Economically, we can expect countries to struggle with fewer young workers and taxpayers. Automation will help but robots don’t buy refrigerators or smart clothes for the office party
For thousands of years philosophers have wrung their hands because of fears about the supposed negative impacts of population growth on life as they knew it. In the 5th century BC Confucius argued that population increases would reduce the quality of life. In Ancient Greece both Plato and Aristotle maintained that a growing population was not sustainable for their resources. In the second century AD Christian philosopher Tertullian, worried that Carthage, with its “teeming population,” was becoming unsustainably “burdensome to the world”.