Also, increased efficiency is a form of economic growth. We are after all doing more with less.
Another important thing to consider is that population size allows and enable certain economic activities to exist. For example, I go to theater and do theater activities, but theater can only exist if enough people go to theater. That threshold can be more easily reached if your theater is in a city.
If you want computer to exists, you need a certain amount of specialists dedicated to that. You need a large population because not everyone cares about computing and there are essential tasks that first need to be taken of such as agriculture and grocery stores and trains.
Finally, economic growth is desirable the same reason improving technology is desirable. It enables more capabilities. The bad side is when we abuse these capabilities, not that these capabilities are bad in itself.
The speed of population collapse also impacts our ability to care for infrastructure and the elderly. While I personally think the global population would be better off at a steady 2-5 Billion people vs 10-20 Billion, dropping down to say 100M would make modern electrons manufacturing difficult to maintain let alone improve upon.
Spending time in the wild may be more unlikely as the time required to maintain a lifestyle grows beyond the number of hours in a day.
I don't think you understand the math of this. It's not that anyone wants a higher population, it's that the spectrum is a little screwed up. There's this line in the middle (fertility rate 2.1), and anything to the right of that is "population spirals out of control". Then everything to the left of it is "human extinction in just a few centuries".
We're currently on the "human extinction in a few centuries". And all the arguments that we're not are positively stupid. People seem to think that we're like moose on some island, that "population bounces back" (it does for animals, because their fertility rate never goes below replacement, so when population pressures subside, their populations recover). Every time you ask "what's the case for higher population", you're actually helping to murder our entire species.
If you were rational, you'd be pushing the idea that we need that 2.1 fertility rate, the one that doesn't result in higher population, and doesn't result in human extinction.
That being said, the lack of population growth we're seeing likely represent a crisis of some kind across the world. Otherwise if it's benign, it just means that people just don't wanna start families.
Little girls raised by mothers who only have 1 child don't grow up thinking that they want five children. Little girls who grow up being taught by childless teachers, excited and inspired by childless role models in the entertainment industry don't think they want four children. When they're bombarded with propaganda about how "adoption is just as good", they tend to believe that. And so on.
These things don't change just because population is shrinking. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I don't believe these things to be deliberate. But I do recognize them for what they are.
> There is no reason to expect that the population will die out in a few century, only that we are in a currently bad situation.
There actually is. People like yourself tend to look at the "population". "Gee, there's 7.2 billion sixty year olds! We'll never go extinct." But it's really the one small demographic slice that is shrinking all the time, even while population grows... the demographic still young enough to make more people.
Your claim is that this trend doesn't just stay the same, that it might reverse. But it's so much worse than it merely not reversing... the trend becomes more extreme. As fertility falls, there are far fewer examples of high fertility for children to grow up around and be normalized to. They lower their own fertility in adulthood in response. Fertility decline is set to accelerate, not slow.
Your claim is that this trend doesn't just stay the same, that it might reverse. But it's so much worse than it merely not reversing... the trend becomes more extreme. As fertility falls, there are far fewer examples of high fertility for children to grow up around and be normalized to. They lower their own fertility in adulthood in response. Fertility decline is set to accelerate, not slow.
Big claim you're making. Populations are not homogeneous.
The relatively few families that have five children, and assuming that the values of having a large family can be passed to offspring, they will continue to have large families.
In a couple generations these people will become the majority of the population and the birth rate goes back up again.
If somehow I were wrong on this, it still wouldn't fix the problem. Technological civilization can't be put on pause for 150 years while they manage to get population back up to a level where it can carry that burden. How many of those children six generations in are likely to make it out of childhood without modern medicine?
It would be one thing to hold out hope for change if attitudes towards this issue with different... but in a world that shrugs and says "oh, things might be different in 50 years" when no one even wants things to be different in 50 years and aren't acting in ways that would cause things to be different in 50 years, then I feel pretty confident telling you that you're just plain wrong.
- Less working age people
- More old people
- More geriatric people
This is the transition which you skip over before you get to the fewer but better-off people. (Better-off? Well I have retiring at 72 years of age or later to look forward to, compared to something like 65 for my father.)
