I wonder how long it will take our societies to stop asking questions like how can we make people have more babies, and start asking questions like is it smart to plan our entire economy around continuous exponential population growth.
What numbers around 1.0 are are logarithmic decline as the population functionally keeps halving which is also hard to plan an economy around paying for two old people and child on the taxes per single worker.
There's always someone else on the other end of „afford the goods and services“.
This generally leads to services and infrastructure getting shut down. Not more stuff spread out to less people because certain modern lifestyle features, things like hospitals, need a minimum level of patients and experts to function well above zero.
Saving where, the stock market? I wouldn't be surprised if a shrinking population means a shrinking stock market too.
The Shift Project [1] did exactly that for France: they elaborated a plan to completely transform the French economy with the explicit goal of not wrecking climate further, aptly called "Le Plan de transformation de l'économie française" (I assume the name is understandable to an English speaker).
An interesting take of this plan is that instead of thinking in USD (or EUR, being in France), they reason strictly in terms of physical resources available, like land, water, oil, wind, sun, crops, wood, various ores, etc. Resources available within the next few decades, not in many centuries with future techs...
Economic growth does not mean using more resources (because that's expensive), it means more productive use of the same resources. The US emits less carbon and uses less water than it did in the 60s with a much larger economy.
(70s US degrowth environmentalism, like Limits to Growth, Cities as Growth Engines, The Population Bomb is the main cause of the US housing crisis due to NIMBYism, but also caused China to doom itself via the one-child policy, so the US wins yet again.)
I'd guess resource usage has grown a LOT
Oh, and forests are growing back some places too, though I don't know about the US on that one. (That's why technological advances are good - it's harder to get clean energy than is it to burn wood for warmth, but it's worth it once you have it.)
when you have a country with 80 million homes, and 50 years later you only need 30 million of them, you're basically inviting decay to set in.
You're acting like this is a major problem, but it seems like a great opportunity.
Similar issues occurred in Detroit and other Rust Belt areas, and those had extreme population declines but could not abandon services and infrastructure.
I mean eminent domain has been used for centuries (even pretty regularly today) for this exact purpose.
If your entity needs to save money by closing up shop they probably can’t pay for eminent domain (which is what we saw in the Rust Belt)
Age 0-18: You are under the care of society.
Age 18-60: You are a productive member of society.
Age 60+: You are under the care of society again.
This is always how humans have lived.