>

Older people are financially more well off which means they tend to lead more healthier lifestyles and can be independent for significantly longer. There's also a strong economic inventive to fine solutions in elderly care.
And it's not like there's a massive cliff we're staring at. It's more like a gradual population decline. Perhaps China, due to its government policies is in for more pain around this issue but in general I don't think it's such a concern that we need to pit every last bit of effort into trying to reverse the population decline.
Population decline by itself isn't a bad thing. The rate of population decline is what is worrying. 
I live in a country that had just under 4.8 million people 30 years ago. According to last year census, we are just above 3,8 million now. By the end of this century we will be perhaps below 2 million. Whatever your political views, the idea that that sort of population decline wont have negative effects on the country and society is completely delusional.
And we are not an exception. Developed countries around the planet are going to have rapid population decline in coming decades.

Innovation comes from a well educated population. Not from a large population. 

If you live on a planet that has a bunch of old people, instead of young people, that means that a greater proportion of money and resources that would have otherwise been spent on education or innovations now has to go towards medical care for the old. Which means less innovation. 
Also. All other things being equal, would a planet with a million people or 10 billion people have more innovation ? The answer is obviously 10 billion. Larger well educated population will have more innovation than a smaller well educated population. Didn't think that was controversial. >


All other things being equal, would a planet with a million people or 10 billion people have more innovation ? The answer is obviously 10 billion. Larger well educated population will have more innovation than a smaller well educated population. Didn't think that was controversial.

The controversial part is where you need to gamble on those 10 billion people always being able to find technology that will save the day. Because if they don't, we are doomed.
On the other hand, if the planet only had 1 million, carbon emissions would be drastically reduced beyond our wildest dreams, and there would be plenty of resources for all. >



On the other hand, if the planet only had 1 million, carbon emissions would be drastically reduced beyond our wildest dreams, and there would be plenty of resources for all.


As someone worried about carbon emissions, do you know what percentage of the atmosphere is carbon?  And what percentage is the ideal? >

It's not that there's a particular number that's ideal, and the problem is that we've stayed from that number. It's that it's changing so rapidly that it's snowballing faster than life in general, and human society specifically, can adapt on a large scale. If the global average temperature rose by 5°C over the next millennium, it probably wouldn't be too big a deal. But half that over the next 100 years is a very big deal.
I guess if i had to give you a direct answer, it would be approximately the amount that we've spent the last few millennia learning to live in. Decisions from that are fine as long as they happen slowly enough that we can adapt socially, and other species can adapt genetically, to the change. >

The atmosphere is currently 0.04% carbon.
Are you saying that 0.05% too much and 0.03% the ideal? Or is 0.04% the ideal?  What happens if it doubles and reaches 0.08%? Catastrophe? >

You're really glossing over the whole "lots of old people, very few young people" problem. >

Yeah, OP says “people should be saving money for retirement, so lots of old people being retired shouldn’t be a problem”
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world and the economy works. It doesn’t matter how much money people have saved for retirement if there aren’t enough working people to make the stuff they need to buy with that money.
It isn’t like saving for retirement means you are saving cans of food to eat later, like you are a squirrel burying nuts for the winter. You are saving money that you hope to trade in the future to someone else for your food and basic needs. This will only work if there is someone to trade your money to; if society is full of old people who have saved up money for retirement and not very many young people to make the food and things, then you are just going to get rapid inflation as all these old retired people try to trade that money to a dwindling number of productive people.
If this is hard to understand, just imagine the extreme… what if ALL the people are old, and they have all saved a ton of money…. Who are they going to pay that money to? No one is making food, they are all sitting on their pile of money wanting to buy food. The money would be worthless. >

ALL the people won’t be, so such an extreme is absurd. reductio ad absurdum >

I wasn't claiming the extreme example would ever happen, I was trying to show why having fewer working age people would lead to problems by using a hypothetical case of having no working age people... sometimes it helps to see an abstract thing like that by imagining the extremes.
Also, that isn't what reductio ad absurdum means; it is a form of argument where you show that if your argument wasn't true, you would end up in an absurd situation. >

