It must also be asked, is improving equality a goal worth pursuing? You could improve equality by making every single individual dirt-poor. Improving average living standards would be a better in my world-view - and by all metrics, that has been going up since the start of the industrial revolution.

Birth rates almost invariably go down as a society gets richer and more educated - therefore the goal of improving average welfare could be better served by improving the lives of third-worlders directly, which would naturally decrease their birth-rates in the long-term.

Another argument could be that many "poor" individuals have positive economic impact - they are consumers of goods increasing overall economic output, or provide useful labor at a low price, allowing many others to have goods and services they could not otherwise afford.

For the poor to stop breeding would be ceding their one and only competitive advantage. Humans, and for that matter, life on Earth in general, aren't "judged" (in the sense that extinction/flourishing is a judgment) based on how many failed organisms they produce. Rather, that determination is based on how many successful organisms are produced.

As residents of richer countries, we're conditioned to breed at or around the replacement level and to view each failure as a catastrophe. So when we see those 80 gum balls being added each year to his misery containers, we're viewing it through the lens of seeing the failure. But in poorer countries, people adapt to the increased chance of failure by having more kids. They breed well above the replacement level knowing that, in all likelihood, not all of those kids will succeed. From that perspective, you need to focus on that 1 or 2 gum balls being allowed into the richer countries. That's the success. And having fewer kids runs contrary to that goal.

The concept to read up on here is r/K selection. Life is certainly judged by how many offspring, but there are various strategies for producing them, and one of the trade-offs is number vs. investment in each. Among all animals humans are far at the r-strategy end (high parental investment).

But different societies choose slightly different points, probably related to their history of farming. And the richer countries today are those traditionally towards the r-strategy end.

As standards of living increase, birth rate drops, until it's at a sustainable 2-per-family, like it is in rich countries.

Force poor people to have less kids, and you keep them in poverty. Improve their living situations and they'll have less kids.

I didn't say anything about "forcing" people to have less kids. But I do think we should encourage them. It would cost very little to feed people in extreme poverty, could you offer them that as an incentive not to have children? Offer them enough food for a family of three. If they want to have 5 kids, its themselves who will suffer? (Thats just a suggestion that I haven't thought through in any depth, I am sure there will be plenty of flaws in it).

On a side note, China has been growing very rapidly in the last few decades, and they had a one child policy for much of that.

Honestly, if you live in desperate poverty, why would you want to bring a child into the world knowing the amount of suffering that its is likely to live through? Yet the poorest people seem to be the most likely to have the most children.

Maybe another way of phrasing the headline would be:

"The poor are reproducing far faster than the rich"

It doesn't sound as shocking then.

What you see as suffering might be seen as normal daily life to them which is terrible. The way most children in richer countries live might seem foreign to them. That being said, infant mortality is also very high in those countries so a chunk of those children born will not make it past 20 years old.

I do believe that as countries get richer the people of the country start having more responsibilities and jobs and those overwhelm the time available to take care of kids.

Many people say this. But it's worth knowing that, historically, lots of societies firmly limited reproduction when they were as poor as (say) most of Africa is now. The methods varied.

What I had in mind was people limiting their own. In the west the main mechanism was delayed marriage (i.e. saving up a socially approved amount of money first) which kept us well away from starvation 500 years ago. In china/japan I believe the pattern was more infanticide (in the same period) but know less about this.

Having children is a fundamental human activity. It gives people purpose, connection, novelty and a million other things I can't think of since I'm not a parent or a mother.

As you say, many poor people have many children. Perhaps you should look into what giving birth means to them rather than just assuming they're selfish idiots.

This statement is all but calling them selfish idiots. Your question is nothing but a self serving rhetorical for conclusions you already made.

https://reddit.com/r/changemyview

Lots of interesting debate happens there.

Hacker News fosters higher quality discussion than most subreddits because it's smaller and has a much higher floor for the scope successful moderation. But look at this thread: people are throwing around uninformed opinions about basic economics left and right. Outside of technical disussion, Hacker News discussions often fracture into arguments where people talk past each other and reinvent entire fields from first principles.

I think HN is nearly as good as you can expect a general discussion forum to be, but the focused, well-moderated subreddits for specific topics are clearly better for useful discussion.