Well said. Personally, I care more about the wellbeing of current, existing humans than I do about hypothetical future ones, though, so given the choice between reducing fertility rates and reducing life expectancy for similar quality-of-life results, I’d choose the former.

We almost-certainly need to keep our population working longer, for economic reasons. And we’re I to get my wish of Far Fewer Babies, that would be even more true than it is today. With no new people to pay our pensions and healthcare needs, we’d doubtless have to work far later into life. And a dramatically-shrinking fertility-rate-fed population will produce other problems, too, like an insufficiency of (young, working) doctors to care for the (multitudinous, dying) old people. But the sooner we’re able to turn around our population explosion, the slower a population decline we can tolerate without “going reindeer” on our island.

Thanks for the comment.