Your argument isn’t true, and you end up in a state of absurdity. >

That doesn’t follow at all. I was not arguing that we are in a world, or even headed to a world, where there are no working age people. That wasn’t my argument.
And even if my argument WAS absurd, it still isn’t a reductio ad absurdum. It isn’t something you say to counter an absurd argument. It is a logical argument where you point out that your own argument has to be the case or you reach a contradiction >

My argument is that not all people can ever all be old. If that isn’t true, we end up in your absurd situation. reductio ad absurdum >

you are still using RAA incorrectly, you have the implications mixed up. >

Well, how ‘bout we admit your premise (all old people) is absurd and entirely unhelpful in advancing any argument. >

no. I'm not even the person you originally started to object to, but their argument is clear.
The premise is "in an aging population, there will be demand for goods and services that outstrip our ability to supply it, which will result in inflation", with the (perhaps implicit) conclusion that "world population decline is a major problem."
They have used an extreme example for illustrative purposes in order to argue why the (far milder) premise holds, but that extreme example is not their actual premise.
If you want to refute their premise you need to engage with it as stated, explain why having only, say, 20-30% of the population (vs. current 50%)  in the working age bracket (25-65) would not lead to demand for goods/services outpacing supply and leading to inflation. >


Population really is the driver of power and economies. 

Say you want to open a business. Do you want to open it in a market with 300,000 customers or 300,000,000 customers? 
As a country, you want to have the largest population possible. If you lose too much population you lose your economic power. 
At a global scale, yes, a lot of innovation is driven by an educated populace, but it also stems from the unbelievably gigantic global market that creates demand for your products. 
Smartphones would not be as good as they are if it wouldn’t be a market of literally billions of customers. not to mention all the niche markets that would simply not be worth any investment into if there wasn’t enough of an international market for it. (the internet has enabled many of those markets in the first place by aggregating globally spread out customers into one neat virtual place.)

Age structure is hugely important. 

The last thing you want is a large amount of elders with only few people to run the economy. Unless you want 80 year olds to be working office jobs, You do not want 2 retired people for every working person. 
First, while people live longer, I would not consider a 70 year old today much more better capable of work than a 70 year old 50 years ago. It’s just that there’s a lot more of them now surviving until that age. 
Also while yes, people should be saving, most people don’t save as cash or investments. They choose to pay into pensions a set amount of money during their lifes and then get paid back later. That money isn’t saved by those institutions. It’s immediately payed out to the current retired, and when you retire, the youngsters’ money will come to you. If the ratio is too extreme, the working generation will have to burden the pensions. 
Gradual decline isn’t as bad, but for many developed countries, the decline is concerningly rapid. >

You don't understand the problem posed by an aging, shrinking population. 
Lets start with these three, because they're the same problem.

People are living longer healthier lives and are (or should be) saving to finance their retirement.
Ah! The poorly designed entitlement programs that just assumed indefinite population growth (see ponzi scheme). 
Deflation caused by an aging population.

LIFE ITSELF is a Ponzi scheme. We've always depended on younger adults to both take care of children, and take care of their elders, because they can't really take care of themselves. These 'entitlements' are simply how we do it these days, instead of shoving four generations into a single household and taking care of them that way. Which, if we still did, would have the same exact problem. More elderly, fewer children. Lots of folks just not having kids. The strain of taking care of the elderly will only get worse and worse as there's more and more of them, relative to the young. 
So unless you've got a solution to the 'retirees consume resource but don't produce resources' problem, you're going to need a healthy workforce to actually support them. It doesn't matter how much money they have if very little is being produced, transported, or maintained, because that money can't buy what doesn't exist. 
And remember, money is just a store of value, not something of actual value itself. You can't eat a fist full of dollars because it's not food. It won't heat your home because it's not gas or electricity. You can't call someone with it, because it's not a phone. You can't browse the internet with it because it's not a computer or internet connection. It's just some paper, if not just a number on a server somewhere. All it is is a bit of a social lubricant to make trade much simpler. This is why we can just print more of it (which is fine, within limits). Think of money as oil in an engine. The engine will seize up without it, but if your engine blows itself up, adding more oil to it won't make help any, just make the fire worse. 
The aging population problem really boils down to this. The elderly don't maintain infrastructure. The elderly don't pick crops in the field. The elderly don't operate power plants. The elderly don't manufacture. The elderly don't transport goods across the world. The more elderly you have, the larger percentage of your population you're dumping into the very basic maintanence of civilization. When this problem gets bad enough, everywhere begins looking like Flint, Michigan: You'll have water systems that needs maybe three or four times the maintenance to keep operating than you can actually throw at it. And this is across all sectors of civilization. 
At the end of the day, you can stuff money under your mattress. You can get into canning and/or jarring food and store a lifetimes supply of food in your basement. But you can't store a lifetime's worth of medical care, or internet access, or electricity. And we literally don't have enough water for everyone to remove a lifetime's supply from the water cycle. We NEED the infrastructure we have. Automation will only take us so far. It can make individual workers more productive in certain tasks, but we're pretty damn far away from the sort of post-scarcity fully automatic luxury gay space communism that it would take to actually run this hypothetical society. 

