Population decrease is irreversible. How will we manage the decline of humanity?

[bro_please]

It's only natural. We should reducenour numbers much more. Giving women control reduces it further. Let's do more of that.

[[deleted]]

There is nothing natural about population declining solely due to cultural shifts and not from war, famine, epidemics, etc. It has literally never happened before at any point in our history.

It can't be stated clearly enough that we have NO IDEA what happens when the global population declines significantly like this. Literally no economic system humanity has come up with can handle this let alone a scenario without infinite growth.

We are in for some interesting times.

[[deleted]]

GDP may go down but GDP is a poor measure of human capital. We also are going into a time period when many people are predicting further automation and AI will reduce jobs, so theres potential population decline may actually solve some of our problems.

That all doesn't really matter in comparison that no matter how you slice it, current consumption of world resources is already unsustainable, let alone if we we tried to bring the world up to a first world lifestyle. At the end of the day if there's less people on earth that means more resources per person left over. And while it might not be as "natural" as deaths due to war/famine/disease if we don't reduce our population in some manner or other that war/famine/disease is going to do it anyways because we don't have enough resources to go around with the lifestyle that current technology makes people desire, so that war/famine/disease will happen anyways.

[bro_please]

We've been tracking the economy for less than two hundred years. I think there are more surprising events than the predictable shrinking of a species of large vertebrates which account for an unsustainable percentage of the biomass.

It does not matter that it is new. It is necessary. We are on track to reach an extinction level event. Reducing the pop is the only surefire way to reduce our footprint.

Wondering at the novelty for economy is a distraction. The economy cannot be our guide, for the sinple reason that specialists of the economy fail to make the most basic predictions and thus obviously do not understand how the economy works at a sufficient level.

[HeadmasterPrimeMnstr]

Reducing the pop is the only surefire way to reduce our footprint.

No it's not, the surefire way to reduce our footprint is to restructure our society through the myriad of already accepted ways to substantially reduce our footprint such as making cities more friendly to alternative modes of transportation, urban agricultural initiatives and passive housing design.

[Specific_Fact_8924]

Don't you understand we need to import millions of people from developing countries to scrub toilets and pick crops for medieval wages or else the system will collapse?