Population Control

Due to the rates at which infectious disease become resistant to antibiotics as well as the shrinking of the world due to easier travel, I'm honestly not that concerned about overpopulation in the long-term.

Population control on a global scale is not going to happen, I think. People are just too different and too incapable of understanding each other.

The problem with overpopulation is really condensed to third world countries, whereas economic growth often outstrips population growth in first world countries. In fact it is constantly argued in economic history and the geography of economics that the persistent high population growth in these third world countries is what has kept them as third world countries (because the economy has been unable to create jobs, wealth or life quality for everyone new).

In a free, democratic society population control is unlikely to happen on a national scale. Generally, people do not consider themselves a net deficit for the environment (but most are).

I think if one wishes to limit population, one must look to the fundamental reasons for having kids. One of the main reasons for having kids in a third world country is to ensure your own economic safety. These countries lack social security, and they lack any form of government pension for when a person gets too old to work. And, in fact, it is often not possible to save up for a pension on your own salary. And because of the population growth which keeps salaries near the absolute bottom, the next generation is forced into the same situation.

Attitudes and religion are also important, although very little can be done about those.

Available contraceptives is another method of voluntarily limiting population growth. A government seeking to limit the amount of kids could support such initiatives (and, similarly, not pay people to have kids like some countries do).

If you're worried about overpopulation, I think it's important not to help people who are starving in areas of constant growth. As cruel as it may sound, and this is coming from someone who has lived through rough times, if a population lives over its production means, it should be forced to shrink or consume less.

Edit: If the reins were free, it might be a good idea to outlaw religion and porn. Those are probably major contributors to pregnancies in first world countries. But honestly, at that point one might as well force sterilization on people with x amount of kids.

And of course, there's also the possibility of covertly spreading diseases to countries that cannot afford vaccinations.

Draconian measures to control population growth? History is rife with such nonsense. Its called ethnic cleansing or genocide, take your pick. Too many of one and not enough of another. Diversity is anathema to some and barely understood by others, none of it respected. No equality....many different classes and many more that have as opposed to the vast majority that does not. There is a great imbalance whether it is in the third world countries or the first (Europe) or the second(The Americas). Its sort of like peace.....how can you have it if nobody wants it? Because if they did they would have had it a long time ago.

Expecting global population control though our current international system does seem implausible, but cultures can and do change rapidly from time to time. But this one is probably harder than the civil rights struggles we in the U.S. have been going through since the 1950s.

Outlawing porn would help nothing, and outlawing religion seems even more insane than wanting a world where civilized women can and do limit themselves to one or two children. As far as food aid goes, the problem is not so simple as subsidizing breeding in an overpopulated habitat. The real mess is that most food aid does little or nothing to help local populations restore their ability to grow their own food. Too many farmers are essentially driven to plant crops for export by distorted 'global' economics when they and their extended families would be far better off in the long run with local food production.

When it comes to 'free rein' thoughts about this problem, my dream is more fully in the land of speculative fiction than Heavenfall's edit in reply 2. I'd like to see a genetic tweak to our entire species that enables women to decide exactly when they want to become pregnant, ensures that the only risk of a failed pregnancy is serious physical trauma, and limits that choice to once in a lifetime unless she manages to live her whole life in a very low pop-density setting. 

Not to worry, mother earth will shake us off like the tiny cold we are.

Starvation (when the oilcrisis hits) will be the natural way to reduce overpopulation. Especially in the primitive 3rd world countries. So things will solve itself. So don't worry, play games and be happy

Rough times??   Aren't you an ethnical Swede that's lived here all your life??   Having a tough life doesn't mean that you were denied the latest iPhone you know

It indeed sounds cruel, but you seem to be one of the few realistic people in the world that dare to say things like that.

I don't understand at all how religion is a major contributor to pregnancy in firstworld countries (since they are christian). Christianity isn't against contraceptives are they? (ignoring catholics)

And pr0n O_o   Don't get that at all.