A decline in military strength.
Oh God. I'm not even going to touch this one.

You should. It's extremely important. You know why Russia went to war with Ukraine? Because Russian demographics are fucked. They will never be stronger. It's now or never. And now China is in the same exact boat. Modernizing will let them keep getting more powerful for several years, but they're going to peak. And when they do, they're going to start a war. They'll have no choice, unless they give up their ambitions. Something I REALLY don't expect the CCP to do. And you're going to see this happening with more and more countries, as they get more and more desperate and feel like their back is against the wall. Every regional conflict will flare up as national leaders realize that they can try now and maybe win, or not try now and definitely lose. 

Innovation comes from a well educated population. Not from a large population. 

Education helps, a lot, but it's also a numbers game. The more people you have, the more resources you have (human and otherwise) to throw at problems. It doesn't matter how educated you are, you aren't about to innovate a fusion powerplant in your basement with a box of scraps. >

Life itself isn’t a Ponzi Scheme. A Ponzi scheme is a term that has to stay more specified or there’s no damn point to using it. The critical idea of a Ponzi Scheme is that new investors are brought in to pay off old investors and that no products actually change hands, and no services are done. This qualifies social security but disqualifies life itself, as services and goods exchange hands.
For what it’s worth I disagree with OP on basically everything else, but he’s absolutely right to call out these poorly structured government welfare programs that were designed to fail. >


Unfortunately, because elders don’t have enough money to pay for adequate care, they will never get those caregivers. Workers will stay in better paying industries. We are looking at a potential for a crisis of elders dying of neglect.

The really sad thing is that it will be of their own doing. This is what happens when Boomers hoard wealth, vote for politicians that influence shit policies, help securitize healthcare, help undermine labor power and force people into other sectors of the economy to make a living. 
My friend works as a hospital administrator in a rural part of the state and they will not be able to care for the aging population. They can't find enough doctors and nurses. Not enough people are pursuing an education to become doctors and nurses are fleeing the field from burnout, being underpaid and COVID. 
Until the US makes major changes to benefit workers, strengthen labor rights, make education cheaper and more affordable for those scared away by sticker shock and the financial burden of schooling, our healthcare system will be a broken mess that can't support an aging population. A massive die-off of older, uncared for seniors will likely be inevitable. >

I especially worry for the growing number of childless people who will have no family to fall back on when shit hits the fan on elder care. 
Healthcare already employs such a large percentage of our population. Even if working conditions improve, I just don’t believe we have the capacity to allocate sufficient numbers of workers to care for a population with the amount of healthcare demands we have and expect to have in the future. >

And this is the main problem of population decline OP is not seeing. There are healthy 80/90 year olds who are self sufficient. But there is a lot who need care. And there simply won't be enough young people to do this, and no free market wishful thinking will change that.
So either we force people to go into elderly care while neglecting other areas of the economy, or let old people suffer and die. >

Requiring "a major problem" is potentially true Scottish territory here.
In the spirit of cmv, the good, please outline (as an edit maybe) what level of "problem" is sufficient to CYV.
You've spoken of other problems that you believe are more important.   That's a differentiation I can support.  But you haven't specified what other problems are more important. 
Eg "I don't think population decline is a bigger problem compared to the current projected pineapples on pizza issue" >

Right, so, what do you mean by not a problem?
Like, not a problem as in: things can run just fine as is with the elderly population growing larger than the younger generation?
Or not a problem as in: things cannot run fine because capitalism depends on exponential growth but if this is what it takes for us to get away from a broken system, then so be it. 
Because that's two wildly different statements. >

