> Population growth is vital for the world economy.
The thing is we know world population boomed for the last few centuries. We don't know what will happen if that stops, there's simply no observations yet. Hysteresis is indeed the major question mark. We can certainly imagine some terrible problems.
Probably the biggest problem that comes out of this imagining is a reverse specialization effect. Think of the economy as a tapestry of different specializations, some of which support a very few people on a global scale. For instance, any particular thing that people get phds in like particular materials research. Or industries that are highly concentrated, which you'll find quite a lot of if you look closely. They might stop being viable on their own, requiring consolidation into wider industries or they'll get dropped entirely.
The hysteresis comes in where we go back to a previous population but we unfortunately cannot support the same economy. You see things like that article about the Japanese trainline that stopped once that girl finished school. I mean that town might well have had a train when it was a similarly sized town getting bigger, I don't know. But that kind of thing might happen in many places.
The thing is we know world population boomed for the last few centuries. We don't know what will happen if that stops, there's simply no observations yet. Hysteresis is indeed the major question mark. We can certainly imagine some terrible problems.
Probably the biggest problem that comes out of this imagining is a reverse specialization effect. Think of the economy as a tapestry of different specializations, some of which support a very few people on a global scale. For instance, any particular thing that people get phds in like particular materials research. Or industries that are highly concentrated, which you'll find quite a lot of if you look closely. They might stop being viable on their own, requiring consolidation into wider industries or they'll get dropped entirely.
The hysteresis comes in where we go back to a previous population but we unfortunately cannot support the same economy. You see things like that article about the Japanese trainline that stopped once that girl finished school. I mean that town might well have had a train when it was a similarly sized town getting bigger, I don't know. But that kind of thing might happen in many places.