[mbgerring]

> I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.

Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution:

Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters.

Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!

[Sohcahtoa82]

> Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth

I don't think this is true at all.

Birthrates are already declining. All you have to do is give proper sex ed and easy access to birth control and populations will shrink on their own. You don't even have to begin propaganda around overpopulation, though we may need to tone down the "WE NEED MORE BABIES" propaganda that the right is currently projecting.

The fact is, there are a lot of people (18-29% of non-parent adults in the USA, depending on your source) that don't want children. Give them the tools to make sure accidents don't happen (IMO, vasectomies would be more popular if there weren't so many myths surrounding them), and birthrates will decline naturally.

[mbgerring]

Neither the global birthrate, nor the U.S. population, are currently declining. The U.S. population may decline this year following the Trump administration’s massive increase in violent, capricious removal of immigrants regardless of legal status or criminal record.

Birthrates naturally declining is probably a good thing, but it happens too slowly to make a dent in housing prices without additional interventions.

[robocat]

> dent in house prices

Already dented in Italy and Japan:

https://impatria.com/en/magazine/1-euro-houses-italy-foreign...

https://www.akiyajapan.com/japan/cheap-houses

We're propping up house prices in New Zealand by adding 50% immigrants (I think is fantastic - we're now at 30% population born overseas). Stop-gap solution but it is working at present.

[saulpw]

> or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth

People are quite naturally controlling their own quantity of offspring, to the dismay of our leaders who insist on perpetual growth. If we limit immigration (not my preferred approach, but here we are), then the population will naturally start to fall, as is happening in other places.

[pixl97]

I mean, ya, it kind of works. Your economy will go to shit for the most part.

[everdrive]

>Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives

I'm really sad to see this response. President deported a large number of illegal immigrants -- to the extent that he was called the "deporter in chief" -- and he did not employ an army of fascist goons. The insane polarization of the last few years has shrunken the scope of people's imaginations, and I'm sure that people think their only choices are "open borders" vs. "barely-trained fascist thugs."

[everdrive]

Sorry, that should be "President Obama"

[Legend2440]

The US population may already be declining. In prior years the only thing keeping it increasing was immigration, and immigration has fallen considerably under Trump:

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-...

[mbgerring]

That’s correct, and to my point above, driving immigration down to this degree required a level of violence and cruelty so extreme that even the people who voted for it now disapprove of it. And that’s before the profound economic consequences really hit.

[DiscourseFan]

I think its also quite apparent that building new housing is a whole lot cheaper than killing and forcibly removing people, its just that it also destroys the value of an asset that the majority of families still hold. I mean its very basic of course: capitalism has a tendency to destroy the family unit, home ownership is a means of maintaining the family unit, and force against the destruction of the family requires violence, which is overall unproductive and wasteful. But anything that is unproductive is also freely determined, which is where the vulgarity of fascism lies, in its conflation of freedom with "letting off steam," so-to-speak.

[joinjune]

Short term you might be right. Long term we have seen that western "education" results in declines in birthrates. Demographics are destiny.

[KylerAce]

Birthrates go down in the east too whenever incomes increase (and sometimes without income increasing)

[xnx]

""education""?