[zimablue]

It's only "economic sense" in a VERY narrow viewpoint where you assume that you're going to disallow immigration AND assume that your social security system is offset by a generation AND assume that economic measures like GDP/etc are important. I'd change those three before pushing the "increase population" button.

Japan had low growth and higher happiness for a couple of decades now.

Even taking all that, economically useful != right. It's economically useful to burn the forests and raise the oceans but it's not right.

[adimitrov]

Immigration is not disallowed. In many European economies, birth rates have been below replacement for decades, and immigration has been the only thing propping up populations. Recent events notwithstanding.

Japan is facing a demographic crisis[1]. Among developed nations, their problem is the most extreme because of very low rates of immigration, and a continuously dwindling replacement rate.

Nobody's talking about increasing population. We're well below replacement rate, and that's terrifying. The environment is not going to be helped by developed nations collapsing under their own demographic weight.

To reiterate my point: abstaining from having children in the West does a) nothing to reduce overpopulation b) severely impacts local economic capacity without benefit to the environment. Said economic capacity is currently at the forefront of developing sustainable energy models.

In order to reduce overpopulation, fighting for women's education and women's rights has proven far more valuable.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.de/japan-fertility-crisis-2017-4...