Cav's Place

Despite the potentially confusing name, Care2‘s Population Growth group was meant to bring together those who are worried about overpopulation, and recently it has enjoyed some amount of activity. During one of these conversations, somebody mentioned advocating measures to control population despite not endorsing eugenics, which prompted me to say that I do support eugenics and in fact can’t see any other way to solve the problem without starting mass slaughters and preferably while also getting evolution back into the game. A couple of people came out to say they agreed with me, but then the others firmly rejected the idea.
After those first messages, I was left alone to debate the issue with only one of those who wrote to say they reject the notion of eugenics, so I can assume that the rest aren’t willing to discuss it further. Still, this little resulting debate has been going on for the past couple of days and it did help me build a stronger case in favor of eugenics and realize even more than I did before just how desperately we need such measures. And that’s because I looked up some numbers and realized that my assumptions were way too optimistic, as hard as that is to believe in my case, meaning that even the numbers I’ve been putting forward would be completely inadequate if we’re to have any chance of reducing the human population to sustainable numbers by the end of the century.

I never actually searched for the number of people that die in the world each year, assuming that the result obtained by dividing the population of around 6.8 billion by the average lifespan of about 67 years would be close enough to the truth, which is why I even used 100 million as an example in my “Suffocating the World” post. However, much to my surprise, I now noticed that in fact only about 56 or 57 million people die each year! And that certainly prompts some changes to the plan, because it’s very easy to see the kind of drastic measures we’ll need to take if we’re to have any hope of reducing the population to, say, two billion by the end of the century: We need to get the population to drop by 4.8 billion in 90 years, which means that it needs to drop by 53.33 million each year. When only 56 or 57 million die per year, that means no more than 2.67 or 3.67 million may be born. However, close to 140 million are currently being born each year, which means birth rates must be reduced by just about 98%.
But going more thoroughly through the numbers, including the low death count, is a topic for another time. The point here was just to show that the current number of annual deaths barely allows for any births. That means that anything other than eugenics, anything other than requiring “breeding licenses” in order to have a baby and offering them only to the very best, only to those who have genes that are truly worthy of being passed on according to completely objective criteria, is doomed to utter and complete failure. Anything may help and everything potentially useful should be tried, but nothing except eugenics could possibly do enough.
Education is being pushed forward left and right as a method to solve this problem, but there is no more time for education, and in fact education regarding overpopulation only works on those who are intelligent and at least somewhat altruistic, which are unfortunately the attributes of only a small portion of humanity. Far from me to deny that even a small amount of education could easily halve the number of children certain women have, but that’d be very far from enough in itself.
Improving the standard of living of the poor is another method supported by many, but that likely requires even more time and, in fact, no resources are left to sufficiently improve the standard of living of the current number of poor. Not that this method could achieve more than a fraction of the required reduction in the number of births anyway, but I also have to say that raising the standard of living requires lowering the population, so claiming to do it the other way around on a planetary scale would be funny if it wouldn’t be so sad for us all.
As for financial means, such as reversing the current trend and offering benefits to the childfree and raising taxes for those who have children, those would also be completely insufficient. This approach would stop those who breed just for the benefits, making a living out of the income generated by the very existence of their children, and also deter many who are uncertain about having children, but once again the effects would be very far from sufficient.
You simply can’t obtain an immediate 98% reduction in the number of births and maintain those results for nearly an entire century by hoping that people will see that only very few of them should have children anymore and voluntarily comply. And you can’t obtain those results by nudging or pressuring them in that direction either. Those methods all help, certainly, but they can’t generate the necessary results, they can’t have the required impact! The number of children that may still be born at the current moment is so low that the only way to achieve it is to say exactly what it is, so everyone will know the number of spots they’re competing for, and then call all who want to have a baby to go through the required tests, handing the permits only to those who qualify for the available spots. And eugenics is the only method that could possibly be used in order to come up with objective criteria to base those tests on, as it deals with the traits that could be passed on by the potential parents to their children, if they’d be allowed to have any.

But, of course, that’s an uphill struggle. Limiting births is an uphill struggle in itself, as the vast majority of people think with their gonads when it comes to that, but advocating the notion of eugenics is even worse as it has been terribly tarnished by the Nazis, who claimed to base their atrocities on it despite using subjective criteria such as ethnicity or hair or eye color instead of objective ones and torturing and killing people for the sole “crime” of being alive instead of simply not allowing the unfit ones to have children. But nothing worthwhile’s ever easy, so perhaps we’ll manage to clear away all the mess the Nazis have created before it will completely destroy our civilization, such as it is, by scaring us away from the only effective solution to the world’s greatest problem.