That the problem is there are too many people in a world of finite resources. A solution is less people.

I'm not suggesting how this is done, but we probably shouldn't e.g. subsidize growth anymore. You shouldn't get a tax break for having kids. It should go the other way.

You're probably correct on this point in general, but the tax break I get from having kids offsets the cost of almost two weeks of preschool. No one is having kids to save money.

You're right of course. Again, no real solutions just pointing out a problem. Also, not sure why people assume I want to reopen Auschwitz when I say we need less people.

Hey, don't get me wrong - I don't assume you want to reopen Auschwitz. I mean, Hitler was a piker. If you really want to get rid of excess population, you want to go for something like engineered famine. Worked for the Soviets, at any rate, to the tune of something like thirty million, but of course that's almost a century ago and there's inflation to consider, so you're going to want to shoot far higher.

Perhaps you think I'm being unkind to you here, or unjust, or unreasonable somehow. Perhaps you don't really understand how people make a connection between saying "there are too many people" and this kind of thing. Perhaps, too, it has escaped your notice that a lot of people said things like that in the century just past, and that the result was atrocity on a scale possibly never equaled, certainly never exceeded, in all human history before that time.

And here you are, not even a hundred years later, trotting out the same blood-soaked idea that started it all - and with the sheer unthinking temerity, the gall, to expect a friendly reception. Do you know nothing of history? Or do you just not care?

> You shouldn't get a tax break for having kids.

Fair enough. Then people should pay more in taxes than they receive in health and pension benefits. Right now, American retirees on average get more in benefits than they paid in taxes. The only way that works is if we have continual population and productivity growth, meaning we need to incentivize kids or we need to stop retiring and getting sick so much.

It gets problematic, because then you'd basically have a system where the government decides who gets to have kids.

A better solution is probably a raised standard of living and more education.

edit: By raised standard of living I'm not talking about AC and other energy-intensive luxuries. I mean not having to have 7 kids because many of them will probably die.

You've got two variables you can control. Birthrate and deathrate.

Someone, or something, will ultimately be making decisions.

Why not a government, or government analog?

What about that bothers you? What alternatives do you suggest? Different mechanisms? Different institutions?

Raising standards of livings has always required raising material resource consumption.

Its an interesting question to ponder if the reduced birth rate by increasing quality of life, education levels and general health will offset the raised material resource consumption by that move.

In the end I think the individuals themselves will be the ones making the decision to have fewer kids. I don't have a source for this, but I seem to remember that immigrants to more developed nations have fewer children after assimilating than people in their native, less developed countries.

Several principles suggest not. The Jevons Paradox, White's Law (after Leslie White), and the Darwin-Lotka Power Law.

These seem to reflect strong underlying tendencies of complex evolving systems. In particular that higher levels of organisation and complexity very powerfully tied to greater rates of energy and resource use, overall if not individually.

If humans manage to defeat this tendency it would be a singular exception.