Families are choosing lower birthrates the world over. It’s dropping fast, just not fast enough for my taste.

You make a great point about convincing people to accept a lower standard of living. A benevolent government would ask for this the same way as a billionaire would squeeze out the middle class so they didn’t have to change their lifestyle. One would have basic security built in, the other would maximize precarity to extort more work out of their disposable slaves. Our hoarding tendencies are ingrained because we KNOW how precarity is abused.

It’s a real problem. I’m not convinced humanity has it in them to survive.