That’s certainly an interesting perspective.

If we look at our history, there have been numerous scenarios where industry was reduced, like disease or war. A society is fairly resilient against short-term fluctuations in the number of working age adults.

I’d not panic about it, especially as the human population continues to grow, and with every passing day there are still vastly more children being born than adults reaching retirement age.

I was primarily confused about your comment about resources. You clarified that this concern is about the production and distribution of food and other essentials. I’m not concerned about this; again, when we look back, we can see how technological breakthroughs have allowed us to produce and distribute more with fewer hands at an exponential pace that has kept up with our equally exponential population growth.

I’m sooner concerned about the depletion of non-renewable resources, like phosphorus, which is essential for life on earth. Reclaiming it from the sea bottom is not something we’ll be able to perform at scale within a generation and the clock on a food crisis had been ticking for some time already. This is just one of many examples.

I’m afraid that the answer to averting a global food crisis is not to increase our population growth, either. As a species, we will need to come up with a better long-term plan for sustainable life on earth.

I’m confused about your comment. Can you elaborate?

I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. Continuing to fixate on short-term problems like bridging a generational gap—which incidentally we’ve survived many times in anthropological history—by continuing policies with long-term ramifications is not a good plan.

At some point we need to come to terms with the fact that continuous population growth is not tenable. Whether the population cap is 10 billion or 100 billion, the fact of the matter is that we will eventually hit it. We can’t keep procrastinating because we’re unwilling to resolve the challenges you’ve mentioned in a more effective manner.

Call me an optimist, but if we’re unable to change our habits as a species, perhaps a well-needed revolution will kick us into action.

How many humans should we aim to have, long term? 20 billion? 50 billion? We’re already on track to reach 10 billion in the next 25 years.

I believe that as a society, we should have a long-term plan and a goal for our species’s population count, because simply offering incentives for continued growth in order to continue funding generational gaps in our pyramid scheme of social welfare is untenable. Ultimately we will reach the logistical capacity of a functional welfare state, to say nothing of all the other problems.

That seems somewhat unfair towards people with other interests who aren’t being subsidized.