Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

It does have good arguments, but I think the reasoning take in account only a part of the problem, which lead to a wrong conclusion.

From my understanding, the statement is: Overpopulation is not a problem, it's the solution, because statistically we have more smart young people that improve and optimize resources available through discovery, reducing its impact on the environment (climate included).

It throw some arguments and datas:

- If we’d gone on as 1950[s] organic farmers, we’d have needed 82 percent of the world’s land area for cultivation, as opposed to the 38 percent that we farm at the moment.”

- resources are becoming more abundant and cheaper as the world population grows

- Especially since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been drastically shrinking their cropland use per capita, and there is no reason to believe this progress can’t continue.

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On this later arguments, it falacious as cropland increased A LOT since industrial revolution.https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-over-the-long-te...

Also, from the same source, it seems that optimization of land is not moving a lot since a decade or two.

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But then, to make all of this viable, because the author know about climate change, he make a very brave, optimistic at best irrealistic at worse, asumption:

- With clean energy technologies, we can completely decouple material well-being from CO2 emissions, for the first time in history.

This single assumption make its whole arguments vanish. It's the only argument that is not scientific, yet so important in its theory.

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And never ever he is talking about the environmental debt that allowed this productivity progress, that don't show up in the graphics he use. It only talks about short terms, not long term. Only about science, not about economy. Economy that is really linked to productivity and consumption, and debt. It avoid to talk about tipping point where things fall apart. It avoid the role of oil and gas in the productivity.

Author should read the story of the [hen that laid the golden eggs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hen_That_Laid_the_Golden_E...): the production methods are killing the chicken, soon we'll not have golden eggs anymore.

As a software developer, I have stopped buying bread from bakeries many years ago, because I no longer like the bread made by modern industrial methods.

Now I make every morning a bread for myself, kneading the dough and baking it (in a microwave oven, where baking is much faster and more reproducible than in a traditional oven).

I would like to also mill the wheat seeds into flour, but I do not have a suitable electric mill. Nevertheless, I mill other plant seeds that I use in much smaller quantities, e.g. poppy seeds, from which I bake a sponge cake.

Anything that you can do yourself at home independently of others will always provide better results than anything that you can purchase.

I agree that there is a correlation between specialization and the size of the labor pool, but even in a small country with a few million humans the size of the labor pool is enough to cover all specialities.

The reasons why various industries are now missing from most small countries (even if they frequently have existed there earlier) have nothing to do with the size of their labor pool. An explanation of those reasons would need a much ampler space.

If I compare my standard of living with that of my grandfather before WWII, there are no real improvements, except that now I am able to do myself a lot of work that he did not do, but my grandmother did for him.

Because now I cook everything with a microwave oven, I can spend very little time with cooking in comparison with my grandmother. The same by using a programmable washing machine for clothes and a vacuum cleaner instead of brooms.

So the progress in living standard is only that I no longer need an unemployed spouse or a servant to do the housework, which is good, because unlike my grandfather I could not afford to support adequately a second person from my salary.

There are too many variables here and we the typescript and django developers with fancy command prompts better stay quiet.

I don't know if it is "rational" (for some sense of that word): kids will excel if they are, simply, loved. Sure, going to great schools is nice. But having a supportive home is way more important than those expensive things.