Yeah I have no idea if there is a good case to be made for the shrinking population theory, its possible there is, I'm not that familiar with the entirety of the data, but this is not a good case. This article makes the claim the population is shrinking and then attempts to support their theory by citing data that is totally inadequate for making any meaningful statistical inference. If you can account for 1 billion missing people using birth, death and immigration statistics, I am all ears