Puppeteer Putin said:
I'm gutted here. I do believe there should be some sort of population control. Yes it's near nigh impossible to enforce and yes it may infringe on the individuals "freedoms" but fact of the matter is, we need less people. We've ended up in the exponential growth of population that has become unsustainable. In the short term, strategically, it may not be a bad idea.
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Because of the exponential growth we need more people to pay for the older generations survive. It's already evident that the generations following the baby-boomers are going to dole out the cash in form of taxes.
So from here there are two options 1) employ population control or 2) don't prolong the life of the elderly, let them go naturally. Now I'm bracing myself for a flaming but many live way beyond their years and are sucking up resources that could be used elsewhere. By no means should they cut their lives short or be refused treatment but perhaps just let them die rather than aggressively prolonging life.
I'm not sure I understand your point about exponential growth and taxes. Are you saying that we require exponential growth in order to retain social institutions (like Social Security)? I hope you understand that the current crisis with social security and the baby boomers is the result pricely of
non-exponential growth. If had continued to grow at the rate of our grand parents then there would be no problem in funding Social Security.
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I have two points to make here:
Point #1: Population control is not as important as say, education in general.
Er, I'm looking for a chart I saw online. I'll edit my post if I find it. If you find it before me, please post it: It's a bar graph comparing educated to non-educated women in six or seven countries and the number of children the average woman is expected to have.
Essentially, people have studied the relationship between the number of children women have with no education and the number of children have with more education. The study compared a bunch of countries. In the USA and many western nations, there is still a trend (women with less than a high school diploma on average have something like 3.8 children), but is not as strong as it is in some developing nations, like Nigeria or Botswana or something. In those poorer African nations, uneducated women can be expected to have as many as 8-12 kids in their life time. However, high school educated women have half of that, and college educated women have even fewer.
All this implies that beyond sex education, distribution of contraceptives, etc, a better policy is just to increase the availability of education to women (especially). This is not only easier, but has many other practical applications as well (too much education can't be a bad thing, unless you're Big Brother).
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Point #2: Populations are starting to control themselves.
Exhibit A:
As I have previously stated, global population growth in the past few decades has
slowed for the first time in human history. Global growth peaked 50-60 years ago with the Baby Boomers, and has since fallen. From 1940-1960 the human population tripled. Since then it has merely doubled (in twice as much time!). To be honest, I'm not particularly alarmed.
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To me, this implies that education and social instruction are much more useful and ethical then strict population control (look at the mess in China!) or something crazy like denying health care to the elderly.
