It's terribly short-sighted to try to portray a whole society on it's economic growth rate.

From that nonsense, it becomes even more foolish to assert that Japan (a G8 nation and the 3rd largest economy in the world) is not "functional" by focusing exclusively on it's economy.

There's nothing in GP that suggested they were referring to the economy specifically: the population has been in decline for some time, and many parts of the country are losing tax revenues.

You start your comment by claiming GP's comment regarding a stagnant nation might not have anything to do with economics, but your supposedly counterexample, tax revenue, is about it's economy, isn't it?

No, tax revenue decline is only one facet of a declining population. A decline in population causes many other things that are dependent upon human beings to also decline: social interaction, art production, and a bunch of other stuff you might file under "economy": tax revenues, jobs, new businesses, new research, et c.

Taking a purely economic view of these things is to misunderstand what is happening. Sure, it's an economic stagnation/downturn when new jobs aren't created, but more important than the money is the loss of the things those jobs produced in society outside of their economic impact: tools, art, research, creativity.

> No, tax revenue decline is only one facet of a declining population. A decline in population causes many other things that are dependent upon human beings to also decline: social interaction, art production, and a bunch of other stuff you might file under "economy": tax revenues, jobs, new businesses, new research, etc.

Japan's current population growth rate is around -0.2%.

It's safe to say that the "evaporating population" hypothesis and it's hypothetical cataclysm on the arts doesn't make much sense nor has any bearing on reality.

> Taking a purely economic view of these things is to misunderstand what is happening. Sure, it's an economic stagnation/downturn when new jobs aren't created, but more important than the money is the loss of the things those jobs produced in society outside of their economic impact: tools, art, research, creativity.

Your "purely economic view" strawman doesn't pass muster. For starters, GDP reflects transactions and economic activity, and money is just the unit of account used to perform those transactions.

We need populations to at the very least stagnate, decline is also not a bad idea.

Yes, the current ideology of constantly increasing populations is not long term sustainable, not economically, nor climate wise or social.

You can describe it as a form of a Ponzi scheme, the idea is that we must increase populations so we can continue living on the current living standard, not a future increased living standard.

What would it take to get to an improved living standard according to the this ideology? Doubling of populations? Tripling?

> (...) the idea is that we must increase populations so we can continue living on the current living standard

Not necessarily. The drive to keep a positive population growth rate is the need to provide resources to maintain the older segment of the population without draining the resources of the economically active population, aka work force.

Reframing on what I already said. I include older generations in "we".

Reframing it does not address it's problem. It is not an issue of "quality of life". It's a problem of being unable to produce the goods and services required to maintain the older segment of the population, which are no longer able to generate income to provide for themselves and have an increasingly greater demand for healthcare.

That is an assumption that our means of production stays the same, but with technology it increases.

In a more and more high skilled society, increasing population can have the opposite effect, do everyone have the skills and knowledge to operate in high skill society? If not, who will feed them?

Combine this with automation and old truths about increasing population to maintain standard of living falls apart.

On top of that, what the lockdowns has showed us is that many jobs are not actually needed for having a functioning society.

Is that opinion common among experts?

Which is possibly representative of the will of the society.

Another one-party democracy that worked well, at least for a few decades, is Singapore.