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Yosarian2 comments on Blind Spot: Malthusian Crunch - Less Wrong
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I think that probably the most effective means of population control, historically speaking has been (in no particular order):
-Increased education (especially of females)
-Improved access to birth control
-Feminism, increased women's rights
-Creating a society where women are allowed and encouraged to work outside the home
-Improved economics; getting out of a third-world economic state is vital
-Lowered childhood mortality rates
-Longer life-spans in general
Top-down population controls (like China's) have much more severe side effects, and are probably less effective in the long run.
You probably need to look back more than the last 50 years to get any kind of insight into the things that will effect human population over the next few hundred or thousand years.
I'm talking about things we can do right now to deal with the potential of population growth.
Obviously if we cure old age, or start uploading ourselves to computers, or genetically engineer ourselves into something different, or fundamentally change human reproduction technologically, we would be in a completely different situation and would need to come up with new solutions. But I'm not sure we can really plan for that until we actually see how that would unfold; and, in any case, in any of those scenarios, we would be better able to deal with the consequences with a world population of 9 billion then with a world population of 12 billion.