[spin]

In college I had an econ friend who said that there's basically only three ways to grow an economy: more workers, better technology or more capital.

If you look at technology, then I think "yes!" it has improved the economy. Look at engines and trains and telecommunications. The first world economy today, per person, is rip-roarin' compared to 100 years ago.

Many western economies haven't noticed the decline in the birth rate yet because of so many immigrants. Japan is unique in that they are a modern country, with a declining birth rate, but very low immigration.

[Markoff]

doesn't declining population mean also lower expenses on infrastructure and everything?

[zanny]

Populations don't decline uniformly and people don't naturally optimize for infrastructure use and the best use of existent resources.

You don't have to even wait for population decline, we already have more unoccupied homes in the US than homeless by an order of magnitude, but all those homes are in "dead" areas where industry or resource extraction came and went. Now those houses and all the infrastructure around them decay without use, while elsewhere infrastructure is overburdened with concentrated people.

If anything, declining population means more per-capita expense on infrastructure, and the per-capita costs of maintaining current infrastructure (at least in the US) is out of control.[1]

[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/4/this-is-why-inf...

[zer0tonin]

No because you might need a lot of infrastructure to keep up with the fact that the largest part of your population is old.