"China will loosen its decades-long one-child population policy, allowing couples to have two children if one of them is an only child, according to a key decision issued on Friday by the Communist Party of China (CPC)."
The parent links to an old article, and that's the old rule which was just overturned. Now everybody can have two -- but apparently still no more than two?
> allowing couples to have two children if one of them is an only child
> To ensure coordinated economic and social development, the population size for China should be kept at about 1.5 billion, said Guo, citing the results of a study sponsored by the State Council, China's cabinet.
> China should keep its total fertility rate at around 1.8, and the current rate is between 1.5 to 1.6, allowing the country to maneuver its population policy, according to Guo.
It seems like the aim is for a long-term stable demography. Ensuring the working population doesn't fall too much, for example.
It might have been a big influence, but I am not entirely sure this will help. Similar issues exist in India without any limit, just because of the cost of raising children.
Look at the timestamp. The article you linked was from two years ago.
The "parents can have two kids if at least one parent is an only child" policy described in that article was overturned today. Now everyone can have two kids.
The interesting thing about humans is that they adapt. There's a reason economic growth exists, and not all of it relies on: suck up more oil, chop down more wood.
Hopefully it can help address the increasing gender imbalance. It has reached 6:5 male to female births, resulting in huge numbers of Chinese men who cannot find marriage partners.
Honestly, for Tinder-like service you just need to turn on WeChat in the evening and run "people nearby" search so that you pop up on a list with updated location. The offers stream themselves.
That's how it actually works. You don't even have to do anything. Just opt-in to temporarily share your location by running a "people in the neighbourhood" scan. "Girls" start writing to you offering "door-to-door full range of services".
I say "girls" because I strongly suspect those are fake accounts run by some agency that will dispatch actual workers to you when you agree for the service. I think so, because otherwise China has a really big evening employment and entertainment problem.
I installed it like few days ago in hope to establish some unfiltered communication to home, and I already want to uninstall it, because deleting the offers that start coming after midnight is just an annoying hassle. I think it's a fine app to use, but never, ever do a location search after the sun is down.
(That is, if you're not interested in the serivces. If you are, then I guess WeChat is paradise on Earth for the Laowai.)
Reminds me of this[0] article that showed up a couple of days ago, which is about a Chinese economist that suggested to legalize marriage between 1 woman and multiple men. Didn't go over to well as I'm sure you can imagine.
My very basic understanding of it was that boys were preferred since they were able to help out in the fields and as a result, girl babies were killed. I wonder if it would just continue since this means 2 able bodies vs. 1? I feel like some state-sanctioned benefits would need to be put into place for the rural populations to prefer raising girls. A 1.2 male-to-female ratio is an appalling metric for a country.
You say it in a crass way but actually, the point of the growing middle class and shifting of China's economic base means there are going to be fewer people making iphones.
China is getting really good at assembly robots too.
However if the process can be completely automated then why not do the manufacturing right where the bulk of consumption is going to happen to reduce shipping costs which are always growing.
That's a good point, but we still need to reach that outcome, and this will happen graudally. Whatever the end results of robofactory revolution, it will have to start here, in the factory of the world, because that's where we make robots for cheap.
Overpopulation is an interesting problem, it exponentially affects every other problem we have -- some balance will have to be found between ultimately telling people they can't kids or maintaining that those people have autonomy over their own lives and can make such a decision. I don't know what the solution is - perhaps making the developing world developed as fast as possible.
that only moves the problem further along the road - much further, but still:
world won't be able to feed infinite humans so a restriction policy will eventually be needed (or systematic culling, depending on whichever comes first between enlightenment and desperation)
an interesting resulting problem of which is that population will keep aging. solutions will need to take into account non productive member in their older age, either balancing with equal amount of younger or culling from the top instead of the bottom of the age bracket
we won't likely see that in our lifespan, with some luck.
Except in no part of the world of the modern world has human population increase continued unchecked.
Most western countries populations grow only because of immigration - fertility is below the replacement rate.
Overpopulation is the "problem" people trot out so they don't have to talk about things they might actually have to do something about, like switching to renewable energy sources, or improving women's education in developing countries.
So we have to increase the lifestyle of 2/3 of the world. The West is free to have 2 or less children on average. Africa doesn't give a shit, they're too poor to afford it - so their population grows.
seems,that other forms of distractions and knowledge are the best presarvatives. But what about cultures that are resistant to education and therefore change?
Exit programs for the kids of the local religious nuts starting from pre-school?
Overpopulation is a non-problem. Fertility has fallow to near- or below-replacement rate everywhere in the world, except Afrika (which will likely follow in the next decades.)
This specific talk I feel he panders too much. The British surveys, for example, seem to have been made to take advantage of the anchoring effect to elicit more wrong answers, to the delight of the giggling audience.
I think perhaps you're conflating world population with the Chinese population. Overpopulation can occur in small areas without the world being too overpopulated as a whole -- most of them in SE Asia. If theres lots of people and limited resources, the math simply won't hold up. It affects issues like the environment and human health.
Singapore is very developed. Overpopulation is more a problem for densely populated developing places - Bangladesh, Victorian London, South American shanty towns et cetera.
You mean, it is not a problem because the planet can support that many? Or do you mean it is a problem, but it will solve itself? I don't think either is correct. The first is only true today because non-First World inhabitants are living on a much smaller ecological footprint than Europe and the US. However, that footprint is increasing rapidly. The second reading at least acknowledges there is a problem, but I think you are underestimating the correction required. I think the correction will not happen (at all, or fast enough) through natural means.
We are already at more than twice a sustainable population level. Even the most generous estimates I've seen place the Earth's carrying capacity at 7.7 billion people. But most estimates say that the Earth can support 2-3 billion people at modest levels of first-world consumption. The more our planet will be stripped of its resources now (whether through overfishing, destruction of forests, or climate change), the lower the sustainable planet population will become.
Put differently, we need to lose at least 5 billion people in the next decades without replacing them with a younger generation to be able to sustain the emancipation of emerging countries. It's not about population growth stabilizing, we need both massive negative population growth and halving of current energy use in developed countries. The only "natural" means through which I can see that happening is massive food shortages or horrific wars, and I think it's a pretty safe bet that the former will trigger the latter. It's also a pretty safe bet that our global society will disappear in that scenario, so I'd rather we have better solutions before that happens.
The earth doesn't have a "carrying capacity" or a "maximum population". The earth has resources that are used more or less sustainably at different times and in different places. If we all still lived like hunter gatherers we would have run out of resources and become extinct thousands of years ago. Luckily we've had social, economic, and technological development.
As soon as anyone frames sustainability challenges in terms of the earths "carrying capacity" they are revealing a bias that is unhelpful. Even if you accept the premise that the earth does have some 'maximum population' then so what? It's a useless proposition -- what are you going to do, force everyone to only have one child, that is unsustainable as China discovered.
Luckily, as the parent pointed out, overpopulation is not a problem. The rate of growth continues to decrease, and global populations will peak in my lifetime.
Eventually we'll have to reach other planets.. and invent wormholes to move past the universe expanding preventing our light cones from reaching other materials.
It gives me an idea for a sci-fi story, where a stable civilization of smart beings faces a threat of the sphere of all-consuming humans expanding at the speed of light.
"Ecologists define carrying capacity as the maximal population size of a given species that an area can support without reducing its ability to support the same species in the future"
http://www.dieoff.org/page112.htm
In the interest of (scientific) discourse, it is generally unhelpful to redefine or ignore generic definitions. Are you asserting that the earth doesn't support any species, or that is perfectly possible to have googolplex people living on earth without reducing earth's ability to support googolplex people in the future?
I think the post is saying that defining the carrying capacity of a technological species is an exercise in futility. Malthus was writing about this many years ago - humans have a habit of raising the bar.
In answer to your googolplex question - I think it's safer to bet on the technology developing to support such a population than against it. (Though I think we'll either be extinct or an interstellar species before then.)
I (think I) understood the GP post, I just have very little tolerance for idiotic and easily falsifiable statements. Therefore, I chose to respond to the first sentence only, and ignore the rest of the post.
My use of that population number was simply that: a refutation of the assertion that the earth has no population limit, as it will be hard to argue that our planet can support 10^9980 humans per square millimeter of land area. A genuine "argumentum ad absurdum", to counter the GP's completely nonsensical opening statement.
I interpreted the opposition to using carrying capacity to mean that it's not helpful from the perspective of a technological species. If we had that many humans, the odds seem high that we would have a way to supplement resources available to use from outside Earth. Carrying capacity is really about an _ecosystem_ and the resources it can provide vs competition with other species. We effectively have no competition, and we can create our own ecosystems, so it's kind of a strawman to apply the wildlife biology concept to our understanding of how human populations will evolve in the future.
Ah, but that would have been an interesting discussion. We could have discussed the merits of carrying capacity with respect to a species that builds its own ecosystem, or whether it makes sense to consider the entire planet a single ecosystem. We could have a meaningful discussion about the various population estimates and what they're based on. Or we could have discussed whether it makes sense to consider ourselves in competition with future generations.
But instead of that, the initial reply:
- refused the basic premise that would have allowed that discussion, by indirectly positing that space on earth is infinite
- followed it up with a very questionable assertion that earth's resources are used "more or less sustainably" (which is already at odds with the previous assertion that resources are infinite, and ignores the many species we've already hunted to extinction)
- added a non-sequitur that we would have run out of resources as hunter-gatherers (again at odds with the initial statement)
- justified the plain refusal of the basic premise with an ad-hominem about bias
- continued on with the apathetic rationalization that nothing can be done anyway
- concluded by reiterating the initial statement without further substantiation
Now, you may argue that my refusal to engage in that discussion is my weakness and it would still have been possible to salvage something positive, however my time is finite and there's better, less taxing discussions to be had.
(/me out, accepting that meta-justification is considered offtopic and will be downmodded).
I think the post is saying that defining the carrying capacity of a technological species is an exercise in futility. Malthus was writing about this many years ago - humans have a habit of raising the bar.
In answer to your googolplex question - I think it's safer to bet on the technology developing to support such a population than against it. (Though I think we'll either be extinct or an interstellar species before then.)
About 20 years ago, when I was a grad student, I attended a colloquium where the speaker (a physicist, for better or worse) had computed the number of people that the planet could support if everyone consumed natural resources at the rate that Americans do. His number was 2 billion. I don't remember who the speaker was and I don't know what assumptions he made -- I don't know how much error there might be in his result or how improvements in technology might change it. If his number is even close to being right, "global populations will peak in my lifetime" isn't even close to being adequate unless you expect the bulk of the population to be satisfied with remaining poor while a small proportion of the population devours the planet.
Which is a calculation based on current technological standards, which is also not proof that we will not become more efficient and better able to manipulate our resources as needed.
Strawman. Strong environmental protections and positive population growth can coexist.
And, of course, we should be striving in our generation to solve these existential challenges, rather than squandering our time optimizing sales funnels and click-through-rates.
What are the "modest levels of first-world consumption" in the estimates you mention? And how recent are these estimates? There are many factors that likely will contribute to a smaller first-world footprint, e.g. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-will-burn-less...
This has a survey of capacity estimates on page 10. I took the median of those, which more or less matched the sources I've encountered over the past year.
Two of the estimates have years associated with them: 1994 and 1999. The survey itself was published in 2013 so didn't have the data available that fivethirtyeight cited. I think it's time for researchers to update their capacity estimates.
> "Even the most generous estimates I've seen place the Earth's carrying capacity at 7.7 billion people."
Can you show me these estimates? Do they take into account ways we could live with a smaller footprint (e.g. vegetarian/vegan diet) and/or advances in eco-friendly technology?
Denying people their meat or SUVs is an equivalent problem to limiting the number of children they have. People won't give their "freedoms" voluntarily - you have to force them either by law or by economy (and letting the free market take care of it will likely be too little too late).
The whole argument sounds to me like "we don't have to force people to change their lifestyle to adjust for Earth's capacity - we can always force people to change their lifestyle".
I'm suggesting people have a smiliar level of attachment to being allowed to buy a SUV as they have to being allowed to have a child in the future.
Which is pretty visible in the West; every time the government tries to limit access to something, you get a stream of arguments that look exactly the same as those against one child policy that are posted here.
Would people miss what they never had though? What if public transport was so good that people just didn't need to buy cars anymore? As in, so good that there wasn't any practical reason to own a car. Would a generation of people raised with a strong public transportation system still find enough of a reason to use a car (aside from as a form of recreation)?
I think they wouldn't. That's why I find most of those objections silly - they're just something people got used to. It's like every time Facebook improves their UX, there's this huge uproar about the fact they dared to change things, but it dies out within a month as people get used to the new look and are still happy.
Sadly, no. I never bookmark or save articles as I come across them. It's a pity, as I've been searching for one specific article which compared our energy use with the total solar energy absorption of the planet (iirc, we were using more than 50% of total input).
As for your question, I doubt that they would include an all-vegan world scenario, as it's considered unattainable, regardless of whether it would theoretically help. Technological advances are generally included, but with very conservative gain estimates.
I don't. But I've always been a glass-half-empty kinda guy, so I tend to err on the side of caution (or, in this case, catastrophe).
Quite frankly, it doesn't matter to me whether the "real" capacity is 1 billion or 20 billion or 100 billion, as I don't believe we (as a species) have any chance of moderation in the face of opulence. As long as there's any surplus capacity left on this planet, we will find a way to use it. As fast and as wasteful as we can, until it all comes crashing down.
> "Fertility has fallow to near- or below-replacement rate everywhere in the world"
What do you expect is causing this? Isn't a large part of the reason for this due to changes in society rather than a synchronised biological trend? For example, couples choosing to have children later, if at all.
If the reasons are social rather than biological, then there's no reason why birth rates (I'm using the term birth rates as it's a more general term for what we're considering) can't increase in the future. The view that overpopulation is a non-problem seems to be based on wishful thinking and/or short-sighted analysis.
- enormous reduction in child mortality
- increased female emancipation and economic opportunities
- (direct and opportunity) costs of child-raising becomes relatively larger when societies get richer
I don't expect any of those trends to reverse itself
> If the reasons are social rather than biological, then there's no reason why birth rates can't increase in the future.
Sure, and there's no reason why the worldwide decrease cant' accelerate further either. The only question is, why do you think some scenario is more likely than the other?
> The view that overpopulation is a non-problem seems to be based on wishful thinking and/or short-sighted analysis.
To me the view that population increase is/will be some huge problem seems to be continuously redressing the Malthusian nonsense that's been wrong for over 2 centuries
> "- enormous reduction in child mortality - increased female emancipation and economic opportunities - (direct and opportunity) costs of child-raising becomes relatively larger when societies get richer
I don't expect any of those trends to reverse itself"
Those aren't the only trends that matter. How about:
* Reduction in working hours/increased leisure time.
* Possibility for development of life extension technology (so long as this comes with an increased window of opportunity for raising kids).
* Changes to family structures (for example, an increase in popularity in tribe-like family structures, which reduces the burden on individual carers).
The point is if birth rate is only slowing down because of how our society currently is, then birth rate predictions are based on that society staying the same, and we have no guarantee of that being the case. Even if you think it's unlikely to change in the near future, humans will hopefully be living on Earth for thousands of years to come. If you were born 1000 years ago, do you believe you could predict how society would turn out in 2015?
You mean like the problem of telling people they can't just drive cars or own firearms and need to meet some competence criteria first, i.e. licensing?
If so, I totally support the idea of licensing human breeding.
Eugenics is about altering genetics by controlling breeding. Licensing decisions could be based on a broader range of criteria than just genetics. Genetics might not even come into it.
Unlikely. The perceived benefits of eugenics would be too tantalizing for those social engineers in control of "licensing" the right to reproduce. Robust markets for DNA sequencing and clinical already exist. It'd be a vanishingly small step to pivot those platforms for eugenics.
The licensing proposal is odious even if we were to (naively) discount conventional eugenics. Licenses would likely be tied to "merit", which is rather inextricably linked to socioeconomic class.
> "Unlikely. The perceived benefits of eugenics would be too tantalizing for those social engineers in control of "licensing" the right to reproduce."
What if the priorities of the eugenicists and other life licensers clash? For example, what if a known criminal was also the holder of some rare genes that would link up well with someone from the ruling class?
> "Licenses would likely be tied to "merit", which is rather inextricably linked to socioeconomic class."
Eugenics has an unacceptably high -- and excruciatingly documented -- risk of mutating into a demographic weapon wielded by racial groups that have attained dominance by historical coincidence against other racial groups. It is a long-dormant existential threat to large populations. The fact that this cluster of comments is discussing "licensing" the fundamental right of humans to reproduce is in itself a triumph of dystopian rhetoric.
Also, excluding Nazis from arguments against eugenics is like excluding Bolsheviks from arguments against communism. Spare me your precious Godwin's Law, Nazism is eminently relevant here.
> The fact that this cluster of comments is discussing "licensing" the fundamental right of humans to reproduce is in itself a triumph of dystopian rhetoric.
We're discussing limits on reproduction because this "fundamental right" is most likely going to fuck up the planet. Don't confuse basic capability with a "right".
> Also, excluding Nazis from arguments against eugenics is like excluding Bolsheviks from arguments against communism. Spare me your precious Godwin's Law, Nazism is eminently relevant here.
Yeah, I'd like to exclude Bolsheviks from arguments against communism too. It's not about Godwin's Law, but about having an actual argument other than "somebody tried that before once and it didn't work". How about exploring why it didn't work and how we can avoid that particular failure mode while reaping the rewards, without throwing the entire concept out?
> reproduction ... is most likely going to fuck up the planet
Malthusian fallacy. The idea of a "population bomb" has been indoctrinated into the modern mind of certain political orthodoxies since the late 1960's. It has yet to pass, because it is wrong. The jeremiads of Malthus and Ehrlich are myopic and dangerously lacking in imagination.
We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, and thrive -- all with a human population that monotonically grows over long periods of time.
> Don't confuse basic capability with a "right".
What does that even mean?
The fact that the same people who fight for esoteric rights of privacy and free speech disproportionately flip their semantic switch to cast the most fundamental human right in scare quotes is difficult to fathom.
> It's not about Godwin's Law, but about having an actual argument other than "somebody tried that before once and it didn't work". How about exploring why it didn't work and how we can avoid that particular failure mode while reaping the rewards, without throwing the entire concept out?
Here's an "actual argument": modern history. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_eugenics. Arguments that an idea is grievously misguided based on broad appeals to disastrous periods in recent history brought about by that idea are valid in matters of social policy debate, which this is.
