You can't have personal choice for reproduction along with a welfare state -- it's an unscalable solution, even if you ignore unfettered population growth. Which makes more sense -- childless "rich" people taxed heavily while poor people have lots of kids with public support for education, sustenance, and healthcare, or rich people paying a cash "societal impact" fee to have another child while poor people are forcibly sterilized? Taken to extremes neither slant seems tenable, but something has to give.

In a rich society you can afford all sorts of civil niceties. The current notion of "no fault" reproduction isn't one that will persist. Will girls keep having sex with zero-worth guys who will disappear, knowing they'll have to feed the baby or watch it starve? Will local fathers' bring back shotgun weddings versus supporting another generation of grandkids? Will people just start marrying younger once again? Will birth control be practiced reliably and abortions be publicly funded? Will abortions be forced if somebody won't agree to support the child? Will people abstain from sex and go childless? I don't know, but I'm sure before too long the social supports will fracture and fail, and then something will give. We can change things on purpose or refuse to address them and live with the consequences. Change will come, regardless. And it will suck to be poor.

I would say at least in the USA it would be wise to get rid of tax breaks and social benefits after the 1st child, and require birth control of those on welfare. Having said that I cant imagine the government (whom people rightfully distrust) would be able to mandate how many children a family may have. The united states could also stop all immigration, I cant imagine taking a government that asked me to have less children while allowing unfettered immigration would be taken very seriously.

Excellent points davebygolly. I recommend Obama appoint you to the new position of 'population czar' and be given full authority to implement the new 'one child per family' policy in the US. I'm sure you will receive the full cooperation of the masses once you explain the gravity of the situation :)

Actually, we have tried population control by means that coercive. It is called education for women, reasonable access to food and basic resources, basic medical care including birth control, and political power for women, and every where we've tried it, it works like magic. You get TFR levels lower than China's doing that - and it is cheaper than coercive programs.

But, of course, it is simpler to call for things that make the next generation of women poorer, including tax cuts (for the record, I'm in favor of eliminating the child tax credit - but only with social programs in place to ensure that we don't undermine our basic goals - that is, every strategy that impoverishes kids now means that they are likely to have more kids, not fewer in the future. Because poor kids get crappy educations and crappy health care.

As for immigration - worldwide, TFR has fallen dramatically - from 5 to 2.7, and is continuing to fall. But that fall will be arrested unless the rich nations pony up money to address the food crisis - one of the consequences of chronic malnutrition in children is lowered IQ - and that means more babies later on. We're all going through a massive contraction of resources, but unless the rich world is willing to contract a little extra and work on the basic question of equity, the population question is essentially hopeless. But it is much easier to turn to coercive methods - those don't cost us anything.

Sharon

I should have said, "in a democracy, fertility limitation must always remain a personal choice."

Garrett Hardin's solution was not democracy, but some version of a command economy. That doesn't make him wrong -- democracy may be fundamentally flawed.

The United States is not a democracy, but the political spinners want us to believe we are. So they will have to come up with clever ways to coerce population control, and make it seem like it is our own choice. I have no doubt that is possible.

In the end it won't matter if you, your fellow Americans, or immigrants choose to multiply, as certainly somebody will, and before long they'll come knocking on the door for food and shelter.

An earlier post mentioned the unpleasant eventuality of a political class who determines who lives and who starves -- this almost has to happen given any sort of managed procreation. If we fence the borders and educate the masses and re-slant social structures, we might avoid it internally, but we will then just be helping to pick who dies in Africa or Asia.

For the egalitarian thinkers who struggle with the notion of life as a privilege of power, perhaps the best you can hope for is an epidemic die-off. This is becoming increasingly likely due to the apparently simplicity of basic genetic engineering. Now you, too, can do it at home for fun and profit. Why worry about passing along your personal DNA, when you can create a novel life-form instead?

Surely it's only a matter of time before a sociopathic genius gives his favorite Horseman a leg-up?

As far as Americans using more farmland, well we have more farmland per capita to use.

That's rich. You're asserting that America has five times as much farmland as other nations so that is a valid justification for profligacy?

Gollum, do you have any current figures about arable land in the U.S. versus other countries? I would wager you don't.

If a privately owned SUV that you might drive produces exhaust, is the air around the SUV not a commons?

I hear that theory from time to time. Usually people who advocate it draw the line between public and private all the same, just in different places (public army good, public healthcare bad, for instance). Then they try to defend why where they draw the line is the only "right and true" place to draw the line and they get quite agitated about it.

However, we have never spoken so perhaps it's unfair to ascribe my past experience to you.

Great! I want to own the air. I'm going to charge people if they want to breathe.