During this time period Americans were being widely taught this experiment and the death spiral of over-population, this followed decades of teaching about the ills of China and India being caused largely by over-population.
White America and Western Civ. embraced this science and quit having babies, remember the new culture of 1.2 children per marriage, or not having children at all?
The 60s was also when the Western and American left changed the immigration laws to colonize the US and Europe with the highly reproductive third world.
The link provided explains that the over-population “academic” interpretation was incorrect as argued by the author.
Resources were not exhausted.
The cage was not overcrowded.
The experimenter asserted that it was the lack of challenges that debased the behavior of the mice.
The “official” interpretations (overpopulation) of this experiment by “experts”, and not the experimenter himself, were incorrect.
I’m not saying resources can’t be exhausted or degraded by outside forces to such extent that society collapses (like the drought that brought down the Mayan civilization).
It’s that there is something about too many organisms living in a given space with plenty of freebies that alters their psychology. Lack of challenges seems to be a big part of the puzzle.
Think about it. If you had to subsistence farm, hunt, fish and take care of a wife and kids you would have no time to fool with proper pronouns and such nonsense.
By the way, at least for India, they live in no utopia. They have to get by any way possible. Their lives present challenges. So it’s not overpopulation per se.