But go to the 3rd world and breeding runs rampant still. Its a question of machismo in so many cultures.
How do we stop this cycle.
#27 | Posted by boojiboy at 2009-10-26 02:56 PM
Education--especially of young breeding age women (ages 15-25), uplift of the standard of living for the same group, both of these things have been shown to slow population growth.
One new idea (that I've actually been working on in a book I am currently writing) would also be to change the way the Current Tax Laws reward people by creating more consumers. If you take America for example, our tax code rewards you for making more consumers...and consumers in turn add--eventually--to the world's population problem and associated calamities...(i.e. urban sprawl, environmental destruction, habitat loss, pollution, etc...)
By changing the tax codes of much of the world--a daunting task yes--but one that the U.N. and other world bodies could push (and actually do something good for a change other than largely pay lip service to the world's problems), one could rapidly start to curtail population growth.
Example: Let's say in America we give a Child Tax Credit of some $500.00 dollars per child. Well of course this induces people to want to have more kids because they get more tax credits (although this is extremely illogical--as it takes on order of $250,000+ to raise a kid to age 18, at least in the U.S.) But if we reversed tax codes around the world, you could quickly begin to remedy the population situation.
Say give a $500.00 refund for the first kid (in the U.S.), and if you want two children, then your tax refund is halved, or you get $250 per child back--still $500.00.
After two children, it should become vastly more expensive to keep having more children. Now you would have to institute fees for those who want to have large families. And it should be a stiff fine, to dramatically curtail population growth, especially amongst the poorest and least educated (those which typically have the largest families)Say for the third child you would have to owe $10,000.00, and double that to $20,000 for the next child, and double for the next child etc...
Not by any means a perfect system, BUT it would accomplish THREE important things.
One: it would force no one to comply. It would not TELL people you can only have X amount of children. If you can afford to pay the fee, you can have more children.
Two: given that most of the dramatic increases in world population are occuring in some of the poorest nations on the earth, the tax would rule out large families for 99% of the people in the very nations that you need to control the population growth in.
And Three: it would generate some income for these nations that they could then invest in education and in raising the standard of living for the peoples in these poor and developing nations. A fact which has also been shown to lower population growth.
Equivalent systems of taxation could be enacted worldwide, costing equivalent amounts of whatever currency the people of that country use.
And on encouraging poor countries to comply with the new tax codes I have an idea on that as well. We, in the relatively rich Western World, could--and probably should--forgive many of these developing nation's national debts as long as they institute fairly strict population control policies along the lines of this tax code change.
Not a pretty solution, surely. But neither is watching millions of kids starving to death and dying of disease. Unfortunately, this is EXACTLY where we are shortly headed with world population set to crest 7 billion in next 2 years, and 8 billion in 10-20 years after that.
Population growth must be curtailed now, or the problems we see in the environment today, will be nothing compared to the dramatic collapse of ecosystems in the future. We, unfortunately, are just at the beginning of this...