We throw the entire concept out because it is intellectually rancid. The taboo is justified. We should not touch eugenics, just like we should not touch proposals for disenfranchising women or chattel slavery.
You're doing this again. Malthus was wrong with his prediction, but he wasn't wrong with noticing obvious limits to growth. It takes special effort to consciously stop noticing it.
> We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, and thrive -- all with a human population that monotonically grows over long periods of time.
You say that like you had any proof for it. Taken at face value, Malthus sounds much more probable than your "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it".
> What does that even mean?
It means: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
> The fact that the same people who fight for esoteric rights of privacy and free speech disproportionately flip their semantic switch to cast the most fundamental human right in scare quotes is difficult to fathom.
I don't flip any switch because I personally don't fight for privacy. I see the current levels of it as a historical anomaly, and generally something we need to outgrow as a society in order to progress.
> We throw the entire concept out because it is intellectually rancid. The taboo is justified. We should not touch eugenics, just like we should not touch proposals for disenfranchising women or chattel slavery.
No, this is dangerously irrational way of thinking. A hundred years ago you would taboo women voting. Two hundred years earlier you would taboo the concept of freedom of black men. What you're doing is just selectively tabooing your cherished belief out of fear your rejection may be wrong. If the belief is valid, it can stand on its own strength, it does not need protection from being discussed.
> Malthus was wrong with his prediction, but he wasn't wrong with noticing obvious limits to growth. It takes special effort to consciously stop noticing it.
Malthus premised his hypothesis on an assertion that there were obvious limits to growth. Both the premise of obvious limits to growth and the conclusion of catastrophic resource scarcity due to population growth were wrong.
Our food supply is an obvious limit to population growth like an unlocked door is an obvious limit to leaving a room. Yes, if you do nothing, then you will be limited. That should not instill hand-wringing, existential dread.
> Malthus sounds much more probable than your "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it".
History has proven Malthus and his modern incarnation Ehrlich to be wrong time and time again, which doesn't bode well for that probability of yours.
Again, "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it" is a strawman. Pithy, but vapid. Firstly, I said we will engineer ways to overcome limitations. Our current generation is, and will continue to, engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, thrive, and grow our population.
Do I have proof that the engineers of future generations won't all squander their life and do nothing more than optimize sales funnels and click-through-rates? No. But I think it is much more probable that our society will continue to produce some engineers that have not only the talent but the focus we need to break through our current brittle limitations to population growth -- just like their parents, grandparents, and every generation before them did.
> "If so, I totally support the idea of licensing human breeding."
That sort of licensing is ripe for abuse. What would happen if someone in power took that license away from you just because they didn't agree with your political views?
> "Then your problem isn't the license. The problem is your government."
The license will still be administered by someone / some group. Whether you call those with the administrative powers a 'government' or not isn't really important.
Most people would agree that mentally ill people should not have children.
But what constitutes mentally ill? The line is fuzzy - perhaps someone is just a bit "quirky", but still could be a good parent?
In order to have a license the criteria would have to be crystal clear and added to the Constitution (sorry, US-centric). And even if in the Constitution, someone could abuse it (see: NSA, surveillance).
I could be wrong but I thought that was the point parent comment was making?
> Most people would agree that mentally ill people should not have children.
Turns out the definition of mental illness covers far more than the most extreme/visible cases so it will be unclear where to draw the line since "mental illness" is too broad a set
Yes, not just political views. As you say, the mentally ill would be one targeted group, former criminals would be another, etc... The most divisive issue would probably be whether those living in poverty would be given the license.
> "In order to have a license the criteria would have to be crystal clear and added to the Constitution (sorry, US-centric). And even if in the Constitution, someone could abuse it (see: NSA, surveillance)."
At most, I could imagine the benefits of taking precautions against accidental pregnancies (vasectomies, etc...), but only as long as those measures would be reversible at any time. I could also see the need for encouraging single child families as the least draconian method of population control (should overpopulation ever become a big issue). Anything beyond that strikes me as a step too far.
How about: every one gets an unconditional license for having one child. That is, pair up with someone and have two children. No need to select subgroups, but enough to stabilize the population.
Are you going to force women to abort "unlicensed" children? Force women to have birth control implants?
Up until the 1990s in Spain, many thousands of children were systematically stolen from political activists and others with the wrong politics or wrong lifestyle. Parents were told that their newborn had died.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15335899
A less severe form would be financial incentives for licensed parents. You're still free to have children if you want, but you're only supported by the state if you got a license. Pair this with free birth control implants and abortions for everyone who wants them and you get most of the effect without the use of force. You could even pay men to get a vasectomy.
Maybe because "it's eugenics, and eugenics is bad, just look at the history!" appeal to 'historic tone-deafness' is not a valid argument.
Yes, Nazi Germany did some shitty stuff for ideological reasons and tarnished the "eugenics" label, but it doesn't invalidate the basic idea of influencing human reproduction and/or selecting for preferred traits and/or direct DNA interventions.
That's like saying "Lenin and Stalin did some bad stuff, but it doesn't invalidate the basic idea of Marxism" (which Marxist True Believers still assert). After seeing too many examples of it working out badly and none at all of it working well, we regard the idea as invalid.
In practice, eugenics seems to move from "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others, and we should strive for those in future generations" to "some genetic makeups are better than others, and we should strive for those", to "some people are better than others, and we should strive for those", to "some people are better than others, and we should force there to not be so many of the others". There doesn't seem to be any clear point at which you can say, "No, you've gone too far", and explain to the true believer why the step they took is too far. They'll just tell you that it's logically implied by the steps that you are in agreement with.
And if you disagree with this, show me historical examples of eugenics movements that stopped at reasonable places. (I probably need to qualify that with "eugenics movements that had some influence", because if you don't have enough influence to get people to accept step 1, you don't move on to step 2. And that may be begging the question on my part, because Nazi Germany may be the only historical example where the ideas got taken seriously and actually influenced much of anything.)
Unrelated comment: Another danger of eugenics is exposed by my wording of the starting point: "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others..." That's clearly true. But the current environment is not necessarily the one that future generations will face; leaving them some genetic diversity (even if it creates some disadvantages) may be a net win. Remember sickle cell anemia.
> That's like saying "Lenin and Stalin did some bad stuff, but it doesn't invalidate the basic idea of Marxism" (which Marxist True Believers still assert).
Because it doesn't. I will assert that even though I'm not a Marxist True Believer.
> After seeing too many examples of it working out badly and none at all of it working well, we regard the idea as invalid.
And that's just plain stupidity, which is exactly what I'm complaining about. It's "someone tried that before some time ago and it didn't work, therefore let's label this stupid and throw it away" kind of attitude. The real reason we're ignoring the entire idea is because communist propaganda has lost and US propaganda has won, and it has little to do with actual merits of the idea itself.
You could utter similar dismissals for fire before we mastered it, or for gasoline before we created ICEs, or for powered flight before Wright brothers. What I was asking for is an actual discussion of the idea - pointing out where the idea is wrong, and talking about how can we modify it to avoid its problems while reaping the rewards.
Which fortunately you did in the rest of your comment, so forgive me for the text above, but I really really disagree with the sentiment of your first paragraph.
--
> And if you disagree with this, show me historical examples of eugenics movements that stopped at reasonable places.
I don't think we had many of such examples - the only ones we label "eugenics" happened within the last 100 years, and involved powerful people with ideology doing stupid and harmful things because doing things because of an ideology is generally stupid and harmful.
> Unrelated comment: Another danger of eugenics is exposed by my wording of the starting point: "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others..." That's clearly true. But the current environment is not necessarily the one that future generations will face; leaving them some genetic diversity (even if it creates some disadvantages) may be a net win. Remember sickle cell anemia.
Yeah, that's a strong point I'm going to agree 100% with. Too strong adaptation to current environment means you'll be really out of luck when the environment changes.
But if it works out badly in practice (enough times, for some value of "enough"), don't you have a basis for saying that the idea doesn't seem to work in practice, no matter how good it sounds in theory?
You don't want to do that after one failed attempt. You probably don't want to do so after two or three. But after enough attempts, you probably have a basis for saying that, no matter how good the theory sounds, it won't work in practice next time either. And if each time it fails produces large amounts of human suffering, there comes a time to quit trying the same stuff that has worked out badly over and over.
That is direct genetic manipulation. Eugenics is, in many people's mind, limiting people's reproduction to breed them like they were pets.
One is unfocused and hard to target genetic manipulation via reproduction incentives and force, the other is a choice for very targeted and obvious things.
No, eugenics really should be tainted forever. Cystic fibrosis can be heritably cured without eugenics, e.g. hopefully within a few decades via gene editing something like CRISPR. Let us not use specious arguments about curing rare Mendelian diseases as a Trojan horse to usher eugenics back into mainstream acceptability.
As a sibling comment notes, eugenics is conventionally understood to be gene selection via people selection, i.e. differential all-or-nothing biological reproduction of whole humans. And it was that sense of the idea I was critiquing.
And it is in that sense of the word that people shooting from the hip with talk of "licensing" the basic human right to reproduce are engaging in shocking historical naivety -- or worse, with facepalm-worthy apologetics like those corners of the commentariat that defend misogyny, slavery and other social aberrations that have rightfully been interred to the dustbin of history.
So you're okay with gene editing. Are you okay with editing a bunch of genes, as long as anyone is allowed to have a child that's still fundamentally a mix between them and their partner?
Because I'm pretty sure that would satisfy 90% of the historical proponents of eugenics, even if you refuse to call it such.
If only certain people are encouraged to have children, you automatically have an underclass, no matter how it's implemented. I think that providing free (or more incentivized) birth control would lead to very few cases of unwanted children. IUDs and vasectomies are simple and effective.
I don't have data at hand, so I can't contradict you with evidence, but you could also provide some numbers with your claims. I know of Project Prevention [1], which pays drug addicts for long-term birth control. The Wikipedia article doesn't provide data on effectiveness, but I guess they'd stop handing out money if it didn't work.
"You're still free to have children if you want, but you're only supported by the state if you got a license."
The traditional "license" to have children used to be marriage, and children born without such a license were called illegitimate - i.e. outside the law. It was an unjust system that hurt a lot of innocent children, and we've moved away from it for a reason.
> It was an unjust system that hurt a lot of innocent children
If the current system (where marriage and procreation are notionally separate) were found to hurt a lot of innocent children, would we call our system unjust and abandon it?
I suspect not. The current culture around marriage and parenting didn't evolve from pragmatism as much as (various takes on) ethics, morality, and self-determinism.
Due to already declining birth rates, human population is expected to peak around 11 billion people in approximately 2100.[1] I will grant that the error bars are quite large, and that there is no certainty that the planet can handle even that number, but it bothers me that there are still people that seem to believe in Malthusian exponential growth.
I was using the middle model. The lower model shows a peak of 8-9 billion in about 2050. The upper model shows continued growth past 2011. Hence, "large error bars." Anyway, I agree it is not the best source, but I didn't want to leave my claim completely without citation. If you investigate a bit, I think you'll find that my claim is consistent with UN estimates.
making the developing world developed as fast as possible - With the cost of living increasing in India more parents prefer having 2 kids mostly in cities.
The people saying it's not a problem or that it will sort itself out are missing one crucial point - all the solutions for maintaining and/or stabilizing a big population require technology, which requires a technological civilization to exist. A technological civilization is not a stable, natural state, and industrial plants do not grow on trees. If the growing population destabilizes - let's be frank, Western - civilization, the world is fucked. The population will bounce back, with billions dying from hunger and war.
>It was also highly effective way to reduce poverty.
Citation needed; correlation does not equal causation. Other East Asian countries showed similar reductions in fertility in spite of no similar policies, and much greater reductions in poverty.
China vs. India vs. Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea): GDP per capita versus fertility rate
The Giver’s portrayal of systematic euthanasia of the elderly comes to mind. I really hope we never have to make that kind of decision. After all, what choice could possibly be compatible with our principles of liberty, equality, respect, and fairness? This may be the hardest ethical problem we can’t afford not to solve.
Seems fairly easy to me. Pay 18 year old boys $10k to get a vasectomy. Watch birth rates plummet. Captialism gives us systematic inequality, we should use it to fix more problems
You control birth rates by controlling FEMALE fertility... not male fertility.
There are mathematical reasons behind this, but for the purposes of simplicity I'll give the lay explanation. ie - A female can only have one (or so) child every 9 months. A single human male can produce one every day. So having a population with only one male, but 100 females, allows for a FAR higher reproduction rate than a population with 100 males, but only one female.
Vasectomy is currently the only permanent sterilization procedure without serious health risks. Barring some strange shift in cultural attitudes where fertile males suddenly become irresistible to every female on earth it should do fine until we find a better way for both genders. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
In that case... I hope you have some strange shift in cultural attitudes planned for preventing females from being forcibly used by fertile males. I'm not saying we need a perfect method... I'm saying we need a method that acknowledges the realities that many populations around the world live in. Female victimization is a reality in a lot of places on this planet. (To be completely fair... it's a reality even here in the US. Even on the university campus I'm sitting on.)
Rape was the major contributor to population growth in Eastern Kivu back when Nkunda was running rampant. And, to keep everything honest, it still is. (Particularly in Goma). It's not like rape and massacres went away because the Rwandans decided to replace their warlords. The Rwandans still do what Rwandans do I'm sure.
I'm only saying that you ascribe certain properties to the populations you are dealing with. And there are definitely places in the world where your assumptions fail to hold up. But biology ALWAYS holds up.
By the way... I was being kind. Rape is only ONE whole in your plan. There are many. For instance, your plan also assumes women will never simply get horny. Or that they will only "get off" in certain predetermined ways that your plan deems acceptable. Your plan assumes a lot ... and all of it from your own perspective and belief system. If we work within biological limits... we achieve our goals regardless of the local belief system.
One possible problem I see is that females becoming comparatively "irresponsible" about birth control due to perception of males having vasectomy, which may increase accidental pregnancies. I am not taking birth control methods used for STD protection into account here, but the the award of 10k may need to be carefully set so as to have an optimal ratio of infertile vs fertile males. Seems like an interesting proposal though.
And what if a human female "gets off" on the ejaculation???
This is the point I'm making... you are asking that human females satisfy themselves with that which YOU deem it acceptable to provide them. What happens if a human female, indeed many human females, decide they want something different???
The once-child policy has been gradually weakened for some time. It will be interesting to see the future population trend in China. I can see it going one of two ways:
1. Multiple children has previously been reserved to those with political connections or money. Now that everyone can have two they will jump at the opportunity.
or
2. Almost every young person in China has grown up in a single child family and sees it as the normal family. Social norms are also based around parents dedicating a lot of resources to one child. So they continue to have only one child. In about a decade China may have to start encouraging people to have more children, like Japan.
I like that question, and I've asked a few people here (I live in Chengdu, China) about it. Anecdotally, it's some of both. City people tend to view raising a child as very expensive, mainly because of education, so many expect they can only afford one. And since that has become the new norm, they're comfortable with that. But many also plan to have two children.
Most I've met who already have a child and could feasibly have a second, don't plan to. I suspect they've already gone through the decision to only have one and don't want to revisit it.
However, I don't know what the rural attitudes are, since I haven't talked with people in the countryside.
I think China's demographic future looks a lot like South Korea's or Japan's, with a shortage of young people:
> I don't know what the rural attitudes are, since I haven't talked with people in the countryside
Rural families have largely been exempted from the one-child policy for a while now. This new development won't change anything for people living in the countryside.
> I think China's demographic future looks a lot like South Korea's or Japan's
Yeah, China already has an issue with a rapidly aging population. It's called the 4-2-1 problem (4 grandparents, 2 parents, 1 child). But this happens in most developed countries. For instance, the average age in the US would be much higher if it weren't for immigration. The native birth rate isn't very high.
The rest of Europe has more than enough farmland to provide for 7 billion people, calorie-wise. If we were to learn how to farm on the open sea, back of the envelope calculations tell me we should easily be able to multiply today's population by 10^4 or more.
If there is a problem, it's water. On the plus side, water is the easiest to recycle by far, the only limit we're close to hitting in some locations is the amount of water that's recycled for free by the weather.
Also, we have skyscrapers. The 11m2 area per person is ground-level area. If you have 10-storey skyscrapers on average, 120m2 for every family on average should be easy, and allow for population to increase 5 fold without exceeding available space in Austria.
It's a complete speculation, because I can't cite this, but isn't Earth not capable of sustaining 7+ billion people? Exponential population growth brings even greater exponential rise of greenhouse effect, oil consumption, deforestation, etc. IMHO it is the main problem of overpopulation.
Nobody knows what its capable of sustaining. There's stuff like using resources more efficiently, recycling etc. We aren't good at these things yet, consumption could go a lot higher with improvements to those.
> We aren't good at these things yet, consumption could go a lot higher with improvements to those.
That's an Malthusianism[0] right here. Why recycling and increased efficiency themselves aren't a solution? Because people will increase their consumption to offset all the gains.
C.f.:
"Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were."
Hans Rosling has a documentary about it, check it out via Google, it's on youtube of vimeo or something.
It's not so much that overpopulation isn't an issue, of course it is (that's why it's called 'over' population), but rather that the trend line is that population growth is very rapidly slowing, that people tend to overestimate population growth, are unaware of big population centres that are shrinking, that the average worldwide children per woman rate is < 2.5 (used to be > 5 just 50 years ago) and that population will likely decline after we add a few billion more.
and extrapolated the exponential growth, and ended up with scenarios of doom, war etc. Food shortages for example are consistently predicted, but food production growth has outstripped population growth substantially and food security is better than any time in the past (yet far from perfect).
Obviously there are huge sustainability concerns, but the biggest source is our level of consumption levels and patterns, not our population numbers, which comes in second.
I think the issue is much more what will happen to the world's numbers before the population numbers decline (IF indeed EVERY ethnic groups starts reducing numbers. God help us all if there is one that doesn't)
Numbers of fanatically religious people will double, relatively speaking. Mostly Catholics and Muslims. This is under the assumption that the current rates of conversions remain roughly the same. Trouble is, people turn atheist, don't have kids, and die out, the number of atheists we have today is a historical anomaly resulting from the baby boom. In other words, that effect will stop. This likely will have policy implications.
People in cities are growing FAR slower than people in rural settings. That means that it isn't just atheists that will drop, but everything you associate with city living will lessen. Most city populations are essentially replaced with fresh people from rural settings every 60 years or so (meaning that the number of new rural people in the city at year+60 is larger than the number of people in the city).
