I would like a study that proves that a country would prosper once the population is greatly reduced.
In European countries food gets wasted a lot. Why not force people to stop wasting so much food and giving more to poor countries instead?
As I said, don't try to apply a magical formula to a complex matter. It's not like humanitarian aid can be used to make a third world country rich, so it should not be used as an argument.
If you want to help a third world country you should try and improve its infrastructure and help them out with technology to grow more food and shit like that instead of getting rid of their population without sufficient evidence that it will actually help.

The more simple you try to make this the more I will assume you have no actual basis because the problems in third world countries cannot be summarized in a sentence like that. Sure, there is famine. There is also poverty. There is exploitation. There is war. There are natural resources to be exploited, there is no infrastructure, there are diseases and everything.
Why focus solely on the amount of people? It's stupid. There are so many factors, changing one will probably not have the effect you are hoping for, unless of course you can prove otherwise.
The burden of proof lays with you.
You have no proof, as I can tell, so I guess I will stop posting here. Once you provide proof I will change my mind and stop being skeptical about your magical solution.

Yes, and so is condoms. What is being proposed by EV is a point of no return, and he is promoting it for just that reason. He is a follower utilitarianism who simply favours his fellow men, and not the broke and poor people of Africa. He believes himself to speak on behalf humanity, while suppressing the native population within a country that faces massive problems due to exploitation of westerners.


YES! And sterilising people is a cheap way of making sure you have less people to help in the future!

So please, read as intended, and I hope you are able to do so, if not most arguments in this forum would have to be at least 500 times longer just to explain simple things as why freedom of choice can be a good thing to have, and why privacy infringement is a problem...

I just realised that my OP didn't mention that only women with 2 children already were explicitly given the offer of sterilisation. That's why the 'stealth genocide' doesn't make sense. We're only offering it, not enforcing it.

By the way, sterilisation is a better method of contraconception than condoms. Condoms perish and will leave behind wasteful residue. They don't keep well in heat and have an expiry date to begin with.

I can sum up countless examples where a lower population would have been or would be beneficial to a country:
1) Rwanda 1994 - the problem was partly a racial conflict, partially a competition for land. Rwanda's population went from 2 million in 1950 to 7 million in 1990. What kind of country can support that? Are we even surprised that they murdered each other? After the genocide, the population went from 5 million to 10 million in 15 (!!!) years!
http://www.indexmundi.com/rwanda/population.html

2) 1947 Japan - Japan was a devastated country after WWII. If not for a single measurement they took, they would have had another explosion in population (like right before the war). Japan legalised abortions, since then, it had a yearly abortion rate of > 1.000.000 until the sixties. I don't think that a country would have been able to rebuild itself with another population boom. The growth rate went from thhe pre-war 7% to 5-3%.

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/poli.../ab-japan.html

3) China. Since 1978, the "one-child-policy" has been implemented in China. If it wasn't for that policy, there would have been 200.000.000 more Chinese in China now. Imagine that, a country that is struggling to provide for its citizens in the countryside, with 200 million more people. The one child policy has its controversial side, but what's the alternative? Besides, why do you bash utilitarianism? If you have to prevent 200 million births by force, in order to save the remaining 1000 million population from famine, I don't see what's unethical. 200 prevented births or 1200 in famine, easy choice to me.

In Mao's time, there was no limit. From 1959-1969, between 15 million (lowest government estimate) and 45 million (highest estimate) perished from starvation. The cause was definitely Mao's mismanagement, but you can't deny that the casualty rate would have been lower if there were simply less infants. The birthrate was 37 per 1000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China

4) http://www.indexmundi.com/niger/demo...s_profile.html
http://www.indexmundi.com/niger/population.html
In short: 1950: 2.5 million, 2010: 15 million. The last great famine was 2010. Before it was 2005. The current total fertility rate is 7 children per mother, what comes down to a whopping 700.000 newborns per year. Apparently, half Niger's population is under 15. Are they gonna feed the country, Ego?

Then there's also the so called demographic transition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition


See, that are sources I can accept.

As alot of people already suggested, I think we are leaving out too many important factors which cause third world problems:
The most obvious one, being poverty caused by overpopulation, was already adressed to some extend but I would like to say that, in my opinion, overpopulation is no the cause but a result of poverty.

You see, when you look at the worldwide growth rates in polulation, you notice that the highest growth rates are infact achieved in third world countries, most notably on the african continent:

Nothing new here right? Wrong.
What this statistic also shows is that in the western countries such as those in europe but also north america (where the slightly higher birth rates could be correlated to the high poverty in the immigrant poulation), are significantly lower or even <0% ie. decreasing.

When you compare this to a map of the density of human population on earth, it becomes apparent that the cause of poverty are not only high population or high fertility-rates but that especially the latter is more a result of poverty.

In my opion, the best way to solve the problems of the third world countries is not to lower the population or fertility rates, but rather fighting the general poverty that is caused by a multitude of factors. For example the pretty much non-existing educational systems, lacking industrial- and/or -civil infrastructure and the inability to feed their own people not because they are so many, but because western countries buy their food in order to feed theirs.

Poverty breeds overpopulation, not the reverse.

Efforts to scale a population down to fit available resources through sterilization is misguided. The correct course of action is to improve agricultural and industrial production to match the economic and material needs of the country.

When there is a level of certitude over whether your children will survive, the impetus to have 12 of them is removed.

Unfortunately the effort of supporting 12 children leaves little time to improve production.