This doesn't seem intrinsically terrible to me, particularly if it's done through incentives and doesn't involve say, murder or sterilisation.
If we accept that any biome will eventually have a finite carrying capacity while the possibility of human reproduction is exponential it seems inevitable that there must be some limits to reproduction. Regulation is crude but might be less bad than "direct environmental feedback" such as die-offs or drastically decreasing quality of life.
Of course it's a co-ordination problem, which is very difficult.
I can imagine many cultural and technological approaches to population control, some of which already exist, and might not be terrible.
It seems to me that in particular any engineered habitats with well-defined carrying capacities, e.g. mars, would have to deal with this quite early on.
It turns out that as countries develop their birth rates naturally decline and eventually turn negative without requiring the government to set the number of children you can have. Indeed Japan and others are doing almost everything possible to encourage people to have more children and cannot get their populations to return to growth.
I agree that market forces and cultural trends seem to be curbing population growth in wealthy countries.
I'm just not sure it's a sign of cultural maturity; it feels like we've quietly skirted a difficult conversation through low wage growth and expensive housing, health care and education (more humans are discouraged because of bottlenecks in key supports).
In theory if there were "smooth" environmental feedback the population would nicely sigmoid without too much overshoot, maybe that's what is actually happening. I wish I knew.
When there are too many deer and not enough predators in an ecosystem, the deer consume all the available food and many die from starvation, self regulating the population to a sustainable level. I see parallels to this in human economic systems.
But a country with a rapidly growing population will struggle to grow economically, e.g. due to the increasing strain on natural resources. The GDP per capita growth of China between 1960 and 2018 is almost 4000%, while some other third world countries even had negative growth[0].
I am not saying that I agree with China's policies or their implementation, but it seems that they worked.
> This doesn't seem intrinsically terrible to me, particularly if it's done through incentives and doesn't involve say, murder or sterilisation.
I do agree with the finite carrying capacity aspect you mentioned but if you think China's child policies weren't awful then you should read up on what it really means to live your life as heihaizi.
What about the rights or consent of the human that's life matters most here, the child? When did anyone thought if the child wanted to be born with those parents who might be poor, unhealthy, genetic diseases that come to child, who is forced in all these without any way out? Should we only care about the parents?
The most precious resource by far is human ingenuity. Home Sapients are not like other organisms. Every additional person increases the rate of innovation across the entire species. Because of cultural transmission there are increasing returns to scale that don't exist in other species.
For that reason, we are exempt from the normal laws of Malthusian ecology and carrying capacity. More people translates into higher, not lower, living standards. That's why over the past 200 years the population has increased seven fold, while the percent living in poverty has fallen to unprecedented lows. The greatest risk by far is not having enough people. Population control robs us of future Einsteins, Borlaugs, and Turings.
“Every additional person increases the rate of innovation across the entire species.”
This is a wild claim. Not everyone is a net positive contributor to the species. The world’s resource are already consumed beyond their replenishment rates, and hundreds of millions of people suffer from abject poverty and constant food insecurity. Total fertility rate decline curves are objectively positive for humans as a species and resource contention.
If we accept that any biome will eventually have a finite carrying capacity while the possibility of human reproduction is exponential it seems inevitable that there must be some limits to reproduction. Regulation is crude but might be less bad than "direct environmental feedback" such as die-offs or drastically decreasing quality of life.
Of course it's a co-ordination problem, which is very difficult.
I can imagine many cultural and technological approaches to population control, some of which already exist, and might not be terrible.
It seems to me that in particular any engineered habitats with well-defined carrying capacities, e.g. mars, would have to deal with this quite early on.