Does a smaller population not benefit everyone?
In: Planetary Science
I think a constructive way to think about this problem is that there are different economies, social norms and cultures you can have in a society. Right now, capitalist free-market societies expect constant growth in everything without much if any thought about sustainability. This expectation is projected onto our healthcare system, our pension system, virtually every social institution is organized in such a way that for optimal function it requires a nonstop growth of tax-paying citizens.
When population not only stagnates, (because reality is that you can’t have endless supply of houses, energy, food, etc., so at some point the free market puts a hard limit on how much stuff we can have) but declines, these institutions go from “ugh, maybe we can get by with some tricks” to “everything is on fire”. Education systems fail, healthcare fails, pensions fail, virtually everything that makes a society a society just collapses.
So, it is not a bad thing necessarily in and of itself, but the economic system needs a constant growth, the social institutions need constant growth, our culture (vaguely western) believes in being “fruitful” and ethnic groups want to prevail within their own defined lands, so this decline of population leads to things getting more expensive, worse in quality, (at some point even essential) services disappearing or failing, social unrest, and all of this is just because of the kind of socio-economic system we decided to live in along with the (fundamentally human, but when it comes to specifics, non-trivial) cultures we have.
We can have societies turn around and focus on sustainability, we can have cultures that are radically xenophilic, etc., but all of these different systems have their own drawbacks and problems that can equally be catastrophically bad as our current system experiencing population decline.
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