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Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, great idea. The single most important world problem we face is overpopulation. Why not make it easier to have children than it already is? Why not tax those who made the right choice and give the money to those who made the wrong one?

The Chinese have the right idea -- they encourage one child per family (an idea that works better in cities than in the countryside), against substantial public ignorance and resistance. If we adopted the opposite policy, we would once again show ourselves to be far behind the times.

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"they encourage one child per family"

Can we say two? Would still lead to a population decrease over time, and given the risks my brothers and I took growing up I'd want some redundancy...

> The single most important world problem we face is overpopulation.

Citation needed.

http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats

Quote: "Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five - 3.1 million children each year."

I invite anyone to try to dismiss the fact that 3.1 million children starve to death each year.

For the most part, the present problem is not due to a global shortage of food:

http://www.wfp.org/hunger/causes

100 billion seems like it would be a challenge.

I'd also note, from the earlier link:

"842 million people in the world do not have enough to eat. This number has fallen by 17 percent since 1990."

We have 1.9 billion more people today than we had in 1990, and we are failing to feed fewer individuals. We're not just feeding more people. We're not even just leaving a smaller percentage starving. We have many more people, and fewer people are starving. "There are too many people, relative to how much food we can produce" is not the dominant effect here.

Please establish that those children starving is because of overpopulation.

> they encourage one child per family (an idea that works better in cities than in the countryside)

it is my impression that the specific form that "works better" takes is that it's extremely difficult to enforce in the countryside.

Yes, that's right. It's a matter of enforcement as well as a long, difficult-to-break tradition of large families among farm owners/workers.

> The single most important world problem we face is overpopulation.

Bullshit. We'd need over 100 billion people on Earth for that to be anywhere near a sane thought. See, e.g.: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2006/09/overp...

> We'd need over 100 billion people on Earth for that to be anywhere near a sane thought.

You know, it can't hurt to get in touch with reality from time to time:

http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats

Quote: "Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five - 3.1 million children each year."

We have seven billion people on the planet, and according to the UN, almost one billion of those people aren't being fed adequately. So we should have 100 billion people? By what cockeyed reasoning?

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