Japan is not without problems related to a shrinking population i.e. https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/05/21/japans-immigration-poli...

but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants.

The 42.7M tourists that went there in 2025 just enjoyed seeing the incredible decay of a dying country, a morbid fascination or sorts. /s (obviously)

> if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down

Except for the very last step in the chain I find it hard to believe that credit cards play much of a role.

This is a call for community and durable systems that serve the human instead of traditional systems built to aggregate and funnel capital to a few. The fertility crisis is a capital crisis (taxpayers needed to pay back debt issued today decades into the future, workers for corporate profits), not a crisis for the individual. I see it as an exciting opportunity to maintain and improve quality of life for humans while solving for decoupling from these suboptimal systems primarily built to extract and exploit. Solarpunk vibes.

https://ilsr.org/ is one resource, there are more.

(to your food example, the US harvests land the aggregate size of the state of Oregon just for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel; this is, arguable, unnecessary, and there are many other examples of unnecessary economic activity that can be deprecated)

> What is your plan if, say, the food distribution infrastructure breaks down?

300 acres on the westward-facing slope of the interior cascade temperate rainforest. Even if the entire region sees extended drying over the next 50, there will still be sufficient rainfall for crops. All it will need are a few holding pools to reliably produce a year-round supply.

It’s also reasonably remote, difficult to reach unless you know of the specific path, and reasonably defensible.

But they have some ideea how many people need to work to make them that much money.

Depends what we mean by freeze up. Revolutions usually mean some part of the elite class gets killed or exiled. Happens all the time.

> more taxes are needed

Don't forget it's not just taxes, but the allocation of labor and resources. If the entire population magically turned 90 tomorrow, no amount of taxes would be able to provide for them.

There's no reason to think things would stabilize but even if things roughly stabilize in terms of population there's problems.

When a certain region in a country gets a cluster of great companies or really any productive advantage you would want more buildings and people there. In a country with a growing population that would make most sense as you need to build houses regardless as there's more people entering the job market who need a home. In a country with a stagnant population for every home you build another needs to be abandoned. This is more expensive especially when this happens enough where a school in the 'abandoned town' closes and a new school should be made in the better town. You can see how the first is more efficient, you don't waste your fine buildings.

Here is what it actually means.

When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?

When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?

But stopping investment does not just mean stopping speculative investment. It means stopping investment in other things as well. Like maintenance. This guarantees that things are going to become worse over time. Which is a feedback loop that makes investment even less worthwhile.

This has happened in the USA before. The last time is called the Great Depression. Read through accounts of what it was like. Would you like to go through that now?

History also teaches that the longer it is between economic setbacks, the worse the next one tends to be. We've gone far longer since a depression than at any point in history. Our next one is likely to be correspondingly more terrible.

Honestly great question. I think of it as:

I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.

I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.

I'm not sure the Black Death is a good example of gradual population decline

> As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent.

Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer closely tied to a finite supply of land? At the time of the Black Death, the majority of men's labor was farming, and having more land directly made labor much more productive[1]. The modern economy feels much more complicated (e.g. if your job involves transporting things/people from A to B, it probably decreases in efficiency as the density of people decreases).

[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...

> Gradual population decline empowers lower-income workers.

Remember this line the next time immigration/H1b debates heat up. The same mathematics are at play.

With renewables and nuclear we have basically unlimited energy, which can solve a lot of resource related issues.

What are you concerned we would run out of?

Yeah, see those millions laid of last 5-10 years, everyone got better, more fulfilling jobs. Companies are falling over each other with ever more outrageous perks and salaries. Excellent healthcare, plentiful housing, unlimited education opportunities, nothing is scarce any more.

Thinking hard, the only thing we are having shortage is of AI tokens. Thats all we need to plan for or worry about in coming decades.

When people say "people can't afford homes now" your referring to places like NY, MA, and CA where people can't afford homes because the local governments have made it basically impossible to build to match the demand in the areas? I.e. Massachusetts despite being one of the most desirable places to live ranks 50th in housing production per capita.

You're not sure humans can enjoy better lives in the future? Like you think things could only get worse?

> how do you sell 100 million smartphones when the population is only 50 million

You don't. You only sell 50 million.

> this leads to layoffs

Why? 50 million people instead of 100 million also means half the employees in the factory, making just 50 million phones instead of 100.

> government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services

Yeah, but no layoffs (same reason as the phone factory). Fewer people need fewer services. Potholes are indeed a problem. Some roads leading to abandoned places will need to be abandoned as well.

> most stocks will tank

By your argument, those people that can't buy a second phone, also can't buy any stocks anyway. I see no problem here.

Growing, biological organisms need growth. Because once they stop growing, now they're in dying mode. It won't happen instantly, of course, but they're going to die. And it's this way with civilizations too. Rather than being one of the "disadvantages of capitalism", it may actually be a principle of life itself.

Populations do not tend to grow to equilibrium and then stop. They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse.

The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it.

A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev.... It walks through a variety of past examples of human societies that went through this. There is no reason to believe that our current world-wide society will fare better.

The population is not "reaching equilibrium", it's shrinking. If it was reaching equilibrium you'd expect the births per women to be slowly reducing until it approaches 2.1 and then staying there. It's dropping substantially below that. And there doesn't seem to be any evidence that the contraction is temporary, the causal factors seem largely unrelated to the existing population size.

Ya but I’m 28 and have had enough with these contractions. For Christ sake can I get a sane decade so I can actually build a career. :)

I don't know where you got that idea, but we're not even the most populous species of vertebrates on the planet (that might be chickens).

If you include arthropods, ants make it not even remotely close.

If the trend doesn't reverse, it's mathematically guaranteed.

But realistically, I agree. Civilizational collapse would happen long before extinction, which seems like it would almost certainly return the birth rate back to pre-industrial levels. I just don't think that's a desirable outcome either.

Or, even more realistically, nations with state religions that effectively outlaw birth control and/or women's rights will take over the world, and nations which don't do those things will collapse. That also seems like a bad outcome to me.

Point is, I don't think it's wise to treat this like it's not a problem.

The concern is that if the birthrate drops low enough that having kids becomes unusual, it causes societal changes that create a negative feedback loop that will continue pushing the birthrate lower and lower. If the number of elderly far exceeds the number of working people (which is already locked in for South Korea), you then have to figure out how to restructure society around this while maintaining social order.

Indeed. And in context of India since that's what Economist's article is about. Having higher population growth is just insanity to me. After destroying land, water, air, forests, mountains and still barely enough for hundreds of millions souls I am not sure how population deflation can be a important concern at this point.