> Historically health in economics is associated with growth and Population growth is part of economic growth. If you measure "health" by growth, then you'll g

> Historically health in economics is associated with growth and Population growth is part of economic growth. If you measure "health" by growth, then you'll get an association between "health" and growth. This means nothing. You haven't even tried to give any other definition of "health". > Additionally the trendline of negative population growth is 0 population. ... and any positive growth tends toward infinity. Furthermore any fixed positive growth rate ends with a spherical mass of flesh expanding at the speed of light, and that happens in finite time. After that you have to slow your growth to cubic, though. Neither projection will actually come true. Neither prediction will come close to coming true. You can't extrapolate anything forever. Furthermore there are obvious mechanistic reasons to expect the "demographic transaction" to be a bobble that will last at most a few centuries. Suggesting that it'll lead to human extinction is, um, loony. And you haven't said why zero population would even be a problem. If everybody at every step along the way chooses not to reproduce, that means everybody got what they wanted. Well, OK, you may have not gotten what you want with respect to other people's reproduction, but you know what? That's none of your business. > I'm not sure you're aware of the criticality of negative population growth that japan/china/korea are all facing. I'm aware of all the people who think it's critical. I do not find their claims very compelling. The best they seem to be able to come up with is that there aren't, or won't be, enough young people to do the work to support all the old people. That probably isn't even true, given that it's a global economy, and we're also on track to replace all human labor, long before there's a global population "shortage". But if it is true, well, who are they that other people should exist to work for them? Most of the the other reasons for claiming things like that are "critical" tend to come down to nationalism, which is anti-compelling. > Can you not call anyone a loonie? It’s this type of attack and personalization that adds barriers to actual critical debate. This was a thread about privacy issues in a phone app. When you drag in your personal obsessions in the context of something totally unrelated, people are going to call you a loony.