Imagine the entire population of the world was a village of 100 houses. There are 100 people.
Imagine the village ages out and you have 90 old people, and 10 middle-aged people. There's not enough people harvesting grain to feed everyone. There's not enough workers to maintain the roads. The life-savings everyone accumulated under the balanced population gets spent squabbling for the limited food at inflated prices. The water and roads fall apart with no one to maintain them. Life gets worse, not better. Unless there is war, famine or pestilence, usually reductions in population will be unbalanced by nature.
Yeah, and that’s why we need universal basic income for all the young people without jobs. That’s why education takes up half of our employable years. That’s why over half of employed people say that their own job could be eliminated without consequence. That’s why unions protest against job cuts. That’s why real wages keep dropping. That’s why the trend toward industrial automation has been dwarfed by the trend toward outsourcing to cheap human labor.
I think you misunderstood me, or had a soapbox you wanted to stand on. My claim was limited--non-gradual population drops are a negative thing.
Basic income is a way of re-allocating the value produced. I'm for it. It won't solve the problems that come from sudden population contraction, which would be a separate additional problem to add to those you list. For example, when you have way more houses than people, what happens to real estate prices and most of your people's net worth? The real estate and construction industry? Rent? Empty restaurants with too few people?
When your tax base is too small and can't easily pay to maintain your infrastructure (Arecibo?) what happens to it?
Imagine the village ages out and you have 90 old people, and 10 middle-aged people. There's not enough people harvesting grain to feed everyone. There's not enough workers to maintain the roads. The life-savings everyone accumulated under the balanced population gets spent squabbling for the limited food at inflated prices. The water and roads fall apart with no one to maintain them. Life gets worse, not better. Unless there is war, famine or pestilence, usually reductions in population will be unbalanced by nature.