Each of those places has double the population of Europe and 5X that of the USA, but aren't really driving human progress in any meaningful way. It seems like pouring more resources into fewer people has better outcomes. 2-3 generations of depopulation might be what we need to make space for some huge innovations.
I am not trying to be elitist, just making an argument that more people != more innovation and smaller groups with more resources will produce better results than just making tons of people and hoping more random geniuses appear.
Said small group result of brain drain from very large group of Chinese, Indian / others. Billions of people are being filtered through foreign academic gauntlets - trying to find random geniuses from large pop base - before being drained / coordinated by US who does not have sufficient indigenous talent.
In current times China and India has a manufacturing industry the US can't compete with (tries to, with expensive hogwash like the Chip act).
Strictly speaking yes, more people != more innovation, but your examples are just not making sense. You are talking about the second and fifth largest economies worldwide.
US has 333m so:
China 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations
Africa 1.3b = 4X more innovations
India 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations
I don't think this holds true at all. Also the innovations you mentioned are from a time before China had a massive population compared to Europe. I am talking about the last few generations when the human population exploded. Why would an innovation from 1000 years ago have any relevance.
> Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people.
Fewer people is easy, but fewer-but-better-off people seems very difficult. The wealth- and tax-revenue-creating capacity of the stock market (which has been going up at an inflation-adjusted average of ~6% annually since the late 1800s, driven by growth) simply cannot be replaced. With compounding 5% returns, saving 10K/year will net you a ~$700K nest egg over 30 years. With a flat market, you'd only have $300K.
All or some of this probably ties into what people mean by "economy", but I think it doesn't lend to any appreciation of the material difference that having more people thrown at a problem presents.
Taken to the extreme: a world void of other humans might be entertaining but would be a woefully inefficient place to learn about medicine or the cosmos. Which again presumes an audience who cares about any of that, but I wager that many do. Automation certainly replaces some people for some tasks, but we haven't escaped the need for humans yet.
maybe you missed it when you first read the article, but it is explained, at length, in the article
A lot of society is a ponzi scheme e.g. social security, insurance. Young supporting the old. In some senses, young inexperienced people "paying their dues" are handling most of the frontline gruntwork. No young people means scutwork for the rest of us by definition. The final revenge of the young naive. That's the "real world" case for it.
The nationalistic case for it is harnessing a natural resource: population. Big country in terms of population can dominate others economically and militarily. People is power and leaders want power.
The humanistic case for it is that of Eli Musk : humans keep growing exponentially, as does knowledge, as does economy, until blossoming out into space and the universe. The futurist view. Idea being, the more people there are the faster that happens, the lower the risk.
> Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people.
Yes, they will naturally fix themselves. it will be painful for some as goods become more expensive, but life gets easier - less traffic, cheap housing, fruitful resources, and so on. Japan has it figured out. All the beautiful rural places to live. Places like that fully exist in the US now too (see: appalachia)
But here's what happens on the long term that is obvious to me : population will begin growing again. They'll be some gene variant that makes people deeply want to reproduce on a biological level. In a few generations everyone will have this gene (people without it... they didn't reproduce). Call it a genetic bottleneck on the genetic will to procreate.
It's worth noting that in 5-10 years we could easily have cloning vats. We now have "cloning as a service" for all pets and livestock, many such commercial companies - on a biological level it's trivial to imagine the same service and structure for human, the only barrier is ethics and regulations. We have cloned primates and cracked the underlying tricks that might equally clone a human. We have cracked genetic modification vis a vis an infinite number of genetic mouse models and CRISPR. We have early stages of artificial wombs (CHOP; some years ago) but equally one could make a human chimeric pig to incubate the clones. I don't envision this will be seen in the near future but at somepoint, somewhere along the lines, some nation state will begin doing this in secret not unlike a manhattan project, and as we saw with nuclear proliferation, once the cat's out of the bag everyone will do it, everyone will complete the civilizaton "world wonder" called "The Cloning Vats" https://alphacentauri.fandom.com/wiki/The_Cloning_Vats