I guess I don't understand what's supposedly been proven wrong?

There seem to be real concerns about whether the environment on Earth can sustain the impact of human society in its current form, and the population is an obvious lever to scale that impact.

I guess what's "surprising" is that birth rates are responding to the pressures I'm alluding to? Rather than just continuing runaway exponential expansion?

It's amazing how many people don't realize that people make a decision, and then find reasons for it.

The next 50 years will cause all industrial countries to face an irregular demographic profile, weighted toward the elderly. The median age in China is almost 41, while the US is reaching 39. In the US, the elderly (65+) will be almost 1 in 4 of the population ~2050. In contrast, boomers were 37% of the US population at their height (elderly were ~9.5%).

There is no underpopulation hysteria. However, the math around demographics is settled.

I'm a millennial and I really really like this planet. It's my favorite one. My kids are going to like it here too someday, I hope.

My peers who are skipping kids are mostly doing so because their other ambitions don't align with raising a family, which I totally get. It's a huge trade off, I hope it'll be worth it.

As a general rule they won't talk about overpopulation being a problem because they know that the population will likely peak within their children's lifetimes.

They do talk about whether the earth can sustain that population as a reason not to have children. They are correct to. Their children might be the generation who have to explain to their children what fish tasted like.

> Millenials talk about not wanting children because they don't want to subject a new generation to this absolute shitshow of a planet

They often list overpopulation as a reason. But yes, it's not the only reason they give.

As an antidote to this kind of mindless negativity, just consider whether any individual human is happy to have been born. It seems very clear to me that most people enjoy being alive and so having children is moral on utilitarian grounds.

You do not have to believe population growth is fully exponential for it to be a valid conclusion. You just have to have human population grow faster than agricultural capacity, which it was.

Additionally, it is reasonable in the 1790s to assume exponential population growth. It would not be until the 1830s that Verhulst would even model it as a logistic curve. Moreover, human population growth really was on a roughly exponential trajectory until very recently.

Obviously we did not experience such catastrophe. But it's also a bit wrong to call it "invalid" when it was a completely logical conclusion to make. If we're going to allow him to invent a magical technology that addresses it in 1798, then all reason goes out the window.

> And if it didn't hold because it's true on it's own terms in some abstract sense, so much the worse for its inability to model changes that would prove to be relevant to actual population dynamics.

That's a bit unfair to Malthus though; sure it was the enlightenment, but all he could rationally go on was to assume that the last 2000 or so years of civilization would be similar to the next, in terms of food and population growth.

What would be abstract would be to make the assumption that unprecedented technological advancement would be made in the next hundred years, bordering on ( to what Malthus would be) magic. You can assume any problem will be solved if you also assume a technology will be invented to fix it. But that's not a reasonable approach to make if you have no reason to believe it is possible.

I wouldn't say proven or disproven, as much as it became no longer applicable.

The world he was modeling in the 18th century is a very different world than we ended up getting. IMO it's neither right nor wrong, it's just a reasonable observation that made sense for the time.

It's somewhat analogous to Y2K, in that there were obvious problems that were going to happen. We didn't experience those negative outcomes because immense engineering effort solved the underlying problem. That doesn't mean Y2K was "invalid" or "wrong," just that the problem itself got addressed before it could blow up. Same with Malthus, chemistry and mechanization allowed us to solve the underlying issue of food production scaling slower than population growth.