- This Big Think video is sponsored by Odoo. - If you go back in human history, I'm sure the 'silver bullet'
of many environmental problems was just, There's just too many people. If we had less people, this
problem would be solved. This particular overpopulation concern became really prominent in
the 1960s and the 1970s. At the time, the big concern of the day was how we could produce enough food for a rapidly growing global population. This is really brought to the fore with the publication of the book, The Population Bomb, by
Paul R. Ehrlich in 1968. I think there are many people
of this same opinion today who still really strongly argue that the root of our
environmental problems is that there are just
too many people on Earth. So some of the really alarming proposals on how to tackle overpopulation
are, for example, adding sterilants to the
water or food supply.

offering responsibility prizes for families that chose
not to have children, offering lotteries where you
only get into the lottery if you are a couple that
hasn't had children, removing financial support
for families of a given size, or some of the most morbid, which is that, and especially for lower income countries, not just this notion of forced
or encouraged sterilization, but also the withdrawal
of food aid packages. There's often this framing
of a triage system, where some countries in the
world might be redeemable, and maybe we should help those
countries to feed themselves, but some countries are past this point- they could never be
able to feed themselves, and therefore, we should
withdraw any food aid. I think there was two key things the proponents of the population bomb or this overpopulation argument got wrong: I think the first one is
that they underestimated the impact of the demographic transition. I think they assumed
that the world population

would continue to grow
exponentially, and it hasn't. While the global population
is still growing, in fact, it's growing at a much slower rate. Global population growth
rates peaked decades ago and have halved since then. If we look at projections
into the future, the UN, for example, expects that
global population will peak well before the end of the
century and start to decline. The key thing that they
underestimated here was the fall in global fertility rates. Now, this is the kind of
average number of children that an average woman would have. Now globally in 1950,
that was around five, so every woman would have,
on average, five children. That has since fallen to
2.3 children per woman, and this is true across
most countries in the world. I think the other key thing the proponents of this underestimated was the massive technological advancements we've seen in agriculture. The issue at the time is that we wondered

how we would produce enough food for a growing population. But not only has global population growth slowed, we've also massively increased the amount of food we can produce. Crop yields across the world have doubled, tripled, or quadrupled over the last 50 years, which means that the amount of food we produce per person has actually gone up, not down, despite the fact that we have billions of more people on Earth. I think a key argument that people often say in terms of climate change is that there's just far too many people. And they'll often point to particular countries where fertility rates are still very high. There are some countries, for example, across Africa, where the average number of children per woman is four or five. I think what's really key to highlight here is that in these countries where fertility rates are very high, the incomes are low, and per capita CO2 emissions are also very, very low, extremely low.

That means that when you
do the maths on this, you could actually add billions of people at those very low incomes. It would have almost no impact
on global CO2 emissions. I think the other issue that some people are now highlighting is the
notion of underpopulation. Actually, population
growth slows down too much, and it creates particular problems. I think this won't be a problem for many countries in the
world, but I think for some, especially richer countries
with aging populations, you will start to see problems
with particular demographics and particular balances
of different demographics. The key problem with aging populations is that within a country, you
want a large number of people in the kind of working age bracket. Those are the people that
are propping up the economy and driving the economy forward. I think the problem that
some countries will have with large aging populations is that they won't have a
large enough group of people in the working age category.

I think there is this comparison that's often made by people that say that the problem is overpopulation. Is that humans are often compared to a cancer. Well, it's true that we do have environmental impacts, and we do have large problems to solve. I think it's a very dire prediction that we don't contribute anything to the world. If your messaging is that the human in front of you is a cancer, what you're saying is that you don't want them to be there, and you think that they should be removed. If this is gonna be the comparison we make on how to tackle environmental problems, it's a really damaging messaging, and just one that won't get us there. Hey Big Thinkers, thanks for watching this video. But before we go, we'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of this video, Odoo. Odoo is an open source business management software that acts as your company's operating system.

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The overpopulation myth, debunked by a data scientist | Hannah Ritchie

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