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The world's population has sky-rocketed from under 1 billion to around 8 billion in only several hundred years? Should we be worried? Overpopulation has become a huge concern among TED talk enthusiasts and social engineer, but is it more than a meme?

We survey the classical views of population growth and its limits starting in Malthus's Principle of Population and how and why his assumptions have been overridden by technological development. Regardless, the 1960's saw a resurgence in Populational Control thinking and the "Zero Population Growth" movement, based in the popular work The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, but also disputed by the optimistic Julian Simon.

Still, one of the more novel issues is that of Behavioral Sinks in modern societies: Industrial economies that are so well off that they population ceases wanting to reproduce or continue normal human life. Modern man is becoming more like the pampered rats in John B. Calhoun's famed Mouse Utopia experiments.

Readings and Links

Note that pay-walled academic articles may be obtained by feeding their URLs to sites like Sci-Hub.

• The Mouse Population Sink – "Population Density and Social Pathology" by John B. Calhoun
• "An Essay on the Principle of Population" by Robert Malthus
• "Does saving more lives lead to overpopulation?", a video by Bill Gates
• The Population Bomb by Paul Erlich
• The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon
• The Resourceful Earth by Julian Simon and Herman Kahn

Timecodes

00:00:00	TED Talk attendees HATE him!
00:01:15	Conspiracies and Georgia Guidestones
00:02:38	Today's readings
00:04:15	Why should population growth be bad?
00:06:54	Malthus and the French Revolution
00:09:43	William Godwin as an Osterich
00:13:13	Malthuses Principles of Population
00:15:50	Carrying Capacity and Well-being
00:17:05	Aside on Supply Curves
00:20:25	Malthus didn't age well.
00:23:48	Soycialism: Utopian and Soyentific
00:25:02	Marginalism
00:27:31	The Mouse Metaverse and Population Collapse
00:31:15	Economic Fragility
00:33:40	GMOs and monoculture
00:35:36	Mortality Comments
00:36:55	Birth control
00:40:30	Decline of White People
00:43:19	BS Jobs: A YouTube hit. Donations
00:47:20	Paul Ehrlich as Lazy Mathusianism
00:51:57	Antinatalism
00:55:27	The Ehrlich-Simon Bet
00:57:40	The Resourceful Earth and the Ultimate Resource
01:03:03	The Greater Population Problem in the Mouse Metaverse

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