The world's population is too high. We use many resources and have huge amounts urban development to sustain these numbers but we can't go on doing this forever. As much as many nations feel the only way for them to catch up is to increase their workforce through encouraging high birthrates they are only digging us deeper into the hole. I argue on the side of NPG, negative population growth. The concept of NPG and no it is not an oxymoron or contradiction, it simply treats growth as a vector quantity rather than a word. NPG mean that birth rates will average out to create a smaller generation than the one doing the creating. Hence bringing about a negative replacement rate between generations. This naturally happens in wealthier areas of developed nations where women have more rights and education available to them so many successful nations don't have huge populations like China or India because they have already passed their need for high levels of unskilled labor for industrialization. However, South East Asian, South American and African economies don't have it quite so well off. They often suffer more greatly from economic fluctuations and can't offer much in terms of research and development or other high end tasks and make up for it with cheap labor en masse. But that kind of economy hastens global destruction in the arctic, rain forests and many other places because there are more mouths to feed and bodies to house in one place and more hardwood floors and oil to ship to another so it can expand it's economy and keep doing well. The profligate, development driven lifestyle and economy of the rich nations and the massive population of the poor is what leads to the negative effects of having a positive population growth in the here and now, but in the future there will be immediate scarcity and famine if the population keeps up the current trend. China recognized this on a national scale and instituted the one child policy. This was a failure in itself but it could have been on the right track. Should there be limitations or at least incentives to keep the population from overrunning us?
I don't think it's possible to regulate human behaviour on such a grand scale as the world. China's policy itself on paper makes sense, however I can also see the problems when put into action. Even if the world applied such a policy, I still don't believe it would work out well mainly because of different cultural views on fertility, sex and childbirth. I would support the same negative growth rate that you propose, mainly becaues if we don't discipline and regulate our numbers soon it'll be nigh impossible to do so in years to come, becoming harder each year. I don't know where our numbers may go globally but eventually we will collapse in on ourselves unless we do something about it. Too bad we don't have an infinite renewable source of energy, alot of problems would be sorted out.
The so called "carrying capacity" of the earth is highly disputed and the number of human beings supportable runs from less than a billion to over 20 billion. It all depends on what sort of global structure is implemented. Independant national structures will be very difficult to co-ordinate.
