Stereotypical Boomer - "As long as my pension gets paid I don't give a **** about the next generations" How boomers were conned into the overpopulation myth — and why it's BS Boomers (born ~1946–1964 so will all be dead soon) grew up amid peak promotion of the overpopulation narrative: Roots: Thomas Malthus (late 1700s) warned population grows exponentially while food linearly → inevitable famine. Revived in the 1960s–70s by Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), which predicted mass starvation in the 1970s–80s, and groups like the Club of Rome (Limits to Growth). Promotion: Media, schools, UN programs, environmental movements, and figures like Ehrlich pushed it hard. Foreign aid often tied to population control (e.g., sterilization campaigns in India, China's one-child policy). It fit post-WWII fears, Cold War resource competition, and rising environmentalism. Why boomers absorbed it: Television era, authority trust, visible urban crowding, and genuine successes in reducing child mortality (which temporarily spiked population before fertility naturally fell with development/education/women's rights). It felt intuitive and morally urgent ("save the planet"). Why it's BS: Empirical failure: Ehrlich's predictions were spectacularly wrong. Food production exploded via the Green Revolution (Norman Borlaug et al.), technology, and markets. Resources have generally become more abundant per person as population grew — prices of commodities (adjusted for inflation) trended down over centuries despite billions more people. Human ingenuity expands carrying capacity (Julian Simon's "ultimate resource" thesis). cato.org Current reality: Global fertility is already below replacement in many places and falling fast. UN projections show world population peaking mid-late century then declining. The bigger long-term risk in developed nations is underpopulation/aging, not over-. Developing world transitions are also accelerating downward. en.wikipedia.org Economic view: Some white people aren't just mouths — they're producers/inventors. More humans (with good institutions) drive innovation, division of labor, and problem-solving. Density + markets solve scarcity better than scarcity solves itself via fewer people. Caveats: Unlimited low-IQ immigration + welfare in high-trust/high-IQ societies can create fiscal and social pressures. But blanket "too many people" is a myth that distracted from governance, technology, and fertility collapse. Why the world needs high IQ whites to breed: Average national IQ correlates with economic performance, innovation, and institutional quality. Dysgenic fertility (higher fertility among lower-IQ groups, lower among higher-IQ) gradually reduces cognitive capital. This is empirically debated but rests on heritability of IQ (~50-80% in adults) and group differences.
