Or, we simply wait out the next few centuries. Reproduction rates in many developed countries have dipped below replacement. Maybe the total world population will decrease in our time.
This is the problem with our current first world financial system, it is predicated on constant growth. Even the slightest hiccup in growth leads to serious consequences for the over leveraged and make no mistake most of our safety nets are over leveraged and dependent upon unrealistic gains when faced with a stagnant to declining population.
The Great Aging is underway, the EU last year had more deaths than births and will for the foreseable future, Japan has been there for a little while and China's working age population is already in decline. Africa, the Middle East/India and parts of South America are the only places experiencing actual population growth, when immigration is not taken into the equation. With Demographics and Automation deflation is the likely outcome. The Central Banks are trying all they can to prevent this from happening in the near term by spending Trillions of dollars to prop up economies and drive interest rates lower to eek out some inflation. They seem not to care whether growth is actual demand growth or simply a mirage in terms of inflation. The central banks are doubling down their efforts and will be even more accomodative in the next few years when the growth they continue to state is right around the corner never materializes.
Unfortunately I do not see a way out of this without the developing nations taking care of themselves.
People seem to have a lot of faith that a drive or urge to reproduce is not something that can be selected for and transmitted through generations, either genetically or culturally, in human beings. If it can be selected for, it will be, and very rapidly, by simple math.
While it is true that the fertility rate goes down with increasing wealth, this may only be true up to some point. With wealth increasing even further the fertility rate seems to start rising again. Whether it crosses the replacement rate again is up for debate. See the chart on the Wikipedia article for income and fertility [1] for an illustration.
As it stands now the EU has more deaths than births every year for the foreseeable future. When birthrates have been below replacement level for over 30 years it would take a massive baby boom to right the pyramid, but what good would that do? We don't need the population we used to and those babies wouldn't be productive for at least 20 years and as it stands now many of them would be as much of a drain on the state as the retired
I am not arguing that population growth would be a good thing, the population growth rate has to become essentially zero at some point. A constant plus or minus one percent per year means extinction within less than 2000 years. Overpopulation will resolve itself by starvation or resource wars, underpopulation seems actually more dangerous in the long run. But I am relatively sure that we will manage to avoid extinction due to a bad fertility rate.
And the population structure will probably become something like a rectangle then, almost everybody becomes 80 or 90 or whatever and dies within a relative narrow window. Setting aside radical changes like getting hit by an asteroid or discovering the key to eternal life.
I really only wanted to point out that it is not absolutely certain that increasing wealth surely leads to a decreasing population. If all work is done by robots and nobody is at risk of a shortage of good and services, what would people compel not to spend some of their years raising three children?
