us, the carrying capacity of the Earth would be in the trillions of people. Conversely, if everyone on earth lived the resource intensive life of the typical North American, we would have exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth many times over already.
So, to answer the question of whether overpopulation is a worrying thing: No. It’s actually a distraction from the real issue …which is certain people taking far more than their share and trying to put the blame on the people who don’t have enough.
Technically yes, but compared to all the other problems we’ve got, it’s not worth worrying about.
There was a quite smart and famous guy back in a day when the population was approaching 1bln and he said the earth couldn’t support more.
Overpopulation is a thing is underdeveloped countries which cannot handle as many people at the present moment. Overpopulation is not a thing in developed countries, it’s not a thing in the long run also. The earth could easily support way more people.
Underpopulation is far more concerning to most world governments than overpopulation right now. Just look at people like Putin who are going on talk shows, appointing fertility czars, organizing contests encouraging women to have babies. Or consider China, Japan, Korea, etc. [East Asia Is Facing A Disaster It Can’t Fix (msn.com)](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/east-asia-is-facing-a-disaster-it-can-t-fix/ar-BB1qZuFJ?ocid=BingNewsVerp)
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