Neither is it natural (from an evolutionary perspective) for us to spend half our lives staring at a TV or mobile screen, my dear Curl. Yet here we are!

The cold truth is: humanity decreasing in numbers is a good thing. A great thing, actually. We're already far past the maximum population this little planet can sustainably support, at least with our current levels of consumption and spending

A couple of decades ago, people were worried the Earth could no longer provide enough resources to sustain the human population. Now, we might actually have a chance to keep things under control without severely sacrificing technology and the comforts it brings us

End of civilization is always thought to be due to some apocalypse. But it looks like the natural progression for modern societies is to shrivel up and die... 

There are other ways to break the pattern, putting more value on having children over working. AI revolution can help with that, but not if the billionaire class takes all the wealth generated by AI. 

If modern societies want to be sustainable in the long term, raising children should be rewarded the same as working for a company. Which requires a huge shift in social values. In today's society being a stay at home mom/dad living on welfare is looked down on. But err, you need children to sustain a society. 

Job working hours can be tuned to school hours instead of having to work more to pay for childcare. Education should be free, school supplies and everything. The costs of raising a child need to be lowered a lot. 

And perhaps make our society a lot more inviting (and safe) for children and families... 

It isn't places like the UK that are overpopulated though, it's the developing world that's overpopulated and having way too many kids.

At this point though we've gone way off topic from the actual incident with the girl though, so I'll leave it there.

Yeah decreasing the overall population in the long term is only a good thing.

The fact is that the vast majority of Earth's population does not yet live at 'our' level of consumption and spending. Hence economic migration. Consumption will still go up a whole lot while living standards equalize.

But still having more kids will be necessary to eventually sustain a stable population. Our current living standards / ways of life in western societies leads to ever shrinking population. Which will only accelerate as people live longer and keep off having kids until later in life. 
(I do hope my kids have kids faster than me so I'm not in my late 70s already before I see grand children lol)

Which, honestly… sounds so much more chill and inviting than the alternative: everyone starving on a hot planet destroyed by climate change, haha

I just think I much prefer the idea of humanity being reduced to a few hundred million people rather than billions having to face humanitarian crises, food and water shortages, and mass migration due to a huge chunk of the planet becoming uninhabitable due to the warmth 

Those countries have lower levels of consumption and pollution. Since they are poor, they produce less trash and have lower CO₂ emissions per capita. If everyone on the planet consumed as much as the average american or european citizen in the last ~100 years we'd be doomed already

There will come a time when even poorer countries will start to pollute heavily just like China is doing now

The fact is, Earth cannot survive if everyone wants to live within the comforts of a capitalist society

All those excess numbers from developing countries then pour into developed countries though and then consume and produce waste too.

Again though, this has gone off topic; a 12 year old girl should be allowed to celebrate her culture in her own country without being punished.

This thread is in part about imigration, because immigration is responsable for fostering a climate where children are not allowed to celebrate their own culture, a fundamental failure in how to handle multicultural societys. This alone (as a microcosm for bigger but similar problems) makes immigration not worth it for me.

But apart from cultural enrichment, people also make an economic argument for immigration. How much does housing cost though, for legal and illegal immigrants? How much for food and transportation? How much for education (learning english as a start)? How much for the additional strain the NHS? How much for additional policing and a higher crime rate in general (Sweden saw a staggering increase since taking on a staggering amount of migrants)? In Germany I heard that almost half the money for the unemployed goes to migrants now. If this veritable mountain of money would go to the native population (the source of all this money), perhaps people would feel more inclined to have kids.

But there are also things way harder to quantify in monetary terms. How much does it cost to go from a high trust society to a low trust one? How much for losing the vote for women? How much for losing free speech? How much for losing democracy to theocracy? Some might think these points to be extreme, but the majority of muslims in the UK want sharia law. And this is exactly what you would get with that.

But importing cheap foreign labour will at least really show the billionairs, right?

There is documented data that shows immigration is a good thing for economies, when controlled. The issue in Europe is immigrants from muslim background are refugees and were accepted in humanitarian way, it was not a controlled (or planned) immigration. Well-educated Immigrants are an actual very good investment, since they come in legal age for working, unlike investing in raising kids that will take 20 years until they become labour force

No amount of money is convincing people to have kids. As SvennoJ said, to convince people to have kids we will need to rework the society to see raising families as a full-time job, it's not a matter of only economic order, but also cultural. Will take a couple of decades to change how people perceive kids. Until there I see no other options other than bringing foreign-born people

We are all going to get old, and there is a gap in population in their 30~50 and kids from 0~10 years. Who will take our jobs to keep society working? We will all need doctors and nurses eventually 

Also, many of people here seem to be born into countries that were build BY immigrants

Brazil, Canada, USA, Australia...

There is no need to fear controlled and planned immigration