[SoftwareMaven]

The answer to that problem is education, not killing off an underclass. Educated societies have far fewer children than non, to the point that some first world countries are losing population.

The thing is, it's impossible to gain an education when you are constantly starving or sick. Solve that problem and you move towards solving the next.

[technoslut]

It's not about killing an underclass. Human beings are selfish.

>Educated societies have far fewer children than non, to the point that some first world countries are losing population.

You're citing statistics without understanding the reason why. Education means a higher household income which has become less so during the recent economic crisis. The traditional reasoning, while crude, of why poor people have more kids is because they have less money. What they can do is have more sex because they don't have the money to do anything else.

We are at the point now where college grads have a hard time finding a job. How is more college grads going to solve the problem?

The gap has been widening in the US between the rich and middle class ever since Reagan. The same is happening for other Western countries as well.

[erikpukinskis]

Education and income both seem to effect fertility independently. There is evidence that income correlates with higher fertility, even controlling for education: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/52/09/48/PDF/publi_p... and vice versa: http://csde.washington.edu/~scurran/files/readings/May12/Why...

That said, all of the science on the subject is measuring very specific things and should be interpreted narrowly. You can say income is broadly correlated with fertility, and rule out some specific measures of education as an explanation for that particular (small) piece of the variance pie, but you can't then just make up an explanation and pretend it's supported by science. Just-so stories like the one you're telling are at best food for thought, or fodder for future experimental hypotheses. There's no scientific basis that I know of for the kind of mechanism you're proposing. Though I'd be happy to see more studies on the subject.

[anu_gupta]

> What they can do is have more sex because they don't have the money to do anything else.

Not sure why you're trolling so hard, but that did make me laugh. Access to entertainment has killed sex!