Not me, but I think that the fundamental argument is quality / quantity.

The quantity side aligns with capitalism and growth for the sake of growth. More consumers. More labor. Supporting the top-heavy aging populace (admittedly a problem) by whatever means necessary. Quantity is an argument favoring people not yet born, or favoring a pyramid scheme by which there needs to be an ever-expanding base of young, productive people to support the old. Nonexistent people’s “wants” should not be considered in any way. If they are not born, they can not suffer. We should not consider what hypothetical people might have wanted. The elderly need to be supported, but by some other means. We cannot continue growth forever simply to support all those who came before us.

The quality side is benefit for the existing populace. As a person who exists, it’s basically the only thing I care about. I prefer my quality of life over sacrifice for the potential existence of not-yet-existent lives. I think any sane person would want there to be more quality of life for themselves and other people living. Quantity of life directly impedes this goal.

The previous poster may not have stated the case as such, but I believe that it is self-evident.

everyone on the planet can fit in Manhattan if they just squeeze tightly

But god damned ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in, not min maxxing the number of people alive for some absolutely incomprehensible reason.

Totally with you on these points. Having lived in NYC it is my conception of ultra-urban hell. Sure, there are worse places. Cairo comes to mind. But this idea that we just have to warehouse people to keep them from having massive sprawling impact on the planet is absolutely the most wrong way to think about it, IMO. I hate when people argue that if we just tighten our belts and accept a lower standard of living, everyone can be accommodated with low environmental impact. I go the other way: if there were few enough people (and hoarding/profiteering was curtailed), beachfront and slopeside real estate would be cheap.

I’m not arguing against concentration of wealth and hoarding by the ultra-rich, which is obviously a problem, but I have said recently: everyone could live like a modern-day billionaire if there were fewer people.

Too often the argument pivots the other way and turns into: if we all eat plants, live in ultradense cities with dystopian warehousing of people, and nobody has a car, we could be in ecological harmony with 8B+ people. I don’t like that angle.

If “Westerners”, or “the global North”, or “developed countries” are consuming more than “our fair share” of resources while some significant fraction of the 8B+ humans are in poverty, that’s not ideal. On the other hand I want my standard of living to increase, not decrease, and I find making concessions a hard sell.

We could easily support our current population and quite a bit more if we actually respected and shared our resources responsibly.

I think this is a monumentally bad argument. Statistically, you are typing this from a computer or smartphone, with internet access, and are probably part of the segment of humanity that consumes the most resources (as am I). You are saying that if we want to have 15, 20, 30 billion people, we can all just live like the most impoverished people in the world and it will be fine.

It’s a quality vs. quantity problem. Maximizing human numbers means we must have very low per-person consumption to minimize impact. Maximizing quality of life means we can all eat/travel/live/consume how we want and the environmental impact will still be low (but with fewer people). I think that’s far more desirable.

EDIT: to distill down the argument further - you support voluntarily decreasing your standard of living, so that we can grow the population more, for the benefit of… ? Creating lives that have not yet been born and can’t care?

Whatever you want, I personally do not want a decrease in my standard of living, and especially not to feed the capitalist machine that requires growth at all costs. I presume, if faced with a real and present choice of the same kind, most people would choose to uphold their standard of living instead of sacrificing, only so that more billions of people can be born. When is it enough? Do we really NEED 8B+ people? I wouldn’t mind living in a world of <1B people where everyone has luxury and plenty without destroying the planet in the process. We can’t get there, but the principle still holds. Put resources into solving the problem of elder care, and just let the population decline naturally.

I mean, I’ve always said that the population is a real problem with no good solutions. People are uncomfortable talking about it because there are no good solutions, but that’s no reason to pretend it doesn’t exist. But people act like even mentioning it is the same as proposing or supporting an unethical solution.

I agree with mostly everything you wrote in that, except to say that the problem is mostly manmade and is economic in nature.

Problem: demographic collapse causes a top-heavy (old-heavy) population pyramid whereby there aren’t enough young people to take care of the aging population. This is a real problem that we should engineer ourselves out of. Maybe a higher % of the workforce is redirected to healthcare, in part by automating away bullshit jobs like fast food and retail workers. Maybe we make advances in automation/robotics/AI that allows some of the caregiving labor in hospitals and nursing homes to be done by machines instead of people (extending the productivity of the human labor). Those are problems we should be working towards solving, and plausibly could solve if the political and economic will were there. I hope Japan and South Korea get really far into solving this before it becomes a problem everywhere.

Problem: our entire economy is predicated upon infinite growth, and the nanoinstant that belief in future growth falters, the stock market and entire economy collapses in a way that makes the Great Depression look like a quaint blip. This is unsolvable. All of the wealthy, powerful, and political factions would revolt if anything threatened their prospects of unlimited future growth. The entire world economy is a ponzi scheme that requires new markets, new consumers, and perpetual growth even to exist at its current level. When you hear “growth is priced in”, that’s basically the fundamental corner we’ve painted ourselves into. The markets assume untenable growth now as the baseline, and if the mirage falters, the economy will tank shockingly quickly. This is the Faustian bargain of late stage capitalism.

As it stands, the population growth has peaked, and the population will naturally peak and then decline. Nobody needs to be killed or sterilized to make this happen - it will happen on its own. The reason seems to be rooted in the education level of women, and the availability of reliable birth control. As someone once eloquently put it: “the average woman would choose to give birth fewer than 2.1 times” (replacement rate).

As a final thought, I will never agree with people who assert that the “carrying capacity” of Earth is far higher than the present population - double or more. This entire premise is based on living like an impoverished person in India or Africa. They will freely admit that the “carrying capacity” is much lower if the baseline living standard is the middle class of developed countries. Most of North America and Western Europe is wildly rich by global standards (fact). I’m here to say that still higher standards are desirable and attainable, at low global impact with lower global populations. We should all be filthy, filthy resource-rich, and to deprive us of that because the Earth “should” have 10-20 billion humans is fucking bollocks.

It’s like clockwork - you can almost set your watch by someone responding like that to pointing out the obvious that human population is straining global resources and making life worse for everyone.

I like to phrase it as this: who is the ecofascist? The person advocating for sustainable human population, or the person telling everyone we need to tighten our belts, give up meat, eschew fossil fuels and personal transportation, and live like a pauper in a cheap cookie-cutter dystopian apartment complex to prevent overconsumption? I would argue it’s very much the latter.

Personal ethics aside (not everyone wants to eat meat and burn gas), everyone could live like a modern-day billionaire if there were fewer people. Everyone could have beachfront and slopeside property. Can’t do that with 8.3 billion people. Isn’t that the goal of fully-automated luxury gay space communism?

Yes, but what about Bubb Rubb?