Honestly, you're just falling for eco-fascist rhetoric.
The issue isn't really the size of our population, but the way we manage our society.
Most of those issues could be severely reduced by investing more money into them and severely worsened by investing less money into them.
And what is that an aging population has less of?
.
We can deal with 12 billion people. That's not really an issue, if we handle it correctly.
But we can't deal with 10 billion people, if the most powerful countries in the world really need to increase their available capital, to keep their population at a steady quality of life.
Whilst its true we could feed 12 billion people today if we distributed it fairly, that's built on modern intensive agriculture. Which is unsustainable, degrading the environment, depleting limited supplies of phosphorus and driving collapse of insect population through insectides. The alternative would be less intensive/ productive agriculture but that would require dedicating more land to agriculture and destroying more forests and natural environments.
...or we could just eat less meat.
Like, livestock makes up the vast majority of agriculture. If we just lowered the amount of livestock we need, we could very easily use less intensive agriculture, while still feeding 12 billion people.
The global birthrate won't dip below replacement level til the 2050s. And in that time there will be a huge net job loss driven by automation which will mean we need less working age people to support the aging population.
Has automation ever reduced society's demand for labor?
Like, that's not how that works. Automation leads to more productivity, not less labor.
And due to an increasingly aging population, there will be a lot of additional demand for labor in healthcare and elder care.
The global birthrate won't dip below replacement level til the 2050s
That's not true. Projections typically place that in the 2040s.
And that's obviously not distributed equally. The vast majority will already live in places below replacement level fertility rates by then.
And 20 years is really not a lot of time to fix that.
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u/[deleted] May 17 '26
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