Not a major problem as we should be spending our bandwidth on other more significant and imminent problems.
Also, those who tend to think underpopulation is a problem brush off concerns over overpopulation, which I personally think is a massive problem that has caused countless other problems. >

You seem to be brushing off just how many of our systems and institutions rely on population growth. It’s not “overpopulation” or “under population” in absolute numbers that’s the issue here, it’s the direction things move in. A steady decline in population will lead to many of our institutions to break down, you can argue that’s due to their own bad design but that doesn’t change the reality of the situation. >

Can you give me some examples of institutions you think will break down? I've obviously pointed out the social programs, which I agree are problems are should be rectify. I just disagree with the notion that we need to someone reverse the population decline in order to find solutions. >

Social Security only works as a retirement income supplement because there are more people paying into it than drawing from it. >

Yes, I am aware of how ponzi schemes work. >

Okay so if that's what you want to call the current system then you are admitting that it relies on growth to stay functional, so option B in the commenters original question?
Population decline causes an en masse breakdown of existing systems and you're saying that's "fine" because the systems sucked anyway? >

That's a bit of a strawman of my perspective. There's obviously a problem with entitlement programs so we need to fix them so in the future they're not contingent on whether there's population growth or decline. And economy is self correcting for malinvestment if we stop doing things to prop up that malinvestment. >

There's obviously a problem if there is underpopulation.
You keep ignoring that the condition of underpopulation is sufficient, ceteris paribus, to create obvious societal problems, because you don't like that the institutions are designed in a way that allows it to be a problem.
But they are designed that way, so it is a problem.
It's not unsolvable. I want to do entitlement reform. But the fact that entitlement reform is necessary and that there's no political will to do it is a problem, and it's essentially a problem because of a lack of population growth, only. >

Problem seems to be a very subjective word, you can call something a problem from a point of view that really isn't necessarily a problem. The system we have has a flawed design that is what happens. The population will fluctuate and change, we shouldn't rely on the assumption that it will grow and it just can't grow indefinitely, making the change sooner than later is much better than just kicking the bucket down the road until we come into a wall... >


People are living longer healthier lives and are (or should be) saving to finance their retirement. Overall they should be getting less and less dependent on their children taking care of them and broader society.

I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what savings are. Ideally, if food and other resources never spoil, you'd want to save those up while you work, to be available to sustain you through your retirement. But they do spoil, so that's not feasible.
By saving money instead, you're giving away the product of your labour with an IOU in return. That IOU is only valuable to your retirement insofar as someone is around who has excess food/resources, and wants to trade it for your money. You don't depend on your own children, but you depend on broader society. >

A decline in military strength being no big deal is a very privileged and naive position to take.
I was living in Ukraine between 2020 and 2022. Left in January right before the war.
The economic catastrophe in Ukraine due to the war. Is absolutely heartbreaking. It gets overshadowed by the far more horrific war. Both things would be have been avoided if Ukraine had a stronger military. 
I really wouldn't discount the immense advantages a strong military provides for a population. It is the core of your standards of living. If China or Russia felt like they could win invading USA or Europe.... they absolutely would. But they know they'd get their teeth kicked in. >

It's also very naive to equate military size with military strength, particularly in the modern world.
Here's a ranking I found that doesn't show a whole lot of correlation between personnel size and strength of the military.
And speaking of war in general, most often war historically has been due to resource constraints and overpopulation. In a lower populated world, there would be less war. >


In a lower populated world, there would be less war. 

Where do you get this claim from? Do you have evidence to back it up? 
If you consider Earth's history, we have more people than ever before and less war than ever before. If you looked at a line graph showing global population and global conflict, population has been going up from day one, and conflict has been dropping. 
You would not know it from the headlines, but today we're living through one of the most peaceful times in human history. >

Seeing as the two most deadliest war in human history happened in the past century I think my claim holds. We're in a period of peace built on mutual mass destruction. >

This is obviously not a strong argument given that the worlds population has quadrupled since the end of WWII. >

That sounds like a very strong argument for not being too concerned about population decline. Thanks! >

Your responses reek of sophomoric dismissal of people that haven’t had the same privileges as you. Ask most of the developing world in Asia and Africa whether they want to return to the economic and global security circumstances of the mid-20th century. >

I don't follow your logic. What does mid 20th century conditions in Africa and Asia have to do with quadrupling the world's population since WW2?
On a side note, Africa is set to be the place where the world's population is expected to grow even more in the next half century. >

Unprecedented global security since the end of WWII, mostly driven by the US’ efforts to create economic alliances during the Cold War has allowed previously destitute countries to build out economies to serve global markets. It’s not a coincidence that global population and economic growth have paralleled each other at historically unmatched rates over the last 70 years. Global consumer decline with an aging population in the developed world fundamentally threatens this.
As for your side note, you are right and it’s a reason that conditions in Africa will likely continue to significantly improve. Population growth in Africa is a reason for them to be optimistic, as long as there continues to be globalized economies for them to serve.
Edit: I think OP’s refusal to respond to this despite commenting elsewhere demonstrates that they aren’t open to changing their mind. >


Edit: I think OP’s refusal to respond to this despite commenting elsewhere demonstrates that they aren’t open to changing their mind.

Exactly, OP seems very dismissive and muster up a rebuttal without being willing to follow through on the argument. It's the equivalent of doing argumental an drive-by.
I appreciated your comment though. I feel like a lot of Americans overlook the role that the U.S. has had in economic development in the rest of the world through their role as a security guarantor >

Gradual? Sure.
Severe population decline?
Supply chain logistics. Less workers means less capability to move supplies around the country.
Hopefully we have good automation on that front at that point. >

Your argument about end of life care is not sufficiently addressed. End of life care is going to be a huge problem if there isn't the trained medical workforce to sufficiently provide care. It will impact everyone because it will be a barrier to care for all ages. It keeps no professional caregivers out of the workforce as well increasing the need for government assistance for multiple generations. Elder care doesn't just affect the elderly. Remember that if you ever find yourself in an ER waiting for a hospital bed to open up. >

Don't the healthcare industry organizations forecast these workforce needs and make adjustments to salaries and program acceptance rates accordingly? I mean in theory that's what they're suppose to be doing year in and year out. >

If there are more nurses then there are less workers in other areas. Your solution seems to be “well we’ll just invent some really awesome robots!!” Which doesn’t seem realistic for things like personal care which need to be provided by humans.
We can’t have nursing robots. >


This point is simply not true.

I was speaking globally. Not everything has to be U.S. centric. And as Steven Pinker pointed out with tons of data in his book Enlightenment Now, we are living in arguably the best time humans have ever lived.

They is a strong political movement to cut medicaid, medicare, and social security

Other western countries are going through this as well, simply because these programs were designed based on the notion that the population will increase indefinitely. The general term is called austerity. Eventually the ponzi scheme collapses on itself. Between make adjustments sooner rather than later to minimize to ultimate fallout.

American military dominance is a big part of how we maintain economic hegemony around the world. The military is already struggling to recruit and this crisis will get worse.

I already commented on someone else's comment on this. It's a bit naive o assume military strength is a 1:1 relationship with the number of active military personnel.
And in any case the underpopulation "crisis" is going to hit China and Russia far harder than anyone else.

They're not. Maybe in an ideal world they should be. But they're not. 2008 should have told you that. Unfortunately economists like Hayek have a idealized view of capitalism and they don't really deal with the reality. I often hear the argument that the state should just not interfere, let the markets decide, let the banks fail, etc. Well, the reality is, the state does intervene, the banks and corporations do get bailouts and subsidies, and so on. That is the reality. And the state will do everything it can to stave recession when convenient. As we saw under Trump, the fed provide massive QE to prop up a bull market for years. 

Hayek's economic views still hold. If anything these "realities" you point to only serve to bolster the malinvestment case.

Global population decline can lead to a recession because where will the large cheap labor pool necessary for our commodity production come from? Things are made by people.

