I guess not enough?
I don't want to sound like an asshole, I only have one child myself and I'm seriously considering stopping at one, I don't think childless people should be punished, but taxes should be steadily increased over time and incentivise child rearing until birthrates become sustainable again.
I realy think the situation described in the article is somewhat akin to colonialism/slave trade where you have poor regions of high birth rate providing meat for the big-city grinders.
This sounds like a poor idea for environmental conservation. There's already enough people reproducing, beyond the replacement rate (that is to say, faster than the rate of people dying). Maybe not the in the USA, but elsewhere in the world. The global population is growing.
Sustainable as in 2.x births per woman if you want to keep a population steady, or a lower number at first, but eventually you will want that 2.x births per woman because otherwise we go extinct as a species.
What's the purpose of keeping our current population steady? Is the goal just to never drop below a certain amount of people since we already reached that number?
Is there some sort of universal duty to have a certain amount of people alive at the same time? And if so, is it based on any sort of science?
Maybe my english is not that great, but I thought I clearly exained that you will EVENTUALY need 2.X children per women, otherwise we will go extinct as a species, do you dispute that?
Wether it's 20 years from now or 100 years it's irrelevant.
Is there an universal duty to keep your weight constant at all times?
No, loosing or gaining a couple of pounds is ok, but dieting by cutting of your hand is not ok.
For one, that's just wrong. You need to be only above 1.0 children per couple on average in order to maintain population growth. You don't need 2 children per woman and mandating that sort of thing would be absurd, not to mention sexist (in the way that it reduces the autonomy of women and removes the choice of having children).
For two, humanity has no innate value that makes maintaining infinite population growth somehow good or even sustainable. We're more likely to go extinct as a result of unsustainable population growth and resource exploitation than a result of reversing population growth globally.
And finally even if that was the case, this is something that would be literally hundreds of years away barring some sort of global extinction event.
Your goal a 2-child (minimum) policy?? Our current population isn't environmentally sustainable. Historically, humans have had no problem increasing their population. I just don't understand the concern.
In earnest, I do not believe that a lack of population is the biggest hurdle in ensuring that people won't go extinct. I would suspect that climate change, geopolitical tensions, and poverty are larger factors.
Okay, how does this work realistically? What about people that are sterile? Or people who choose to not have children due to their genetic history? Or what if they literally cannot afford to have children?
And what does sustainable mean in this context? Is every nation supposed to have a positive growth of population into perpetuity?
