I don't disagree that depopulation has been ongoing - and presents problems, but the right-now issue is an oncoming shortage of working age people. Looking at the demographic 'pyramids' of, say, China, Germany, or the RF, they're pretty much screwed. Not enough young people to support elders in (or going into) retirement. The US, Australia, France, and NZ seem to be in decent shape as their Boomers had kids. The US will have labor availability issues for the next ten years or so, but there's an end in sight. Meanwhile, there are still plenty of willing workers in the Global South who might fit into the "settler" societies of Canada, the US, Australia, NZ - and maybe eventually Ukraine, although I'd expect it to be more of a draw to Russian speakers. The rest of the world has an issue as whatever industry they have needs to be able to export goods (and possibly import raw materials). Japan, a country that's been in population collapse since the late 80s has solved this by siting manufacturing facilities in countries with enough middle-age population to support a consumer-based economy. They could do this because they became relatively rich before their collapse. China has been struggling to emulate Japan, but they've crashed before getting rich - and have pissed off their trading partners both by using MFN to dump products at below cost and have been raiding intellectual property via industrial espionage. Those partners are (IMO finally) reevaluating the situation. And now that they've realized that their provincial governments have been lying about birth numbers for the last couple of decades, they've realized just how dire their situation is.
Without getting into how the US backing away from supporting the Breton Woods Accords is going to cause food-availability problems for countries dependent on imports of either food or agricultural inputs - essentially undoing the 'Green Revolution' for them.
On top of all that, Economists have NO idea whether the economic controls (interest rates, money supply, etc.) will work in a shrinking economy. So an uncharted world for them, leading to multiple missteps.
We live in interesting times indeed.
Disclaimer: Boomer with no offspring here (we decided not to have any based on Ehrlich's thinking and US per capita consumption of natural resources vs the rest of the world).
Apologies for such a long response; no way to say it in fewer words (I suck at self-editing).
