A 50 year transition to 50% of the current population would be difficult to manage, but if you could skip ahead another 50 years, I believe everyone would have

A 50 year transition to 50% of the current population would be difficult to manage, but if you could skip ahead another 50 years, I believe everyone would have a higher quality of life: cheaper housing, less crowded nature and more of it, less competition for natural resources, more land available per person, more opportunities for recognition in winner-take-all markets, etc. At our current population density levels and birthrate, I believe society should (moderately) discourage having kids, and one of the best ways to do that is to say "those who want it the most should do it", which means those for whom its the most beneficial and meaningful. A good starting point for that is not to discourage having kids, but not particularly support it either. If its hard, that's ok, the people who are ok with the difficulty will do it, and those that aren't won't, and we'll have fewer new people to the benefit of ourselves and future generations. I didn't think this until several years ago, when I got the opportunity to work at an NGO focused on carbon neutral energy systems research. This gave me a lot of work time to explore what the US looks like today, and how that has changed over the past 50 years. One of my key random personal takeaways from several years exploring carbon chains, land use, etc, a takeaway shared with several of my colleagues who already had children, was that we had previously underestimated the degree to which quality of life in post-2000 (completely aside from quality of life for other species, which is a separate topic) is negatively impacted by the increased density of people. For example, and there's lots of stories you can tell like this, many people like having access to alone time in nature, and it's a lot harder in 2020 than it was in 1970, simply because more people in the country => less natural / fallow land. "The woods behind the neighborhood" is less and less a thing. As an aside, my wife and I were considering having kids until I got exposed to these viewpoints, and they changed my mind. I think its better that my brother has kids, because he REALLY REALLY wanted to have them. And that's great. But, for example, he now doesn't have the free time I have to do open source.... and neither will I if I work longer hours to cover for him ;-)