Ehh… it’s still a problem absent GDP concerns if it’s drastic enough or continues for long enough. At worst, the population might vanish completely, but even if that gets averted you’re still going to have a couple generations where you don’t have enough people to take care of your elderly, or do physically demanding jobs like what paramedics or firemen do relative to your middle age and higher population that needs such services without being able to staff them.
It’s not exactly wrong to call the problem self-correcting, but it does gloss over some necessary cruelty inherent in that correction.
Edit: beyond logistics concerns, I think a bigger, if less concrete, issue is that reproduction is up there among the strongest drives that any species produces. If you have a population that isn’t reproducing at scale, and this is an ongoing problem, that’s a signal that something has gone horribly wrong.
Ehh… it’s still a problem absent GDP concerns if it’s drastic enough or continues for long enough. At worst, the population might vanish completely, but even if that gets averted you’re still going to have a couple generations where you don’t have enough people to take care of your elderly, or do physically demanding jobs like what paramedics or firemen do relative to your middle age and higher population that needs such services without being able to staff them.
It’s not exactly wrong to call the problem self-correcting, but it does gloss over some necessary cruelty inherent in that correction.
Edit: beyond logistics concerns. I think a bigger, if less concrete, issue is that reproduction is up there among the strongest drives that any species produces. If you have a population that isn’t reproducing at scale, and this is an ongoing problem, that’s a signal that something has gone horribly wrong.
Ehh… it’s still a problem absent GDP concerns if it’s drastic enough or continues for long enough. At worst, the population might vanish completely, but even if that gets averted you’re still going to have a couple generations where you don’t have enough people to take care of your elderly, or do physically demanding jobs like what paramedics or firemen do relative to your middle age and higher population that needs such services without being able to staff them.
It’s not exactly wrong to call the problem self-correcting, but it does gloss over some necessary cruelty inherent in that correction.