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.
After the black death first ravaged europe, killing something like half the population, the people left behind had one of the largest transfers of wealth, social mobility and lifting of restrictions ever.
Before this, wages had stagnated, work was hard to come by and seasonal and day laborers were basically told to be happy with what they got, cause there was always someone more desperate to do the work for the pay offered.
Once the plague passed, farms that had been rented out needed new tenants. Now, the market was flooded with far to few workers. Land owners had to negotiate rather than dictate terms, and the average tenant farmer got a better deal at lower cost in money, goods or labor owed per year.
The same happened to seasonal workers and day laborers. Now you actually had to pay them whay they wanted, not what the most desperate would take.
It also made people more mobile, people travelled farther for work or to fins vacant tenancy. And all this added wealth being put in the hands of what had been the lowest social strata ensured that they could generate long term wealth and made the change of social status possible.
The population of many parts of Europe remained lower for centuries, not coming back up to pre-Black death for centuries, only to explode in the industrial revolution.
Without migration, the aging population of Europe and North America would probably lead to an economic miracle for those who remain, who would then have more children.
With migration replacing those, we will stagnate into spiraling social costs.