the only reason for population growth is that economy (asset valuation) is based on future projection of consumption (which is based on population) and social security, which is based on future taxpayer paychecks.

the idea behind "population growth" is that we will need future slaves to prop up our social security and asset bubbles.

think of a country as an ant colony, what happens if population decreases? the queen will get less food

I wasn’t as clear as I should have been: I am not talking about global population and humans going to zero in some hyperbolic nightmare fantasy. I am talking about one society, e.g. US population, living with the values and freedoms and technology we enjoy today, sustaining itself. Our society will cease to exist because of course humans aren’t just going to stop making babies. It’s just that the ones that do achieve positive replacement rate will have different society than us. The call to action is that if we want our comfortable society to persist, we have to swing back to a positive replacement rate at some point time (preferably before we become an irrelevant global minority), and also figure out how to insulate against the other faster growing societies, eventually. I never argued we always have to go up, that only matters in the context of ways to combat other more rapidly growing populations.