Precious Roy wrote:
None of these issues are directly related to population size. Overpopulation is just a myth generated by the white global North to make people think that all the problems in the world are the result of people of color in the global South having too many children. This myth is intended to divert attention away from the fact that all of these environmental, economic and social ills are the result of a capitalist political and class structure which can all be overcome without any draconian restrictions on family size.
Pollution and waste are the result of capitalism's failure to account for the cost externalities of production. It costs consumers nothing to throw away a plastic bottle, but that plastic bottle can end up in the ocean and harm wildlife. Capitalism fails because it does not assign a cost to pollution and waste to consumers. But if you can fix that with regulations. People used to dump motor oil into storm drains. That is now illegal. A tremendous amount of plastics can be reduced by doing things like banning plastic bags.
Traffic is the result of the domination of the automobile and poor planning of urban development. Those can be fixed by investing in public transit and banning automobiles in high density urban areas. Also, urban density that causes traffic problems is the result of a few metropolitan areas being crowned winners and becoming packed with hundreds of thousands of new residents when rural and urban areas that fall out of favor (Detroit, Cleveland, etc.) are basically empty with tons of cheap real estate.
Agricultural demand is largely driven by meat and fish consumption. There is enough highly productive arable land in Nebraska to feed most of the world. All you need to do is reduce meat and fish consumption to sustainable levels. Also, hunger has nothing to do with food supply. During the Ethiopian famine, farmers were exporting cattle and grain. The problem was that the drought and crop failures meant that no one had any money to buy food and the government was more interested in putting down the Oromo insurrection than feeding people.
Resource depletion is not an issue when you shift to renewable energy and have effective programs for recycling and reuse. Also, people in the global North consume many times over what people in the impoverished global South consume. Consume less and you fix the problem.
The real estate issue is the same as traffic. If you sent half of the tech companies in Silicon Valley to small to midsize cities in the midwest, you could fix the real estate problem in a minute. The US has tons of land and very little density compared to many other parts of the world.
In a capitalist society, growth is highly dependent on population. When population size is stagnant or declines, you have economic recession or stagnation. When population size grows, you have economic growth. Of course, the last 30 years in the US have shown that economic conditions have little to do with wage growth. If you want higher wages, empower unions and raise the minimum wage.
Crime and violence are social ills that have little to do with population size. Some of the most dense cities in the world like Singapore are the safest. That is because there is very little poverty and good social programs.
There are a lot of benefits to children to growing up with siblings. Only children face a lot of challenges and do not necessarily do better by having more attention from their parents. And things like quality prek and k-12 schools, universal childcare and free college have a lot more to do with child development than dedicated parental attention and resources.