Numbers of black people and asian people (not Chinese) will grow a hell of a lot more than the other groups. Africa should have 3-4 times more people than today at least before it stabilizes. Same goes for some countries in Asia. This of course also means that Europe is going to look back to today's Syrian "refugee crisis" and wonder why people were worried about a mere 1 million people per year.
Truth of the matter is that there isn't much any political movement in either Europe or America can do. So it doesn't even really matter.
Actually atheism is on the rise (or rather, religiosity is on the decline, yes worldwide, too), and urbanisation has been and still is on the rise (recently passing the 50/50 line, with now the majority of people living in cities), and no, rural populations don't impose their culture on cities, rather they seem to get integrated or even further, assimilated by the city culture.
As for an increase in non-white population, absolutely. But you seem to say it as some kind of issue. I don't care about skin color. A concern may be preserving a western culture, absolutely, but there the world has indeed westernised tremendously and shows few signs of slowing down.
I don't really share the sense of concern I interpreted (perhaps wrongfully) in your post.
> Truth of the matter is that there isn't much any political movement in either Europe or America can do.
The answer has always been obvious. It's a long-term answer, one not chosen for centuries. And it's called genuine cooperation and the desire for the rest of the world to rise up, become wealthy, prosperous and sensible, for us to yield some so the rest of the world can rise. Migrants have no interest in moving to where you do, if their own country is great. They have no interest in attacking you, if they're not oppressed or exploited by you. They've no interest in fanaticism if they have something to lose, and no enemy in sight, and an open hand shown to them. They have no need to bear 5 or 6 children if their healthcare system ensures all of them live. The world needs to do everything in its power to help developing countries if you ask me. Every country that has raised living standards has seen population growth decline. And the correlation between living standards and war/religiosity/fanaticism is negative, too. It's a moral imperative to help others, and research shows it helps ourselves, too. It's exactly the same principle why it makes sense for rich people to pay taxes to help the poor in their own country, because it improves their lives when the poor do better, when crime is reduced, and schools improve and roads are safe to drive on and homelessness is reduced and teenage pregnancies drop and schools get better etc etc. Imagine the rich in the US got private armies and lived in gated communities like in some areas in Brazil and walled off their tiny society, the US'd be a terrible country for all, same applies to Europe. Instead we build social democracies. Somehow we don't apply that beyond our borders much, at least not in the past few centuries, instead close our borders, sometimes exploit others beyond our borders, and when we see populations boom and signs of ill will towards us and see populations cling to a different culture than our own, we act surprised. We shouldn't be, it's the logical outcome of our foreign policy.
It's interesting, the generalized idea you have about "Catholics" and "Muslims" comes from a point of view where they're a minority. I'm from Mexico where almost 90% of the population is Catholic and something interesting happens here:
Protestants are the minority and they're viewed as the "fanatically religious people", people would say they're always talking about their religion, they don't party a lot, they don't drink alcohol and usually they have a lot of children, Mexico is a Catholic country and the average family has 2.2 children, but protestant minorities usually have more than 4-5 children.
I've noticed Americans apply some stereotypes to Catholics that would fit pretty well to the stereotypes protestants have in Mexico.
Maybe there's a correlation between minorities and the attachment to their ideas (not only religious ideas) and that could be interpreted by the majority as "radical" or "fanatic" positions.
> Maybe there's a correlation between minorities and the attachment to their ideas (not only religious ideas) and that could be interpreted by the majority as "radical" or "fanatic" positions.
It probably doesn't need to be interpreted as "radical" or even "fanatic", it actually is radical and fanatic.
I grew up in a country of 90+% Catholics, but I was raised in a minority Christian religion. Yes, we always talked about the religion, didn't party (that) much, etc. - that was because we actually cared about following our beliefs, which can't be said about Catholics in my country.
Thinking more about it led me to the following conclusion: any religion that grows so big that it becomes mainstream has to relax a lot. Religious life becomes intertwined with day-to-day problems of employment, managing the economy, etc. Meanwhile you stop having small communities that can push all unconvenient issues to outside with "us vs. them" attitude. Professional specialization starts, people are delegating their religious issues to their priests (compare the way Catholicism looks in big cities vs. small villages). And then one day you wake up and can't ignore politics anymore, because suddenly your religion is the society, and thus is the politics.
TL;DR: Going from "more fanatic / more real" to "less fanatic / less real" seems to me to be a natural course of evolution of a religion as it grows.
It's mostly a resource allocation problem the last time I checked at least with regard to food. We make plenty of it, but we're terrible at allocating it. Water? I think that one is definitely in shortage with regard to potable water. And other resources are more easily managed like metals and other materials that go into electronics we use everywhere (I'm thinking mostly medical, educational, and communications here).
Other than water, I think the only real problem with the current and projected populations is energy. It's not cheap to get oil. And we use it in everything. So, it's really a matter of time before the question of energy makes the rest of the abundance we have useless. No cheap oil means no cheap way to ship food to markets.
So, I'm split on how to see the problem as it is. I think Malthus is going to get the last laugh on all of us.
From the article "All couples will now be allowed to have two children".
So it seems China isn't so much ending its one-child policy, as augmenting it by one to a two-child policy. This means the brutal and cruel enforcement will continue, only it will kick in at the third child instead of at the second.
Brutal and cruel? I agree it's a severe limit on the personal freedom but China doesn't value personal freedom as highly as the west does. Brutal and cruel is not the right terms for this in my opinion, you can have a beautiful, rich and fullfilling life with 2 children or less. You can plan to have just two children (up to some point).
Also, I think it could benefit the earth if more countries would limit children.
Perhaps nobody's denying that China doesn't value personal freedom as highly as the west does, or that you can have a beautiful, rich and fullfilling life with 2 children or less.
Some, myself included, do deny that it could benefit the earth if more governments would enforce limits on children. I think humans are important to the future of the earth, and treating them in a cruel and brutal fashion will cause more problems than it solves.
Africa and India to play ball. The wealthy West limiting its procreation doesn't buy much for the Earth when somewhere else, poor families are pumping out children by the dozens.
Africa and India don't have widely available contraception, high levels of education, and low rates of infant mortality. Solve those problems and people will have fewer kids.
Yes, but we are a) not growing, b) moving to greener energy sources. Compare with Africa and Asia exiting poverty with positive growth, lots of people, and little clean energy infrastructure.
I'm starting to think it's in our best interest to start building nuclear reactors pro bono all over Africa - you don't want them all to rise their standards of living by burning coal.
You're in luck. human overpopulation is mostly a solved problem thanks to modern contraception. To curb it all one needs is to build a robust economy and make it avaliable. No need for state policy beyond it, people will do it themselves.
It solved the problem so well that the human race is actually likely to go extinct over the long run. Just need to get Africa and India on board with the program.
Larger creatures, and those higher on the food chain, having greater access to resources and higher survival rates, invest more in fewer children. Smaller creatures, with lesser access to resources and higher mortality rates, invest less in more children.
A rabbit doe can theoretically have 480 offspring, at 12 per litter, 10 times per year, over 4 years. That's the kind of thing you might do if 98% of your kids get eaten, because you will still have 10 left. Rabbits can also abort their litters when stressed.
An elephant might have one calf every four years, over 55 years, or a maximum of 14 children. That's what you might do if only one other species can reliably kill any of you, and you expect all of your babies to survive to adulthood.
With humans, the observed historical behavior is that poor or uneducated humans are relatively fecund, producing 8-30 children per pair, occasionally with multiple births. As wealth and education increase, and particularly when child mortality drops and elder care becomes socialized, birth rate drops down to the population replacement rate (or below). Middle-class first-worlders usually have 0-4 kids.
I completely agree with you. In terms of population alone, we are exceedingly multiplying; something that might not be of out best advantage. More even when you consider that there will be less opportunities for an increasing number of people, and we will lose this personal freedom you spoke of -to an extent-
I am also pro child limit laws. I would suggest nothing too strict, just impose a tax on the third child and up. We know from psychology that little restrictions and the mere fact of a 'cost' would reduce the intrinsic desire of people to even take an action, in this case child bearing.
Furthermore, I think a tax is a not an extreme measure, considering the fact that you would still be allowed to have children if you want. But do keep in mind that the poorest, less educated are often the ones to have plenty of children, which ends up harming the family, this might be good for them.
Human ingenuity is the world's greatest resource and leads to wealth creation and advancement of living standards. Limiting population growth would be ill-advised.
I would put any research or estimates into perspective. We have well surpassed predicted carrying capacities, but maybe these estimates are different?
Example:
> In a 1994 study titled Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro estimated the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million
The dangers of over-population myth assumes a naive view of a static society. For instance, we can reasonably have X land for food production, from that we can grow Y food and that can feed Z people so anything above Z would be harmful. The problem is that Y is dependent on human innovation and technology. Same can be said for most resources. We never did reach peak oil.
These predictions of inevitable decline have been wrong for a long time. I don't know why you put so much faith into the modern day equivalents.
Additionally, Z is dependent on social and economic pressures. As the world becomes more urbanized, birth rates have been going down because it is becoming more expensive to raise children. This is occurring naturally without artificial limits imposed.
lol - I suggest you read history: every time we come close to a 'carrying capacity' human ingenuity finds a better way. Necessity is the Mother of Invention.
How is it that we're on a technology forum and people continually insist that we've achieved the maximum rate of advancement? Also we most certainly do not spend all of our resources advancing areas of technology that would sustain more people, for instance I think there could easily be more research put into food growth/production/sustainability and perhaps things like housing development than are currently being done, but since there is no impending doom from overpopulation we tend to spread our interests around as the free-ish market allows. Everything we produce isn't going to make it easier for more people to survive, but I'm sure much could be done if it became a priority.
Some of us wish we'd be smarter than free market and have the ability to allocate resources proactively, instead at the last possible minute, when prices finally start to reflect the impending doom. Noticing that Earth has a carrying capacity and that we have to do something about it (either stop growing, lower our footprint or extend that capacity) is expressing the belief that we can do better.
I didn't insist anything. I simply suggested reading about carrying capacity. It's a relevant topic to population control, and it could broaden his understanding of the issue.
The "carrying capacity" of earth is well, well above (constantly revised) estimates.
What will need to change is the efficiency of how we as a species make use of the earth. We can feed many times the current world population easily. We can house many times the current world population easily. What we can't accomplish is doing those things the same way we do things now.
Advances in agriculture, energy and housing are needed. Advances which are happening as we furiously type at each other.
While in essence I agree, I think it is much more nuanced and complicated.
Inequality seems to be deeply encoded in the system. Capacity, in my opinion, only makes sense if you extrapolate from an average human, but there is no such thing as an average human being. However, I don't think it is an exaggeration that our western way of life is not sustainable on a global scale. I wish the fruits of human ingenuity could be enjoyed by every single one of us, but unfortunately it seems utopian.
In what year was the average, or even marginal person better off? Yes, there may be more income distribution, but would you prefer to be born into a different time under the veil of ignorance?
Even the poorest in our society have incredible access to goods.
Just to list a few:
Wikipedia
Ability to talk to relatives from across the world to little or no cost (Skype and alternatives)
Ability to send money and store wealth cheaply (low cost ETFs, bitcoin, free checking)
Social acceptance of previously marginalized lifestyles
Access to wide variety of foods and entertainment
There has never been a better time to be alive, and I expect that to continue, despite greater inequality.
That is, if the population growth doesn't destabilize the economies and make us revert back to the old times. That's the crux of the issue. The rising tide is lifting all the boats, but we need to make sure the tide keeps rising.
As much as I agree that the earth is overpopulated, I think better than taxing people is providing access to free birth control. A lot of people don't have access to it, or education about it.
Having many children is an economic issue, not access-to-birth-control issue. Poor families in third world countries will continue to mass-produce children because they can't afford not to. For the contraception to be used, we need to raise them out of poverty first.
I think lack of ability to plan when and if you have a family is a contributor to poverty in many places. Children are expensive and time consuming.
I've noticed here in the USA young girls getting pregnant and not being able to pursue higher education. I've also met some of my family in the Philippines who had many children by age 14. The husband's salary would pretty much all go to the children, and the wife would spend all day taking care of them. They are just trying to survive day to day-- little thought was given to trying to reach for anything higher.
Most people with access to birth control have children-- just when they're more ready for it. Not only does this make them more financially steady, but they are happier, and the same goes for their children.
"I find suggestive evidence that individuals’ access to contraceptives increased their children’s college completion, labor force participation, wages, and family incomes decades later." - Martha J. Bailey, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. Here's the article and link to her work. http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/09/the-long-term-effects-of-...
i've lived in China for a few years, and no one's ever seemed to care much about the one child policy. i just asked some people, and they said it depends on where you grew up, but that it hasn't ever really been a big deal for at least their lifetimes (~30 years).
you have to understand that laws here usually range from completely unenforced to strong discouragement with possible financial implications.
it wouldn't surprise me if there were incidents of the stuff you mention, but doesn't seem like any of it was ever common place.
The context you likely have is that of the more urbanized parts of China - not the rural towns and villages where most of the more extreme ("brutal and cruel") practices take place.
yeah, i know, i live in a big city. but i'm talking to some people that came from rural areas... no one's even heard of this stuff. that in no way means it doesn't happen - China's a really big place - but it certainly doesn't seem to be the status quo.
friends actually said the opposite: people in rural areas would tend to have a lot of kids trying for a boy (something about boys getting to go to school and being able to work the farm), though i guess that's getting better with the education and gender equality stuff.
did you grow up in one of those areas or something? or know people that did? which areas are you talking about?
Enforcement have been fairly lax in the last decade or two across the country. For every "unplanned" childbirth you can pay a one-off fine (Social Maintenance is the current euphemism) which is probably more like a poll tax based on your income (with caps in certain regions) and your offspring is readily accepted into society.
The main contention is that people who work in the public sector (which is giant in China) does not have the option because it is still, technically, illegal and will ruin your chances of promotion within the party or any state-owned enterprises. The law change merely levels the playing field for public sector workers so they have one less incentive to leave.
Just to make it clear, these types of enforcement are not norms. The law never suggested such enforcement. The law is that you get a financial fine if you have more than one child, that's it. It's actually against the law to force any kind of abortion. That being said, in some rural area, some officials maybe so greedy to make achievement for their "career" that they "enforce" this policy by breaking the law.
Some of the examples you listed have only one report. And it's policy that lasted almost 40 years in a country with a billion people.
> Just to make it clear, these types of enforcement are not norms
Back up your statement with a citation please. Considering that they explicitly made forced abortions of these kinds illegal (although this is hardly enforced) implies that it was a big enough problem the government needed to step in.
> Considering that they explicitly made forced abortions of these kinds illegal (although this is hardly enforced) implies that it was a big enough problem the government needed to step in.
The officials are not dumb, they probably saw the incentives structure and decided to ban this proactively.
GP has a good point. Singular events in few decades in a population of over a billion? That's either bullshit or random fluke, depending on how charitable you want to be towards the report, but it's definitely not something a reasonable person should care about.
Most of the brutal and cruel acts you listed are a result of carrying a child to birth. Surely they would have noticed that they were pregnant and had the opportunity to abort at an earlier time. Better yet, why couldn't they just... not have children? Do they not have access to contraception?
No matter the history, using terms as they are applied in real life is generally accepted. The definition of communism means one thing, the real world applications of it are something else. How many communist governments have there been that weren't totalitarian?
In this case they're not totalitarian though. China is a Republic, it's just a Republic with a taller pyramid than our own.
You elect district leaders, who elect state leaders and the congress, and they elect the president and prime minister.
Technically, that's roughly the same system we have here with the electoral congress and faithless electors. The difference is that in the US, faithless electors are much less common than in China.
China's system is actually not so different from ours was 150 years ago, so they're not that far off all-told. Or, actually, in a sense even more recently when the congress decided between Bush and Gore.
Look at the unrest in Hong Kong over China pre-approving candidates for political office. In a place that had democracy and is transitioning to Chinese rule it is obvious that very many people don't think they are getting "more choice" with their locked in list of candidates. I am not championing the US system (it has many flaws) but at least Democrats and Republicans have vastly different ideologies that people can choose from. That citizens from both parties tend to pick moderate candidates (that are closer in ideology) does not lessen the real choice the people are given when voting in elections.
Looking at what China does in Hong Kong is vastly different from what China does in China.
By the same token, in the States we get say in the president. The same is not true for places under the control of The Office of Insular Affairs & Puerto Rico.
At least the citizens of Hong Kong get to vote.
I'm not saying Chinese government is perfect, it absolutely has massive hurdles before it could be described as modern, but it's not nearly as bad as most Westerners make it out to be. A lot has changed in the last 30 years.
As I implicitly recognised in my initial comment, the number of non totalitarian communist governments is small. Nonetheless there are plenty of people who self-identify as communist (e.g. in Greece) who don't advocate policies that require or imply totalitarianism. That's why the precision matters.
Well there aren't any actual communist governments, so there haven't been any totalitarian ones. :P
I agree, somewhat, about using vernacular, but that misses the point.
The USSR was no-more a communism because they said so than they'd have been a capitalism by saying so... You are as you do, not as you wish to be seen doing.
Communist governments, in order to function, pretty much have to be totalitarian - unless you can think of another way to have a one party system with complete control over the economy.
I think you are trivializing thousands of years of history with this. China is ... china. They use the same alphabet they used when egyptians used hieroglyphs. The sensibilities of the chinese population are not about a people being dominated by a marxist tyranny. It's china being ruled as it has always been ruled - the dynasties have come and gone but the dynamics of government - and the cultural sensibilities which coexist with these - have co-existed longer than most western countries have a written history.
The communist party is just another dynasty in the long succession of dynasties. That they have a specific brand of ideology should not fool you - the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy than an ideological communist state.
> the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy
Has there ever been a nominally communist state that wasn't a pragmatic autocracy? That seems to be the main criticism of communism... that it's impossible without immoral coercion of some sort.
'Immoral coercion' makes it sound like a quick graft. I suggest it's more fruitful to compare countrys policies with the histories of government within the same region rather than other countries in different cultural regions. If you want to moralize this method makes it far easier to pinpoint the really bad apples.
China managed to succeed in increasing people wealth and loosening laws (still bad for Western standards, but huge step comparing to China 30 years ago).
Only because West thinks this is "brutal and cruel" dosent mean our laws would ever worked there.
Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify).
Same with China - imagine them exploding with an extra 1 Billion people over next 20 years. Who will feed them? What would be social implications of such a move?
Our freedoms are not always applicable in other parts of the world.
It should be that way. But some cannot understand that some countries do not want Democracy. Its not that they don't matured - they just don't want it. Even in some European countries we can see the move to shift much more power to presidents (Hungary, Slovakia, Poland).