You're definetly a freespeaker or what they call it. But the problem is that it's not guaranteed to be effective since the UN & EU would hurry to create a cure and might even want Europe to take care of them....Another possibility is to arm warlords (there is an endless amount of them down there in Africa) that want to conquer.

Religion - go forth and multiply (christianity). Islam also has some stuff about massproducing the faith. Rules against abortions and contraceptives also ups the birth rates.

Porn - believe it or not, correlation between pregnancies and amount of porn. The french government ran porn one day every week for a while when they wanted to boost their numbers, and guess what... it worked.

Rough times = no dime in my pocket and no place in the world to get another.

Have some faith, people. We'll exterminate ourselves, one way or another. You'll see. Probably.

Yes.  Because it is so close to a 100% fact any future event can be, that there will be a massive population crash sooner or later, it will sort itself out.  But not very easily, and very painfully for most if not all people on Earth.  Even the lucky(??) ones who survive won't be happy.

Which is why I'm leaning towards having no kids myself.  You don't have to have kids to be a part of improving people's lives.  And "baby bonuses" and the like are very short-sighted ways of trying to improve things locally.

Best regards,
Steven.

How does one be both naive and banal at the same time?...;)

BTW....reproduction is NOT 'a fundamental human right' ... it's an animal function, like eating, shitting and breathing..... none of which is any sort of 'fundamental right'.  

'Population control' will only either be conscious choice or inevitably imposed through whatever environmental/social/economic 'hardship' gets you first.

One way or another every single death through starvation or alternate forms of genocidal manipulation of the world's resources will get YOU, not 'just' them.

Eventually.

Agreed. Besides, what criteria or organization, entitiy, authority, etc. would anyone suggest be responsible for determining the measure or worth by which one stays..or goes. Be kinda like playing God, don't you think? (or whatever "higher" power you believe in...) 

It would seem that only the most drastic means for controlling population have been suggested, some things never change. 

In case you haven't noticed there is an easier and less violent way.  Across the world there is in fact an alternate life style that would more than likely, over time, have the same effect on the growth of population that everyone is seeking.  Now I'm not saying that everyone has to adopt the life style.  Allow the alternate life style the same status as we give the so called accepted life style and I think we would achieve what everyone is looking for.

The solutions to problems don't always have to be drastic and involve some sort of dominace of one side over the other. 

I bet this made some folks sit back in there chair. 

It might if I had any idea what alternative lifestyle you were talking about.

Anyway attitudes are more difficult to change than laws.

Really, you have no idea?

Whose attitudes are you talking about?  Must be those who are resistance to change and want to use the same problem solving techniques that have been shown not to work.

Well, maybe I'm from a different culture or something, but if you're talking about a gay lifestyle then that already has the same "status" in most of the civilized world. In fact I find it slightly offensive that you would label it a separate lifestyle at all.

I'm talking about the attitudes of people, everyone, that may take whole generations to change (with no guarantee of success). I don't think there is any practical solution to the problem of population overgrowth, I just suggested possible ways to go about the problem. Most likely mother nature will be the limit.

Nah. That's already been tried (Third Reich).

Besides, we've already got "Death Panels" [insert heavy sarcasm].

Heavenfall I didn't mean to offend you or anyone.  When most speak of an alternative lifestyle they refer to one that is different from which they practice. Well, atleast I do.  I also happen to live is the U.S., which is behind the times when it comes to some subjects.  Hence my reference of one side having dominace over the other.

My references to problem solving is based on the responses so far.  My thinking on this is for instances Wars, if they were meant to be a problem solving solution, why do we still have them.  How many times to we have to fix the problem.  Just doesn't seem to work by any standards.

I'm pretty sure he's using outdated slang to refer to homosexuality. If you buy the Kinsey scale, which I mostly do, then it's true that perhaps half of the population has the potential remain exclusively homosexual, but that would take tremendous cultural change that would almost certainly entail lots of the violence that Philly (sarcastically?) suggests his plan could avoid. That, or it would take a very long time.

