So change the economic system? The balls to the wall neoliberal, winner takes all, no safety net model that the Anglo American world has been moving towards for the past thirty years is not the only one. The Anglo American post war consensus model which was more redistributory correlated with higher growth rates (not saying it caused them, kinda hard to tell) while the Northern European corporatist, Scandinavian mixed model and Japanese corporatist models have all been successful in both creating economic growth and distributing that wealth more evenly amongst the population. It has always entertained me that the one thing that the average Marxist and neo liberal share is a belief that there is only one type of capitalism.
But neither the Northern European nor Japanese models can cope with negative real growth in consumption. Nor negative real growth in savings.
There is a fundamental issue in capitalism that there must always be growth. Without growth, the entire concept of investment breaks down and the business cycle cannot continue. You could totally replace it with something that isn't capitalism, but that's not a small endeavor and won't happen without massive conflict.
Our current reality is that if the population shrinks significantly, there is a good likelihood that will happen.
