Just throwing stuff at the wall here, but with the coming population collapse, I'm thinking we might be able to derive some lessons or maybe even a blueprint for how to navigate said collapse by examining MMORPG economies. I know that in the past economists have studied WoW in earnest so maybe there's still some insights yet to be mined.
How does the economy change once the server population starts shrinking?
I know from my own experience playing FFXI back in the early 2010s that there were regularly specialized materials on the auction house that wouldn't get stocked regularly. In my case it was some fish and for a couple weeks I was able to make good money at it because while there was almost no one supplying the item there was definitely still a demand for it. Then someone started flooding the market and I moved on to other ventures. No idea if the end result of that was a temporary supply or if it turned into a stable availability of the product. Maybe the one guy just made a whole bunch of product the one time and then once it was sold he moved on to the next thing and all the smaller producers like me ended up gone and the product itself just outright vanished from the market.
I imagine the dynamic is quite different now as the population dwindles further, although they do consolidate servers so that might throw a wrench in the fact finding opportunities here.
Population collapse should not be as much an issue as currently is.
Automation progresses should cover more then enough of the population decline. We keep seeing automation in services, agronomy , medicine.
What it does impact is profits. Less consumer base = less money.
Over simplified but this is how I'm seeing the current trend. Do we really need 10 people to oversight the work of 4 engineers? Do we really need 100 people in marketing with 10 people working on the actual product? Do we need this bloated state and federal system?
In my un-educated opinion the current system should be able to maintain the population decline. It will not create infinite market growth but do we need that?
That is the not what I'm saying. The population decline can be supported thru automation. You can't complain that automation is taking jobs and that the population is declining.
Automation taking jobs should mean we need less immigrants to harvest crops and automation in medicine means that you can get your diagnosis based on some tests with very little doctor interaction and less of a chance the doctor will screw up.
Most places we have immigrants can be supported by automation to some extent but no one wants that because initial investment is high, requires planning and does not increase the consumer market.
I'm bad of explaining my own train of thought.
Initial issue: population decline and how it hurts the economy and sustainability of a country
current solution: mass migration to stop population decline
proposed solution: automation instead of mass migration
cons to new solution: those with money want growth, want more consumers, want house prices to go up, want cheap labor and less of an investment.
Automation taking away jobs and having a population decline are not compatible issues as one should solve the other.
Additional input: lack of social security for old people. Automation can match the needs but does it also cause growth? Economic growth is need it for social security for old people.
Additional analysis and solution is need it to tackle the increase cost of social security for old people.
One monkey wrench I see emerging is that this requires the populace to be able to learn the new technology and at the current rate of technological advancement I don't think that's actually a given. Between tech becoming more complex and our population becoming dumber(in part because we keep importing third worlders) we might find ourselves in a situation where those new jobs just require more cognitive capacity than the population has to offer up.
As to the rest of your post, wouldn't those 70 excess just be put to work providing luxury goods and services, or are we accounting for those in the machines + 30 people already? It's a grim outlook to be sure.
Well historically the answer is to burn off the excess population in war, but even that is becoming more and more tech centric.
Its the opposite as I see it. I work in what you might call a fundamental supply chain. My industry WILL always exist, even if the nukes drop.
There's nothing left here except shuffling things through, making things just bad enough to need repair, so you can quit and get a better job fixing what the last guy let decline. Endlessly cycling on that principle until somebody dies.
It doesnt HAVE to be this way. At all, in fact in reality our industry really behaves as a complex ecosystem in stability. Production demands can't keep up with the full scale of growth that we aim for, but the competitors are always ready to scrape a bit of fat off for their overlarge pile, just long enough for you to right the ship and scrape off of THEM.
It'd be completely illegal if you codified it, but that'd be the way to achieve efficiency of the system.