I'm asking for a leftist perspective. I have a classist liberal acquitance that said that poverty is, in large part, a product of overpopulation and the competition over resources, jobs, homes, etc. that results from it, and that people without the resources to give their children a good upbringing simply shouldn't have them.
So while it struck me as an obviously elitist viewpoint, I couldn't help but wonder: What if the poor stopped reproducing?
Either as a protest against the system ("We won't bring children to such a dreary world") or enforced by an autoritharian state who determines income to be the most important thing.
Fwiw this has been tried in a less radical way, as Singapore did have aspects of this, as they paid poor people to sterilize themselves while encouraging women and men with college degrees to have children.
The facts don't back up your friend's claim. We produce 1.5 times the amount of food necessary to feed everybody on earth. You've got roughly 6 empty houses for every homeless person in the U.S. 8 people are as wealthy as 3.5 billion. The resources exist to provide literally everybody in the world with food, shelter, and medicine, the only reason why poverty still exists is because the current economic system does not assign resources based on need.
Jace Nguyen
I am somewhat skeptical whenever I hear this figure. I'm sure it's true in the sense that the gross quantity of food produced in farms is 1.5 times the quantity which people actually need to put in their mouths, but I suspect it neglects to include unavoidable waste. For instance, when you empty a can of food you probably don't manage to get 100% of it into the pan. You might get 99%, if you rinse it, but that 1% is lost. Then when you empty the pan you lose another 2%, and again when you eat the food off the plate. It all adds up at every point in the process. I'd love to see figures on how much is actually wasted due to avoidable inefficiencies of capitalism such as farmers being paid to keep fields empty or supermarkets throwing out stock because it's not worth trying to sell.
Leo Hall
lol
Anyhoo, educated women with access to birth control have very few children. Providing education and health care to everyone will lower the birthrate.
Isaac Edwards
Well, the poor can't reproduce less. For them, having children is a way to survive, to increase the family's income potential and to ensure that there's someone to look after them when they're too old to work themselves. You can't simply ask them nicely to stop, because that would mean even further immiseration and financial uncertainty.
Thus overpopulation is exactly caused by the competition that capitalism entails.
Ethan Morgan
Pay them to stop. Give a guaranteed pension to anyone who doesn't reproduce.
Brandon Garcia
Simply give out pensions, improve healthcare and education. People won't need to have that many kids.
John Myers
It would amount to minority genocide.
Cameron Green
brown people dont need anything though, especially their lives
Leo Rogers
Most of the waste comes in the form of "defective fruit", that which is judged not-aesthetic-enough to fetch a decent price and is thus left to rot. The poor would love it, but that would take extra money to give it to them. Normal consumers won't buy it anyways. So it just rots.
Yes, that's really how it is. Our system sucks. Why do you think we're socialists?
Logan Bennett
Interesting. I can believe that, although I'd love to see a proper breakdown of it.
Eli Wood
It's cultural too. Talk to any African (from Africa, not from the US), even if they live here plenty of them want to have a crazy amount of children. Maybe it's just the men though, I never spoke with their women. I doubt they take into consideration their retirement given the poor in rich countries don't.
Back in the day when the Irish were dirt-poor in America, having lots of children was a big thing for them too. Not so much anymore. There are of course cultural factors that play into it, but most cultural factors are informed by pragmatic concerns.
Noah Foster
if you want people in places like india and africa to stop popping out so many kids, you have to educate the girls (sex ed, teach about contraceptives, personal finance and the implications of having to raise kids, etc). it is the only proven, surefire way to reduce the birthrate to something manageable.
on the flip side, you can educate the boys for as long as you want, it wont make a difference.
Male genocide when? They are responsible for the vast majority of violence and suffering in the world.
Better yet, under communism we can forcibly inject them hormones and make them all into traps.
Kayden Jones
0w0 whats this….
Cooper Peterson
An octopus with penis-tentacles.
Evan Foster
Don't teach girls not to get pregnant. Teach boys not to cum inside.
Lincoln Wood
Solving Overpopulation with underpopulation is retarted. Also men do the majority of labor.
Wyatt Howard
Children of men happens.
Christian Foster
MARS COMMUNE
Jose Russell
Fully automated luxury communism and I get to be a trap SIGN ME UP MISTRESS
Carson Foster
Hmmm… /leftypol's/ reaction is now mostly memes and jokes instead of violent rage. It's an improvement.
Soon enough you will all be convinced of the superiority of glorious worldwide CPC-style 2 child policy.
Carson Diaz
That's absurd because population increase shifts both the demand and supply curves rightward by essentially the same amount, unless we're talking about an absolutely scarce thing that can't be continually expanded through labor, like land. For the most part though, Marx's "labor is the only truly scarce resource" is an accurate approximation. "Jobs" do not have some absolute, intransigent, limited quantity, they're determined by socially necessary labor time and how the market happens to coordinate it.
