This is mostly a joke, but I do foresee a time when a very authoritarian government just kills a bunch of old people.

For example, during the One Child Policy the Chinese government did hundreds of thousands of forced abortions.

Thanks, that was a much more nuanced take that I have a much easier time agreeing with :)

I think the population problem has some in common with food distribution: There's enough food in the world, it's just distributed in such a way that some places have obesity as a societal-level issue, while other places people are dying of malnourishment.

Similarly, the global population is increasing, however it's increasing far more rapidly that sustainable in some places, while declining more rapidly than sustainable in others.

There's only so much you can do by redistributing wealth in a better way (which I think we should, regardless). It doesn't help to tax the rich if there isn't any manpower you can buy with that tax income to actually do the work that needs doing. I think that's the scary part about a rapid population decline: We're heading towards a situation (in some places) where the ratio of capable workers to people needing care approaches 2:1, which means a far larger fraction of the population will need to spend their entire working career as direct care providers than is currently the case. You can't really alleviate a manpower shortage with just money.

Elon Musk could end world hunger. Full stop. He wouldn’t even notice the dip in his finances. (He offered once, claiming if someone gave him a concrete number, he would pay it, and a nonprofit took him up on it. Surprise, surprise, the whiny little snit backed out.)

They totally could fix the problem. But to those rich shitheads, it’s not a problem. It’s a feature.

Sort of depend on perspective, hunger only exists because there's no political will to remove it.

We produce more food globally than we consume, and we can multiply it several times with the same cost of space by swapping more meat for vegan crops.

We have plenty of space for everyone to have shelter, the problem is largely due to the issue that most people want to live in a metropolitan area. So the price for living in a highly sought out location increases to unmanageable levels.

A key factor is the big difference between the kinds of jobs you can get in a more rural location compared to the bigger urban centers. Everyone are forced to move to urban locations to study, causing most people to form their first adult social and professional circles around whichever urban location they studied at.

There's a lot of minor things that needs to be done, what exactly differs by country. But making the rural regions more accessible to live in should be considered across most countries. One simple first step, would be to make remote capable jobs offer their workers to do it all remotely. Government office workers, could quite easily spearhead such an initiative; I bet some people would move closer to nature, if they could hold onto their bread

We can make more money.