Population growth leads to more consumers as well as producers. Activating a "dormant" producer segment (as if stay-at-home parenting isn't producing tangible value...) leads to an increase in producers, while the number of consumers stays the same.

And I'll point out that your parenthetical is one of the points of the article: that stay-at-home parenting is apparently extremely costly to replace.

So it's a double-edged sword: you flood the supply side with new laborers while keeping the demand side static, and you increase the general cost of living because you now have to pay for childcare that you used to get for free.

dual income houses have more money to spend...

> Would we have a stronger middle class if we Thanosed the population?

There is historical precedent for it, see 14th-century Italy after the Black Death halved the population.

https://dailyhistory.org/How_did_the_Bubonic_Plague_make_the...