With fewer people more things will count as "too niche to be commercially viable". I lived in a village where I couldn't find a pencil 3b or softer at local stores.

I hope anon enjoys mainstream music more than i do

This is the true purpose of religion: to maintain the conveyor belt of cheap workers/soldiers through 'marriage', also the same reason religious folk universally agree on banning abortion.

The biggest problem is the aging population and the need to support them via social security, etc. As the population ages, the distribution becomes an inverted pyramid and we’ll need to pay for more and more people’s retirement. It’ll slowly become worse and worse as one person will eventually be responsible for the survival of 4-5 old people (and their family notwithstanding). Otherwise I think a declining population is fine.

I'm not worried about population decline but regret to inform Anon that I was around when there were half as many people and it was not better. Sorry. There was terrible pollution and more crime.

We are humans and as such we have always adapted. We will adapt again. You can all live in fear re population decline if you like but I’m just getting on with it.

Who will pay to care for the aging population? Welp, whether you live in a socialised care country or the United hellscapes of America, the answer is: you will. Or your kids will, or whatever generation we're talking about here.

Even if you do live in the US and have no elderly relatives, the insurance companies will have to hike the shit out of their premiums to remain profitable.

The fewer working age people there are compared to people past working age, the worse it will be.

Population decline is fine. It’s the population boom driven by World War II panic that was the oddity instead.

In a matter of time, we might return to population levels from the 17th century, and if we do, then so what? A single individual will become all the more valuable, similar to how European nations valued labour more after the Black Death occurred. History likes to repeat itself, even if not necessarily by events like the plague.

What's the connection between population decline and tight knit communities and crime? I can't see any

Considering how people struggle with the comparatively small hiccup that is the current Iran-US war, I find it hard to believe that all commenters here would be fine when global trade dwindles.

I however am built different and would simply survive economic and societal collapse.

“I guess we’ll have to increase wages”. Doesn’t work when there aren’t enough working people to maintain critical infrastructure.

World wide population decline is going to cause some serious problems. The US will need to establish a strong immigration policy to absorb people fleeing failing countries/geographies while continuing to provide food, and the transportation of that food, to the rest of the us.

Look what happened after the plague, 50% of the population was gone.

It broke the back of the Catholic church and feudalism. Peasants got their first pay raise... ever.

Even the fears about the economy and government spending are bullshit. Notice the folks obsessing over birthrates always quote the retiree to worker ratio. They don't talk about the dependent to worker ratio, and that's what really matters. Yes, our populations are aging, and yes that means relatively more old people to take care of. But we in turn also have far fewer children to take care of. If we can adapt to the Baby Boom era, we can adapt to an aging population.

Further afield, fears about human extinction are total bullshit. No country is a monolith; every nation has groups within it with higher and lower relative birth rates. If the birth rate stays low and never recovers among the mainstream society, eventually the smaller groups end up composing most of the population, and then the birth rate recovers. The Amish inherit the Earth.

Or, if even that fails, ultimately technology loss alone stabilizes your birthrates. Eventually your population falls so low that you just can't physically manufacture reliable birth control anymore. That's a product of industrial production. It requires a certain minimum population size to run a factory. Below that and we just regress to earlier technological eras. Eventually we end up back in a mostly agrarian state, and suddenly having kids is once again economically beneficial.

The people that want higher birth rates don't care about higher wages, the environment, or people's safety.

They just need workers they can milk them until they can't work anymore. They need these workers to spend all their money so they have to keep working.

Houses are already kept artificially empty to retain prices. Capitalism always finds a way to screw you over.

Well, the Japan's population is declining and they've been in stagflation for the last 30 years.

who will work unskilled jobs if there aren't enough people to do them?

Immigrants usually

When the population was predicted to explode into the 21st century, the news said this was a big problem. Now the population is expected to gradually decline. The news is saying this is a big problem.