The people that want higher birth rates don't care about higher wages, the environment, or people's safety.

They just need workers they can milk them until they can't work anymore. They need these workers to spend all their money so they have to keep working.

8+ billion people on the planet and people complain about not enough people.

Ponzi schemes aren't sustainable.

Ya know, I have vague memories of reading an argument somewhere that the black plague killed off so many peasants that the surviving ones had materially less shitty conditions for a little while, due to scarcity and all that.

Look what happened after the plague, 50% of the population was gone.

It broke the back of the Catholic church and feudalism. Peasants got their first pay raise... ever.

When the population was predicted to explode into the 21st century, the news said this was a big problem. Now the population is expected to gradually decline. The news is saying this is a big problem.

Houses are already kept artificially empty to retain prices. Capitalism always finds a way to screw you over.

We just never get to retire.

By 2030 it's projected to be 2.0 workers per retiree.

you all going to say bullshit about retirement, like if fascist around the globe don't want to take it from you already, no amount of canon fodders you spawn for billionaires won't change that

increase wages

Hahahaha oh. That's cute.

Okay, but retirement is based off there being more people working than not, so in countries with national pensions we'll have to significantly raise taxes, and in countries without such a system, retirees who are invested into index funds, need publicly traded corporations to start underpaying their employees even more (it's really eye-opening when you realize people over 55 own 73% of all the resources of the US, from money to stocks to real estate).

The population isn't declining, though. See for yourself: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Edit: Granted, it is in some countries: China, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea to name a few.

Population decline is fine. It’s the population boom driven by World War II panic that was the oddity instead.

In a matter of time, we might return to population levels from the 17th century, and if we do, then so what? A single individual will become all the more valuable, similar to how European nations valued labour more after the Black Death occurred. History likes to repeat itself, even if not necessarily by events like the plague.

Even the fears about the economy and government spending are bullshit. Notice the folks obsessing over birthrates always quote the retiree to worker ratio. They don't talk about the dependent to worker ratio, and that's what really matters. Yes, our populations are aging, and yes that means relatively more old people to take care of. But we in turn also have far fewer children to take care of. If we can adapt to the Baby Boom era, we can adapt to an aging population.

Further afield, fears about human extinction are total bullshit. No country is a monolith; every nation has groups within it with higher and lower relative birth rates. If the birth rate stays low and never recovers among the mainstream society, eventually the smaller groups end up composing most of the population, and then the birth rate recovers. The Amish inherit the Earth.

Or, if even that fails, ultimately technology loss alone stabilizes your birthrates. Eventually your population falls so low that you just can't physically manufacture reliable birth control anymore. That's a product of industrial production. It requires a certain minimum population size to run a factory. Below that and we just regress to earlier technological eras. Eventually we end up back in a mostly agrarian state, and suddenly having kids is once again economically beneficial.

Yeah, there will probably be some growing (er, shrinking) pains, but I'm totally fine if the world just wasn't meant to have 10 billion people on it

who will work unskilled jobs if there aren't enough people to do them?

Immigrants usually

Lower population is generally better for almost all sectors.

But lowering the population means killing people or restricting birthing rights.