> We need depopulation but every country's economy seems to be based on infinite growth and can't deal with an aging population.
There is no way of organising an economy that will allow it to support having the demographic of net producers significantly outnumbered by the demographic of net consumers. This is an economic problem, but only in the sense that if you want people to have access to good and service then you need people willing and able to produce those goods and services is economic problem. If you have a demographic collapse, then you don’t have that any more, no matter what system of economic management you’re using.
The idea that we need depopulation is also about as intellectually and scientifically valid as the voluntary extinction movement is, yet somehow a lot more people seem to think it has some credibility.
That doesn't seem to make sense because we're talking about how many people produce and consume things, not the rate of which they produce and consume things.
We just need the working age populace to produce more than everyone can consume. Automation was supposed to achieve that. In fact, I think it has already achieved that long ago?
I'll reword it in a depressing, pragmatic way. We can already produce enough to satisfy the NEEDS of the entire population. So if you only need X jobs to produce for everyone, but extra people are getting born because nobody can just set a limit to how many people are born, then what do these extra people do in their lives? What is going to be their job?
If they produced things, it would be a waste of resources, because the needs of the entire world are already satisfied. But that's exactly what they do. Do we really need fancy clothes, and fancy houses, and fancy food, and TV shows and music? Do we need art? We don't really "need" them, but we already produce enough that we can afford to have people whose jobs is just making these things. But by this logic we don't really need computers either, you can't eat them, so I guess I'm superfluous as well.
I guess the point is, how many of these "superfluous" things we should produce? If population goes down, some jobs won't get as many workers as before. I can't really say "artists are unnecessary, we should just get rid of the entire profession and replace it with Dall-E because it's more productive." In fact, I'm not sure there is any job we can just get rid off to state "we will birth no more people to do that job. It will have 0 workers assigned to it."
And this is of course just speaking theoretically, assuming you could control births and professions with precision, which we can not in practice. People are going to get born and they will do jobs that aren't as productive as other jobs and there is nothing we can do about it. But to say we can't produce enough doesn't make sense if we can't even define how much is "enough."
> If they produced things, it would be a waste of resources, because the needs of the entire world are already satisfied. But that's exactly what they do. Do we really need fancy clothes, and fancy houses, and fancy food, and TV shows and music? Do we need art?
The majority of society’s basic needs have been catered for since ancient Mesopotamia. The only significant innovation we’ve had since then is modern medicine. In regards to needs, everything else since then has just been fine tuning and improving access.
The majority of human development since that period has primarily been delivering for wants. The basic premise of your argument here is “how about you do without _everything_ that you want”.
This also ignores the fact that no, we cannot make “enough” of only the needs, and just remove all of the wants, because they have the same supply chain. You might argue that I don’t need the spark plugs in my car, but a farmer would certainly need the spark plugs in their tractor.
There is no way of organising an economy that will allow it to support having the demographic of net producers significantly outnumbered by the demographic of net consumers. This is an economic problem, but only in the sense that if you want people to have access to good and service then you need people willing and able to produce those goods and services is economic problem. If you have a demographic collapse, then you don’t have that any more, no matter what system of economic management you’re using.
The idea that we need depopulation is also about as intellectually and scientifically valid as the voluntary extinction movement is, yet somehow a lot more people seem to think it has some credibility.