[neveroffensive]

> climate change + population growth will stress humans on the continent and increase environmental destruction

I find it interesting that population growth is discussed so little in the context of climate change. It seems like simple incentives/restrictions could be imposed to reduce birth rates. This would have a major impact on both climate change, and the depletion of the planets resources.

[bsder]

> It seems like simple incentives/restrictions could be imposed to reduce birth rates.

You don't need to do this. The simplest solution to birth rates is to improve the economic power of your women--generally by education. Once women have choices that don't suck, birth rates drop dramatically.

[saagarjha]

People generally don't like it when they're told to not have children, as opposed to say buying an electric car or turning off the lights. Restrictive policies, if applied selectively, can also have an effect similar to eugenics.

[newnewpdro]

Restricting population growth is just another restrictive policy, and not all forms of it resemble eugenics as you've implied here. If you just had a yearly quota of births and members of the population were eligible to enter for a random drawing from the quota, it is not eugenics.

[emodendroket]

I think you are not going to find many advocates of forced abortions and involuntary sterilization.

[saagarjha]

What do you about children born over the quota? Fine their families?

[newnewpdro]

I was only pointing out an obvious example approach which is not eugenics-like, it wasn't intended to propose the hypothethical as an ultimate solution. Debating it as such isn't something I have time for or interest in right now.

[saagarjha]

The point I was trying to make was that a levying a fine would end up being a impose a crude way of eugenics on the population, since it might end up allowing for those that are rich to over-reproduce since they can better deal with the consequences.

[newnewpdro]

I'm not convinced enforcement is even necessary at all. Just a quota with zero enforcement would be a significant difference.

Simply having a department receiving resources supporting scientific research and planning of what is an appropriate population size for some kind of nationally recognized standard quality of life, and having that department publish annual figures comparing our size and trajectory to their data would be useful.

Today one often can't even have the conversation without what's effectively a table-flip reaction in the form of terms like eugenics, forced abortions, involuntary sterilization, fascism, nazism, and the holocaust.

I personally think the only way to gracefully manage population size is culturally. A population that's cognizant of how impactful their decision to have excessive children is to everyones' long-term quality of life will behave differently. Today we don't even inform people of what excessive is in this context. Can we even agree in this conversation what an excessive number of children is? Where has it been defined? There's zero consensus, and our leaders willfully ignore the topic.

We have MPG figures on vehicles, we have MPG standards put out by the government as targets, people can qualify what is a fuel-efficient vehicle according to current standards relatively easily as a result. There's _nothing_ from the government saying what is an excessively large family to the best of my knowledge. When people can start having real conversations on this topic, with generally respected data behind the figures, then the culture can begin to evolve through the natural course of societal life.

When the EPA started talking about fuel economy and setting standards, it normalized the conversation surrounding fuel-efficient vehicles while supplying tangible figures. It would be quite useful if something similar happened with the topic of population size. Normalizing this conversation would go a long way towards helping people acknowledge that the main cause behind anthropogenic-caused global problems is the multiplier.

It's not something I expect to ever happen. Our economy is too dependent on continuous growth.

Somewhat off-topic but relevant: If this UBI concept actually gains any traction, it will be very interesting to see what happens to all the optimistic predictions of population size flattening out relatively soon. Occupying people while they make just enough to scrape by is, I suspect, a big part of what keeps their numbers down. UBI is just one example of something that may inadvertently blow those predictions away. When you've got a population on the order of hundreds of millions like in the USA, it doesn't take many doublings to become a billion.