Abortion and Population

[Mister Agenda]

Very interesting question. I can think of a number of reasons for population growth to be good. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that unimpeded growth is good.

Here are my initial thoughts

• A declining population isn’t good, just from a practical standpoint. Without new people, lots of business start to shut down. Baby products is an obvious one, but also schools, colleges and universities. Then, we don’t have enough people in the workforce. (We already are experiencing that) We don’t have enough trade workers to keep things running, doctors, lawyers (okay, less of them is fine), teachers, admin assistants, etc. People will consolidate and make do. Maybe we’ll eventually reset at a certain level, but we could also go out with a whimper.
  
• If we want to achieve great things, then we need new people, new ideas, new energy. I want us to go to the moon, Mars and beyond. To do that we need to have people to settle those places. We also need new people to invent new things. We have problems, like people not having enough to sustain themselves. New people with new ideas can help with that.
  

A steady population could be good, it seems. Unfortunately, our current path isn’t going this way.

Can you think of any other reasons?

A declining population really isn't a problem as long as the global population continues to climb. Countries with declining populations, which are preety much only industrially advanced nations, can easily make up the numbers through immigration. Some countries, like Japan and the USA don't like that solution, but it isn't the fault of declining population if they choose to shoot themselves in the foot to keep foreigners out. Not to mention, we can always incentivise having more babies if we want to.

It is not possible in the foreseeable future to ship any significant portion of our population off to other planets, even the nearest ones. There's no conceivable future in which the expense of space travel isn't a far greater restriction than having enough people to send.

We already have over 8 billion people to invent new things, at some point there are going to be diminishing returns. The most conservative UN projection has global population continuing to increase until at least 2050. And again, falling birth rates due to factors under our control is something we obviously can control.