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Notes -
How do you mean?
All the examples that come to mind from the classical period have a ton of confounding factors. Were the Romans out of money because their tax base died of plague, or because they wasted too much on panem et circenses, or because they just had too many enemies?
By the Industrial Revolution, population is definitely less important than development, natural resources, etc. I think this probably dates back to the late medieval period, but I don’t know enough about the history to pick out key trends on graphs like these.
I guess I agree with the “all else equal” statement. It’s just rare.
Well I mean you are less likely to have too many enemies if you had lots of young people!
I think the experience of France during the World Wars would suggest otherwise (or, at a minimum, it would suggest that more people means you can better develop your natural resources!) France - which had a higher population than Germany and the UK in the middle of the 19th century - had already started suffering from a comparatively low TFR going into the First World War, where they suffered horrific casualties. Their lack of desire to run another meatgrinder the second time around is probably at least somewhat related to their population woes: note by contrast that the Germans suffered higher casualties numerically in the First World War, but were willing to bleed white in a multi-front war. (And for all the talk of GERMAN WONDERWEAPONS, Superior German Technology was more a late-war thing - I don't think it was dispositive in their struggle with the French. In fact, France's biggest mistake may have been failing to substantively attack Germany while the German army was deployed fighting in Poland - the farce of the Saar Offensive makes a lot more sense if you model the French as having a lot of unwillingness to incur casualties.)
I definitely agree that in this case (and most cases where population decline occurs) there are cofounding variables. But an older population makes pretty much all of those problems worse, and more people can be deployed to solve almost any problems (particularly now that agriculture is so efficient!)
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