What is an optimum population?

With the worlds population ever rising, we're in a state of 'possibly-over-populated'. With the worlds population soaring towards seven billion, we are ever closer to not having enough food to fill half the plates in the world, never mind the 20% of the world who are without clean water or a decent meal.

But hey, it's been like this for ages, and we're always getting closer to achieving our goal through Comic Relief, etc, right? Believe what you want, but I'm unsure that all these charities will ever sort out the major underlying problem, resources.

Every day, we, in the more prosperous world, waste food; regard water as 'something that'll be there' and pollute the world with chemicals we're fast running out of. The worst thing about all this is, we say we'll stop, we commit ourselves to making renewable energy, we try to consume less water, we try to absorb less energy, we try to not litter or use reusable bags but still, when we get to the graphs and numbers, we're consuming more and more.

I'm sounding more like a pessimist but the moment, moving on, yes! Optimum populations, that's what you're here for. An optimum population, in brief, is a population with the perfect amount of resources to fund and grow the town/city/country. Optimum populations can be 500 people, who have a good draft of resources coming in and prosper from them. They can come up to the millions though, in Kerala, a very large Indian city, the population, while at 32,000,000, is fine for the amount of resources they have - most women only have one-two children; they've got good health treatments and great education. They've also got one of the best water supplies in the whole of India, with two monsoons per-year, keeping almost ever citizen healthy.

In short, it's just, as I said, a population that has just the right amount of resources. If a city/country have too many resources, the city/country is under-populated, although not many countries have that these days (greed & prosperity for the self). If the city/country doesn't have enough resources, it's over-populated, and the only way to close the gap is either stop the population booming or grab more resources.

This really depends on a variety of things (this is the part where I give complex bits of my knowledge in no order, try and keep up). To start any population off, you need a good work-force, you need people that will be able to manufacture, create and fuel the economy. This will, in any country, bring money to your country and possibly immigration, which is always good for economies when they're working. The second and possibly "biggest" compound you need, is farming space, farms feed the world, without them, you wouldn't have your delicious red-meat and shreddies (I think). They are "growers" or, in my words, "seeders" to the country. They'll bring the economy up and the population as well.

Now to calm the current, using:

1. Education - Every good thing starts with education, but today, it's not about cross-gender education, this is only for the women. If women are educated in a poorer country or one with an over populated country, they're more likely to leave school, get pregnant and have a few kids, happy days! Except, they're not working; they're not helping the world; they're just taking away from the people that are. Most women that go into education and develop a good understanding of the world will be less likely to marry & get pregnant early. They're more likely to find a job, get a career and build on that until they're able to finance a marriage and baby (lets just hope number 3, 4, 5 are also in the countries policies).
2. Contraception - For obvious reasons, many babies are unknown and/or unwanted. If people are able to stop pregnancy or prevent it, there will be less babies. It's officially true, I could give you graphs and figures, but I'm assuming you'll understand that if people do not want to be pregnant but want to have sex and contraception is available, a baby won't be born. Simple, get it?
3. Women's Rights - Another "biggy" in getting your population to ceasefire, if women have rights, they'll get jobs and not burn up the population with more and more children. This basically links with number 1, as you'll find a lot of them will.
4. Law & Freedom - As long as the country is not corrupt like some countries are, there'll be opportunity for both men and women. Having freedom of speech and freedom to do what you want in your life is also a commodity towards sucking the population out of the world. Having a very strong religious country does not necessarily mean that the country will have over-population - although in some cases due to women having to marry young and have up to double-figure kids, it's a supplement.
5. Better Health Care - Having health care will stop diseases such as malaria, AIDS, TB, etc, from spreading around the country and infecting many people. Which will stop the population from having large families. This is because, in some sub-Saharan places, a women will have several children, because she knows many will die and only a few will live past childhood, thus she wants some to survive - if health care is advanced, not so many will die, which will stop women having so many.

Supplementing them both together and adding resources, you've got yourself a prosperous country, for now. Look at America, once a large industrial, wealthy, growing country, now one in turmoil with finance and ridiculed for having over 9 hectares*, which is 7 too many for their population.

*hectares - a hectare is basically how much resources are consumed within a certain radius. If we all lived on two, we'd be able to manage a population of seven billion. But since some country, namely America & West Europe use 5-10, we're outgrowing our population.