Science Forums 2

[SugarMoses]

There is evidence that suggests as education and standard of living increases, parents decide to have less children. It is the quality over quantity argument. This said, I think it is important to continue to improve quality of life throughout the world, especially in undeveloped/developing countries, in efforts to help with population issues. As education and standard of living increase, the lure of the dowry system is reduced, as there are other means of earning money, etc.

As far as tax incentives or fines... I'm currently in China and have been for over 4 months now. I've talked with many Chinese about the 1-child policy (which is limited to urban areas. If you live in a rural area and your first child is a girl then you can have another. Furthermore, it's important to remember there are still parts of rural China that are more-or-less out of Communist control and therefore still have as many children as they want/is necessary) and i feel that the general consensus here is that the fee imposed upon a family that has two children (10,000 RMB which is not a small amount of money to the monetarily conservative Chinese people) is a good deterrent from having more than one child. Thus, I think that this method of population control could realistically be pursued by many countries in the not-too-distant future.