"Royalists" have been a phenomena everywhere. Then again population of a country is able to change it's mind.
Just before WWI lot's of European intelligentsia favored communism. Same happened before WWII with fascism. It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend. And something else will come after it.
For any given moment, it's even probable that majority of some country does not want democracy. There are ~200 countries and several somewhat convincing ideologies.
> Just before WWI lot's of European intelligentsia favored communism.
Just to get a real feel for it, I recommend reading through this[0] book review, it may scare one shitless. Also, that belief went for longer than just I WW, it went through the II WW and finally dwindled down when the Cold War started. But imagine this - western newspapers were literally refusing to print bad news about Soviet Union, because it would offend their readers.
As has barefaced lying to the populace about their own dislike for democracy.
It seems particularly common in Egypt where the idea that "the people just aren't ready for Democracy yet like they are in the west" is commonplace among the country's elite.
>It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend.
Nobody's ever voted democracy away and it's not fashion that causes it to end, it's violence.
There is always some kind of "evidence" for vote rigging. How about Egypt? Turkey? You don't vote Muslim brotherhood into power while thinking they maintain democracy. German federal election, March 1933, over 50% of population voted for either NSDAP or communists. And then there is Bhutan.
If someone truly doesn't want democracy then they are participating in it. Only some theoretical person without desires could be said to not want a system that lets them express them.
Now, it's debatable if a "representative democracy" would seem to offer that, but I wonder that myself from time to time...
The problem is that current democracy is no democracy at all in most countries. It support corruption, the governments are barely changing (same deputies, the name just changes), total detachment of administration from real human problems, hostile approach towards small businesses.
The thing is that true patriot and authoritarian government for a decade can fix many problems that democracy cant handle. Once again - not everywhere though.
In Libia for example most people loved Kadaffi. Yet, he was removed by revolution that would surely fail if not for major help from west. Kadaffi while violent man, managed to make Libia in to blooming example of African country that can distribute prosperity to majority of people.
Let us check Singapore - did it work? Sure. Was it bad for people? Not really. Obviously there will be some affected by strong power, but devastating majority seen their lives skyrocketing comparing to Malasia.
The issue is that majority of strong Leaders are either military man, or democratically chosen governments that refuse to give power away - and they are often bad news.
> The thing is that true patriot and authoritarian government for a decade can fix many problems that democracy cant handle. Once again - not everywhere though.
Exactly this. And isn't it the reason so many people here are into startups? Technology is inherently undemocratic, and so are tech startups that succeed - but we don't call it that because this is "private land", not "politics land". And even ignoring the profit motive, that's why technology is appealing - a few smart people (backed by enough money) with one good design can force a change on the entire world that would never fly if you've asked people themselves.
And frankly, this might be something that we desperately need for the coming decades. Democratic countries have proven themselves unable to tackle the serious issuses of energy and climate change. They don't even bother making token gestures. On the other hand, if a decade ago they'd just said "fuck it, we're building those nuclear power plants whether you like them or not", we'd all be running on green energy now.
Sure, in many places, for some time, a benevolent dictator in tune with the needs and desires of their people might best approximate a democratically chosen ideal. And in other times not.
The point though, is that nobody can choose to not have the freedom to choose. And as such, we all wish to choose the best government for us - whatever form that may appear. But when it stops serving us...
Oh hell like anyone wants to shift power to president in Poland. Or as if anyone believed presidents have any power over anything (even the US president doesn't have any real power; you don't get to be in that position if you're a wildcard that is likely to do things against your party or the rest of administration).
If anything we have a conflict between people who want the country to be more Catholic and the ones who want it to be less Catholic, and a secondary push against any government because people seem to believe that entrepreneurs are force of good that is being murdered by the Evil Government through means like taxation.
Democracy is strong here - people are being indoctrinated in it since early childhood, and it's especially effective since we have the boogeyman of comunist USSR to scare them with.
> Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify)
Some parts of the world are not grown up to handle democracy or make social decisions. Those worlds usually have only three options, forced dictator, forced democracy or domestic war.
We could go in to the detail but I assumed my point was clear on this one.
When a death row inmate is killed the executioner is without doubt responsible for the death. Just like the judge that sentenced him is responsible. Now whether they were justified or not is a different question (which many would argue there is never good enough justification for the death penalty)
Anyway, it's not interesting, the only thing the parents are responsible for is having a second child and breaking the law. What people do to enforce the law is their responsibility not the responsibility of the parents that broke it, the same applies for the murderer on death row.
Just because something is legal doesn't absolve you of responsibility. The same way soldiers "just following orders" are responsible for the actions they commit at the behest of their superiors. Both the superiors and the soldiers are responsible
If you don't consider any punishment the responsibility of a criminal, then I think you're using a different definition of 'responsible' than most people, and this might actually be a semantic argument rather than anything meaningful.
> responsible : having an obligation to do something, or having control over or care for someone, as part of one's job or role.
The criminal is only responsible for breaking the law, the only thing he had control over before he was caught (assuming he was caught for the sake of argument). We as society are responsible for dealing out the punishment.
How could the criminal be responsible for the punishment when he is not the one inflicting it on him/herself.
edit: To make my argument slightly easier to understand I'm going to give an extreme example
Let's say it's illegal to be a certain religion. Is it the insert religion here person's responsibility that he is punished and sent to a death camp?
The punishment being justified depends entirely on whether or not the law itself is just (e.g. capital punishment is largely considered to be a legal injustice). Whether or not responsibility is transitive a separate, but important, matter.
As it turns out, responsibility for statutory laws is only transitive when applied to a party to the statute (e.g. a lawmaker or the enforcer).
A thief is responsible for restitution because depriving someone of their property is violation of natural law. A party who breaks a contract is responsible for fulfilling the terms they agreed to, because they made that agreement.
A thief, or a party who breaks a contract, is not responsible for a _statutory law_ enforced against them (unless they are a law maker or the law enforcer).
The creators and enforcers of the statue are responsible for creating it and enforcing it. They are responsible for its outcome, whether that is a dead murderer or a dead baby.
And if the contract is "you can live and work here if you don't have a baby"? Let's say a hypothetical government doesn't touch the woman, but they insist the woman do something to avoid raising too many children.
Honestly curious: Are you making an argument that laws and punishments for breaking them are wrong across the board? Or are you saying that the laws might be just in some cases, and the punishment a necessary evil, but that even in those cases you think it's important to place responsibility on the enforcers of those laws?
The latter. If people took responsibility for their actions I believe injustices like forced abortions wouldn't happen as often. I can imagine it's very easy for somebody that is forcing a woman to have an abortion at 8.5 months pregnant to rationalize away what they are doing as upholding the law and that the government is responsible for what is happening.
You have to punish the defectors if you want to have a stable society. If you set up a law that says "X is punishable by death" and someone does X, then you have to deliver death to that person, or else the law loses all its coordinating power. If the law itself is not just, then you're responsible for unnecessary deaths, but a person committing X in full knowledge of the consequences is responsible for their own death.
It's really similar to jumping out of the 10th floor window. It's the dv/dt that actually kills you, but it's you who is responsible for your own death.
This assumes that China has a strong legal system and that government officials won't abuse the system to meet arbitrary quotas. Neither of which are true.
tl;dr Couple had the legal right and license to have a second child, but the local family planning officials were over quota so they made up some bullshit about her license being expired and forced her to abort her 8-month old fetus.
Plenty of godfilled cultures have compromised just as many if not more violations of the sanctity of human life. Take your god away from me, and help yourself instead.
>Same with China - imagine them exploding with an extra 1 Billion people over next 20 years. Who will feed them? What would be social implications of such a move?
Well for one thing, you'd have a billion more potential farmers...
Population growth is a pretty old problem, and if recent developed nations' demographic reports show, it solves itself once you reach a certain level of development.
China's success is not necessarily because of the policies in place by the government. It could very well be in spite of them.
The quantity of the available resources is not nearly as much of a problem as the allocation. Subsistence farmers are not as productive on the same plot of land as industrialized commodity farmers.
We have more than enough land and water to feed everyone, but the (simplified) problem is that when one person does all the farming for the whole world, nobody else can afford to trade for any of it from them.
Surely the farmer needs clothing. So he will trade with the sole cloth maker. Surely the club maker needs threads and dyes, so she will trade with the due maker and the thread spinner... And ad infinitum.
>China's success is not necessarily because of the policies in place by the government.
Please enlight us then; Knowing that in china government is present in EVERY aspect of a life (religion, state, education, internet) I cannot see how their success is not because of the policies of the government. Any place that has an exploding growth is in deep shit just look at the whole africa. better off countries with exploding growth, turkey or maghreb countries are also in deep shit with big parts of the population immigrating to europe to survive this.
China already has an average of ~1.7 children per family [0] if you factor into account that the policy is enforced at a provincial level, and depending on that province, it may be the case that (0) people of certain backgrounds (e.g. farmers, minorities, parents with disabilities or medical conditions) can be exempt in some areas, (1) affluent people sometimes just pay the fine and have a second child, (2) in the most recent version of the law, if one parent is an only child, they were permitted have 2 children, (3) Chinese citizens who have resided overseas for some period of time may be permitted to have 2 children.
A lot of people may go from 1 to 2 children. Not that many people will go from 2 to 3 children. Children are very expensive for most families.
imo you are not including the fact that Chinese culture is quite different to other parts of the world. It would be better to compare them to India and Vietnam rather than world statistics.
Development is not something that happens naturally if you just leave people alone. Overpopulation hinders development. They most certainly wouldn't be as developed as they are if they had grown faster than their economy could sustain.
China's success is DEFINITELY because of the policies they put in place.
Population growth at China's scale is not a "pretty old problem". It's literally the largest population in the history of the world. No one, not even the U.S. government has an idea of what to do there. Then, add in the fact that when these policies were made, China had not even been through an industrial revolution and just had a MASSIVE famine (20-40 million deaths), I think the decision to have a one-child policy made a lot of sense.
>Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify).
A mistake was made. It was not understood that people in war-torn countries want peace and stability above all else, and are willing to hand in their liberties for it. It was also not understood that among people who don't trust news or words of any kind (justified in this case) it is rational to support the candidate that's closest to yourself genetically.
The link between democracy and wealth, stability and trust flow both ways, and it's easier to start with wealth, stability and trust than with democracy.
Also, there is a lot more at play in the middle east than simply whether the people want democracy or stability. There is plenty of foreign interference going on from USA, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc... it's hard enough to overthrow a dictatorship and set up a free and democratic replacement. It's even harder when several foreign powers are fighting to prevent this from happening.
As I understand it (probably needs some correction):
This is a cold war being fought over who will supply Europe with natural gas. Russia, the current supplier, makes a ton of money off the current arrangement and it gives Russia influence over Europe. Europe has largely stayed out of the fracas publicly, to avoid antagonizing Russia, but supports the US's efforts to get the pipeline built to have an alternate source for the energy they need. I'm unclear as the role of the US in all this, but we're tightly allied with Western Europe, so I imagine we're representing Europe's interests by proxy. But what is clear is that it's no coincidence that the countries where all this craziness is happening are the countries along the planned route for the pipeline. Seen through this lens, everything starts to make sense, including Russia's endeavors to support Assad, an opponent of the pipeline.
Expecting stability in a region where one superpower wants a pipeline built and another doesn't isn't reasonable, no matter how ready the population is for democracy. Add in that the region has a ton of people who believe in a medieval religion that advocates violence against non-adherents, and what little hope there was vanishes.
> China managed to succeed in increasing people wealth and loosening laws
To be clear, do you think that killing children or forced abortions were major contributors to that? Or does it just so happen that the two happened at the same time?
It seems like a bit of a logical stretch to me to say, "America installing democracy didn't work in Iraq, so we shouldn't be worried if China kills or forcefully aborts children."
Maybe instead of building camps and fighting between A and B consider option C? I am not saying its OK by my standards but it seems that this was only way for China to properly handle this issue at the time when they made this move.
Your assumption is a stretch. You are putting words in my mouth and that's just below level of conversation one should expect from HN community.
There is a lot more at play in the middle east than "they never really wanted it".
As I wrote elsewhere, it's hard enough in a vacuum to overthrow a dictatorship and start a free and functional democracy. It's even harder when there are a multitude of foreign powers interfering in your country preventing this from happening. Democracy is failing in the middle east because there are a lot of powerful people and nations who don't want it to succeed, want the region to remain unstable, and want the region to remain within their respective spheres of influence.
And finally, how does anybody know "what they really want" unless you ask the entire country in a free and fair manner? This is the big fallacy behind "the people prefer the lesser evil of dictatorship." You can't say that. You don't have a clue what the people prefer. This is the whole point: if the people want a dictatorship, give them a free, fair, democratic vote and let them choose dictatorship.
> And finally, how does anybody know "what they really want" unless you ask the entire country in a free and fair manner? This is the big fallacy behind "the people prefer the lesser evil of dictatorship." You can't say that. You don't have a clue what the people prefer. This is the whole point: if the people want a dictatorship, give them a free, fair, democratic vote and let them choose dictatorship.
It's not even that easy. Ask the entire country in a free and fair manner and you'll quickly discover that people's opinions are not independent and do not exist in a vacuum. They may say to you they prefer living in a dictatorship because of a combination of not knowing anything else and pro-dictatorship propaganda. Or they may say "democracy!" because they drank the kool-aid.
I'm starting to believe that the only way to reach democracy as a stable state is for a society to naturally evolve towards it. Just leave it alone, let them figure things out; after a few generations they will probably sort out their culture and then they'll have a democracy that's sustainable because it'll be backed by decades of cultural growth. Trying to speed this transformation up is a dangerous game. Trying to speed it up with tanks and guns is just crazy.
Are you implying that all those middle-eastern countries were failed states, ruled by hordes of warlords? For instance, I vaguely remember Iraq being a pretty fine country; for decades, a lot of engineers from my country went there, and we had a pretty good economic cooperation. Then the US came and bombed the living shit out of it.
As for Africa, isn't most of the mess the result of Europe coming there, destroying their local governance, abusing them for a while and then withdrawing, leaving a huge power vacuum behind?
Iraq after the invasion sort of was. No civil society existed, but there were plenty of bands of guerillas and local religious extremists who'd been fighting Saddam; they inherited the state when we destroyed the Baathists. (The CPA tried to create a civil society, but that can't be done artificially.)
_The Prince of the Marshes_ is a good book to read on this subject.
These are two different issues -- democracy and human rights. There's nothing wrong with having a king, for example; but there's something very wrong with state-mandated infanticide -- and it would be just as wrong if it was imposed by a democracy as by any other form of government.
The brutality and cruel enforcement is not a widespread problem at least in the eyes of general Chinese population.
The only lawful enforcement for the one-child policy is a financial fine (which more and more people can afford now).
Any other forceful abortion is against the law. And that is the more common situation in China.
The problem of illegal and brutal "enforcement" only exists in some rural areas and nowadays with the popularity of Internet, it a lot more rare than before.
And thus it's not part of the incentive to end the one-child policy.
Agreed, but it should also be noted that in practice, families that want to have more than two children are quite rare in urban China today, as they are in most developed countries. Meanwhile, rural families in China have been allowed to have two or more children (depending on a few rules) for several years already.
it is just as brutal and cruel as US cop.in china,one child was a law,you want more child,you pay more money,it was called Social maintenance fees.but someone did not want to pay the money,so come the brutal and cruel just like US cop shoot on blacks,but in china the one child law-executor has no gun,and they are base officer,they have more pressure and want more benefit than US cop
Am I the only person who thinks population control policies like this are a great thing? This strange notion people have that they should be able to breed without bound is baffling to me.
People talk about the dangers of overpopulation as if they're theoretical. They're not, numbers don't lie. At some point people have to stop having babies, whether humanely by a government mandate, or by the inhumanity of war and poverty.
You're not the only one. I'm in that camp too. Yes, I can imagine perfectly well the happiness a parent gets from having a child, and maybe I will want to have a child of my own in the future. Nobody says we can't breed. When the population levels off, everyone will be able to have two children.
If you want more, then there's only one solution - push harder for science and technology, so that we may use our resources in a more efficient way (Earth has a lot of carrying capacity on the surface, and we haven't even begin to colonize oceans). And then we may move to other planets.
But people need to grow up and realize they're not free to do anything they like, not yet. Freedom to breed is just another one we need to collectively decide to restrict for now. And then, like with every other coordination problem, you have to punish the defectors, because coordination is not a statically stable state.
Are there any psychology/sociology studies how one-child policy impacted China's society? It has been documented how having one child vs siblings impact one's psyche. I wonder what kind of impact it has on a culture/society as a whole if most are from single-child families.
Well, we definitely know that the policy combined with the already-existing culture resulted in a massive gender gap. Not sure of any studies beyond that, I too would be interested!
I have a number of friends who are teachers, all of whom say that you can spot a single child within about 5 minutes of observing them. They just act differently.
Watching the difference in my oldest child when the second came along and was old enough for them to play together - it was astounding.
There must be some optimal number of siblings for mental health. More than 1 less than 4 ?
> I have a number of friends who are teachers, all of whom say that you can spot a single child within about 5 minutes of observing them. They just act differently.
Differently how?
Whenever a student comes late to class, I've always imagined that those students who look up from their work are more likely to come from rural areas in Norway, and that those who don't look up to see who is coming are more likely to come from the city.
But I don't really know what the difference in behavior would be for a sibling vs only child.
Their main finding: "[We find that the one-child policy] has produced significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals."
In my personal experiences dating women from China that now live in the US: There is also a loneliness, depression, and generalized malaise to their thoughts due to being an 'only child'.
If we take that observation as general rule (not that it is, but let's pretend) - wouldn't that make for a stronger collective then? In order to mitigate those issues. Lots of interesting speculations can be made. Sociologists and psychologists must have a field day there.
> less trusting, less trustworthy (...) less competitive
I wonder how it goes together. "Less trusting" and "less trustworthy" should mean "less cooperating" and thus more competitive. Adding "more risk-averse", does this mean they just sit around doing nothing? I'd be interesting to read an additional analysis, as I notice I'm confused by those findings. But:
Yeah, I wonder if there's been any studies done on the validity of "Little Emperor" syndrome. That is, the fear that the generation of single children would grow up spoiled and socially maladjusted.
"A Christian Manifesto" by Francis A. Schaeffer gives a reason why.
Our creator inspires freedom and love. When we follow him we seek to spread freedom to not only ourselves but to others as well. A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly.
The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.
America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is
predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms.
> America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view.
America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one.
Fixed that for you.
> The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.
