Last couple of posts highlight the real problem: Civilisation requires spare wealth. If the rich think their wealth will protect them when people are starving and well-armed then they need to think again. We need to address the population vs resources while we still have spare resources. If we get into explicit "rules of jungle" (even more than US has recently done) then it is doubtful that survival and civilisation can co-exist.
Whatever we do, the less bankers involved the better: *That* I am certain of!

There are some weird and even horrifying comments to this article. Some people seem to have a craving for authoritarian and frankly fascist 'solutions' to problems.

Here are three positive and human-friendly ways to reduce population over a few generations:

* educate the women: for every year of education that women receive above a basic level, on average there are 0.3-0.5 fewer children;

* compulsory education systems: as John Caldwell pointed out long ago, when a country introduces and enforces a system of compulsory education, it turns young children from being an economic asset around the house or the farm into an economic liability, and within a generation, families are far smaller;

* aged-pension systems: understandably, in countries without pension systems, families are large to ensure that there will be enough grown children to look after parents in their decrepitude.

A fourth factor would paradoxically be cutting the infant mortality rate, so that parents are more confident that the fewer children they have will be more likely to survive.

Joe

Loudmouth,

Governments might be slightly more inclined to adopt your excellent proposals if more babies didn't mean more greenhouse carbon credits that could be sold to the developed world. There might also be a problem if a country is simply too poor to provide free, compulsory primary education for all or to provide old age pensions, even if just for the people who don't have sons to support them. I don't know if China had any real alternative to more coercive measures.

Please, be specific. Climate change is a natural process converted into playground of bureaucrats to benefit from playing digits while speechifying of industrialisation as the most devil moving force of.

Don't forget that developing nations' "peasants" chop down trees and burn off, regularly and fiercely, every dry season. I have seen it and have suffered bronchitis because of it.

They also dynamite reefs to catch fish.