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The logical, healthy approach to natural population growth and maintenance would be to provide social protections and supports for families and young people to grow into a society where they are encouraged and helped to start a family of one or two children in order to supply a healthy steady supply of new people for future generations.

Unfortunately, our world is governed by sociopathic wealthy overlords who demand more from people and want to give less to them. It's not all their fault because the majority of us all sit around and just passively accept it as just a normal part of society. What that will probably mean is that in the future it will be a strange form of population control where children are no longer born but they will be manufactured and bred in order to provide a steady supply of human resources to keep the profit driven capitalist machine running for wealthy overlords.

From the look of how we managed our society in the past century ... we won't solve this problem sensibly, or with any empathy for society as a whole but rather try to deal with it from an economic and financial point of view. The wealthy owning class don't see humanity as a whole that should be supported in any kind of healthy way ... they see humanity as a source of wealth and a group of thinking individuals that can be taken advantage of to extract wealth for owners rather than for the whole of society.

+1 for correct understanding of "tulpa". We need to be aware of our ideas and ideals we create and sustain. Not all tulpas are what we envision. They are, otoh, all teaching spirit-guides.

Beautifully articulated!

without going Easter Island on their own turf

what does this mean

The education system rivals international peers.

Almost all true except this part. The Japanese education system is actually pretty bad compared to most Western countries.

Because all forms of poverty are not the same. It's only confusing if you insist on measuring things in dollars instead of stability. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India has a much more secure and stable life than a precarious retail worker in the US. Yes, the precarious retail worker might have more trinkets and consumer goods than the Indian farmer, but the Indian farmer owns their own livelihood.

Having a child is ultimately an act of selflessness and generosity. People have children when they are fairly confident that they will be able to ensure those children will enjoy a quality of life that they find acceptable. And "acceptable" is context dependent. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India can have a couple kids and guarantee that their children will have a secure future. If nothing else, they can pass the farm onto their children. At the worst, the farmer's children will have the same standard of living as the farmer. Most such farmers would hope their children would get an education and do even better than they did. But if nothing else they can always just take over the farm. The same isn't true for a wage slave working for Walmart. The Walmart worker knows their existence is incredibly precarious. If rents spike again and wages don't keep up, they will be living on the street. Their existence is precarious, and few people want to bring children into such a precarious life.

Stability is the key to birth rates. It has nothing to do with dollars earned. A US retail worker makes far more dollars in wages than the market value of the Indian subsistence farmer's crops. But the US retail worker has to live in a much, much more expensive country. And the Indian subsistence farmer owns their own land, a plot that's been in the family for generations. They don't have to pay rent. They don't have to worry about getting fired. The only thing they have to worry about is crop failures. But farmers have had to worry about those since the dawn of time.

Having kids is a lot more expensive when you're wealthy/middle class than when you're poor (most of the costs like food, education, etc directly vary with your already existent quality of life), so to poor people it's a lot easier to make the decision to have another kid. Also I don't know about India but for example in my (third world) country daycare isn't a necessity in the same way it is in the West so that's part of the equation too.

It's because it's not quite true. Reproductive rates are inversely correlated with wealth and education. If you're poor, you need more kids to help the family (and, morbidly, even more kids in case some die due to lack of healthcare), especially once you yourself become elderly. When you're secure, you end up not doing that.

But if you're secure, but the world sucks, you say "why would I want to bring a child into this?"

If you want to maintain a population, you need to create the conditions for people to want to have kids, and give them the opportunity. Separately, you should also want to give your citizens a high standard of living.

It is not an inverse pyramid though. The older humans are the more likely they die. So you always and up with a pyramide at the top, at least somewhat. With low birth rates a society has to care for fewer children. That results in an actually fairly stable ratio of working age population to dependents.

A shrinking population also means build infrastructure is already built. They just have to keep things running.

One of the most overcrowded, expensive, energy- and arable land-poor nations on earth with an unemployment crisis and comical economic inefficiency is facing a population decline.

Oh no.

Hear me out for a wild idea: businesses could offer living wages, benefits, and work-love balance.

Or, we could transition away from people doing made up jobs that don't need to exist to doing things that actually need to get done