What is a better form of population control, war or birth control?
Most people would say birth control, and I'm not really going to disagree with that, but in my
perfect world the world government is limited in scope for the sole purpose of allowing individual countries the freedom to design their own governments according to their own value systems, so it kind of makes sense to consider the validity of some of those other value systems. After all, if something really is universally true, then maybe the world government should enforce it.
From a purely philosophical standpoint, I'm not sure it makes much difference whether you limit population through death or through lack of birth. Is it better to live for a short time and then die, or to never live at all? We are horified by the loss of life through genocide in Rwanda or from the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, but I can imagine a similarly horrifying statistic concerning the number of people who have never been born in the U.S..
I'm going to make up some numbers here because I'm too lazy to try to find out what the real numbers are, but let's say that we have 10 million families in the U.S.. Without birth control, let's say that each family would produce an average of 10 kids over the course of a 50 year marriage, whereas with birth control, they only produce an average of 2 kids over the same 50 year marriage. Now, for a little math: without birth control, you would have (10 * 10,000,000) / 50 = 2,000,000 births per year. With birth control, you have (2 * 10,000,000) / 50 = 400,000 births per year. That means that every year 1,600,000 people are not born in the U.S. because of birth control. Oh the humanity!
Okay, now let's look at the practical issues, I'm better at those anyway. Here are a few practical points to consider concerning this issue:
1) Natural Selection. A nation that does not try to prevent disease, starvation or murder will, over time, produce a genetically superior population than one that tries to make sure that everyone, once born, survives into adulthood.
(One exception here could be a nation that tries to make sure everyone survives, but only allows genetically superior people to reproduce. Unfortunately, I don't have the space or the time to cover every possible variation here, so this, and doubtlessly countless other variations, will be left as an exercise to the reader.)
2) Increased productivity. When people are less likely to be killed at home, they can afford to spend less time fortifying their homes and more time working and enjoying the fruits of their labor (e.g. jet skis). This strengthens the whole nation, allowing it to compete efficiently against its neighbors.
As a nation, we could spend less on police and military if we have a culture of peace and non-aggression. These extra resources can then be applied to research and development, further bettering your society and giving your nation a further advantage in competing against other nations.
Even if there are other internally agressive nations in the world that could threaten your security from the outside, if your nation is at peace internally, your citizens will be free to work and produce rather than spend time protecting their homes, so you will have more resources with which to defend yourself against these agressive nations.
2) Decreased grief. It is inherently a part of our nature that we feel grief when someone close to us dies. This will be true even if we live in a culture that puts a low value on life in general. We feel more grief over the loss of someone we knew than over the hypothetical non-birth of someone.
3) More wisdom in leadership. In a more peaceful nation, you will have a larger older population to help direct the efforts of the population as a whole. I'm not talking just about your grandfather telling you stories about when you were a kid, but also about older people in the workplace who have already tried the ideas that younger members are coming up with. Their experience helps stop companies from wasting a lot of time pursuing unproductive ideas.
Okay, there are probably other issues, but my kids are starting to hound me for food, and I'm getting distracted, so let me just wrap this up. The main point that I'm trying to make is that, while I think that a peaceful nation, relying on birth control to limit its population, is better than a chaotic one that limits its population through natural attrition, I'm not convinced that this is a universal truth, and I don't think that the world government, as I envision it, should enforce this.
