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If human population stops rising or decreases, what will be the negative effects for people?
From the environmental standpoint shrinking of human population is often quoted to have desirable effects, and that's reasonable. But from the point of view of our daily lives and functioning of the human society, what negatives could we then expect? (I mean a soft decline due to lower birth rates, not some abrupt events.)
For example, with smaller population fewer music albums could be made every year than some time before, and people would maybe feel less inspired and satisfied. Less scientific research, less choices for relationships... and maybe other things? Would being more technically advanced compensate for the issues? Won't we feel ourselves in oblivion and romanticize the "numerous" past?
This sure is my sort of topic! Let's clear up my standpoint first: I heavily advocate for population decline at a sensible rate towards around 1 billion people. My basis for this is that humans aiming for reducing environmental impact via being more efficient & considerate is idealistic at best, and going to lead us towards disaster in the worst cases. Furthermore, I'm also of the opinion that the environment & biosphere of the planet is far more sensitive than we currently realise. Even minor things like building sites cause huge changes in erosion which can cause problems hundreds of miles away down river or into the oceans. So many people don't think about even these most fundamental things.
I do take issue with the title asserting a negative stance instead of a neutral one; however. There are pros and cons of all approaches. For example, yes, you could say less art would be made, less scientific research would be conducted; but we already have billions of people in poverty who are currently unable to fulfil their lives anyway. How about we invest in third world aid, education, & birth control and enrich the lives of those who already exist instead of creating new ones? Furthermore, a lot less negative things happen with a reduced population too. We get less war, less murder, less accidents, less terrorism.
These are also fully anthropocentric concerns only. How about concerns about our planet and biosphere? We're in the anthropocene, which has been called the sixth great extinction in our planet's history. Species are disappearing forever. Forests & pristine environments are being cleared in the name of rampant capitalism and greed. Our environment is in turmoil. We're actively altering the chemical composition of our atmosphere at a rate that has likely never occurred in the 4.5 billion years that our planet has been around.
Even if we could reduce our environmental impact, not all environmental issues can be solved by being more eco-friendly—as I cover in this comment—take kids lighting forest fires, people littering, land use, people being hurtful to others and other species. These are for the most part 1:1 matchings with population that cannot be solved via technological progress or education. It's just stupid people being stupid, you can educate against it, but you can't fix it. We need to drop idealistic fantasies about carbon zero and adopt an "all hands on deck" approach of both environmental footprint reduction as well as promoting family planning, taxation of large families, tax credits for those who maintain 1-2 children families, and other sensible policies.
I get your perspective though: a desire for growth is hard-wired in the human brain. We want to expand and succeed. But sometimes, we need to let our intelligence override our primal desires. Take Tildes for example: part of the goal of Tildes isn't infinite growth, it's infinite sustainability. It's not about maximising logged in users, or monthly advertising revenue; it's about optimising for quality over as long of a period as time as possible.
The KPI we need to optimise for isn't YOY growth. It's YOY sustainability. Frankly, the way I see it is that less people means we can celebrate individuality and expression more; while also being far more environmentally friendly and conscious.
You have a cool idea. If we have 10 billion people and 2 billion of them are "golden billions", and then there are 3 billion people with the same 2 billion wealthy ones, there will be still the same amount of music released globally because very poor people don't have money to do that, but there will be also 8x reduction of poverty and 3x reduction of ecological impact (including foolish forest arsons) in this example. With even more population shrinkage, increasing density of creativity and good mental health when most people live good lives appears to be able to compensate and be enough in theory. But will the remaining innate competition for the richness allow so high median standards of living? Maybe the rich will just fly starships with VR and immortality snacks and the average Joe will still be better off than most of us today. Or hopefully we can train ourselves to soften greed, especially when development is put on track of sustainability.
The big worry is that we're going to have to restructure our economic thinking to not be so growth oriented, since if we crash our planet-bound population to something sustainable like one or two billion, growth just isn't going to be happening for a long time. That's not a bad thing, economic growth has to stop eventually, but it's contrary to the very core of our economic system.
To copy/paste a comment I made a while ago on that topic:
While a period of strong economic growth is needed to initially lift the populace from agrarian poverty, you would actually expect some economic contraction after a decent standard of living was achieved, if the economy was rationally managed to promote sustainability. Think appliances, for example. In the early years, you're going to need lots of refrigerator production, because you need to provide them to the tens or hundreds of millions of households that don't own them. After a while, everyone that needs one has one, so ideally you'd want to ramp down production and shift into maintenance mode, building replacement parts and some baseline level of new units for population growth and such.
But this would be considered a disaster in our growth focused system, you'd instead see subsidies to produce refrigerators people don't need, and the incorporation of planned obsolescence into designs to create demand from an otherwise satiated populace. People rail against the inefficiencies of planned economies, which is fair, but there seems to be this blindness about the large parts of our market economy structured like an ouroboros to both induce and satisfy demand, leading to however many millions of tons of resources being dug up, processed, and re-buried to ensure that those processors and miners have something to do.
As for a decreased production of art and science, I don't think that's a massive issue. There's only around 2 or 3 billion people right now that have the wealth to produce art with a global audience, or get sufficient education to contribute to scientific advancement. If there were only that many people on the planet total, there'd be enough to go around to make sure the same number of artists and scientists would crop up.