Declining pops diminish the need for expansionism and internal unrest. Less fighting over limited resources.
Society can adjust if it's allowed. Before the 1900s old people didn't retire (unless they were wealthy and never actually did hard work). Maybe we need to rid ourselves of the idea of living idly with golfcourses and driving an RV all over the country and instead to add to the household, if in diminishing amounts as one ages.
I do wonder how we will accomplish really big projects, such as properly decommissioning nuclear power facilities, with a reduced population. All of the models for licensing and re-licensing reactors assume population growth, and doing it wrong or neglecting it could lead to some really fucked up situations.
I'm not sure what that means. There have been periods of population stagnation in continent-size swaths of land before.
Culturally speaking, stagnation has effectively been "official policy" in Europe for centuries, before the XIX/XX century changes. It ended simply because technological advance by growing societies made it culturally unsustainable to pursue ideals of eternal stagnation. If you don't grow, somebody else will and eventually they will show up at your door. This is also the case of Japan, btw. They were effectively forced to grow and progress by foreigners demonstrating military power and tech that they could not match. If they stagnate too much, they are at serious risk of somebody else (China) doing it to them again.
If you think a global policy of stagnation would not have such drawbacks, you're effectively stating that no interplanetary species will ever show up at our door with big guns, ever. That's kind of a big gamble.
Yes, war gets rid of the surplus population and wealth, forcing a rebuilding of society in terms of economics and population. Of course it would be smarter to just give the surplus population something to do even if it is not the most effective use of the surplus population. After all, that is still better than having no surplus at all.
Shrinking populations in particular puts a lot of strain on workers to support a larger elderly population. The more rapid the decline, the worse the strain is.
Second, the trail of supporting cast for any technological development is enormous, and we're making a huge mistake when we forget that. Not just the people who clean the streets and the buildings, but the people who build them, design them, maintain them, create the organizational and financial structures that keep them operating, and so on. And a few of those roles aren't very low end, just to keep the static pieces of the built environment from falling apart, just so you can get to the point where there's somewhere to live for the people fixing bugs and writing documentation for the the libraries you want to use multiple times a day, quite likely for free, without asking anyone for them or even giving a second thought. And it's not like those were written for you: there are dozens of implementations in as many languages, just waiting to be picked up. Things get massively more difficult for you if those tools are being produced for you specifically (that's what military procurement projects tend to have.)
That obviously does nowhere near justice to even a simple software project. Now take that x1000 for any hardware project, where the raw materials, processing, and logistics circle the globe several times on their way to you.
I don't see the connection. Why do you need to get many entrants as possible? Why not do the obvious thing and create those fertile environments instead of letting random chance decide everything? All I am seeing here is the argument that given a high enough population fertile environments don't matter. No matter how difficult you make it for fertile environments to exist a higher population will always cancel it out.
This is the exact opposite of what I read GP to say. They were making the point that for every “genius” driving innovation, there is a long trail of people necessary to support and foster such innovation. This is not an “innovation by numbers” argument.
Edit to add: A side effect of all those people just barely going astray is that you get improvements in thought and technology across a span of many fields, which in turn brings future great achievements nearer to our reach.
I visited my rural hometown last week, and the normally-occupied (though I wouldn't call it busy) downtown was empty. Of the 4 worthwhile restaurants, 1 was open, 2 kept narrow operating hours because of staffing problems, and the 4th was unexpectedly closed because of staffing problems that day. The prices at all the restaurants was quite out of character with the area, even accounting for the general inflation that has been pervasive this year.
It's apparent to me that the town has been largely priced out of having local restaurants by expanded unemployment benefits. Those that remain serve dinner 4 times a week. And it's unclear to me how people who were working for low wages are better off having any clear way to serve their community.
All that to say, "not needed for anything" needs many qualifiers.
It's the exact opposite. There will be a strain on the large elderly population that dies alone while workers get large salaries paid by all the wealthy old people.
This is probably true, but the problem is that its logical conclusion is the literal death of everyone. Stop anywhere short of that, and people will return to the point where they're no longer too preoccupied with avoiding imminent death to compete for resources. At that point, the less fighting is unlikely to be less per capita, and the only good thing to say will be that technology will have regressed so far that we won't be able to fight and kill very efficiently.
This is getting into a whole other can of worms but I firmly believe the most moral path for the US to aim for is the latter.
We do not need that many people. The planet does not need it. We need to learn to live with less and without never ending growth.
Just as we target the 1990s or some other period for C02 production, we should do the same for population stabilization. A couple of droughts here and there (as we used to suffer from in the past) and we'll have massive hunger and famine problems.
We need slack in the system for safety. We cannot operate at the limits and not expect catastrophes.
Degrowth is just killing people, in which case the people proposing it rarely want to go first.
That and you'll increase inequality which will cause people to kick you out and elect fascists.
(One reason for the California housing crisis is that 70s degrowth/pastoralist environmentalists thought it would encourage population decline if no-one could afford to buy a house and have children.)
This is where I really think it gets into the grounds of a moral or philosophical argument. Life without this neverending economic growth is nasty, brutish, and short. We would never have advanced modern medicine, increased lifespans, or invented any of the conveniences we all use every day without it. There are no systems other than broad economic/productivity growth that have ever worked on a large scale for improving the living conditions for humanity. And we still have a long way to go to make life better for the poorest communities around the world. Denying this type of progress to future generations of humans, for a purely aesthetic reason such as we're comfortable enough today in our upper middle class lifestyles and we just kind of feel like we don't need more people around, is unconscionable.
There is plenty of water on the earth, and capacity for clean energy production, it's just a question of how do we harness it effectively while mitigating the downsides. I'm all for making some short term sacrifices and paying some costs now to avoid the worst of climate change, but that does not mean accepting that the future for humanity should be degrowth.
China has a similar issue coming down the line. https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/
For reference, the U.S. population pyramid looks a bit "healthier" (more balanced), though the retirement of the boomer generation will still pose a challenge. https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...
One big difference now is people expect to "retire". That's a modern construct. Sure, people used to add less and less to society as they aged and ultimately would need some subsidy, but much less than today.
But yeah, it looks like we'll go back to no retirement soon enough, the current systems are not sustainable. Lots of people will be pissed off.
How do you come up with this stupid idea? Japan has deflation and slow growth because of demographics, meaning the economic problem is the exact opposite. Old people spend very little money, meaning they need very little support to take care of them. The economy is dying because those old people don't spend their money, resulting in surplus workers that can't find well paying jobs who then subsequently drop out of the labor market. If old people somehow spent all their life savings on medical bills to stay alive for one more year then a lot of young people would end up getting that money.
Those young people have a whole life time of earning money ahead of them. It's only when you deny them the ability to earn that money that they suffer. Full employment will just create more demand for increases in productivity which then results in greater increases in productivity than one would expect if there wasn't urgency.
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/07/674548447/facing-critical-lab...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-economy-workculture...
> As of 2019 Japan's unemployment rate was the lowest in the G7.
> Japan is now facing a shortage of labor caused by two major demographic problems: shrinking population because of a low fertility rate, which was 1.4 per woman in 2009, and replacement of the postwar generation which is the biggest population range who are now around retirement age.
Far worse is the modern reality in most places, which is systems that take growth and a certain demographic shape as base assumptions, and then make promises to people decades in advance based on those promises. That's what we do in the United States (and probably most places, but I won't speculate.)