Today (4/22), the Diane Rehm show featured the World Population topic. It was refreshing to hear someone saying something good about China’s one child policy, which has been stigmatized by the western society forever and forever. At the same time, it was mildly disturbing to hear someone from UN (Hania Zlotnik, director, Population Division, United Nations) still refers to Hongkong and Macau as COUNTRIES. Common on, how many years has it been?

Interesting questions:

Does Capitalism rely on the expansion of population since Capitalism feeds on consumption?

Should it be free will for people to choose how many children they will have?  It’s general knowledge that we Human destroy the very planet that we live in. Non-renewable resources, waste product, etc. (A new thing is the contraceptive hormone disturbance we pass on to the nature . ) So the more of us, the faster we destroy the planet.  Is the control of population in conflict with liberty and freedom? What should the government do, to control (few people like this word, so lets rephrase — encourage/discourage by benefits/stimulus) or just educate?

Given people the free will to choose, will they naturally choose to have few babies? The UN lady thinks China’s policy wasn’t effective in a sense that the Europeans voluntarily chose to have fewer and fewer babies.Well, look at America. Aren’t there more and more babies?

Since people with higher education and higher income have a tendency to have fewer babies, educating people to think from the perspective of the future of their kids, grand kids is certainly necessary.