Who’s gonna build that real estate with fewer people around? Where would money for higher salary come from with fewer customers? Pollution argument is a “carbon footprint” type of bullshit to shift responsibility to general population from companies that actually do most of pollution, and violently defend their right to do so. Communities become less highly knit because of third spaces dying, phones colonising spare time, and algorithms pushing people to have worse view of world and each other.

Increase population should increase efficiency (economies of scale, many products of intellectual labor being infinitely replicatable) - and efficiency did increase at the same time as population. It’s just that salaries didn’t.

Mental gymnastic to make worsening conditions of ordinary people somehow fault of other ordinary people.