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ThrustVectoring comments on We need new humans, please help - Less Wrong Discussion
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The world is overpopulated in places like India, China, and especially the "third world". It's not overpopulated in the high infrastructure/education/social and economic capital centers like the US and Western Europe.
There's plenty of room for the people the children of the average LW reader are likely to become.
The rich countries are actually rather more overpopulated when you consider the sheer amount of resources we use - rather more than the poorer countries... a single person in a rich nation has many times the resource pull and footprint as one in a poor nation.
Overpopulation isn't a hard line. There's a continuum between 'having enough wealth to go around', and 'oh no, half the population is starving'. In between these two extremes, there are various stages of poverty. One of the first signs of overpopulation is unemployment i.e. too many people and not enough stuff for them to do. Most wealthy countries have comparatively low unemployment rate as of now, but history has shown that things can change swiftly. Just a doubling of the population of the USA would probably be more than enough to cause the unemployment rate to rise significantly.
Third cause; This correlation does not imply causation.
This is only a valid symptom within certain preassumed conditions, and in other contexts fails horribly as a metric.
For illustration, a certain fictional island could have rather poor and difficult source of food (farmland, fish populations, etc.) that simply cannot sustain a population past X, regardless of whether the remaining (N-X) humans have work to do (infrastructure, repair, killing the Giant Death Crabs that prey on the farmers, etc.). Similarly, its sister island could have a large population of wild fruit-bearing trees that can freely sustain any number of humans up to Y, whether or not some of them find themselves without "work" or any skills valuable to other inhabitants.
Both of the above parables are related to real, but complex, issues with natural resource distribution and acquisition in the real world.
Overpopulation, by contrast, is when the net resources of a timespace / group / system can no longer reliably support the population by whatever metrics are necessary or employed by the population -- food, clothing, shelter, kinship, entertainment, and yes, even work, employment and unemployment.
But all of these depend on the context. If you fix the problem of humans requiring food, then food no longer needs to be considered as a metric for overpopulation. If you fix the problem of humans requiring employment to gain access to the food (which retains its own separate overpopulation threshold, generally held to be higher than employment in some places), then employment no longer needs to be considered as a metric for overpopulation.
There's plenty of room in countries all over the world, if not in every individual community. We don't have a global overpopulation problem, we have a resource overconsumption problem, which, as CellBioGuy noted, is more concentrated in first world countries than third world.
The solution is not necessarily to reduce consumption, since many material limitations might be circumvented by technological means, but as it stands people in the first world still contribute more to the existing problem than people elsewhere.
There are plenty of people who want to migrate from the third world into the first. If you want more humans in the first world you can just allow migration.
There's no good way to filter immigration by cultural values. It's not just more humans in the first world, but more people with first-world values and education in the first world. (Yes, I think American/Western European/etc values are better than other places. If I didn't, I wouldn't have those kinds of values).
Depends on the value. At the moment there is a lot of immigration filtering by persistence.
Revised statement: