The Economics of Falling Populations
For beyond the population peak, these guys forecast too far ahead for their predictions to be realistic (there will be unknown confounding factors along the way).<p>The &quot;too few ideas&quot; claim is also weird. For you to contribute some ideas to the global economy, at the very least you need some access to capital, that currently most of the world doesn&#x27;t have. Having good education and some freedom from spending all time and all your energy just to survive on subsistence level also helps. In production of ideas, lifting people everywhere to the Western middle class standard of living and mindset is far more important than raw population count. This would probably require bringing industrial labor wages to a more realistic level everywhere, also in poorer countries.<p>The whole system of relying on cheap labor in developing countries would have to change somewhat with decelerating population. The stuff in the West would be more expensive, although maybe with fewer workers wages couldn&#x27;t be so stagnant. The model of buying materials and labor cheap somewhere and selling stuff highish to Western population would be harder to sustain, making many businesses less viable. Maybe this is especially scary for people that are heavily into capital.<p>This is my personal take and it&#x27;s somewhat related to the post-Black Death phenomena in Europe that the article mentions. There&#x27;s also &quot;The Great Demographic Reversal&quot; book where the authors apparently also predict rising inflation and take into account aging of the population (I&#x27;ve only watched an interview with one of the authors).