Declining Birthrate

This article from the Atlantic (gift link) takes a thoughtful, thorough look at why the world population has slowed its increase and may indeed begin declining by 2055. (We're already no longer at a replacement level.) Read the article, but spoilers: it's educating women and giving them access to birth control, as well as underpaying half our workforce. Who can afford kids when rent is half your income?

I'm not convinced a population decline would be a bad thing, given what damage humans are doing to the global climate. Would the world be better off if there were fewer humans? Like, maybe, a couple billion, instead of nine billion?

On the other hand, it's the large population that makes all the things we (I, anyway) love possible: the internet, books, good food, air conditioning, universities, parks...when there were only a billion of us infesting the planet, life was grim indeed. Could we keep the advanced technology, medical knowledge, long lives, and Netflix if there were only a billion of us?

Not to mention the loss of genetic diversity if most of us stop reproducing. Loss of cultural diversity too. 

Then there's the "how do a billion working age people support four billion elderly?" question. But automation could fix that, I suppose. Agricultural robots, driverless vehicles, arcologies...and maybe we can all work to age 75. Not me, mind you. Future old people.

This is a question for science fiction. Back in the previous century, all the books were about how overpopulation would doom us. I remember all those books about women having nine or ten kids each, blissfully delighted to spend their lives changing diapers and cooking dinner. Nothing about the physical toll that many pregnancies took on a woman. All the authors were men, of course. No one seemed to have any notion that if women had a choice, they might not want ten children, or three, for that matter.

I'm currently re-reading Kage Baker's Company series, written mostly at the start of this century, in which (among other things) a coalition of rogue cyborgs decides to save the planet by getting rid of 'bad' humans -- people from Africa, for example, and people in prison, and people in the military, religious people, violent people, it's a long list. What one person, I mean cyborg, thinks is fine, another might decide to doom. This cyborg coalition thinks the planet will be better off if there's only about half a million humans, all kept safely on reservations built specifically for them.

I'm not too worried about the declining population, is all I'm saying. Though I am worried about what fascist governments might do if they see their populations falling. We're seeing a bit of that from MAGA America already.