And you are wrong about individual prosperity being a result of fewer people. Extremely wrong in fact. In a village of 100 people everyone is poor. Part of the reason US is becoming less prosperous in the last 50 years is because of this collapsing birth rate.
Prosperity after population decline is supported by history, look up the economic impact of the Black Plague for example.
What confuses things is local areas tend to lose population due to economic decline and prosperous areas attract people. However, when the decline is on much larger scale things flip.
History is not a useful guide here. Widespread birth control is an extremely new phenomenon. Cannot be compared to any other era. We are already seeing the impact of low birth rates on economic growth / home ownership etc and it will become even more dramatic as the boomers continue to retire.
Everyone always says this time will be different, but you didn’t actually put forth any reasons why it would be.
Fewer people from war, disease, or birth control still just means fewer people. You need to look at economics after population decline not causes of population decline to suggest why today might be different.
War and disease have existed forever and hasn’t stopped human population from exploding.
Sometimes “this time is different” is actually true. What’s different about now is that you have this feedback loop of less kids -> less growth -> less kids. That’s never happened in history because people have never had so much control over their reproductive rights. Most of your ancestors were “surprise” children - you certainly would not be born today if your ancestors could have just used a piece of plastic to avoid the trouble.
There is a reason sex feels good. People for the most part don’t have sex to have kids. Birth control hacks this process and turns sex from a necessary condition for human survival to a drug people take to feel good.
Again you just suggested that population will decline not why that would cause economic problems. Let’s assume it does at some point hit 4 billion people and is trending down at that point, that’s still only half the argument.
You need to also justify why a world with 4 billion people would be worse for those living in it than today.
Economy is roughly proportional to number of people and economic growth is roughly lagging indicator of birth rates. China for instance has a billion people which is why it’s economy is so huge but as the birth rate has collapsed so has the economic growth.
It’s per person GDP that matters not total GDP, would you rather be in a tiny rich country like Switzerland or a giant poor one like Pakistan? Also, the data doesn’t support your conclusions in terms of China’s growth.
Switzerland is rich because it's a hub for international trade and finance, and therefore has an "effective market" that is much larger than their actual population. Same was true of England in its heyday. If you cut off international trade and finance Switerland's economy would be a tiny fraction of what it is today.
It's strangely difficult to get intelligent people to understand the basic concept of more people -> bigger economy. Intelligent people a lot of times think that if the logic for something is too obvious and simple it must be false, because if it was true, their favorite intellectual / institution would be saying it.
That's why a lot of times, lower status people actually have more accurate perception of politics than higher status people, because all they have is common sense and their wits, and not some status driven perspective on "the truth", because by definition lower class people aren't winning status games so all they are left with is the truth.
