Is Thanos Right About Overpopulation Essay Example

We all know Thanos to be a terrible villain in the MCU Universe, but was he actually a villain or did he have the right idea? The Earth currently has about 7 billion people on it with another million coming about every 5 days. With that many people can the Earth sustain us all or do we need to start working on other solutions?

Since as far back as 1932 people have worried about the number of people on our Earth. A man named Ehrlich wrote a book alongside his wife about the danger of the growing population, Ehrlich hypothesized that by the 70’s there would be mass famine across the globe. There are many people like Ehrlich that believe that the Earth does not have the resources to sustain us. 

The problem with having a lot of people on the Earth is that we don’t have enough room. When I say “room” I don’t mean for people to live in I mean room for us to grow food to meet the supply and demand, and we’re just talking about food here we’re not talking about all of the other things that people need like clothes, electronics, furniture etc. According to Walter E. Williams “the energy used to produce food, per dollar of GDP, has been in steep decline.” This decline is something to worry about because it can lead to structural unemployment, which can cause the economy to crash. 

We need to look at the factors of production, how much things cost, how much space does it need to be made and how much power does it take to make it. Another key factor is what is the opportunity cost to make everything we need. Without knowing these things it can lead to the supply chain being disrupted. The supply chain directly affects the markets around the world. When markets crash it causes household income disparity.

The only way I can think to fix the problem without being Thanos is to work on the education system and the taboo around birth control and other forms of population control. I’m not saying we should snap people out of existence, but we should start in schools and properly educate our kids about sex ed and give them ressources that may help them in the future. We also need to put power towards women to be able to control their own bodies. Just starting with these small steps it can help the population not grow as fast. If we put more money into planned parenthood programs it has shown that that helps decrease the number of birth rates. 

The growing population is a concern that we need to start fixing now or else it’ll be too late. So to answer the question,  “Was Thanos right?” He was and he wasn't. Thanos understood the harm that our growing population is doing but it isn’t right to snap people out of existence. Maybe if he helped the Avengers stop the root of the problem he wouldn’t be such a bad guy.