Well, Qatar's birthrate is in a decline, too. But that's beside the point, since I don't actually disagree with you. Both your comment and mwengler's reply strike me as arguing a different point from what I was making in the essay.
I was primarily trying to say that life extension won't cause an immediate economic disaster - that yes, although it will impact global demographics, it will take many decades (maybe centuries) for the impact of those changes to propagate through society, which is plenty of time for our economy to adjust. Dealing with gradual change isn't a problem, dealing with sudden and unanticipated shocks is. We've successfully dealt with many such gradual changes before.
In contrast, you two seem to be making the Malthusian argument that in the long term, any population will expand until it reaches the maximum capacity of the environment and each individual makes no more than a subsistence living. And I agree with that, but that has little to do with life extension, since the very same logic would apply regardless of whether life extension was ever invented. Yes, life extension may have the effect that we'll hit population and resource limits faster, but we'd eventually run into them anyway. The main question is whether life extension would accelerate the expansion towards Malthusian limits enough to make the transition period much more painful than what it would otherwise be, and whether that added pain would outweigh the massive reductions in human suffering that age-related decline causes - and I don't see a reason to presume that it would.
Well, Qatar's birthrate is in a decline, too. But that's beside the point, since I don't actually disagree with you. Both your comment and mwengler's reply strike me as arguing a different point from what I was making in the essay.
I know this is tangential, but I want to point out why the statistic you used is deceptive. Qatar has a huge foreign population (80% of the population) with much lower birthrates than the native Qataris. Four kids/ woman for Qataris, and 2 kids / woman for resident foreigners. So the decline in birth rates is mainly caused by...
I might need a better title (It has now been updated), but here goes, anyway:
I've been considering this for a while now. Suppose we reach a point where we can live for centuries, maybe even millenia, then how do we balance? Even assuming we're as efficient as possible, there's a limit for how much resources we can have, meaning an artificial limit at the amount of people that could exist at any given moment even if we explore what we can of the galaxy and use any avaliable resource. There would have to be roughly the same rate of births and deaths in a stable population.
How would this be achieved? Somehow limiting lifespan, or children, assuming it's available to a majority? Or would this lead to a genespliced, technologically augmented and essentially immortal elite that the poor, unaugmented ones would have no chance of measuring up to? I'm sorry if this has already been considered, I'm very uneducated on the topic. If it has, could someone maybe link an analysis of the topic of lifespans and the like?