With fewer people more things will count as “too niche to be commercially viable”. I lived in a village where I couldn’t find a pencil 3b or softer at local stores.

I hope anon enjoys mainstream music ~more than i do~

How do you account for buildings decaying with time? Let’s look at shorter term too while we’re at it. Luckily, we don’t have to speculate - in Japan a lot of towns depopulate, locally due to people moving to big cities, as well as generally due to population decline. They have increased bear attacks, car brigdes use of which is banned because they are old, but municipalities don’t even have money to demolish them, healthcare less available

Who’s gonna build that real estate with fewer people around? Where would money for higher salary come from with fewer customers? Pollution argument is a “carbon footprint” type of bullshit to shift responsibility to general population from companies that actually do most of pollution, and violently defend their right to do so. Communities become less highly knit because of third spaces dying, phones colonising spare time, and algorithms pushing people to have worse view of world and each other.

Increase population should increase efficiency (economies of scale, many products of intellectual labor being infinitely replicatable) - and efficiency did increase at the same time as population. It’s just that salaries didn’t.

Mental gymnastic to make worsening conditions of ordinary people somehow fault of other ordinary people.