As sibling comment says, this is the outcome of what we did right, and decades of policy programme.
We spent the 20th century changing the norm from "women will, from teenagerhood, roll the dice on pregnancy approximately five times with a 2% maternal mortality rate, with the expectation of at least one child not making it to adulthood, and a reasonable chance of experiencing famine at least once in your life" to .. not that. From the 1.65 billion people who entered the 20th century to the approximately 8 billion today.
We averted the Malthus catastrophe. With tremendous effort we got the line to dip below replacement rate. Now people are panicking that it will never go up again?
How many people do you think they should be on Earth? 8 billion, sixteen, a hundred billion? What does the average megacity look like at that level?
How can it be the outcome of what we did right when it is leading to shrinking, aging populations struggling to pay for less and less used infrastructure? The only way we are avoiding becoming Japan 2.0 in the West is by immigration, and that's leading to the resurgence of far right politicians in Europe, which turned out very well the first time around.
I don't think we should grow the population forever. I also don't think we should shrink so smaller and smaller generations are burdened to pay for the life of older and larger ones.
We spent the 20th century changing the norm from "women will, from teenagerhood, roll the dice on pregnancy approximately five times with a 2% maternal mortality rate, with the expectation of at least one child not making it to adulthood, and a reasonable chance of experiencing famine at least once in your life" to .. not that. From the 1.65 billion people who entered the 20th century to the approximately 8 billion today.
We averted the Malthus catastrophe. With tremendous effort we got the line to dip below replacement rate. Now people are panicking that it will never go up again?
How many people do you think they should be on Earth? 8 billion, sixteen, a hundred billion? What does the average megacity look like at that level?