It's another SF solution. Maybe it could be workable with some 'change syringes' like the ones in Nancy Kress' Beggars Ride. Instead of making people photosynthetic, it could flip the current proportions of our population so that breeders were the minority. Jafo's correct about the matter being part of our animal natures, but our tool use is definitely near ready to start drastically changing ourselves as well as our environment.

On a loosely-related point: Reproductive freedom is a legal right in most nations. I don't buy 'natural law' as a source of rights. Rights come from and are maintained, changed, or discarded by political processes. When rights touch closely on our most 'primitive' drives, they make for especially tricky politics. I support zero population growth as a minimal goal for the whole planet (reduction for a while would be better still). But I do not support things such as the block-lady menstruation cops and forced abortions that helped China get a handle on their unsustainable population growth.

GW Swicord I didn't know that I suggested a plan, just another way to look at solving the problem.  I'm old now, 62, but in my lifetime I have not married or fathered any children, unfortunatly I have participated in wars.  Nope I didn't follow an alternative lifestyle either.

It took the world a long time to get to where it is with it's problems, solving them will more than likley take as long.  As far as violence, most folks are resistent to change over a short period of time.

I've read a lot of history and I basically agree with you here. Except that people can be damned surprising at times. When I came out in the early '80s, I could never have imagined that before I even made it to my 50th birthday we would have same-sex marriage in a growing number of states and soon the military will no longer make gay people live a lie in order to serve in uniform.

As far as heterosexual folks who choose not to create more people, more power to all of y'all. There's a ludicrous mountain of cultural forces telling everyone that they're not truly whole adults until they reproduce, plus the even-more-mysterious hormonal stuff (I have men friends who went baby-crazy almost like they had ovaries...).

One of the weird twists of success for the gay rights movement is that now many of us get to keep our parents after coming out, but have to suffer them talking about adoption, surrogacy, sperm donors, and all that. Grandchildren are some kind of crack to many parents, it seems.

Well, as said previously, every action ultimately has an effect on other people's reproductive choices. For example, the issues of food price. So the issue is arguably not whether or not we choose control population, but whether we choose to do so more directly than we do now.

What about a simple fund through which western countries offer cash in return for sterilisation? No one loses their rights through that: if people choose the status quo then fine, if they choose to make use of it then it's a transfer or wealth to where it is needed. Ie, a carrot rather than a stick. This is similar to how renewable energy subsidies work and there are many other paralells.

First, there is already far too much sketchy social policy woven into the tax codes of the industrialized world. I would be far happier with clear and accountable subsidies for all manner of policy goals instead of the smoke and mirrors that 'pro-business' and 'pro-family' tax breaks create.

Second, I trust your fine idea of paying for folks to volunteer for sterilisation includes wealth transfers to impoverished sectors of wealthy nations. Right here in the U.S. we have many regions where problems of poverty are made worse by a lack of family planning.

Plus, we still have plenty of prosperous, money-oriented folks who tend to over-reproduce and a sturdy payout to get them out of the baby business would also do well for us all in the long run. There's no reason to limit the call for population control to the poorest people on the planet. Every baby sucks up resources, and rich babies suck up a great deal more than poor ones.

There is another way that the problem of over population can be looked at.  Instead of concentration on the reproduction end of the cycle, babies, how about looking at the end of the life cycle.  Through all of the advances in technology and medicine humans live a much longer life.  Take away 10 or 20 years out of the life cycle and............. 

Your use of shudder quotes is telling. None of these scenarios are even moderately plausible in the short term because every major culture in the world is saturated with norms that promote population growth.

As far as the fantasy-land side of this thread goes, I never said anything about paying someone what "he/she thinks sterilization is worth." I just prefer the idea that any scheme that used my fictional tax dollars to promote sterilization set a 'price' that would both be a big (or very big) deal to poor folks everywhere and at least moderately attractive to 'average' U.S. citizens. It's just a matter of building a funding formula that's based on the estimated resource consumption for children of the given sterilisation candidate. Something like that is barely more fictitious than the current governmental definitions of poverty.