No one has moral absolutes, they do not exist except in the minds of those who want to force their morality onto others who don't agree with them. Laws aren't about morals, they're about reason.
It's an expression. Liquid water has mass and takes up space. It's material. It exists in a materialistic universe where the only things that exist are matter an energy.
On the other hand, there's nothing physical about "laws." They lose their law-like properties and become conventions of thought rather than regulators of truth and rationality in a world where only matter and energy exist.
> Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world.
And how do you suppose that? Materialism doesn't deny the existence of logic; you seem to not really know what materialism is.
> Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?
Yea, you don't know what materialism is. I can't stub my toe on hacker news either, nor any website, but they clearly exist and they exist in way perfectly compatible with materialism as does your mind and the thing we call logic. They still all reduce down to patterns of matter in your brain or patterns of electrons in computer chips, it is all physical at the base level. To a materialist, mind is simply what the brain does, it's your operating system just as Windows is what your computer is probably doing. Perfectly compatible with materialism.
Science and logic go hand in hand and scientists are virtually all materialists because so far as anyone can demonstrate with evidence, materialism is the nature of reality.
> If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right?
If they're using different forms of logic, then they're both right according to the form they're using, but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic.
> Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then.
It's not my view, it's simply the way it is. Different rules of logic exist [1]; such systems are axiomatic and obey their own rules. There is no one "correct" system of logic, there are many competing systems. The term law is meaningless, logic isn't a law in the sense you seem to think, it is merely a system of formalized thinking according to rules.
> I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions.
Logic is merely a branch of philosophy concerned with valid reasoning. Reasoning is not in opposition to materialism. Materialists do not argue that thoughts don't exist and logic is merely a formal method of thinking. You're objecting to materialism when it's quite clear you don't understand what it is.
> If they're using different forms of logic, then they're both right according to the form they're using,
Absurd. Knowledge is impossible if both are right. You're bad at this.
> but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic.
Says who? Your conventions? What if my "conventions" of logic say the can be compared if they're different systems of logic? You're imposing a "law" of "you can't compare when I say so."
I'm telling you that you can't know anything or say something is rational or irrational with conventions of logic.
I'm also pointing out your treating laws of logic like laws (yay! I commend you for treating them like laws), but you are coming from a worldview that doesn't allow for laws (boo! inconsistency!).
This is where materialists bow out because they don't want to dig too deeply into their presuppositions.
> I'm telling you that you can't know anything or say something is rational or irrational with conventions of logic.
Stawman, that point is not in dispute.
> but you are coming from a worldview that doesn't allow for laws (boo! inconsistency!).
No I'm not. Your notion that materialism doesn't allow logic is simply wrong. You don't know what materialism is and I'm tired of repeating myself on that point why you continue to skirt the issue and ignore that.
> This is where materialists bow out because they don't want to dig too deeply into their presuppositions.
No, they bow out because you're clearly irrational and unable to engage in meaningful conversation because you don't address points being made to you. You just ignore them and keep saying the same non-sense that's being challenged.
Most contentious issues--marriage laws, universal healthcare, minimum wage, etc--are explicitly framed and argued (by both sides) with the language of justice. Moral preferences guide law; reason is just post-hoc rationalization.
You might object that "law" is not the same as "contentious issues," but that changes nothing. The emotionally charged political process that drives these debates is the same one that produces legislation. It is almost structurally incapable of producing rational outcomes.
Justice is not necessarily a moral concept, it's quite a reasonable concept as well. Laws are about reason in the sense that they're things we can convince majorities to abide by; sometimes those justifications are moral, but being immoral is not a justification to be illegal as morals themselves are fluid and what is moral for one isn't for another. As there are no absolute morals, laws are thus based on reasoning between moral beings as to what they can agree to.
"A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly."
I think you need to specify which principles exactly one wants to adopt in a society. All the european states were devoutly christian for 2000 years and I would not call e.g. 15th century Spain the epitome of human rights and freedom.
"America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms."
At what point in time would you say america was more respectful of individual rights? It's not long ago it practiced genocidal policies towards the indigenous people of the continent - nor is it that long while ago it abolished slavery. If you go much back the colonies will not have been even established.
Our founders did that hard work for us. The Bill of Rights and the constitution explain what freedoms we are granted and as well why we are granted them (inalienable rights from our Creator). Previously throughout history, rights were granted to people from their government, through laws.
These concepts were flipped upside down, and if you study why, you'll see the reason is Biblical principles. All you have to do is read many founding documents to see this.
John Adams wrote "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Why would he say this? Think about it.
I'm not experienced enough to describe or explain why America has done bad things throughout history. We all make mistakes, and we are all unique. I'm sure corruption existed throughout our history. My personal feeling is that between 1900 and say now, Americans are more willing to reject the reasoning that gave it freedom to accept the reasoning that will take it away.
This rejection starts not only at the bottom but at the top.
Many Ivy League colleges were founded to educate and raise missionaries. Why? Perhaps to spread the message of freedom and liberty. What are they doing now? The exact opposite. Think about that.
Many here will argue it's a good thing. So be it, but it doesn't make it anymore true than the message I'm sharing.
"My personal feeling is that between 1900 and say now, Americans are more willing to reject the reasoning that gave it freedom to accept the reasoning that will take it away."
I can give several counterexamples to that claim.
Racial segregation "ended" in the United States in 1964. I would claim the country was - at least from a legislative standpoint - more free after than before it. So starting from 1900 I would claim there is a trend towards more freedom.
The recent years have seen the acceptance of more people as they are. Gay marriages are now legal which I think is a fantastic achievement in the history of human rights - no matter how long it took to get there
So, at least from the point of view of several minorities, United States seems to be more free now than ever. I don't know what the totality of the situation is, though (not an american).
I would state that the behavior occurring was already unconstitutional, as we are all created equal and we all have equal rights. This was a founding principle.
The question is, do you have equal rights on my private property? The law says yes. It's disappointing we need a
law to get us that far. We had to give up individual liberty, by allowing laws to move into our personal lives, in order to give equal rights to others?
I don't respect people of other nationalities because there is a law to do so. What new impact did the law have on people's hearts? What impact does the Bible have on a persons heart when it says to "love thy neighbor like thyself".
Even with the Civil Rights acts, we have a heightened sense of urgency in the united states, where the media reports violence between white and black people frequently. A new law won't stop this, but a change of heart just might.
If this account of things were correct, then we would expect to find that less-religious (or specifically less-Christian) nations have less freedom. It doesn't look to me as if this is true; for instance, the nations of Scandinavia are distinctly less Christian than the US (they often have established churches, but the rate of actual religious belief and commitment in the population is low) and they seem no less free than the US; and some notoriously un-free societies have been explicitly Christian (e.g., Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, Mussolini's Italy).
We would also expect to see correlations between freedom and Christian belief and affiliation within nations on longer timescales. For instance, in Europe the Middle Ages are generally thought of as particularly religious; was that a specially free period of history? It doesn't seem so.
But the OP was not talking about "religion" per se, he was saying that freedom is a natural result of following Christ, specifically following the words of Christ as found in the Bible.
Your example of the Middle Ages is a case in point: During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language (Latin). How could society develop an attitude towards freedom in such a climate of religious oppression?
> not talking about "religion" per se [...] following the words of Christ as found in the Bible
We're in some danger of getting no-true-Scotsmanned here, since it's by no means straightforward to determine who is and isn't actually "following the words of Christ as found in the Bible".
Still, let's consider Uganda, where being (actively) homosexual is now punishable by life imprisonment thanks largely to the activism of Christians following the words they find in the Bible. (Not specifically "the words of Christ", but actually that's a bit you just made up; what code4life said was "the new testament Biblical principles".) Now, for all I know you may think this is a good law, and I'm not going to try to change your mind if so -- but what it obviously isn't is an improvement in freedom.
Or consider the long and sad history of how Christians, following the principles they found in the Bible, have tried to prevent schoolteachers telling their pupils accurately about certain areas of science. Again, you might agree with the people who made the laws in question that, e.g., evolution is a damnable atheistic error, but these laws very plainly reduced people's freedom. (In more recent years, as a result of having one such measure after another struck down in the courts, antievolutionists have shifted tactics, and since roughly the 1990s their preferred legal measures haven't been particularly anti-freedom. But that's only because their attempts to get their way by impeding teachers' freedom stopped working.)
> During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language
I think that's a rather tendentious way of putting it. What happened, rather, was that Latin-as-vernacular largely died out but the prevailing Bible translations remained in Latin. Not a matter of scripture being taken away from the people, but of the people moving away from the language used for the scriptures. (And from written language in general; literacy was very low in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Providing vernacular bibles might not have done anyone much good.)
So, anyway, it's true that mediaeval people generally didn't have Bibles. But they did go to church, where those clergy were supposed to expound on doctrines derived from the Bible, and they did have a culture saturated with Christian ideas. And, actually, it's not even so clear that they didn't have vernacular Bible translations. Take a look here (apologies for the outrageously long Google Books link):
"To be sure, the Protestant Reformation did achieve a change in the way the Bible was read and the way it functioned within Christian spirituality, but this change was largely due to a long medieval tradition of lay access to biblical texts."
The sad part is the policy was likely unnecessary given what we now know about the effects of urban migration and modern healthcare on reducing population growth.
It's often too expensive to have multiple children in a large city, and when infant and child mortality is reduced there's less incentive to have lots of kids (so people use birth control).
China's 1 child policy (now 2 child, I guess) is a difficult to fully form an opinion on.
On one hand, "population crisis" is something a lot of people are concerned about^ and the policy was a direct and practical way of tackling it. On the other, it is unmistakably totalitarian.
Going to 2 is a strange choice. It's just as totalitarian, but probably has a fairly negligible effect on average fertility rate. I guess they don't see
^On a tangent, I don't totally buy population crisis and judging from how rarely I hear it mentioned these days I think I'm not alone. There is obviously some natural limit on human population, but I don't think we're near it.
The fact that we hear less concern about it is says something interesting about the zeitgeist. I think people believe in technological progress more in 2015 than they have since the space age and nuclear age of 50 years ago, maybe more than ever. At our current rate (ignoring the projected gradual reduction) we'll double every 65 years. I can certainly see us absorbing doubling population density in that time considering all the empty oceans, deserts, the potential for landless food productions, megacities and all that jazz. I mean, If the US & Australia went to the population densities of Germany and France (moderately dense with quite a lot of open spaces), we would be good for another 100 years.
Its not really a strange choice, its been "1 with lots of exceptions that mostly make it 2" for some time (there were exceptions with a limit of 2 instead of 1 for many rural areas, for families where at least one parent was an only child, etc.) Going to 2 is a pretty obvious simplification that doesn't really change much except the degree of administrative overhead, plus the policy has hurt perception of China in the developed world, and changing it to two from one along with well-managed press relations get you lots of "China to end one-child policy" headlines around the world, and with most people not reading below the headline, that's a huge propaganda win for doing essentially nothing but making a totalitarian policy administratively simpler.
And, really, it was always the plan: the OCP was originally conceived of as a single generation policy to bring the population down, which would be replaced with a stable population policy; it didn't exactly work out that way in a crisp sense, but a going from a one-child policy with very limited exceptions, to a growing set of exceptions, to finally a two-child policy is, in outline, generally consistent with the original blueprint.
> There is obviously some natural limit on human population, but I don't think we're near it.
The practical limit is going to be dependent on pre-existing environmental conditions, technology and distribution of lifestyles and other factors; its a moving target. (And not necessarily moving consistently in one direction.)
> The fact that we hear less concern about it is says something interesting about the zeitgeist. think people believe in technological progress more in 2015 than they have since the space age and nuclear age of 50 years ago, maybe more than ever.
I don't think that's the issue. I think that the fact that Gen X and the Millenials have been less economically secure than preceding generations (reversing the trend toward greater security) means that increasingly, people are focused on more immediate, personal concerns. Plus, to the extent that there is a concern for broader, global environmental issues, the focus has been climate change rather than overpopulation (the two concerns overlap considerably, but climate change is more specific and concrete than generalized carrying capacity concerns.)
> At our current rate (ignoring the projected gradual reduction) we'll double every 65 years.
And, IIRC, in the mid-1960s, that was about 32 years. Which difference also contributes to the reduction in concern for overpopulation since then: we may be closer to whatever limit exists, but we're approaching it much more slowly now and that rate is still dropping.
We've definitely got the space and the resources. The demographic-economic paradox shows that solving the problem of overpopulation is simply a matter of distributing the renewable surplus we have of food water and shelter to the close to 50% of the world which struggles to obtain. This would create a positive feedback loop which would in turn pay for itself.
>There exists a realizable, evolutionary alternative to our being either atom-bombed into extinction or crowding ourselves off the planet. The alternative is the computer-persuadable veering of big business from its weaponry fixation to accommodation of all humanity at an aerospace level of technology, with the vastly larger, far more enduringly profitable for all, entirely new World Livingry Service Industry. It is statistically evident that the more advanced the living standard, the lower the birth rate.
I think the angle people are missing is that "totalitarian" doesn't always mean bad. Some problems are generally unsolvable by a democracy (coordination problems in general), you have to introduce some way of unilateral decision making to make progress, if you want to progress faster than by a random walk.
The one-child policy in China is one of the few issues that will piss off both pro-choice and pro-life Americans. Very few things will bring this sort of across-the-board unanimity in American politics.
I don't know. Going through the comments, people here seem to be ahead of the curve in accepting that China may actually have had a point. But it's hard to agree with for many, because that would mean conceding that undemocratic solutions can be good and effective.
Ya I find that westerners in general have a REALLY hard time dealing with the success of China in the past 30 years, all of which springs from undemocratic policy. All media articles I read about China are ridiculously spun to grasp at straws for flaws in the government, while glossing over the tremendous good that the government has done for the people.
I've been on vacation in China this summer and a tourist guide told me that they can have as many children as they want, but 1) they have to pay some sort of one time fee for the second and successive children (maybe 10,000 Yuan? can't remember) and 2) school, healthcare, etc are to be paid in full for those children. Basically if you're not reasonably wealthy you can afford only one child.
454 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] thread(Yes, it's from a couple of years ago, but it describes China's thinking).
So there are still rules, just not as stringent.
> To ensure coordinated economic and social development, the population size for China should be kept at about 1.5 billion, said Guo, citing the results of a study sponsored by the State Council, China's cabinet.
> China should keep its total fertility rate at around 1.8, and the current rate is between 1.5 to 1.6, allowing the country to maneuver its population policy, according to Guo.
It seems like the aim is for a long-term stable demography. Ensuring the working population doesn't fall too much, for example.
> there will be 30 million more men than women in 2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Sex-based_bir...
It was against the law to find the gender of your child in China because if given the option many people wanted boys and would abort.
Look at the timestamp. The article you linked was from two years ago.
The "parents can have two kids if at least one parent is an only child" policy described in that article was overturned today. Now everyone can have two kids.
(four times the entire population of the USA for perspective)
I guess the logic is it will help their economy?
Hopefully it can help address the increasing gender imbalance. It has reached 6:5 male to female births, resulting in huge numbers of Chinese men who cannot find marriage partners.
Interesting turn of phrase there...
I say "girls" because I strongly suspect those are fake accounts run by some agency that will dispatch actual workers to you when you agree for the service. I think so, because otherwise China has a really big evening employment and entertainment problem.
(That is, if you're not interested in the serivces. If you are, then I guess WeChat is paradise on Earth for the Laowai.)
[0] http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/china-polyand...
The 2011 projection says 19 million more boys than girls (Age 0-14).
And 34 million more males than females if you look at the whole population.
wives
Next it will move to Vietnam
However if the process can be completely automated then why not do the manufacturing right where the bulk of consumption is going to happen to reduce shipping costs which are always growing.
world won't be able to feed infinite humans so a restriction policy will eventually be needed (or systematic culling, depending on whichever comes first between enlightenment and desperation)
an interesting resulting problem of which is that population will keep aging. solutions will need to take into account non productive member in their older age, either balancing with equal amount of younger or culling from the top instead of the bottom of the age bracket
we won't likely see that in our lifespan, with some luck.
Overpopulation causes many problems, being able to feed them is not one of them.
Most western countries populations grow only because of immigration - fertility is below the replacement rate.
Overpopulation is the "problem" people trot out so they don't have to talk about things they might actually have to do something about, like switching to renewable energy sources, or improving women's education in developing countries.
Which highlights the other reason people talking about overpopulation are unsettling: suddenly everyone's playing psychopath.
Exit programs for the kids of the local religious nuts starting from pre-school?
A nice talk from Hans Rosling on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA5BM7CE5-8
We are already at more than twice a sustainable population level. Even the most generous estimates I've seen place the Earth's carrying capacity at 7.7 billion people. But most estimates say that the Earth can support 2-3 billion people at modest levels of first-world consumption. The more our planet will be stripped of its resources now (whether through overfishing, destruction of forests, or climate change), the lower the sustainable planet population will become.
Put differently, we need to lose at least 5 billion people in the next decades without replacing them with a younger generation to be able to sustain the emancipation of emerging countries. It's not about population growth stabilizing, we need both massive negative population growth and halving of current energy use in developed countries. The only "natural" means through which I can see that happening is massive food shortages or horrific wars, and I think it's a pretty safe bet that the former will trigger the latter. It's also a pretty safe bet that our global society will disappear in that scenario, so I'd rather we have better solutions before that happens.
As soon as anyone frames sustainability challenges in terms of the earths "carrying capacity" they are revealing a bias that is unhelpful. Even if you accept the premise that the earth does have some 'maximum population' then so what? It's a useless proposition -- what are you going to do, force everyone to only have one child, that is unsustainable as China discovered.
Luckily, as the parent pointed out, overpopulation is not a problem. The rate of growth continues to decrease, and global populations will peak in my lifetime.
It gives me an idea for a sci-fi story, where a stable civilization of smart beings faces a threat of the sphere of all-consuming humans expanding at the speed of light.
In the interest of (scientific) discourse, it is generally unhelpful to redefine or ignore generic definitions. Are you asserting that the earth doesn't support any species, or that is perfectly possible to have googolplex people living on earth without reducing earth's ability to support googolplex people in the future?
In answer to your googolplex question - I think it's safer to bet on the technology developing to support such a population than against it. (Though I think we'll either be extinct or an interstellar species before then.)
My use of that population number was simply that: a refutation of the assertion that the earth has no population limit, as it will be hard to argue that our planet can support 10^9980 humans per square millimeter of land area. A genuine "argumentum ad absurdum", to counter the GP's completely nonsensical opening statement.
