bringing the population down

There is a long history of warning about population growth beginning with a fellow named Malthus.  It's pretty obvious, so it's not like it takes a genius to figure it out.  I'm not aware that any particular steps were taken because of the popularity of The Population Bomb.  The only steps taken that I am aware of is China's one child policy which preceded that book..

Was that policy effective?  Well it was effective in reducing China's population growth. It was according to wiki.  I really should look more deeply into this,  Here is a major social experiment and yet it is not investigated much.  Maybe people don't want to look into it because if it proves effective maybe people will try to impose it on their own country.  Not likely though since it would be wildly unpopular and I can't think of any other country that has that much control over its people.  Well there are the tinpot dictatorships but those guys generally want to have as many subjects as possible.

There was another book that caused a bit of a stir, Freakonimics, which came out in 2005.  One of their observations was that there was a drop in crime about twenty years after Roe vs Wade.  Their explanation was that legal abortion enabled poor young women to not have so many kids and when they had fewer kids they were able to raise them better and they did not become criminals,  It makes sense on the face of it, but there might be something else going on.  Those stats should probably be looked into more deeply, but not by me this morning.

There will only be ten candidates in the upcoming debates, and one of them will be Andrew Yang.  He doesn't get much ink because he has no chance, but he has an interesting idea, which I am not going to look up right now of a guaranteed annual income whereby the very poor get money   Okay I looked it up and it is called a Freedom Dividend and it's a thousand a month.  The idea is that when you are very poor it's all you can do to keep a roof over your head and food in your belly and you are just living day by day and have no chance of getting ahead.  But if you got a Freedom Dividend, you would have your roof and you would have your food and you could begin to get ahead, to be part of a productive work force and pay taxes.

But won't they just spend it on booze and lottery tickets?  Some surely will, but there have been studies that show that a large percentage of poor people do get ahead when they get extra money.

And of course if they get ahead they will have less children.  Beagles is correct that having too many kids drives you into poverty, but as the income rises people tend to have fewer kids.

And the same would apply to foreign aid,  If we gave money to stimulate the economies of those poor countries down south they would have fewer kids and we wouldn't be trying to build that awful wall through a national park with a delicate ecology for Chrissake.