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Even if the cap is true (and it's all theory at this point), I think the words "too few humans" does not mean what they think it means.
The article is heavy on criticism of population decline and light on an argument of why it is so bad. As a parent in the USA I also don’t buy the argument that it is all education and birth control driving these changes. Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children. And for others climate anxiety makes them question the future.
I can't speak for your friends. But I think that when someone says "can't afford" what they really mean is "I'd rather spend that money on something else".
Some people literally can't afford children. But those in the middle class (or better) in the US certainly can. It would just take money away from other parts of their lifestyle: the home the live in; the car they drive; ability to vacation; newest phone model, etc.
Generally, the more money you make in the US, the fewer kids you have. So, for most, it's hard to argue that they can't "afford" children. They can't afford children while maintaining their same lifestyle. And that will generally always be true (except for the truly rich).
Croatia has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people to other EU countries that offer higher salaries, or to Zagreb if they can't find a job in Denmark or Germany.
Japan has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people from smaller cities and towns to Tokyo.
The end result is that small towns are, quite literally, dying. Small cities are emptying out. Rural regions are beginning to resemble retirement estates, complete with hobby farms.
The "solution" is immigration -- if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese, or a Lebanese man will become accepted as Croatian. I don't think that's going to happen in either place. In Croatia, I know a bunch of Chicagoans of Croatian descent who moved "back to the homeland." Nobody in Croatia accepts them as "real Croatians." They're going to be part of some expat community for life. It's going to be even worse with culturally distinct foreigners. And it's going to lead to trouble. If there's an elegant way to manage this, I'm not aware of it.
This can be easily and summarily dismissed if you know anything about minimum population numbers. Humans will never, through simple declining birth rates, reach the low-or-sub-1000s numbers that would result in there being too few humans to maintain genetic diversity.
https://www.livescience.com/minimum-people-to-survive-apocal...
> how many people would it take to keep our species going? The short answer is, it depends.
> "With populations in the low hundreds, you can probably survive for many centuries. And many small populations of that kind have survived for centuries and perhaps millennia," Cameron Smith, an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University in Oregon, told Live Science.
What the article is really just arguing is that scientific advancement relies on larger populations, which, cool story bro. Having more kids in economically or ecologically untenable situations just to keep new tech being sold, is not a serious argument that people who are choosing not to have kids are going to be receptive to.
I think it confuses causation and correlation by claiming that having more people, faster population growth, leads to finding solutions to major problems humanity deals with faster. I don’t buy that. In fact, I’d say our inventiveness has been the _cause_ of both population decline and solving the major issues the article mentions (like progressing agriculture to use less resources)
I also think it takes a too anthropocentric stance. In the beginning of the article it claims that population decline is bad for the planet, but surely humanity going extinct does not have a net negative effect on the planet. As many climate change critics are prone to point out, nature will do what it wants despite the influence of humans and nature will adapt with or without us.
Ok I have to ask but why is HN flooded with pseudo scientific climate change/ population control far right bullshit today?
Everybody is more or less like that, and here is where the issue roots.
Right now, some influential cultures, but not all of them, feel existentially endangered.
Too few humans? I see this said a lot but it’s so counter-intuitive to me that humankind will be worse off in the long term with fewer of us around.
A less biased objective is to maximize the expected value of the number of all humans that will ever exist from now onwards. Then you have to start thinking about things like global warming which will cause destabilizations (e.g. large scale climate refugees fleeing the equator in the year 2060 and the rise of authoritarianism in the global north as a reaction) which causes future population decline which is self-sabotaging of the objective of increasing the number of humans.
I think the real problem here is really just global warming. If we can fix that, we should be able to add many more billions of people, with all the associated upsides and without the biggest downside.