But instead of that, the initial reply:
- refused the basic premise that would have allowed that discussion, by indirectly positing that space on earth is infinite
- followed it up with a very questionable assertion that earth's resources are used "more or less sustainably" (which is already at odds with the previous assertion that resources are infinite, and ignores the many species we've already hunted to extinction)
- added a non-sequitur that we would have run out of resources as hunter-gatherers (again at odds with the initial statement)
- justified the plain refusal of the basic premise with an ad-hominem about bias
- continued on with the apathetic rationalization that nothing can be done anyway
- concluded by reiterating the initial statement without further substantiation
Now, you may argue that my refusal to engage in that discussion is my weakness and it would still have been possible to salvage something positive, however my time is finite and there's better, less taxing discussions to be had.
(/me out, accepting that meta-justification is considered offtopic and will be downmodded).
In answer to your googolplex question - I think it's safer to bet on the technology developing to support such a population than against it. (Though I think we'll either be extinct or an interstellar species before then.)
And, of course, we should be striving in our generation to solve these existential challenges, rather than squandering our time optimizing sales funnels and click-through-rates.
This has a survey of capacity estimates on page 10. I took the median of those, which more or less matched the sources I've encountered over the past year.
Can you show me these estimates? Do they take into account ways we could live with a smaller footprint (e.g. vegetarian/vegan diet) and/or advances in eco-friendly technology?
The whole argument sounds to me like "we don't have to force people to change their lifestyle to adjust for Earth's capacity - we can always force people to change their lifestyle".
Which is pretty visible in the West; every time the government tries to limit access to something, you get a stream of arguments that look exactly the same as those against one child policy that are posted here.
As for your question, I doubt that they would include an all-vegan world scenario, as it's considered unattainable, regardless of whether it would theoretically help. Technological advances are generally included, but with very conservative gain estimates.
Quite frankly, it doesn't matter to me whether the "real" capacity is 1 billion or 20 billion or 100 billion, as I don't believe we (as a species) have any chance of moderation in the face of opulence. As long as there's any surplus capacity left on this planet, we will find a way to use it. As fast and as wasteful as we can, until it all comes crashing down.
What do you expect is causing this? Isn't a large part of the reason for this due to changes in society rather than a synchronised biological trend? For example, couples choosing to have children later, if at all.
If the reasons are social rather than biological, then there's no reason why birth rates (I'm using the term birth rates as it's a more general term for what we're considering) can't increase in the future. The view that overpopulation is a non-problem seems to be based on wishful thinking and/or short-sighted analysis.
- enormous reduction in child mortality - increased female emancipation and economic opportunities - (direct and opportunity) costs of child-raising becomes relatively larger when societies get richer
I don't expect any of those trends to reverse itself
> If the reasons are social rather than biological, then there's no reason why birth rates can't increase in the future.
Sure, and there's no reason why the worldwide decrease cant' accelerate further either. The only question is, why do you think some scenario is more likely than the other?
> The view that overpopulation is a non-problem seems to be based on wishful thinking and/or short-sighted analysis.
To me the view that population increase is/will be some huge problem seems to be continuously redressing the Malthusian nonsense that's been wrong for over 2 centuries
I don't expect any of those trends to reverse itself"
Those aren't the only trends that matter. How about:
* Reduction in working hours/increased leisure time.
* Possibility for development of life extension technology (so long as this comes with an increased window of opportunity for raising kids).
* Changes to family structures (for example, an increase in popularity in tribe-like family structures, which reduces the burden on individual carers).
The point is if birth rate is only slowing down because of how our society currently is, then birth rate predictions are based on that society staying the same, and we have no guarantee of that being the case. Even if you think it's unlikely to change in the near future, humans will hopefully be living on Earth for thousands of years to come. If you were born 1000 years ago, do you believe you could predict how society would turn out in 2015?
If so, I totally support the idea of licensing human breeding.
The licensing proposal is odious even if we were to (naively) discount conventional eugenics. Licenses would likely be tied to "merit", which is rather inextricably linked to socioeconomic class.
What if the priorities of the eugenicists and other life licensers clash? For example, what if a known criminal was also the holder of some rare genes that would link up well with someone from the ruling class?
> "Licenses would likely be tied to "merit", which is rather inextricably linked to socioeconomic class."
So someone who is poor is of less "merit"?
With the word in quotes like that? Absolutely yes.
So they have merit in an absolute sense, but not in a societal opinion sense.
Also, excluding Nazis from arguments against eugenics is like excluding Bolsheviks from arguments against communism. Spare me your precious Godwin's Law, Nazism is eminently relevant here.
We're discussing limits on reproduction because this "fundamental right" is most likely going to fuck up the planet. Don't confuse basic capability with a "right".
> Also, excluding Nazis from arguments against eugenics is like excluding Bolsheviks from arguments against communism. Spare me your precious Godwin's Law, Nazism is eminently relevant here.
Yeah, I'd like to exclude Bolsheviks from arguments against communism too. It's not about Godwin's Law, but about having an actual argument other than "somebody tried that before once and it didn't work". How about exploring why it didn't work and how we can avoid that particular failure mode while reaping the rewards, without throwing the entire concept out?
Nazis are
Malthusian fallacy. The idea of a "population bomb" has been indoctrinated into the modern mind of certain political orthodoxies since the late 1960's. It has yet to pass, because it is wrong. The jeremiads of Malthus and Ehrlich are myopic and dangerously lacking in imagination.
We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, and thrive -- all with a human population that monotonically grows over long periods of time.
> Don't confuse basic capability with a "right".
What does that even mean?
The fact that the same people who fight for esoteric rights of privacy and free speech disproportionately flip their semantic switch to cast the most fundamental human right in scare quotes is difficult to fathom.
> It's not about Godwin's Law, but about having an actual argument other than "somebody tried that before once and it didn't work". How about exploring why it didn't work and how we can avoid that particular failure mode while reaping the rewards, without throwing the entire concept out?
Here's an "actual argument": modern history. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_eugenics. Arguments that an idea is grievously misguided based on broad appeals to disastrous periods in recent history brought about by that idea are valid in matters of social policy debate, which this is.
We throw the entire concept out because it is intellectually rancid. The taboo is justified. We should not touch eugenics, just like we should not touch proposals for disenfranchising women or chattel slavery.
You're doing this again. Malthus was wrong with his prediction, but he wasn't wrong with noticing obvious limits to growth. It takes special effort to consciously stop noticing it.
> We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, and thrive -- all with a human population that monotonically grows over long periods of time.
You say that like you had any proof for it. Taken at face value, Malthus sounds much more probable than your "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it".
> What does that even mean?
It means: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
> The fact that the same people who fight for esoteric rights of privacy and free speech disproportionately flip their semantic switch to cast the most fundamental human right in scare quotes is difficult to fathom.
I don't flip any switch because I personally don't fight for privacy. I see the current levels of it as a historical anomaly, and generally something we need to outgrow as a society in order to progress.
> We throw the entire concept out because it is intellectually rancid. The taboo is justified. We should not touch eugenics, just like we should not touch proposals for disenfranchising women or chattel slavery.
No, this is dangerously irrational way of thinking. A hundred years ago you would taboo women voting. Two hundred years earlier you would taboo the concept of freedom of black men. What you're doing is just selectively tabooing your cherished belief out of fear your rejection may be wrong. If the belief is valid, it can stand on its own strength, it does not need protection from being discussed.
Malthus premised his hypothesis on an assertion that there were obvious limits to growth. Both the premise of obvious limits to growth and the conclusion of catastrophic resource scarcity due to population growth were wrong.
Our food supply is an obvious limit to population growth like an unlocked door is an obvious limit to leaving a room. Yes, if you do nothing, then you will be limited. That should not instill hand-wringing, existential dread.
> Malthus sounds much more probable than your "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it".
History has proven Malthus and his modern incarnation Ehrlich to be wrong time and time again, which doesn't bode well for that probability of yours.
Again, "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it" is a strawman. Pithy, but vapid. Firstly, I said we will engineer ways to overcome limitations. Our current generation is, and will continue to, engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, thrive, and grow our population.
Do I have proof that the engineers of future generations won't all squander their life and do nothing more than optimize sales funnels and click-through-rates? No. But I think it is much more probable that our society will continue to produce some engineers that have not only the talent but the focus we need to break through our current brittle limitations to population growth -- just like their parents, grandparents, and every generation before them did.
That sort of licensing is ripe for abuse. What would happen if someone in power took that license away from you just because they didn't agree with your political views?
I.e. If the license becomes a problem, it's because you've got bigger problems.
The license will still be administered by someone / some group. Whether you call those with the administrative powers a 'government' or not isn't really important.
Most people would agree that mentally ill people should not have children.
But what constitutes mentally ill? The line is fuzzy - perhaps someone is just a bit "quirky", but still could be a good parent?
In order to have a license the criteria would have to be crystal clear and added to the Constitution (sorry, US-centric). And even if in the Constitution, someone could abuse it (see: NSA, surveillance).
It is vastly oversimplifying, and prejudicial, to say something like that.
Many more people than you seem to think have experienced, or will experience mental illness in their life.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/any-men...
> Most people would agree that mentally ill people should not have children.
Turns out the definition of mental illness covers far more than the most extreme/visible cases so it will be unclear where to draw the line since "mental illness" is too broad a set
Yes, not just political views. As you say, the mentally ill would be one targeted group, former criminals would be another, etc... The most divisive issue would probably be whether those living in poverty would be given the license.
> "In order to have a license the criteria would have to be crystal clear and added to the Constitution (sorry, US-centric). And even if in the Constitution, someone could abuse it (see: NSA, surveillance)."
At most, I could imagine the benefits of taking precautions against accidental pregnancies (vasectomies, etc...), but only as long as those measures would be reversible at any time. I could also see the need for encouraging single child families as the least draconian method of population control (should overpopulation ever become a big issue). Anything beyond that strikes me as a step too far.
Huh? They would? Are you sure about that?
Labels: Slippery slope.
Up until the 1990s in Spain, many thousands of children were systematically stolen from political activists and others with the wrong politics or wrong lifestyle. Parents were told that their newborn had died. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15335899
Yes, Nazi Germany did some shitty stuff for ideological reasons and tarnished the "eugenics" label, but it doesn't invalidate the basic idea of influencing human reproduction and/or selecting for preferred traits and/or direct DNA interventions.
In practice, eugenics seems to move from "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others, and we should strive for those in future generations" to "some genetic makeups are better than others, and we should strive for those", to "some people are better than others, and we should strive for those", to "some people are better than others, and we should force there to not be so many of the others". There doesn't seem to be any clear point at which you can say, "No, you've gone too far", and explain to the true believer why the step they took is too far. They'll just tell you that it's logically implied by the steps that you are in agreement with.
And if you disagree with this, show me historical examples of eugenics movements that stopped at reasonable places. (I probably need to qualify that with "eugenics movements that had some influence", because if you don't have enough influence to get people to accept step 1, you don't move on to step 2. And that may be begging the question on my part, because Nazi Germany may be the only historical example where the ideas got taken seriously and actually influenced much of anything.)
Unrelated comment: Another danger of eugenics is exposed by my wording of the starting point: "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others..." That's clearly true. But the current environment is not necessarily the one that future generations will face; leaving them some genetic diversity (even if it creates some disadvantages) may be a net win. Remember sickle cell anemia.
Because it doesn't. I will assert that even though I'm not a Marxist True Believer.
> After seeing too many examples of it working out badly and none at all of it working well, we regard the idea as invalid.
And that's just plain stupidity, which is exactly what I'm complaining about. It's "someone tried that before some time ago and it didn't work, therefore let's label this stupid and throw it away" kind of attitude. The real reason we're ignoring the entire idea is because communist propaganda has lost and US propaganda has won, and it has little to do with actual merits of the idea itself.
You could utter similar dismissals for fire before we mastered it, or for gasoline before we created ICEs, or for powered flight before Wright brothers. What I was asking for is an actual discussion of the idea - pointing out where the idea is wrong, and talking about how can we modify it to avoid its problems while reaping the rewards.
Which fortunately you did in the rest of your comment, so forgive me for the text above, but I really really disagree with the sentiment of your first paragraph.
--
> And if you disagree with this, show me historical examples of eugenics movements that stopped at reasonable places.
I don't think we had many of such examples - the only ones we label "eugenics" happened within the last 100 years, and involved powerful people with ideology doing stupid and harmful things because doing things because of an ideology is generally stupid and harmful.
> Unrelated comment: Another danger of eugenics is exposed by my wording of the starting point: "some genetic makeups are more fit for the current environment than others..." That's clearly true. But the current environment is not necessarily the one that future generations will face; leaving them some genetic diversity (even if it creates some disadvantages) may be a net win. Remember sickle cell anemia.
Yeah, that's a strong point I'm going to agree 100% with. Too strong adaptation to current environment means you'll be really out of luck when the environment changes.
You don't want to do that after one failed attempt. You probably don't want to do so after two or three. But after enough attempts, you probably have a basis for saying that, no matter how good the theory sounds, it won't work in practice next time either. And if each time it fails produces large amounts of human suffering, there comes a time to quit trying the same stuff that has worked out badly over and over.
Heritably curing the cystic fibrosis gene with an injection? That's eugenics.
One is unfocused and hard to target genetic manipulation via reproduction incentives and force, the other is a choice for very targeted and obvious things.
As a sibling comment notes, eugenics is conventionally understood to be gene selection via people selection, i.e. differential all-or-nothing biological reproduction of whole humans. And it was that sense of the idea I was critiquing.
And it is in that sense of the word that people shooting from the hip with talk of "licensing" the basic human right to reproduce are engaging in shocking historical naivety -- or worse, with facepalm-worthy apologetics like those corners of the commentariat that defend misogyny, slavery and other social aberrations that have rightfully been interred to the dustbin of history.
Because I'm pretty sure that would satisfy 90% of the historical proponents of eugenics, even if you refuse to call it such.
This will only mean the most vulnerable (who need the most support) will be unsupported. You're creating an underclass.
You'd be surprised
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention
The traditional "license" to have children used to be marriage, and children born without such a license were called illegitimate - i.e. outside the law. It was an unjust system that hurt a lot of innocent children, and we've moved away from it for a reason.
If the current system (where marriage and procreation are notionally separate) were found to hurt a lot of innocent children, would we call our system unjust and abandon it?
I suspect not. The current culture around marriage and parenting didn't evolve from pragmatism as much as (various takes on) ethics, morality, and self-determinism.
That alone will prevent many unplanned and unwanted babies in a population without any force, political, eugenics or racist overtones.
I don't know the long term effects of these implants so it's a tentative idea.
In the context of America this was already tried
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#...
Sterilization and licensing are the exactly same mechanism - the state holds veto right over who gets to procreate.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
> "increase to 11.2 billion in the year 2100"
> "may rise to 16 billion by 2100"
> "forecasts between 9.3 and 12.6 billion in 2100, and continued growth thereafter"
> "World population to hit 11bn in 2100 – with 70% chance of continuous rise"
China vs. India: GDP per capita versus fertility rate
http://www.google.se/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ct...
Citation needed; correlation does not equal causation. Other East Asian countries showed similar reductions in fertility in spite of no similar policies, and much greater reductions in poverty.
China vs. India vs. Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea): GDP per capita versus fertility rate
http://www.google.se/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ct...
Taiwan excluded because it seems to be missing from that dataset.
This is HN. Please quit spewing ignorance.
You can't comment like this here. Please re-read the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively or not at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox
With growth and technology, fertility rates goes down and emerging markets,specially BRIC nations, will be severely affected by this.
That's not the way you control birth rates.
You control birth rates by controlling FEMALE fertility... not male fertility.
There are mathematical reasons behind this, but for the purposes of simplicity I'll give the lay explanation. ie - A female can only have one (or so) child every 9 months. A single human male can produce one every day. So having a population with only one male, but 100 females, allows for a FAR higher reproduction rate than a population with 100 males, but only one female.
I'm only saying that you ascribe certain properties to the populations you are dealing with. And there are definitely places in the world where your assumptions fail to hold up. But biology ALWAYS holds up.
By the way... I was being kind. Rape is only ONE whole in your plan. There are many. For instance, your plan also assumes women will never simply get horny. Or that they will only "get off" in certain predetermined ways that your plan deems acceptable. Your plan assumes a lot ... and all of it from your own perspective and belief system. If we work within biological limits... we achieve our goals regardless of the local belief system.
This is the point I'm making... you are asking that human females satisfy themselves with that which YOU deem it acceptable to provide them. What happens if a human female, indeed many human females, decide they want something different???
But it's a well documented effect. Seems to me the easiest way to cut reproduction is to simply develop countries.
1. Multiple children has previously been reserved to those with political connections or money. Now that everyone can have two they will jump at the opportunity.
or
2. Almost every young person in China has grown up in a single child family and sees it as the normal family. Social norms are also based around parents dedicating a lot of resources to one child. So they continue to have only one child. In about a decade China may have to start encouraging people to have more children, like Japan.
Most I've met who already have a child and could feasibly have a second, don't plan to. I suspect they've already gone through the decision to only have one and don't want to revisit it.
However, I don't know what the rural attitudes are, since I haven't talked with people in the countryside.
I think China's demographic future looks a lot like South Korea's or Japan's, with a shortage of young people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan
Rural families have largely been exempted from the one-child policy for a while now. This new development won't change anything for people living in the countryside.
> I think China's demographic future looks a lot like South Korea's or Japan's
Yeah, China already has an issue with a rapidly aging population. It's called the 4-2-1 problem (4 grandparents, 2 parents, 1 child). But this happens in most developed countries. For instance, the average age in the US would be much higher if it weren't for immigration. The native birth rate isn't very high.
Of course this illustration is a simplification but it brings the world population back to perspective.
If there is a problem, it's water. On the plus side, water is the easiest to recycle by far, the only limit we're close to hitting in some locations is the amount of water that's recycled for free by the weather.
Also, we have skyscrapers. The 11m2 area per person is ground-level area. If you have 10-storey skyscrapers on average, 120m2 for every family on average should be easy, and allow for population to increase 5 fold without exceeding available space in Austria.
It's a complete speculation, because I can't cite this, but isn't Earth not capable of sustaining 7+ billion people? Exponential population growth brings even greater exponential rise of greenhouse effect, oil consumption, deforestation, etc. IMHO it is the main problem of overpopulation.
That's an Malthusianism[0] right here. Why recycling and increased efficiency themselves aren't a solution? Because people will increase their consumption to offset all the gains.
C.f.:
"Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were."
