I strongly feel we should strive to decrease the amount of people on this planet: less people means less resources needed to feed and to house them. It means less pressure on the planet's ecosystems, less CO2 produced, less pollution.
The only ethical way to get to a lower amount of people is to have less children. We should see falling birth rates as a good thing, not a problem to be solved.
Are falling birth rates a problem for the economy, as the article hints? I can see how that's a problem, but if the economy only works well when the earth's population is ever increasing, that's clearly not sustainable. The future needs to be sustainable, or human kind is not going to have a future.
Because survival is the goal of every species. It's encoded into the brains of a healthy animal. A falling birth rate is the opposite of that, so from a philosophical point of view it's against our most basic and most important purpose of life.
From a more modern economical point of view a falling birth rate means that a lot of the luxuries we enjoy today are based on the fact that future generations will pay for them. Pensions is the obvious one, people from today won't have a pension tomorrow if tomorrow's young people are less than tomorrow's old people. But forget pensions for a moment, an even bigger issue would be health care. Health care is mostly consumed by old non working people and paid for by the younger working population, if the former hugely outnumbers the latter then it's not hard to see how our entire healthcare system will collapse.
This raises the next big issue: immigration and the loss of a nation's own culture. If a nation cannot fix the problem of the falling birth rate then the only way to sustain itself is by having to import huge amounts of young working age people from other countries, inevitable therefore changing the culture and demographic of the nation itself. You don't have to be a right wing lunatic to see that such a drastic slow shift of demographics will cause a lot of friction and issues over a long period of time before it settles again (essentially when one demographic was mostly replaced by a new one).
> The only ethical way to get to a lower amount of people is to have less children. We should see falling birth rates as a good thing, not a problem to be solved.
Well, a falling birth rate means the extinction of humankind, so it's hardly a good thing. What you mean is that you think that we need a temporary slowdown in births because you think that we have grown by too much too fast. Well, that is possible, I don't know for sure, but if you'd look at a graph of humankind you'd want to zoom out by 100x until you don't see every little blip in acute rises and drops and see a slow but steady growth, because anything else would suggest that we have a fundamental issue with our own survival. Now when our grandparents were born the world had not even 50% of the people we hav etoday, so there was definitely a huge influx of humans over the last 100 years and that is mostly explained through huge improvements in medicine and standards of living, vaccinations, etc., so perhaps there is a good argument to say that a short term fall in births is a good thing to soften the issues we see today from those drastic increases in population, but overall a fall in birthrates is not a good thing.