Distrust runs rampant, people turn to the extraction of their peers vs expansion with their new friends.
It will get better.
Edit:
Think bigger than the extractors!
An alternative thought is "I'm not going to do that because I don't want to upset potential friends/future relationships that will benefit me"
Likewise, it sounds like you're upset at all of these people and would like to just be left alone
An alternative thought is "Look at all of these people around me who are don't feel like they have a place in the community or that they won't have enough in the future. What can I offer to my community, and how can I get them involved?"
If population were to decline, wouldn't that mean each person's piece of the pie is growing? If "piece of pie" is real estate or some other scarce resource that would seem to be the case.
Certain resources would become more available such as land and housing, while others like say, new cheap speakers that rely on plentiful hands and brains, would become scarce. You may see people who are retired and rely on new speakers staying cheap use laws or force to maintain their same level of access to new cheap speakers, at the expense of everyone else. The newfound access to housing in desirable areas may also not be a panacea: with a decrease in hands and brains some neighborhoods may find themselves poorly maintained, abandoned, or even dropped from local utilities (like in Detroit when its population drastically changed).
In general I think, in the USA, a growing population is a good thing for our pie. There's some level of population where too many people is bad, but until then each person adds to the experience of everyone else.
Even for housing it would feel positive: if our population was growing quickly many wouldn't mind moving to St. Louis - today's St. Louis will be nothing compared to tomorrow's Mega Louis, for example!
* In the last 10 years, billionaires have doubled their wealth, making nearly six times more than the increase in wealth seen by the bottom 50%.
* Since 2020, for every dollar the bottom 90% have gained, billionaires have gained $1.7m.
* 81 Billionaires hold more wealth than 50% of the world combined.
* During the worst of the pandemic, according to the World Bank, the income losses among the poorest 40% of humanity were twice as large as among the richest 20%, and global income inequality has risen for the first time in decades.
See Section 1.1 for the big hitter statistics. Chapter 2 goes into the whys, which corresponds pretty closely to a description of what you could call a cartel operation conducted by the global elite.
...so not only is the pie already insanely skewed, but the companies that these people control are raising profit margins on essential goods and services during a time where those who are already precariously-positioned in our economy are losing out on income opportunities so fast that global progress on income inequality reversed during this time.
This is literally entirely about the extraction being done by the class of people who have executive control over the policies and mechanisms of extraction -- minerals/metals/water/fossil fuels/generally physical extraction, predatory/extractive behaviors in finance, privatization vis a vis a minimization of accountability which acts as a force multiplier for extraction, etc.
These are those who pat themselves and each other on the back for flying on planes powered by kerosene to a centralized location to make non-binding, unenforceable gestures in the loose shape of policy at periodic COP and Davos summits. These are those who pacify and distract the masses with unified narrative-making campaigns to manufacture consent for the status quo -- lies like "recycling is an individual problem" and "privatization and unregulated markets are prosperous economies", as well as redirections and mislabelings like "wouldn't more cops (guns) in school mean children will be safer?" and "through our cameras you can see violent, out-of-state rioters in the streets".
A wealth tax is not an insane idea. It is a gentle brake that allows us to regain enough control of our earth-ship to maneuver around the imminent obstacles. We can talk about more radical steps if you want, I'm all about more active global economic management, but we need to recognize what this system is becoming.
[1] https://webassets.oxfamamerica.org/media/documents/survival-...
And at leasy until very recently, leaded kerosene. Long after leaded fuel has been banned for regular (car-driving) people due to it's known disastrous health effects.