>>53242743Have you not seen the calls for them to up the birth rate?
Supply and demand, friend.
Lots of people wanting jobs means you can offer lower wages, as the demand for the jobs you offer exceeds the supply. Why pay a guy 90k/yr for something when someone else will do it for 70k?
Look at England after the Black Death. There were fewer peasants due to so many being killed by the plague, and thus the survivors had something of a position where they could negotiate fairer wages and conditions, as the nobility could hardly find other peasants (By virtue of said peasants being dead).
Lots of people means lots of consumers, also. The elite want the profits to go up, always up. Less people, then, means less supply, less Marvel movies, Iphone 18X's and Prime Energy drinks going off the shelves.
This is particularly interesting in the field of agriculture. It has so often been expanding evermore to feed a growing population. What then when this becomes the reverse?
I predict a growth in meat and other resource-intense crops, as the need for land in which to grow staple crops such as wheat and maize decreases with the population.
Granted of course, this doesn't mean a loss of birth rate is a splendid thing.
A demographic collapse means the elderly/retirees become the majority, and the few young/middle aged (Who are the only ones producing income) are taxed relentlessly to provide services/care for their elders.
But to fix that would require creating an environment where having families is not a severe financial liability, to the point of being entirely unattainable. And that requires the expenditure of money better spent on superyachts, classy prostitutes and beachfront homes.
I suppose you could blame industrialism, as where a child was previously free labor for the agriculturalist, its now dead weight (And a damn expensive one at that) - but that's a little bit of an oversimplification.
