This isn't a given. This is due to the continuous growth cycle without effort made towards long term stability. A pyramid scheme will fall apart if they can no longer scam new members to join.
A system where you need to increase those at the bottom for the top to succeed is a pyramid scheme.
Invest now in elderly care training. Reallocate resources from wasteful corn subsidies into healthcare, edible crops, and renewable energy. This will soften the blow from the inverted pyramid and society will be able to work through it over a period of 20 years.
Or, continue investing in war, divest from education, ensure wealth trickles up, and cry about the problem we all caused. It's not the woman's duty to keep this meat grinder going.
Yes, but not to infinitely grow. Any animal population with unchecked growth will eventually be culled by their own outgrown presence if their environment cannot support them. Humans have deemed current society cannot support their children in the ways they deem important.
Thus we've culled ourselves, not by over-grazing, but by using our own reasoning.
In this case, Humans are capable of supporting as large or small population as we'd like. The planet would support it. What the greater challenge is, is resource allocation. We've collectively decided society-by-combat is the most efficient way to allocate resources and because of that, some people have checked out and used what power they have to not continue that game.
The people deciding not to have children will be the same that suffer in their old age. That is their vote.
Multiple problems with this:
- converting farms from one type of crop to another is often enough outright impossible (because climate and/or soil conditions don't allow other crops), very expensive (e.g. need to replace specialized machinery and buildings) or takes decades (if you shift to anything based on bushes and trees, that shit needs time to grow)
- rebalancing agricultural subsidies is a very, very fine line to walk. as a country, you want overproduction of at least core crops, even if it means excess going to biofuel, and you want to isolate farmers from wild speculation swings on global markets so that they don't call it quits and you suddenly end up with (far) less than you actually need. famines haven't been an issue for the Western world precisely of the artificial oversupply situation for many, many decades.
- healthcare doesn't need more budget. The US, Germany and many other Western healthcare systems have more than enough money - their issue is waste, corruption and perverse incentives.
- corn subsidies aren't automatically wasteful. the corn is needed to provide bio-ethanol as a synthetic fuel, and there are more than enough usecases that foreseeably cannot be converted to electric.
- letting farms just die out or go fallow and no one take over is also bad, especially in areas where soil erosion is already an issue. Once soil dries out and there is no plant material to tie it together, it either can get blown away by the wind or in the worst case it can compress all the way down to the nearest layer of bedrock, making it all but impossible to restore.