I think I see what you are saying, and I haven't read the book or anything on this topic. I can absolutely imagine how people would have better lives with more and cleaner water. But billions of people is an extraordinary equilibrium population already, and it makes me wonder if access to water will improve the lives in question, or raise the equilibrium population to a higher level at the same amount of misery and suffering.
At a high level, considering the population growth rates of developed nations, almost all of them are in decline. One could posit that at some point of improvement in life for a given population, the growth rate will plateu and then begin to fall, rather than increase in perpetuity. Looking closer at the developed nations that still have increasing population growth reveals a significant portion of it coming from immigration.
I've read a lot of stuff that says we should panic because population growth is bad, the world has too many people, it's already at or exceeding its carrying capacity, there's no way the whole world can live at Western levels, people in the West are super greedy and borderline evil for living like kings while everybody else starves. You and I need to get a lot poorer to free up resources for Asians and Africans to get out of extreme poverty, and if we object to becoming a whole lot poorer for the benefit of strangers halfway around the world, we're terrible evil racists.
I've also read a lot of stuff that says we should panic because populations are shrinking and aging. Economic growth is fueled by population growth, Social Security in the US and really the whole world's economic system is a Ponzi scheme based on an exponentially increasing population, we're headed for a ton of turmoil and collapse. If America wants to avoid a complete economic collapse, or having to replace its population with a super high immigration level that really ignites political tensions (think Trump presidency but 10 times worse), everyone needs to start having tons of babies like right now.
Is it really the case that positive growth and negative growth are both catastrophes? How does it even make logical sense that there are too many and too few people at the same time? Or is somebody lying? If so, who, and how can we tell?
