tallowood wrote on Jan 15^th, 2026 at 9:59am:


It depends on what you're actually prepared to change.

If the goal is to rework the economy, embrace automation in manufacturing, deepen public–private collaboration, reverse the privatisation of essential services, and properly regulate the free market, all paired with a Universal Basic Income, then population growth is not a hard requirement.

If, however, you want none of that, if you insist on clinging to an economic model built on perpetual growth, speculative markets, and suppressed wages, then yes, continuous population growth becomes a necessity to keep the system from collapsing under its own contradictions.

You cannot have it both ways. A genuinely sustainable population is incompatible with preserving the current economic landscape unchanged.

One of them has to give.

Because the current system is actively harming the very people who keep it running, they're having fewer children as the costs of living, housing, healthcare, and education continue to spiral. That isn't a mystery or a moral failing, it's a predictable outcome of policy choices.

Those choices are being defended most loudly by many here, especially by people with an obsessive hatred of immigrants, who somehow fail to notice they're entrenching the conditions they claim to oppose.

It's the same incoherent logic as demanding cuts to foreign aid and then acting shocked when refugee numbers increase. You don't get to manufacture the problem and then feign outrage at the consequences.