giving a complete view of the argument presented in the book. I'm going to
blog about this in the next day or two.
In the most relevant chapter, they divide population reduction methods into
two categories: family planning, which is administered by individual
families, and direct population control, which is administered by
governments. They state that in the developed world where individuals are
considered to have fundamental rights, governments are not widely seen to
have the right to control population, but that the population crisis is so
imminent that the world does not have time to wait for the values of people
in these countries to catch up.
They present a number of types of population control, all of which were
first proposed by other authors with no role in writing the book. The most
mild is using the tax system to encourage low reproduction, such as taxing
children or giving out payments to women who agree to marry after the age of
25. In this section they also discuss requiring all illegitimate children
to be given up for adoption, especially those born to young mothers. The
intermediate solution is forcing all women to get a birth control
implantation at puberty and requiring them to get permission for the
government to have it removed, thus allowing the government to directly
limit each female to two children. More extreme scenarios include adding a
sterilant to the drinking water, or, better, adding a component that would
very specifically interfere with fetal implantation and would only reduce
fertility partially, anywhere between 5 and 75 percent, with the government
able to adjust the reduction as needed.
They levy criticisms of ALL of these solutions, both practical and moral.
They even call the most extreme examples "appalling."
However, they also state that an imminent population crisis exists and that
allowing it to occur would be MORE horrifying than the worst of the
population control measures. They state they would prefer "mild" solutions
because if used immediately they MIGHT be enough to avert the NEED for the
"appalling" solutions, but state very clearly that they believe direct
population control is an absolute necessity and individual family planning
is not enough.
The authors do not seem to see world government as a positive end. They
state clearly in the conclusion of the book that ultimately we should favor
an aversion to "bigness" of all sorts and should favor political and
economic decentralization, and hold the hunter-gatherer society up as a
richer society than ours. What they seem to be arguing is that, in order to
achieve the small-scale ideal, big government will be necessary to achieve
the requisite reductions in population.
Chris
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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