Even a stable population can't mean it can never shrink. A long-term stable population means that sometimes it grows a bit over a period of decades, and sometim

Even a stable population can't mean it can never shrink. A long-term stable population means that sometimes it grows a bit over a period of decades, and sometimes it shrinks a bit over a period of decades. Overall long-term it roughly stays the same, but short-term it doesn't necessarily. The baby boom caused huge problems down the line: now we have an elderly population with proportionally a relatively small working population, and no one really knows how to deal with that. Keeping the population growing forever is not physically possible. The real question is whether we want another baby boom. It seems to me it might solve some issues 20 years down the line, but will cause lots of issues 80 years down the line. Before crashing catastrophically at some unknown point in the future. And lets be real here: the US has a population of about 340 million people today. In 2000 it had about 280 million people. If the system can't handle a relatively small shrink back to 330 million or 320 million over a period of several decades, then the system is bad.