It really depends on what things you're talking about. Automation, digitalization, etc. take away the need for this large cheap labor pool you think must exist for us to live by the standards of today. That's kind of an antiquated view on where value and productivity comes from. >

The Jason Hickel op-ed in the Guardian says, "So what happens if we measure global poverty at the low end of this more realistic spectrum – $7.40 per day, to be extra conservative? Well, we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today. Suddenly the happy Davos narrative melts away."
Do you happen to know where that data is presented?  I'm interested to change my view if global poverty (as distinct from global extreme poverty) really is increasing. >

I’m not sure where to find his source tbh. Either way I think the number of people living below an arbitrary poverty line is sort of a red herring.
When people like Pinker or Gates say things are getting better and better, they are using that as a defense of the status quo. It is an argument that says “the system works.” But the fact that even one child is forced to work in a cobalt mine so we can have iPhones is a failure of the system. The fact that 18 million people in the US (the world hegemonic power, the richest country on earth) are living in “extreme poverty” (and 40 million more living in just poverty) according to the UN shows the system is failing.
And we know the system is not the reason we have what we have. Child labor had to be ended through violent struggle. The end of slavery took a massive civil war. The right to vote had to be won. The 40 hr work week had to be won. The history of liberalism is constantly fighting to have basic rights against the force of capitalism.
This kind of argument also ignores the more specific problems of global capitalism. For example how the lack of vaccination (due to Moderna and Pfizer hoarding the mRNA patent) led to countless deaths globally.
Or consider how the IMF enforces debt peonage on all “developing” nations which are not developing but stuck in slavery to the West in order to perpetually pay off their debt in dollars or pounds or Euros. The West is actively keeping countries down. We can see what the US and IMF did to cripple Haiti’s  economy as an example. Things are not getting better for these countries.
And every time a natural disaster or something akin to it happens, many countries slip further down. Cuba has struggled under the American blockade since their trading bloc with the USSR died. Iran has struggled economically under US sanctions. Madeline Albright famously gloated on TV about paying the price of half a million Iraqis to, idk, punish Saddam through sanctions. We don’t even have to go into the wars in Iraq and Libya and Syria and Yemen which have left these places in ruins. 
It is also a way for Pinker to basically wave away real problems. Does it matter if our wages are up by whatever percent if we are now living in slums? 
That’s another thing: these statistics are often meaningless. There is a common phenomenon happening across the third world where rural farmers are being pushed out of their land through privatization and foreign investment and forced into slums in the cities where they earn meager wages. This can show up as employment going up, wages going up, urbanization (mistaken for industrialization) going up, and all that. In reality it is a huge problem.
And as Hickel mentioned, the system looks good because China and its 1.4 billion people have propped it up. China played a huge role in saving the world economy in 2008. And it has brought a billion people out of poverty not by following the liberal consensus but rather going directly against it under the Communist Party. >


My view is well those are just very poorly designed programs. You can either rectify it or you can try to keep on kicking the can down the road.

Great, so what is your proposed alternative? You mention people "are (or should be) saving for retirement" - but 40% of seniors live exclusively on social security. I assume you do not want to leave them on the streets for not investing better.
And what are we supposed to invest in, our 401ks? Well those won't be worth much in a deflationary economy, where young people don't have the income to consume because a lot more productivity is needed to take care of the elderly.
I hear you, social security is a systemically flawed system... but so is democracy. It's great to criticize it, but I think we need a superior alternative before we just go "screw it", no?
Also, is it a ponzi scheme? 🤔 I think of it as "our social obligation to the elderly" (esp. b/c in our culture we are not expected to personally take of our elderly family members). I would gladly pay more taxes to fund it better, which seems like the more pressing issue, but that's me. >


A loss of culture and the diminishment of trust among citizens.
Is this really the number 2 reason? Cultures are constantly evolving and I think that's amazing. This is definitely the grumpy old conservative argument with not so subtle racist views.

Not really sure why you consider this a grumpy old conservative/ racist view.  
Population decline often results in displacement, which disrupts communities and causes loss of cultural identity, which causes all kinds of problems including a decline in mental health. >


People are living longer healthier lives and are (or should be) saving to finance their retirement. Overall they should be getting less and less dependent on their children taking care of them and broader society. Perhaps there might be a problem if there's a dramatic generational decline but gradual population declines don't seem that burdensome.

Western society is currently trapped in a misguided assumption that money buys happiness. The average Westerner spends all of their income every year.
Even those who set money aside and invest are going to lose their investment if the economy retracts from fewer customers/producers.

