The biggest problem in the world

Hunger. Poverty. Resource depletion. Environmental pollution. Climate change. Traffic congestion. Species extinction. There is one major factor underlying all of these problems: overpopulation.

There are too many people in the world competing for a finite amount of resources. Reduce the world’s population and all of these problems become far easier to deal with. Increase the population, and they become intractable. I think it is futile to attempt to solve these problems without addressing the major underlying cause.

Year - Population
1800 - 1 billion
1900 - 1.6 billion
2000 - 6 billion
2100 - 9 billion

Anyone see a problem here? Why doesn’t anybody want to talk about it, or even acknowledge it? I think people tend to be blind to it for a variety of reasons: the problem seems too large and intractable, they don’t see any solutions, various religions encourage large families and discourage birth control, various cultures value large families, it’s politically incorrect to pick on the poor countries where population growth is greatest, the problem is “over there”, etc.

The solution is simple, in concept: if each couple has less than 2.3 children, the overall population will decline. All we need to do is reduce birth rates. This will occur through cultural change; as a people (particularly women) become better educated, they tend to have fewer children. But we also need to get it into people’s heads that it is simply not ok to have 14 children. As great as children are, having more than two doesn’t do the rest of us any good.

We also need better and more widely available contraceptive technology. A few billion dollars invested in birth control in the countries where population growth is highest and in developing new technology could in the long term save trillions in aid and environmental damage, and prevent untold misery (but the politician who first proposes this had better be wearing an asbestos suit).

How to get the solution into practice? I have no idea.