They answered “so we don’t starve in our old age”. The local government instituted an old-age pension, and the birth rate went down.

The thing is, Malthus is mainstream again, whatever the Guardian says. When I was researching for an article on the food crisis I found that in most online discussions of the problem, people blithely agreed that the problem was the current population level. As long ago as 2004, the Independent was saying Malthus was right all along.

The Guardian is right though that population control doesn’t work. There was an interesting section on this in David Smith’s ‘The Dragon and the Elephant’ which I reviewed recently on Culture Wars. In India the effort failed completely despite its utter brutality. In China, the one-child policy has led to an alarming imbalance between males and females (something like 16% more men than women) and the population continues to expand dramatically.

It might be that some future democratic society decides population control is a good idea, but when it’s imposed through authoritarianism (be it Gandhian, Chinese or Green) it just won’t work. The only thing that historically has cut population growth is economic development: people living in advanced Western economies tend to have barely enough children to reproduce themselves (2.1 children per couple on average); in several countries the birth rate is already lower. So if you want fewer people, the answer is obvious… but inimical to green sensibilities.