I keep seeing Elon Musk repeating the concept that the earth can support a lot more people, and he keeps advocating people to have more kids. He claims he has a lot of kids because this is a major problem. Of course, he points to the most extreme examples like Japan with its inverted population pyramid, and there is some validity to this example because it is where many places could be one day. He said the world is in a population decline, and he thinks the UN reports are wildly inaccurate. Well, the UN says we added a billion people in the last twelve years and will have another billion in around fifteen years, for a total of 9 billion.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/15/11367...new-u-n-report
While some countries will see population decline, others will be overtaking countries even if those countries don't decline like India overtaking China and Nigeria overtaking the US, so the globe is likely to expand in the poorest countries. Typically the poorer the countries, the more likely they are to have shorter lives and large families, but there is also this goldilocks zone where people are too poor to afford to live at the means of their peers or the means they expect to live, yet make enough to not be dependent on kids for labor. This is where the US is where raising kids is expensive and money is relatively tight for most in the middle class compared to the past.
The top 1% has taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90% since 1975. Before then, wages grew with GDP, but after 1975, wages grew at the rate of inflation, which is to say they didn't grow at all. If the top 1% had shared those corporate profits, and the middle class had been paid at the rate of GDP then the median worker would be making $48k-63k a year more, which seems to me like money that could be used for having kids, so if Elon Musk wants people to have more kids then they need to be home more and have more money to do so, or they need to be starving farmers who need children to work the farms.
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion...ality-america/
With that said, how many more mouths can the world support? We are already depleting the oceans, clearing all the land to raise livestock and feed livestock, clearing land for food too, and we are consuming a lot of resources. The rest of the world wants to consume as much as the US, and they are actively working to match the standard of living of the modern world. How much can the earth support?
This isn't an easy answer. Resources change over time. Technologies improve our yields of crops, while they can also deplete our resources. For instance, before synthetic fertilizer or synthetic nitrogen production, the world would probably already be unable to support as many people as it does. If you are not familiar with how nitrogen generation changed the world then it is worth looking into. Who knows what will come along that will deplete or enrich our resources.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-...ertilizer-feed
Regardless, I thought these were interesting. Looking at the map of the US, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of extra space for any type of growth unless we get off of these cows:
I know what you are thinking. Screw this. He doesn't know what he is saying. There is more than enough land for everyone. If everyone had their own equal plot of land then I'm sure there would be plenty. Well, there is 57 million square miles of land and 8 billion people, so there is less than a square mile per person, so let's convert to acres, and we get 36,480 million acres or 36 billion acres, but there are some parts of the land that are ice, desert or mountains, so there is actually only 16 billion acres of "habitable" land, but lets just say 36 billion acres anyways. Well, that leaves about 4.5 acres per person.
Some might think that is a lot of living space, but on that lot you need space to raise crops, chop wood, raise livestock, have a water well, dispose of trash and sewage, have a strip of road to drive on, generate electricity, have an oil well, etc. You would need to make a little room for visitors to a state/national park area for wild animals and protected species. Elon Musk says the world can support billions of more people...many times more. Doing the math, he seems delusional.