Most people say kids are worth it, and it teaches you something about yourself, and that's certainly true. It's not a requirement though to have that appreciation, but I think there is actual utility to bringing healthy adjusted kids into the worth. Maybe we will reach some sort of grand equilibrium in the future with everyone having exactly 2 kids (more likely we go down a different path before then), but now is not that time. We have a lot of challenges, and unless people actually make the sacrifices and try and raise kids better than themselves, they're going to be better adapted to the future world than we are.
I find the idea of an an aribritrary population limit kinda dark. Why stop at 700 million? Maybe just one atomic family (though that would be biblically fucked up), maybe a small town of 2000 would make more sense, add in a few for redundancy, more than enough sand to go around, we'll just run the whole thing. Getting down to 700 million you realize would entail forced castration for almost everyone, are you imagining some dystopian society where we castrate and separate into breeders? I just don't see how your solution is at all plausible in the first place. I'm sure we have 700 million people alive no now under 20. So what's the plan, create a political party?
I’m not advocating for that number as a limit. I’m proposing we consider that a smaller population in general may be a good thing over the long run. A factor of ten was simply an easy value to reach for to jumpstart a discussion.
There is only 77 countries that are above the replacement rate and it's going down everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
We are blowing through the financial inheritance left to us and sooner or later that well will run dry (to wantonly mix metaphors).
To put it callously, old people can't work much and consume lots of resources, so a plague that kills them off (however sad) actually makes life easier for everyone else.
But lower fertility rates have the opposite effect, the ratio of old people to young people increases, which is why it makes things harder.
To be clear, I understand that getting there will be undeniably painful given our economic systems’ expectations of and reliance upon indefinite and unlimited growth. But such an outcome may be unavoidable in any case and it’s one I’d rather see us plan for and soften the impact of than continue to rush blindly into.
I just don’t believe any more that the Earth can support the number of people we have at anything vaguely shaped like a modern Western lifestyle for much longer. We can and should continue to try to reduce our rate of consumption. But we’re too big at this point to have many good solutions left. I mean, for fuck’s sake, we’re running out of usable sand.