Is a declining socio-economic performance inherently a bad thing? Why does the output of a country need to go up forever rather than remain constant? Or even decline to come to an equilibrium with the new lower population.

I feel like the ideal is to have a population with a near perfect 2 - 2.1 replacement rate with a socio-economic performance that allows for the fewest people in poverty and then for that to continue forever.

Perhaps this is the first time in history that most of the world has reached its population limits and since we overshot it, it is now attempting to correct and will come to an equilibrium eventually.

I've wondered about this. The current world population is close to twice what it was when I started college in the late 1970s.

Comparing what life was like then to life now and thinking about what I'd miss if I had to go back to say a 1976 lifestyle everything I'm coming up with is just that we've now got better technology, more advanced medicine, cleaner energy sources, and we passed laws and regulations to take better care of the environment.

Did we need 4 billion more people to get those things? I don't think so. In an alternate universe where the world decided in 1976 to voluntarily lower the fertility rate to just keep the population at 4 billion I think that 2025 in that world would be a lot like 2025 in our world as far as tech, medicine, energy, and the environment go.

It is a bad thing for the people being left worse off by their parents looting the country on their way out.

Inclined to agree. If per-capita well-being and productivity continues to rise, is a GDP decline in proportion to population decline such a bad thing? The only bad thing I can think of is that we will see fewer children around than we're used to.

Yes. It's time we rejected the cancer economic growth model.