Is this really the number 2 reason? Cultures are constantly evolving and I think that's amazing. This is definitely the grumpy old conservative argument with not so subtle racist views.

Only someone with no knowledge of history can say this. Atrocities like National Socialist Nazism, Stalin and Maoist Social Communism, etc; are social ideologies that came out of a progressive agenda that resulted in genocidal catastrophes that set back those nations for generations.

Ah! The poorly designed entitlement programs that just assumed indefinite population growth (see ponzi scheme)... My view is well those are just very poorly designed programs. You can either rectify it or you can try to keep on kicking the can down the road. Canada has that flexibility due to low population density and lots of resources. Most countries unfortunately do not. See French protests as an example.

This is a very naive answer. You're basically saying the solution is, 'just fix it,' which isn't a solution to the problem.

A decline in military strength.  I'm not even going to touch this one.

This isalso a naive response. Of course it'd be great not to need a strong military (or one at all) but that's not the world we live in. Many countries around the world would not have their freedom without the US's military might (South Korea, Taiwan, most of SE Asia, 20th century Europe (twice), Iraq, Kuwait, and many many more).

Innovation comes from a well educated population. Not from a large population. There are a ton of innovations going on in small population countries. Nobel prizes per capita would be one metric to look at. 

The US currently has more Nobels than I think all other countries combined. This without being even in the top 25 in level of education. It'd be a hard sell to say this isn't because the US is a top 5 nation in population.

First, I don't buy a population decline would be permanent recession, particularly on a GDP per capita basis, which is the true metric we should be focused on. Relying on continued population growth as the main component of your company's growth just means you have a bad company. Recessions are a way to clean out malinvestment in the economy.

The US's massive economy didn't exist without reaching a large population size, especially the baby boomer generation.
Companies don't entirely rely on population growth but it's hard to grow without more customers and workers.

This goes back to my malinvestment argument. The only reason economists fear deflation is because falling consumer prices means less revenue for companies selling those products. But my argument is the good companies will and the bad companies will be shown for what they are. At some point deflationary pressures would abate.

This is not how any depression or recession has played out in reality. Recessions cause all economic activity to contract, not just purchases from "bad companies." Saying that "deflationary pressures would abate at some point" is a cop out answer that means nothing. >

Nazism was definitely not a progressive agenda.  It was a violently reactionary swing towards traditional values. >

The Nazis believed in creating a genetic-eugenics utopia by classifying people based on physical-ethnical features, and systematically eliminating the undesirables. None of that is traditional values. >

It was absolutely based on traditional values.  Using bunk science to support your "let's make this country super white like it used to be" conservative politics are are still conservative politics. >

What part of Nazism was traditional?
Nazism was a socialist party that exponentially expanded the government to socially engineer society into a hierarchy based on eugenics. That's one of the most progressive agendas there has ever been.
This is why I compare it to communism. Another anti-religious, social-economic societal engineering, ultra-leftist revolution that had never existed before.
To have an argument you're going to have to offer more than "conservative politics are are still conservative politics." I'm only going to argue with someone who offers some sort of logical evidence to support their claim. >


What part of Nazism was traditional?

The nationalism part.  The "let's make our country super white again and get rid of the religious/ethnic minorities" part.  The homophobia.  The veneration of the military.  The "our country first attitude."
Basically everything but the fact that the word "socialists" was part of the party name.  I don't know why conservatives love focusing on this one fact and ignoring all of their actual policies.  And the fact that "nationalist" was also part of the party name. >

Inverted population pyramids are unstable. % of robots will far exceed humans in the future to stabilize this. People might oppose that strongly, potentially increasing social fragmentation. >


A rise in the dependency ratio which would increase the economic pressure on the workforce.

People are living longer healthier lives and are (or should be) saving to finance their retirement. Overall they should be getting less and less dependent on their children taking care of them and broader society. Perhaps there might be a problem if there's a dramatic generational decline but gradual population declines don't seem that burdensome.


Im gonna need some clarification on this. Are you mostly referring to the financial capacity of the elderly to take care of themselves? Because I think a major cause for concern isn't necessarily just the need for children to take care of the elderly but rather a larger-scale issue where there aren't enough/as many younger people to fill in the positions left vacant by the now retired, an issue that I'm not so sure would be solved simply by the elders being able to pay for their own care.