[0] - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418
It's not so much that overpopulation isn't an issue, of course it is (that's why it's called 'over' population), but rather that the trend line is that population growth is very rapidly slowing, that people tend to overestimate population growth, are unaware of big population centres that are shrinking, that the average worldwide children per woman rate is < 2.5 (used to be > 5 just 50 years ago) and that population will likely decline after we add a few billion more.
That's not to say that it isn't an issue, but traditionally we held some really weird views about overpopulation. Basically we looked at this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Po...
and extrapolated the exponential growth, and ended up with scenarios of doom, war etc. Food shortages for example are consistently predicted, but food production growth has outstripped population growth substantially and food security is better than any time in the past (yet far from perfect).
Obviously there are huge sustainability concerns, but the biggest source is our level of consumption levels and patterns, not our population numbers, which comes in second.
Numbers of fanatically religious people will double, relatively speaking. Mostly Catholics and Muslims. This is under the assumption that the current rates of conversions remain roughly the same. Trouble is, people turn atheist, don't have kids, and die out, the number of atheists we have today is a historical anomaly resulting from the baby boom. In other words, that effect will stop. This likely will have policy implications.
People in cities are growing FAR slower than people in rural settings. That means that it isn't just atheists that will drop, but everything you associate with city living will lessen. Most city populations are essentially replaced with fresh people from rural settings every 60 years or so (meaning that the number of new rural people in the city at year+60 is larger than the number of people in the city).
Numbers of black people and asian people (not Chinese) will grow a hell of a lot more than the other groups. Africa should have 3-4 times more people than today at least before it stabilizes. Same goes for some countries in Asia. This of course also means that Europe is going to look back to today's Syrian "refugee crisis" and wonder why people were worried about a mere 1 million people per year.
Truth of the matter is that there isn't much any political movement in either Europe or America can do. So it doesn't even really matter.
As for an increase in non-white population, absolutely. But you seem to say it as some kind of issue. I don't care about skin color. A concern may be preserving a western culture, absolutely, but there the world has indeed westernised tremendously and shows few signs of slowing down.
I don't really share the sense of concern I interpreted (perhaps wrongfully) in your post.
> Truth of the matter is that there isn't much any political movement in either Europe or America can do.
The answer has always been obvious. It's a long-term answer, one not chosen for centuries. And it's called genuine cooperation and the desire for the rest of the world to rise up, become wealthy, prosperous and sensible, for us to yield some so the rest of the world can rise. Migrants have no interest in moving to where you do, if their own country is great. They have no interest in attacking you, if they're not oppressed or exploited by you. They've no interest in fanaticism if they have something to lose, and no enemy in sight, and an open hand shown to them. They have no need to bear 5 or 6 children if their healthcare system ensures all of them live. The world needs to do everything in its power to help developing countries if you ask me. Every country that has raised living standards has seen population growth decline. And the correlation between living standards and war/religiosity/fanaticism is negative, too. It's a moral imperative to help others, and research shows it helps ourselves, too. It's exactly the same principle why it makes sense for rich people to pay taxes to help the poor in their own country, because it improves their lives when the poor do better, when crime is reduced, and schools improve and roads are safe to drive on and homelessness is reduced and teenage pregnancies drop and schools get better etc etc. Imagine the rich in the US got private armies and lived in gated communities like in some areas in Brazil and walled off their tiny society, the US'd be a terrible country for all, same applies to Europe. Instead we build social democracies. Somehow we don't apply that beyond our borders much, at least not in the past few centuries, instead close our borders, sometimes exploit others beyond our borders, and when we see populations boom and signs of ill will towards us and see populations cling to a different culture than our own, we act surprised. We shouldn't be, it's the logical outcome of our foreign policy.
Protestants are the minority and they're viewed as the "fanatically religious people", people would say they're always talking about their religion, they don't party a lot, they don't drink alcohol and usually they have a lot of children, Mexico is a Catholic country and the average family has 2.2 children, but protestant minorities usually have more than 4-5 children.
I've noticed Americans apply some stereotypes to Catholics that would fit pretty well to the stereotypes protestants have in Mexico.
Maybe there's a correlation between minorities and the attachment to their ideas (not only religious ideas) and that could be interpreted by the majority as "radical" or "fanatic" positions.
It probably doesn't need to be interpreted as "radical" or even "fanatic", it actually is radical and fanatic.
I grew up in a country of 90+% Catholics, but I was raised in a minority Christian religion. Yes, we always talked about the religion, didn't party (that) much, etc. - that was because we actually cared about following our beliefs, which can't be said about Catholics in my country.
Thinking more about it led me to the following conclusion: any religion that grows so big that it becomes mainstream has to relax a lot. Religious life becomes intertwined with day-to-day problems of employment, managing the economy, etc. Meanwhile you stop having small communities that can push all unconvenient issues to outside with "us vs. them" attitude. Professional specialization starts, people are delegating their religious issues to their priests (compare the way Catholicism looks in big cities vs. small villages). And then one day you wake up and can't ignore politics anymore, because suddenly your religion is the society, and thus is the politics.
TL;DR: Going from "more fanatic / more real" to "less fanatic / less real" seems to me to be a natural course of evolution of a religion as it grows.
This is the video. It has some nice visualizations of population related statistics.
Other than water, I think the only real problem with the current and projected populations is energy. It's not cheap to get oil. And we use it in everything. So, it's really a matter of time before the question of energy makes the rest of the abundance we have useless. No cheap oil means no cheap way to ship food to markets.
So, I'm split on how to see the problem as it is. I think Malthus is going to get the last laugh on all of us.
So it seems China isn't so much ending its one-child policy, as augmenting it by one to a two-child policy. This means the brutal and cruel enforcement will continue, only it will kick in at the third child instead of at the second.
Also, I think it could benefit the earth if more countries would limit children.
Some, myself included, do deny that it could benefit the earth if more governments would enforce limits on children. I think humans are important to the future of the earth, and treating them in a cruel and brutal fashion will cause more problems than it solves.
I'm starting to think it's in our best interest to start building nuclear reactors pro bono all over Africa - you don't want them all to rise their standards of living by burning coal.
http://www.economist.com/node/14743589
Larger creatures, and those higher on the food chain, having greater access to resources and higher survival rates, invest more in fewer children. Smaller creatures, with lesser access to resources and higher mortality rates, invest less in more children.
A rabbit doe can theoretically have 480 offspring, at 12 per litter, 10 times per year, over 4 years. That's the kind of thing you might do if 98% of your kids get eaten, because you will still have 10 left. Rabbits can also abort their litters when stressed.
An elephant might have one calf every four years, over 55 years, or a maximum of 14 children. That's what you might do if only one other species can reliably kill any of you, and you expect all of your babies to survive to adulthood.
With humans, the observed historical behavior is that poor or uneducated humans are relatively fecund, producing 8-30 children per pair, occasionally with multiple births. As wealth and education increase, and particularly when child mortality drops and elder care becomes socialized, birth rate drops down to the population replacement rate (or below). Middle-class first-worlders usually have 0-4 kids.
I am also pro child limit laws. I would suggest nothing too strict, just impose a tax on the third child and up. We know from psychology that little restrictions and the mere fact of a 'cost' would reduce the intrinsic desire of people to even take an action, in this case child bearing. Furthermore, I think a tax is a not an extreme measure, considering the fact that you would still be allowed to have children if you want. But do keep in mind that the poorest, less educated are often the ones to have plenty of children, which ends up harming the family, this might be good for them.
Example:
> In a 1994 study titled Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro estimated the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million
The dangers of over-population myth assumes a naive view of a static society. For instance, we can reasonably have X land for food production, from that we can grow Y food and that can feed Z people so anything above Z would be harmful. The problem is that Y is dependent on human innovation and technology. Same can be said for most resources. We never did reach peak oil.
These predictions of inevitable decline have been wrong for a long time. I don't know why you put so much faith into the modern day equivalents.
What will need to change is the efficiency of how we as a species make use of the earth. We can feed many times the current world population easily. We can house many times the current world population easily. What we can't accomplish is doing those things the same way we do things now.
Advances in agriculture, energy and housing are needed. Advances which are happening as we furiously type at each other.
Either we all die horribly or we'll all be fine.
Inequality seems to be deeply encoded in the system. Capacity, in my opinion, only makes sense if you extrapolate from an average human, but there is no such thing as an average human being. However, I don't think it is an exaggeration that our western way of life is not sustainable on a global scale. I wish the fruits of human ingenuity could be enjoyed by every single one of us, but unfortunately it seems utopian.
Even the poorest in our society have incredible access to goods.
Just to list a few:
Wikipedia
Ability to talk to relatives from across the world to little or no cost (Skype and alternatives)
Ability to send money and store wealth cheaply (low cost ETFs, bitcoin, free checking)
Social acceptance of previously marginalized lifestyles
Access to wide variety of foods and entertainment
There has never been a better time to be alive, and I expect that to continue, despite greater inequality.
Some believe we should limit growth now, thus potentially preventing the problem before it becomes, well, a problem.
Nobody is suggesting nobody has children. People will still be born, discoveries made etc.
I've noticed here in the USA young girls getting pregnant and not being able to pursue higher education. I've also met some of my family in the Philippines who had many children by age 14. The husband's salary would pretty much all go to the children, and the wife would spend all day taking care of them. They are just trying to survive day to day-- little thought was given to trying to reach for anything higher.
Most people with access to birth control have children-- just when they're more ready for it. Not only does this make them more financially steady, but they are happier, and the same goes for their children.
"I find suggestive evidence that individuals’ access to contraceptives increased their children’s college completion, labor force participation, wages, and family incomes decades later." - Martha J. Bailey, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. Here's the article and link to her work. http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/09/the-long-term-effects-of-...
Brutal and cruel acts include:
* Killing of child immediately after birth
* Killing of child whilst being born, e.g. in birth canal during birth
* Termination of pregnancy as late as 8.5 months
* Forced abortions (incorporating kidnapping and assault)
All of these things have happened routinely as part of enforcement of the "one child" policy in China and have been widely reported on by human rights organisations. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Human_rights_...
The policy has also encouraged infanticide/gendercide, corruption, child abandonment, neglect, and abuse.
you have to understand that laws here usually range from completely unenforced to strong discouragement with possible financial implications.
it wouldn't surprise me if there were incidents of the stuff you mention, but doesn't seem like any of it was ever common place.
friends actually said the opposite: people in rural areas would tend to have a lot of kids trying for a boy (something about boys getting to go to school and being able to work the farm), though i guess that's getting better with the education and gender equality stuff.
did you grow up in one of those areas or something? or know people that did? which areas are you talking about?
The main contention is that people who work in the public sector (which is giant in China) does not have the option because it is still, technically, illegal and will ruin your chances of promotion within the party or any state-owned enterprises. The law change merely levels the playing field for public sector workers so they have one less incentive to leave.
Some of the examples you listed have only one report. And it's policy that lasted almost 40 years in a country with a billion people.
Back up your statement with a citation please. Considering that they explicitly made forced abortions of these kinds illegal (although this is hardly enforced) implies that it was a big enough problem the government needed to step in.
The officials are not dumb, they probably saw the incentives structure and decided to ban this proactively.
GP has a good point. Singular events in few decades in a population of over a billion? That's either bullshit or random fluke, depending on how charitable you want to be towards the report, but it's definitely not something a reasonable person should care about.
I spent a summer in Beijing in 1998 and knew a young lady whose unborn baby was forcibly killed. So I don't buy "in some rural area".
Most of the brutal and cruel acts you listed are a result of carrying a child to birth. Surely they would have noticed that they were pregnant and had the opportunity to abort at an earlier time. Better yet, why couldn't they just... not have children? Do they not have access to contraception?
It's a terrible thing to let economic concerns so dominant the public arena and politics that people let the gov't decide how many kids they have.
You elect district leaders, who elect state leaders and the congress, and they elect the president and prime minister.
Technically, that's roughly the same system we have here with the electoral congress and faithless electors. The difference is that in the US, faithless electors are much less common than in China.
But you can look here and see that there is a history of faithless electors in the US too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_fait...
China's system is actually not so different from ours was 150 years ago, so they're not that far off all-told. Or, actually, in a sense even more recently when the congress decided between Bush and Gore.
...from a list of candidates approved by the Communist Party.
In the US you generally get one Democrat and one Republican.
When you have only one party, it's as though you have no parties, you get to elect from many different candidates.
By the same token, in the States we get say in the president. The same is not true for places under the control of The Office of Insular Affairs & Puerto Rico.
At least the citizens of Hong Kong get to vote.
I'm not saying Chinese government is perfect, it absolutely has massive hurdles before it could be described as modern, but it's not nearly as bad as most Westerners make it out to be. A lot has changed in the last 30 years.
I agree, somewhat, about using vernacular, but that misses the point.
The USSR was no-more a communism because they said so than they'd have been a capitalism by saying so... You are as you do, not as you wish to be seen doing.
The communist party is just another dynasty in the long succession of dynasties. That they have a specific brand of ideology should not fool you - the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy than an ideological communist state.
Has there ever been a nominally communist state that wasn't a pragmatic autocracy? That seems to be the main criticism of communism... that it's impossible without immoral coercion of some sort.
Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify).
Same with China - imagine them exploding with an extra 1 Billion people over next 20 years. Who will feed them? What would be social implications of such a move?
Our freedoms are not always applicable in other parts of the world.
Just before WWI lot's of European intelligentsia favored communism. Same happened before WWII with fascism. It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend. And something else will come after it.
For any given moment, it's even probable that majority of some country does not want democracy. There are ~200 countries and several somewhat convincing ideologies.
Just to get a real feel for it, I recommend reading through this[0] book review, it may scare one shitless. Also, that belief went for longer than just I WW, it went through the II WW and finally dwindled down when the Cold War started. But imagine this - western newspapers were literally refusing to print bad news about Soviet Union, because it would offend their readers.
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-...
As has barefaced lying to the populace about their own dislike for democracy.
It seems particularly common in Egypt where the idea that "the people just aren't ready for Democracy yet like they are in the west" is commonplace among the country's elite.
>It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend.
Nobody's ever voted democracy away and it's not fashion that causes it to end, it's violence.
Now, it's debatable if a "representative democracy" would seem to offer that, but I wonder that myself from time to time...
The thing is that true patriot and authoritarian government for a decade can fix many problems that democracy cant handle. Once again - not everywhere though.
In Libia for example most people loved Kadaffi. Yet, he was removed by revolution that would surely fail if not for major help from west. Kadaffi while violent man, managed to make Libia in to blooming example of African country that can distribute prosperity to majority of people.
Let us check Singapore - did it work? Sure. Was it bad for people? Not really. Obviously there will be some affected by strong power, but devastating majority seen their lives skyrocketing comparing to Malasia.
The issue is that majority of strong Leaders are either military man, or democratically chosen governments that refuse to give power away - and they are often bad news.
Exactly this. And isn't it the reason so many people here are into startups? Technology is inherently undemocratic, and so are tech startups that succeed - but we don't call it that because this is "private land", not "politics land". And even ignoring the profit motive, that's why technology is appealing - a few smart people (backed by enough money) with one good design can force a change on the entire world that would never fly if you've asked people themselves.
And frankly, this might be something that we desperately need for the coming decades. Democratic countries have proven themselves unable to tackle the serious issuses of energy and climate change. They don't even bother making token gestures. On the other hand, if a decade ago they'd just said "fuck it, we're building those nuclear power plants whether you like them or not", we'd all be running on green energy now.
The point though, is that nobody can choose to not have the freedom to choose. And as such, we all wish to choose the best government for us - whatever form that may appear. But when it stops serving us...
If anything we have a conflict between people who want the country to be more Catholic and the ones who want it to be less Catholic, and a secondary push against any government because people seem to believe that entrepreneurs are force of good that is being murdered by the Evil Government through means like taxation.
Democracy is strong here - people are being indoctrinated in it since early childhood, and it's especially effective since we have the boogeyman of comunist USSR to scare them with.
That is highly contentious statement.
We could go in to the detail but I assumed my point was clear on this one.
Or when did you got the illusion that "human are capable of handling democracy"...
Dont tell me USA is a democratic country... There is hardly anything people can control in this country, let along democracy...
Not saying the law is just, but the parents did it to themselves.
No, it couldn't. The person responsible for killing the child is the person that enforces the law and the person that created the law.
It follows then the person that kills a death row inmate is responsible for their death, not the inmate for committing a crime in the first place.
Anyway, it's not interesting, the only thing the parents are responsible for is having a second child and breaking the law. What people do to enforce the law is their responsibility not the responsibility of the parents that broke it, the same applies for the murderer on death row.
Just because something is legal doesn't absolve you of responsibility. The same way soldiers "just following orders" are responsible for the actions they commit at the behest of their superiors. Both the superiors and the soldiers are responsible
The criminal is only responsible for breaking the law, the only thing he had control over before he was caught (assuming he was caught for the sake of argument). We as society are responsible for dealing out the punishment.
How could the criminal be responsible for the punishment when he is not the one inflicting it on him/herself.
edit: To make my argument slightly easier to understand I'm going to give an extreme example
Let's say it's illegal to be a certain religion. Is it the insert religion here person's responsibility that he is punished and sent to a death camp?
As it turns out, responsibility for statutory laws is only transitive when applied to a party to the statute (e.g. a lawmaker or the enforcer).
A thief is responsible for restitution because depriving someone of their property is violation of natural law. A party who breaks a contract is responsible for fulfilling the terms they agreed to, because they made that agreement.
A thief, or a party who breaks a contract, is not responsible for a _statutory law_ enforced against them (unless they are a law maker or the law enforcer).
The creators and enforcers of the statue are responsible for creating it and enforcing it. They are responsible for its outcome, whether that is a dead murderer or a dead baby.
Your "need" to kill them because they crossed some line is your need, and you're the killer. (For better or worse...)
It's really similar to jumping out of the 10th floor window. It's the dv/dt that actually kills you, but it's you who is responsible for your own death.
Why won't you stop hitting yourself?
http://www.pri.org/stories/2013-04-15/china-past-due-one-chi...
tl;dr Couple had the legal right and license to have a second child, but the local family planning officials were over quota so they made up some bullshit about her license being expired and forced her to abort her 8-month old fetus.
If you can accept these as being OK because they are occurring in a different culture, then my only response is "God help you".
Well for one thing, you'd have a billion more potential farmers...
Population growth is a pretty old problem, and if recent developed nations' demographic reports show, it solves itself once you reach a certain level of development.
China's success is not necessarily because of the policies in place by the government. It could very well be in spite of them.
We have more than enough land and water to feed everyone, but the (simplified) problem is that when one person does all the farming for the whole world, nobody else can afford to trade for any of it from them.
