Every story about China should include a note that the government decides how many children its citizens are allowed to have. We've grown numb to how terrible this is.
If we accept that any biome will eventually have a finite carrying capacity while the possibility of human reproduction is exponential it seems inevitable that there must be some limits to reproduction. Regulation is crude but might be less bad than "direct environmental feedback" such as die-offs or drastically decreasing quality of life.
Of course it's a co-ordination problem, which is very difficult.
I can imagine many cultural and technological approaches to population control, some of which already exist, and might not be terrible.
It seems to me that in particular any engineered habitats with well-defined carrying capacities, e.g. mars, would have to deal with this quite early on.
I'm just not sure it's a sign of cultural maturity; it feels like we've quietly skirted a difficult conversation through low wage growth and expensive housing, health care and education (more humans are discouraged because of bottlenecks in key supports).
In theory if there were "smooth" environmental feedback the population would nicely sigmoid without too much overshoot, maybe that's what is actually happening. I wish I knew.
I am not saying that I agree with China's policies or their implementation, but it seems that they worked.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(real...
For that reason, we are exempt from the normal laws of Malthusian ecology and carrying capacity. More people translates into higher, not lower, living standards. That's why over the past 200 years the population has increased seven fold, while the percent living in poverty has fallen to unprecedented lows. The greatest risk by far is not having enough people. Population control robs us of future Einsteins, Borlaugs, and Turings.
This is a wild claim. Not everyone is a net positive contributor to the species. The world’s resource are already consumed beyond their replenishment rates, and hundreds of millions of people suffer from abject poverty and constant food insecurity. Total fertility rate decline curves are objectively positive for humans as a species and resource contention.
I do agree with the finite carrying capacity aspect you mentioned but if you think China's child policies weren't awful then you should read up on what it really means to live your life as heihaizi.
I'd agree it's not the worst thing they've done so far, but given that they're actively committing genocide that's a pretty high bar.
2. You can means-adjust the fines to dissuade the rich. You can even redistribute revenue from these fines to the poor if your concern is inequality. I’m particularly curious about paying the poor not to have children since fining the poor seems likely to be unproductive.