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My main issue with this line of thought is that we aren't running out of people, and reducing the population by 75% or more seems positively wonderful. The US was plenty capable of a very rich and successful society with far fewer people than today.
Why would we want more? Do you want 1.2 billion people in the US, with the accompanying congestion, resource usage, and garbage? Why is 330 million the magic number? Surely 75 million is sufficient?
Sure actively lowering the population would make me question your motives, but if people just prefer cruise ships and video games to reproducing, why do you want to stop them? Why not just have kids of your own who get to inherit a cleaner, more open world with beaches that aren't packed with strangers?
Why not have one billion Americans (I haven't read it yet myself)? We are nowhere near constraints on space right now; the United States is on the low end for population density. There's so much space to grow.
The world will not be more idyllic following a population collapse. Even more of the economy than now will be spent on supporting old people. If this hits worldwide, then we could well have an economic decline everywhere, as division of labor and economies of scale worsen. Especially because developed countries are the ones where birthrates are falling the most, we could see us unable to maintain modern standards of living, and much less innovation. Which might lead to more use of dirtier power and so not the "cleaner, more open world" you describe. And more garbage, as things designed for more people fall into disuse.
People do not think Detroit is better because its population has fallen.
But further, even supposing you're right and those are the options, do you really think that cruise ships and video games are a better life than raising a family?
No, but we are well beyond the point where you can add any more people without it having a negative effect on other people. Kowloon Walled City is the constraint on space. I don't want that.
Immediately? Perhaps not. In the long term, the average-quality-of-life ceiling is higher with fewer people.
The economic gains of the last 80 years have not been driven by increasing economies of scale or division of labor, but by technological advancement. This is part of why labor value has declined so precipitously. A farmer today can produce many multiples of the amount of food of one 80 years ago, with fewer people working to make that happen. Most of our economy is either providing service tasks (the demand of which obviously falls proportionally to the population) or performing largely pointless clerical tasks. You could achieve the same real output with far fewer people, and likely much higher on a production-per-capita ratio (which is the measure that actually matters).
I expect this is likely true for some comparatively small amount of time. Once a sufficiently large economic contraction happens, however, I do not think the entirety of the working-and-fighting-age population will consent to toil to pay for 80-year-old welfare. Sucks for those that didn't have kids, sure. They made bad choices and can pay for them.
80 million Americans doing nothing but burning coal results in a cleaner world than 1 billion Americans consuming at current standards with all the electricity coming from non-nuclear renewables.
The disuse of things currently in existence would have an infinitesimally small impact on the amounts of garbage compared to that produced by an extra ~650 million Americans.
No, they think it's worse because it has too many net-negative people. I am not suggesting we remove the most productive people from the group (which is roughly what occurs to a city like Detroit when it's primary import-replacement industry collapses,) but merely that we have fewer people in total.
Absolutely not. I will continue to tell people I care about that they should raise a family, I just don't know why I would want to increase the birthrate among the population at large in the meantime. The ideal scenario as far as I'm concerned is "literally no one but me and my family and friends has kids," but that's obviously not realistic.
Do you have evidence you can point to for this?
I don't know that I'm convinced of this. The earth is not currently running up against Malthusian limits, so having the increased labor force allows for more work, more innovation (and so more technological progress), more division of labor, and so on. Of course, some parts of that depend on having decent institutions.
Anyway, average (arithmetic mean, I assume?) quality of life is not my sole concern, but I get that it's yours, so I'll assume it for the sake of the argument.
Yes, and the current fertility rates are dysgenic with respect to IQ, at least in the US, though I don't remember to what extent. We need a smart enough populace for upkeep, at the very least.
Roughly the same can be said of the remainder of your paragraph.
But this doesn't depend on public spending. With fewer people, and an inverted population pyramid, more of the total wealth will be devoted to supporting retirees.
Fair enough.
But demographic trends are currently removing the most productive people from the group, or at least moving in that direction.
I think decline in population also can lead to insufficiently maintained infrastructure and buildings.
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I think I would take post-depopulation Detroit over ~late 70s/early 80s ditto, and the rural parts of Japan and Spain, for instance, seem quite nice.
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The problem is that there can't be cruise ships and video games if there aren't enough people working good enough jobs to pay the tax revenues to support that life. Economic collapse due to lack of labour also means that the cruise ships don't get built and if built, can't be staffed, etc.
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The problem isn't that there are fewer people. That's the good part.
The problem is that there are fewer Europeans.
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I think a large fraction of the people who are in favor of reorganizing society for the sake of more fertility are not really concerned with how large the population will be in the future, they are just consciously or unconsciously trying to sneak in social conservatism (what they really want) by using the argument that "society will collapse if the fertility is low". It is similar to how some people who claim to want to fight anthropogenic climate change are really just trying to sneak in far left social and economic policies by appealing to people's fear of climate change.
There are also some who are mainly worried about their own ethnic group being outbred by other ethnic groups. That at least is a pragmatic and tangible argument, rather than being fundamentally an emotion-driven preference like I think the majority of social conservatives' social conservatism is.
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Yeah i don't get it. I want fewer people. Not more!
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