Please enlight us then; Knowing that in china government is present in EVERY aspect of a life (religion, state, education, internet) I cannot see how their success is not because of the policies of the government. Any place that has an exploding growth is in deep shit just look at the whole africa. better off countries with exploding growth, turkey or maghreb countries are also in deep shit with big parts of the population immigrating to europe to survive this.
China already has an average of ~1.7 children per family [0] if you factor into account that the policy is enforced at a provincial level, and depending on that province, it may be the case that (0) people of certain backgrounds (e.g. farmers, minorities, parents with disabilities or medical conditions) can be exempt in some areas, (1) affluent people sometimes just pay the fine and have a second child, (2) in the most recent version of the law, if one parent is an only child, they were permitted have 2 children, (3) Chinese citizens who have resided overseas for some period of time may be permitted to have 2 children.
A lot of people may go from 1 to 2 children. Not that many people will go from 2 to 3 children. Children are very expensive for most families.
[0] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN
Population growth at China's scale is not a "pretty old problem". It's literally the largest population in the history of the world. No one, not even the U.S. government has an idea of what to do there. Then, add in the fact that when these policies were made, China had not even been through an industrial revolution and just had a MASSIVE famine (20-40 million deaths), I think the decision to have a one-child policy made a lot of sense.
A mistake was made. It was not understood that people in war-torn countries want peace and stability above all else, and are willing to hand in their liberties for it. It was also not understood that among people who don't trust news or words of any kind (justified in this case) it is rational to support the candidate that's closest to yourself genetically.
The link between democracy and wealth, stability and trust flow both ways, and it's easier to start with wealth, stability and trust than with democracy.
As I understand it (probably needs some correction):
This is a cold war being fought over who will supply Europe with natural gas. Russia, the current supplier, makes a ton of money off the current arrangement and it gives Russia influence over Europe. Europe has largely stayed out of the fracas publicly, to avoid antagonizing Russia, but supports the US's efforts to get the pipeline built to have an alternate source for the energy they need. I'm unclear as the role of the US in all this, but we're tightly allied with Western Europe, so I imagine we're representing Europe's interests by proxy. But what is clear is that it's no coincidence that the countries where all this craziness is happening are the countries along the planned route for the pipeline. Seen through this lens, everything starts to make sense, including Russia's endeavors to support Assad, an opponent of the pipeline.
Expecting stability in a region where one superpower wants a pipeline built and another doesn't isn't reasonable, no matter how ready the population is for democracy. Add in that the region has a ton of people who believe in a medieval religion that advocates violence against non-adherents, and what little hope there was vanishes.
To be clear, do you think that killing children or forced abortions were major contributors to that? Or does it just so happen that the two happened at the same time?
It seems like a bit of a logical stretch to me to say, "America installing democracy didn't work in Iraq, so we shouldn't be worried if China kills or forcefully aborts children."
Your assumption is a stretch. You are putting words in my mouth and that's just below level of conversation one should expect from HN community.
I still disagree with your overall point, but I was responded to what you wrote, not what you had in mind.
As I wrote elsewhere, it's hard enough in a vacuum to overthrow a dictatorship and start a free and functional democracy. It's even harder when there are a multitude of foreign powers interfering in your country preventing this from happening. Democracy is failing in the middle east because there are a lot of powerful people and nations who don't want it to succeed, want the region to remain unstable, and want the region to remain within their respective spheres of influence.
And finally, how does anybody know "what they really want" unless you ask the entire country in a free and fair manner? This is the big fallacy behind "the people prefer the lesser evil of dictatorship." You can't say that. You don't have a clue what the people prefer. This is the whole point: if the people want a dictatorship, give them a free, fair, democratic vote and let them choose dictatorship.
It's not even that easy. Ask the entire country in a free and fair manner and you'll quickly discover that people's opinions are not independent and do not exist in a vacuum. They may say to you they prefer living in a dictatorship because of a combination of not knowing anything else and pro-dictatorship propaganda. Or they may say "democracy!" because they drank the kool-aid.
I'm starting to believe that the only way to reach democracy as a stable state is for a society to naturally evolve towards it. Just leave it alone, let them figure things out; after a few generations they will probably sort out their culture and then they'll have a democracy that's sustainable because it'll be backed by decades of cultural growth. Trying to speed this transformation up is a dangerous game. Trying to speed it up with tanks and guns is just crazy.
No, that's dictating.
Does the presence of terrorists in developed countries prove "we" don't want democracy either?
Because I didn't see the people (of the middle east) choosing, I saw the same thugs and warlords of the past continuing to make the decision for them.
As for Africa, isn't most of the mess the result of Europe coming there, destroying their local governance, abusing them for a while and then withdrawing, leaving a huge power vacuum behind?
_The Prince of the Marshes_ is a good book to read on this subject.
But more seriously, thanks for the recommendation :).
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10474120.
And theocracies and kingdoms are slave states by definition, so most of what was around them is the same or worse.
You have a lot of exciting history reading ahead of you if you have the will to learn.
Is that what they teach in American schools? Let's see how you cope with this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
The problem of illegal and brutal "enforcement" only exists in some rural areas and nowadays with the popularity of Internet, it a lot more rare than before.
And thus it's not part of the incentive to end the one-child policy.
I am not saying it's not brutal or cruel, it is. But please, I dont want to hear it from a country people literally are killing each other everyday...
People talk about the dangers of overpopulation as if they're theoretical. They're not, numbers don't lie. At some point people have to stop having babies, whether humanely by a government mandate, or by the inhumanity of war and poverty.
If you want more, then there's only one solution - push harder for science and technology, so that we may use our resources in a more efficient way (Earth has a lot of carrying capacity on the surface, and we haven't even begin to colonize oceans). And then we may move to other planets.
But people need to grow up and realize they're not free to do anything they like, not yet. Freedom to breed is just another one we need to collectively decide to restrict for now. And then, like with every other coordination problem, you have to punish the defectors, because coordination is not a statically stable state.
I have a number of friends who are teachers, all of whom say that you can spot a single child within about 5 minutes of observing them. They just act differently.
Watching the difference in my oldest child when the second came along and was old enough for them to play together - it was astounding.
There must be some optimal number of siblings for mental health. More than 1 less than 4 ?
Differently how?
Whenever a student comes late to class, I've always imagined that those students who look up from their work are more likely to come from rural areas in Norway, and that those who don't look up to see who is coming are more likely to come from the city.
But I don't really know what the difference in behavior would be for a sibling vs only child.
Their main finding: "[We find that the one-child policy] has produced significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals."
edit: This seems to be the paper that's not behind a paywall http://www.researchgate.net/publication/234104566_Little_Emp...
> less trusting, less trustworthy (...) less competitive
I wonder how it goes together. "Less trusting" and "less trustworthy" should mean "less cooperating" and thus more competitive. Adding "more risk-averse", does this mean they just sit around doing nothing? I'd be interesting to read an additional analysis, as I notice I'm confused by those findings. But:
> less competitive
That's actually a good thing, isn't it?
bye bye green Earth, hello surpopulation and pollution...
Our creator inspires freedom and love. When we follow him we seek to spread freedom to not only ourselves but to others as well. A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly.
The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.
America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms.
America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one.
Fixed that for you.
> The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force.
No one has moral absolutes, they do not exist except in the minds of those who want to force their morality onto others who don't agree with them. Laws aren't about morals, they're about reason.
lulz
Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world.
Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?
I'm really unsure what point you're trying to make.
On the other hand, there's nothing physical about "laws." They lose their law-like properties and become conventions of thought rather than regulators of truth and rationality in a world where only matter and energy exist.
And how do you suppose that? Materialism doesn't deny the existence of logic; you seem to not really know what materialism is.
> Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?
Yea, you don't know what materialism is. I can't stub my toe on hacker news either, nor any website, but they clearly exist and they exist in way perfectly compatible with materialism as does your mind and the thing we call logic. They still all reduce down to patterns of matter in your brain or patterns of electrons in computer chips, it is all physical at the base level. To a materialist, mind is simply what the brain does, it's your operating system just as Windows is what your computer is probably doing. Perfectly compatible with materialism.
Science and logic go hand in hand and scientists are virtually all materialists because so far as anyone can demonstrate with evidence, materialism is the nature of reality.
You're adorable.
If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right?
Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then.
I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions.
And you're bad at this.
> If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right?
If they're using different forms of logic, then they're both right according to the form they're using, but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic.
> Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then.
It's not my view, it's simply the way it is. Different rules of logic exist [1]; such systems are axiomatic and obey their own rules. There is no one "correct" system of logic, there are many competing systems. The term law is meaningless, logic isn't a law in the sense you seem to think, it is merely a system of formalized thinking according to rules.
> I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions.
Logic is merely a branch of philosophy concerned with valid reasoning. Reasoning is not in opposition to materialism. Materialists do not argue that thoughts don't exist and logic is merely a formal method of thinking. You're objecting to materialism when it's quite clear you don't understand what it is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#Types_of_logic
Absurd. Knowledge is impossible if both are right. You're bad at this.
> but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic.
Says who? Your conventions? What if my "conventions" of logic say the can be compared if they're different systems of logic? You're imposing a "law" of "you can't compare when I say so."
Silly reasoning is silly.
I'm telling you that you can't know anything or say something is rational or irrational with conventions of logic.
I'm also pointing out your treating laws of logic like laws (yay! I commend you for treating them like laws), but you are coming from a worldview that doesn't allow for laws (boo! inconsistency!).
This is where materialists bow out because they don't want to dig too deeply into their presuppositions.
Stawman, that point is not in dispute.
> but you are coming from a worldview that doesn't allow for laws (boo! inconsistency!).
No I'm not. Your notion that materialism doesn't allow logic is simply wrong. You don't know what materialism is and I'm tired of repeating myself on that point why you continue to skirt the issue and ignore that.
> This is where materialists bow out because they don't want to dig too deeply into their presuppositions.
No, they bow out because you're clearly irrational and unable to engage in meaningful conversation because you don't address points being made to you. You just ignore them and keep saying the same non-sense that's being challenged.
Most contentious issues--marriage laws, universal healthcare, minimum wage, etc--are explicitly framed and argued (by both sides) with the language of justice. Moral preferences guide law; reason is just post-hoc rationalization.
You might object that "law" is not the same as "contentious issues," but that changes nothing. The emotionally charged political process that drives these debates is the same one that produces legislation. It is almost structurally incapable of producing rational outcomes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think you need to specify which principles exactly one wants to adopt in a society. All the european states were devoutly christian for 2000 years and I would not call e.g. 15th century Spain the epitome of human rights and freedom.
"America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms."
At what point in time would you say america was more respectful of individual rights? It's not long ago it practiced genocidal policies towards the indigenous people of the continent - nor is it that long while ago it abolished slavery. If you go much back the colonies will not have been even established.
These concepts were flipped upside down, and if you study why, you'll see the reason is Biblical principles. All you have to do is read many founding documents to see this.
John Adams wrote "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Why would he say this? Think about it.
I'm not experienced enough to describe or explain why America has done bad things throughout history. We all make mistakes, and we are all unique. I'm sure corruption existed throughout our history. My personal feeling is that between 1900 and say now, Americans are more willing to reject the reasoning that gave it freedom to accept the reasoning that will take it away.
This rejection starts not only at the bottom but at the top. Many Ivy League colleges were founded to educate and raise missionaries. Why? Perhaps to spread the message of freedom and liberty. What are they doing now? The exact opposite. Think about that.
Many here will argue it's a good thing. So be it, but it doesn't make it anymore true than the message I'm sharing.
I can give several counterexamples to that claim.
Racial segregation "ended" in the United States in 1964. I would claim the country was - at least from a legislative standpoint - more free after than before it. So starting from 1900 I would claim there is a trend towards more freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
The recent years have seen the acceptance of more people as they are. Gay marriages are now legal which I think is a fantastic achievement in the history of human rights - no matter how long it took to get there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_Unite...
So, at least from the point of view of several minorities, United States seems to be more free now than ever. I don't know what the totality of the situation is, though (not an american).
I would state that the behavior occurring was already unconstitutional, as we are all created equal and we all have equal rights. This was a founding principle.
The question is, do you have equal rights on my private property? The law says yes. It's disappointing we need a law to get us that far. We had to give up individual liberty, by allowing laws to move into our personal lives, in order to give equal rights to others?
I don't respect people of other nationalities because there is a law to do so. What new impact did the law have on people's hearts? What impact does the Bible have on a persons heart when it says to "love thy neighbor like thyself".
Even with the Civil Rights acts, we have a heightened sense of urgency in the united states, where the media reports violence between white and black people frequently. A new law won't stop this, but a change of heart just might.
We would also expect to see correlations between freedom and Christian belief and affiliation within nations on longer timescales. For instance, in Europe the Middle Ages are generally thought of as particularly religious; was that a specially free period of history? It doesn't seem so.
Your example of the Middle Ages is a case in point: During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language (Latin). How could society develop an attitude towards freedom in such a climate of religious oppression?
We're in some danger of getting no-true-Scotsmanned here, since it's by no means straightforward to determine who is and isn't actually "following the words of Christ as found in the Bible".
Still, let's consider Uganda, where being (actively) homosexual is now punishable by life imprisonment thanks largely to the activism of Christians following the words they find in the Bible. (Not specifically "the words of Christ", but actually that's a bit you just made up; what code4life said was "the new testament Biblical principles".) Now, for all I know you may think this is a good law, and I'm not going to try to change your mind if so -- but what it obviously isn't is an improvement in freedom.
Or consider the long and sad history of how Christians, following the principles they found in the Bible, have tried to prevent schoolteachers telling their pupils accurately about certain areas of science. Again, you might agree with the people who made the laws in question that, e.g., evolution is a damnable atheistic error, but these laws very plainly reduced people's freedom. (In more recent years, as a result of having one such measure after another struck down in the courts, antievolutionists have shifted tactics, and since roughly the 1990s their preferred legal measures haven't been particularly anti-freedom. But that's only because their attempts to get their way by impeding teachers' freedom stopped working.)
> During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language
I think that's a rather tendentious way of putting it. What happened, rather, was that Latin-as-vernacular largely died out but the prevailing Bible translations remained in Latin. Not a matter of scripture being taken away from the people, but of the people moving away from the language used for the scriptures. (And from written language in general; literacy was very low in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Providing vernacular bibles might not have done anyone much good.)
So, anyway, it's true that mediaeval people generally didn't have Bibles. But they did go to church, where those clergy were supposed to expound on doctrines derived from the Bible, and they did have a culture saturated with Christian ideas. And, actually, it's not even so clear that they didn't have vernacular Bible translations. Take a look here (apologies for the outrageously long Google Books link):
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2pSGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA178&lp...
"To be sure, the Protestant Reformation did achieve a change in the way the Bible was read and the way it functioned within Christian spirituality, but this change was largely due to a long medieval tradition of lay access to biblical texts."
It's often too expensive to have multiple children in a large city, and when infant and child mortality is reduced there's less incentive to have lots of kids (so people use birth control).
On one hand, "population crisis" is something a lot of people are concerned about^ and the policy was a direct and practical way of tackling it. On the other, it is unmistakably totalitarian.
Going to 2 is a strange choice. It's just as totalitarian, but probably has a fairly negligible effect on average fertility rate. I guess they don't see
^On a tangent, I don't totally buy population crisis and judging from how rarely I hear it mentioned these days I think I'm not alone. There is obviously some natural limit on human population, but I don't think we're near it.
The fact that we hear less concern about it is says something interesting about the zeitgeist. I think people believe in technological progress more in 2015 than they have since the space age and nuclear age of 50 years ago, maybe more than ever. At our current rate (ignoring the projected gradual reduction) we'll double every 65 years. I can certainly see us absorbing doubling population density in that time considering all the empty oceans, deserts, the potential for landless food productions, megacities and all that jazz. I mean, If the US & Australia went to the population densities of Germany and France (moderately dense with quite a lot of open spaces), we would be good for another 100 years.
Basically, I think we have the space.
Its not really a strange choice, its been "1 with lots of exceptions that mostly make it 2" for some time (there were exceptions with a limit of 2 instead of 1 for many rural areas, for families where at least one parent was an only child, etc.) Going to 2 is a pretty obvious simplification that doesn't really change much except the degree of administrative overhead, plus the policy has hurt perception of China in the developed world, and changing it to two from one along with well-managed press relations get you lots of "China to end one-child policy" headlines around the world, and with most people not reading below the headline, that's a huge propaganda win for doing essentially nothing but making a totalitarian policy administratively simpler.
And, really, it was always the plan: the OCP was originally conceived of as a single generation policy to bring the population down, which would be replaced with a stable population policy; it didn't exactly work out that way in a crisp sense, but a going from a one-child policy with very limited exceptions, to a growing set of exceptions, to finally a two-child policy is, in outline, generally consistent with the original blueprint.
> There is obviously some natural limit on human population, but I don't think we're near it.
The practical limit is going to be dependent on pre-existing environmental conditions, technology and distribution of lifestyles and other factors; its a moving target. (And not necessarily moving consistently in one direction.)
> The fact that we hear less concern about it is says something interesting about the zeitgeist. think people believe in technological progress more in 2015 than they have since the space age and nuclear age of 50 years ago, maybe more than ever.
I don't think that's the issue. I think that the fact that Gen X and the Millenials have been less economically secure than preceding generations (reversing the trend toward greater security) means that increasingly, people are focused on more immediate, personal concerns. Plus, to the extent that there is a concern for broader, global environmental issues, the focus has been climate change rather than overpopulation (the two concerns overlap considerably, but climate change is more specific and concrete than generalized carrying capacity concerns.)
> At our current rate (ignoring the projected gradual reduction) we'll double every 65 years.
And, IIRC, in the mid-1960s, that was about 32 years. Which difference also contributes to the reduction in concern for overpopulation since then: we may be closer to whatever limit exists, but we're approaching it much more slowly now and that rate is still dropping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox
>There exists a realizable, evolutionary alternative to our being either atom-bombed into extinction or crowding ourselves off the planet. The alternative is the computer-persuadable veering of big business from its weaponry fixation to accommodation of all humanity at an aerospace level of technology, with the vastly larger, far more enduringly profitable for all, entirely new World Livingry Service Industry. It is statistically evident that the more advanced the living standard, the lower the birth rate.
-Buckminster Fuller, Foreword to Grunch of Giants
https://tripinsurancestore.com/4/grunch-of-giants.pdf
Talk about good things about China -> Get downvotes and people rebutting you with clearly one-sided sources.
Am I surprised? No.
Am I pissed? No.
I believe time will tell.