Wall Street and Population Control

I often blame overpopulation on religion, but it's hard to deny the fact that our capitalistic system is also what supports it. It too, actively contributes to a deteriorating environment that leads to climate change, hence my finger-pointing at Wall Street.

As we all know, capitalism requires sustained production growth to remain stable, improve standards of living and keep a growing world population employed. Then, all that production need consumption; without it, the system would cease to function.

Evidently, this leads to a vicious cycle where constantly improved production demands even more consumption and more consumers to keep the machine running. This shows that mass consumption or consumerism isn't just a passing cultural behavior; it's instead an essential element of capitalism, an economic system in which the mad dog keeps on turning faster to bite its own tail.

This cycle is almost impossible to stop, because companies are constantly pressurized to cut costs; if they don’t, their competitors will.

Reasonably, one way of cutting costs would be to re-invest some of the savings into the environment, but capitalism has no built-in mechanism to do that, so it would require some forms of non-market intervention either by the State or by organized social forces.

Obviously, States' main concerns are to grow their GDP and keep their population working. States are also permanently under the pressure and influence of big business, have little incentive to intervene and only social forces are left to pick up the slack. In summary, Wall Street or capitalism have absolutely no incentive to discourage runaway births and could care less about the effect of overpopulation on the environment.

As firms are constantly pressured to cut costs and optimize profits, issues like overpopulation fall pray to the compulsive market behavior of developed or emerging Nations and are never discussed by their governments that prefer to keep their citizen unaware of that stark reality.

Without the intervention of social forces, capitalism as an economic system, is simply unwilling to reduce the world population and protect the planet.