Scholars, the real deal, are rare for a reason - few people choose knowledge over wealth and power. There lies the crux of the matter, since anyone who pursues the other two paths would be the antithesis of the system so designed.

It's a nice model, but it runs too counter to human nature to work; and there is precious little (if anything) that can change the nature of a species as expansive as humanity.

What are "Decent Living Standards?"

I'd bet that they're at least one step down from what the usual Westerner is accustomed to.

"I have a magical reality-changing glove. Should I change the nature of beings to want to share for the benefit of all? Nah, I'm gonna remove a random half of them from existence. It's clearly the ONLY thing I could possibly do to solve the problem! I'm so smart and awesome!"

I agree with this, but I still feel there are too many people. Like we don't need 8.5 billion. We could use so much less stuff if we just stopped fucking so much. We could REDUCE the size of our grid significantly. That seems like a good goal.

Btw genocide is a dumb way to achieve this. Plenty easy to just let people live to death since you can provide for 3x the number of people.

Edit: I thought I made it clear with the above line, but I'm not suggesting fucking eugenics. How do you get that from what I said..? I literally specified the fucking opposite. Unless people view any form of population controls in any sense to be eugenics. Which is just fucking braindead.

This somehow completely disregards the most critical side-effect of overpolulation esepcially when you calculate in dying oceans and trees.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

The sustainable capacity was calculated to be around 2 billion. This is not affected by food output.

Resources aren't evenly distributed naturally, some area may not have enough resources.

It takes more resources to get more resources, we may be measuring 30% of total resources, but not 30% of resource capacity.

I'm fine with population control, but it should be implemented willingly at an individual level, and pushed via education and community acceptance. I catch a small amount of flak for not having kids, but wife catches a lot more.