How To Fix Overpopulation And Reverse The Negative Correlation Between Procreation And Iq

[Kriminal99]

Create a market for procreation. You temporarily sterilize people, then make them pay to create children. Part of the funds will be a sort of mandatory savings to take care of the child, and part of it may just be a tax to support early education and health care etc.

 

Having children will eventually be perceived as more of a luxury, and people who are successful may have more. People who struggle to make ends meet will not create a lineage of people with the same problems.

 

Pretty simple extension of the solution to pollution control. The biggest issue would of course be public perception, but this is an issue of communication. In the U.S. people are generally ignorant of the real problems being faced and their causes. Until something changes about how we receive information on these subjects, the voters will always have a superficial understanding of politics and vote accordingly. Once they begin to understand the problems being faced and the depth of these issues, they will be more in a position to make tough decisions along with the leaders.

 

Until we breach that barrier, we will never solve any problems.

[joekgamer]

And how are people to be made 'temporarily sterile'?

[CraigD]

Create a market for procreation. You temporarily sterilize people, then make them pay to create children. Part of the funds will be a sort of mandatory savings to take care of the child, and part of it may just be a tax to support early education and health care etc.

I’m not an economist or political scientist, but I don’t think a government taking something away from people, then making them pay to have it returned, is considered a market, because in markets, people trade things they have for things that other people have. I think the “make them pay to create children” scheme Krim describes is a possible policy of a totalitarian government.

 

I don’t think such schemes should be dismissed out of hand – and historically, they have not been – but describing with popular free-market capitalist buzz phrases like “create a market” is deceptive and strange.

 

And how are people to be made 'temporarily sterile'?

Technically, I think there is presently a practical way to somewhat temporarily sterilize everyone.

 

Vasectomy and tubal ligation are both effective, somewhat reversible sterilization surgeries. Cited success rates for vasectomy reversal is 50 to 70%, for tubal ligation, 50% to 80%. These procedures are practical for sterilizing an entire population in a country such as the US, because although they require trained surgeons and facilities, they need only be performed at about a nation’s birth rate, which is small fraction of the total surgery rate.

 

Having children will eventually be perceived as more of a luxury, and people who are successful may have more.

This has been the effect of the PRC’s one child policy. As the name suggests, this policy doesn’t require people to pay to have one child per couple (or more, for some regions, ethnicities, and special circumstances), nor that they be sterilized. It imposes monetary penalties for exceeding the child limit, both flat fines and ongoing reductions in wages.

 

We must be careful, however, in using the term “successful” without qualification. As krim proposes, and the PRC actually has implemented, reproducing requires financial success, or more precisely, having money. Not all people with money have it due to financial success – that is, having made money – because some people inherit wealth. Not all successful people – that is, people lauded and awarded by colleagues and the general public – are financially successful.

 

People who struggle to make ends meet will not create a lineage of people with the same problems.

I think krim makes a serious mistake in estimation here.

 

People who do not struggle to make ends meet – that is, people who want for practically nothing that money can buy without having to exert any effort, constitute less than 1/3 of the US (possibly much less – I’ve not made a deep study of it). If one sets the cost to have a child so high that only people who never struggle to make ends meet, for the first generation under a zero child policy, each payer must have 6 or more children to avoid negative population growth. If polygamous mating is allowed, wealthy men could have many children by many women – a situation common in wealthy families in nations such as Saudi Arabia – but in nations with strong monogamy traditions, it would require each woman to have 6 children, which many women would find unacceptable.

 

Eventually, one of several problems might occur.

Wealthy people’s estates would be exhausted.

There would be no poor people willing to work in unpleasant jobs

 

Pretty simple extension of the solution to pollution control. The biggest issue would of course be public perception, but this is an issue of communication. In the U.S. people are generally ignorant of the real problems being faced and their causes. Until something changes about how we receive information on these subjects, the voters will always have a superficial understanding of politics and vote accordingly. Once they begin to understand the problems being faced and the depth of these issues, they will be more in a position to make tough decisions along with the leaders.

I believe a bigger obstacle than public perception in the US would be legal precedent. The US Supreme Court has clearly stated the opinion that reproduction is a basic right guaranteed to all people, and that all forms of compulsory sterilization are illegal.

 

Overturning this opinion is, I think, legally impossible. Mandatory sterilization or other birth control would, I believe, require setting aside the entire US Constitution. I don’t think many people in the US want to do this, so the only way I can imagine it happening is a coup by a small number of people overthrowing the US government. Such a coup would, I think, be very difficult to accomplish.

 

As a general political rule, I believe compulsion is inferior to consent. Totalitarian government, characterized by compulsion, is steadily being replaced by republican, which derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. This trend is, I think, a good thing. Policies requiring its reversal are, I think, bad.