[QuarterReptile]

Fewer people means less specialization. If you lose a billion people, recognize that you're not losing the billion poorest people, but rather a distribution that skews rich. When populations are declining, a lot of the things we thought were as sure as gravity turn out to be the fun parts of cryptocurrency bubbles: infrastructure maintenance; ever-increasing division of labor, specialization, and the global development initiatives and technologically advanced low-carbon energy research those entail; people determined to protect trees and wildlife; and all pensions, home value trends, and fiat currencies that depend on growth to obscure.

Everyone has a vested interest in growth. Unfortunately, many wealthy people have short-term (single lifetime) interests in the reverse.