is population growth good? bad? neither?

[CW: racism]

People who are worried about people not having children and almost 100% doing so for racist reasons (not enough 'white' babies to outcompete the 'brown immagrants breeding like rabbits'). That, or they're the insane capitalist 'infinate growth' Musk types that are wanting more disposable workers. Usually it's both.

The "there's too many people" types are usually middle class. They see the damage that the rabid consumption has done to our planet, as well as our mental health, and have come to the incorrect conclusion that it's due to there being "too many people". Being middle class and fed a diet of neoliberal eugenic classism, the people that they think there are "too many" of tends to be uneducated lower class people who they deem as "idiots". They're usually the type to believe that idiocy and criminality is genetic and that those are the ones we should get rid of. The problem with this outlook is it assumes that our rate of consumption is largely due to our population size, which is incorrect. We consume far more than our population needs (and waste a large amount) due to capitalism's wasteful and inefficient management of resources. It also ignore the role material conditions have on people.

The real answer is that population growth is largely dependant on material conditions. Humans are social animals that are supposed to live in a community. Capitalism has destroyed this and atomised us. Now all we have are ourselves and direct family, meaning each of us is expected to have children. This is not how we do things when we live normally. In a normal human community we don't all have to have children. We help raise each other's children, we are one big family, "It takes a village" after all. Our rate of population growth becomes dependant on our environment and naturally slows when there are enough of us or increases if we are dying out.

If we were to manage our resources in an efficient, non-capitalist way, where everyone got what they needed and we built in a way that doesn't fuck our environment, and if we didn't expect everyone to have kids and instead raised children communally as one big family, we would be fine.

To answer your question: It's neither. It's only "bad" or "good" because of capitalisms wasteful nature and need to consume everything.

degrowth isn't about the population, it's about over-production and waste for profit rather than organizing the economy around human need.

the current liberal systems eat shit if there isn't continuous population growth, but i don't think it's a viable angle for deliberately undermining capitalism. my argument against having kids is the suffering they would be subjected to.

More people means more labor power that people can use to solve problems and make the world better. Also more friends.

The size of the population, as well as the rate at which it grows or shrinks, is not really a huge factor for any wide scale political trends in the current stage of history. As Dirt Owl said the main reason you'd be concerned is for racist and misogynistic reasons. Even the notion that more workers = more cheap labor isn't even that relevant, because the capitalist class doesn't need to worry about replacing the productive labor in the imperial core, they only need to make sure a solid consumer base exists to keep capital flow going. If not enough people are having babies they can just tweak wages, interest rates, and other parameters to keep the desired level of consumption. Meanwhile, in the periphery and semiperiphery, there is constant population growth from rural countries where families need to have more children to assist in farming, and many of those children grow up to move to industrialized urban centers (often outside of their own countries, see how many migrants from Bangladesh go work abroad for example). This population growth and migration is beneficial for capital, but it also creates problems for capital in the long term because it creates something like an apartheid system for migrant workers; the Marxist discourse on these kinds of dynamics is honestly beyond me but the long and short of it is, the thing you gotta focus on is the movement of capital because capital determines how labor will move in turn, so any problems that porky tells you are happening because of population growth are downstream from the movement of capital.

Population growth is just a statistic, neither good nor bad.

Arguments panicking about growth could probably be separated into two categories, arguments from ignorance and Malthusian arguments.

The ignorant arguments could possibly be addressed by talking to a person who genuinely has just taken something they heard/read as truth without investigating deeper. Shallow arguments about too many people, using too much stuff, generating too much pollution and causing catastrophic environmental collapse sound completely reasonable in theory. But there are researchers out in the world studying all this stuff and (while I don't have any sources prepared) it does seem like most of the population grown panic arguments I've heard throughout my life don't match with reality.

The Malthusian arguments, if you can dig down into them a bit always change from "population growth is a problem" to "the growth of certain populations" are the problem. And this... is the fascist stuff. Its probably going to be very hard (or impossible) to engage with these arguments as the person is likely using Malthusian arguments to run cover for their internalized bigotry against some group(s). Their solution is never about using resources more efficiently to address shortfalls and always about liquidation of the undesirable population that is growing too large.

All politics is sexual pathology. /thread