>>216058241
>I do think if men choose to have kids later in life, like 40-50 late, then overpopulation wouldn't threaten to ruin everyone's quality of life.
The extent to which overpopulation is a real problem has been the subject of fierce and unresolved debate since the idea was first contemplated. Localized patterns like high fertility rates in some of the lowest-resource environments, and increasingly large populations of expensive geriatrics in areas with declining births are real things, and sometimes problematic, but there really isn’t a definitive answer as to whether the planet has, or ever will have, “too many people.” The best macrodemographic models suggest that the human population will probably peak around 10 billion and then decline, but whether that’s higher than the planet’s carrying capacity can’t be definitively answered. Depending on the variables you want to analyze, it may have been too many three millennia ago, or there is room for billions more. And of course the damage humanity wreaks upon the planet has as much to do with what people do as it does with how many we are.
Oh, and there are some negative correlations between paternal age and health outcomes for children (kids of older fathers experience higher rates of schizophrenia, leukemia and other blood cancers, maybe the dreaded autism, a few others), but nothing indisputable.
I personally think at least slightly older reproduction is a good idea, for both men and women, just because it usually allows for better-resourced families, and gives some couples more time to enjoy a childfree, dual-income lifestyle (my wife and I had been married for six years before we had kids, during which time we traveled, made money, bought a home, and grew out of most of our hedonistic impulses). But there limits to how late it can be safely pushed, obviously, and if a man with a younger woman waits too long, he’s going to miss out on active participation in a lot of his kids’ lives.