You're not getting the point that, in the aggregate, it is NOT a choice to have farmers, soldiers* , and yes, parents. On an individual level it might be a cho

You're not getting the point that, in the aggregate, it is NOT a choice to have farmers, soldiers* , and yes, parents. On an individual level it might be a choice, but society necessarily needs to be structured to get enough of each of those occupations, i.e. to have sufficient numbers of people making each of those choices. And the required population percentage of parents is at least 50X higher than for farmers and soldiers. And overpopulation/overconsumption isn't a problem. What is a problem is unsustainable growth. Life is much more pleasant today for most people than it was centuries ago because simply having more people allows for more technological development, more sub-specialization, and better efficiencies of scale, and thus paradoxically with more people everyone can have a much higher standard of living than with fewer people. In other words, it isn't zero sum. If the world's population starts rapidly declining then that will be a significant decline in the average standard of living, not an improvement. * I don't want to get into the argument here whether soldiers are actually necessary; let's just assume for this argument that they are, or replace them with construction workers or whatever.