What do you think about Eugenics?

[The Grand Nudger]

This isn't just aimed at Americans, or rich people.  Although I agree that the west uses too many resources, that is tied right into our entitlement issues, which go hand in hand with this freedom to screw up the world notion so many westerners have.

And hey, poor people might have a bit more money if they didn't have 6 to 20 kids.  Yes, I'm being a bastard, but it's true.  Giving them the option to have less children, and a financial incentive to boot, as someone else suggested, might help lift them out of poverty.  Did you consider that?  I'm very poor by american standards (because I'm disabled) so I chose voluntary sterilization after just one child.  Because of just one child, we have been able to slowly improve our lives. If I'd continued to have more children, I expect I'd be one of the unwashed masses, as you say, by now.

The goal is now to make the poor richer, rather than alleviate some future resource scarcity issue? Granted, if  -insert long list of shit- were different, then -long list of shit- would be different.   As it stands, in this world....where that long list of shit aint different...there's no linear progression between number of children per household and resource consumption by ratio or resource consumption rate.    

Those societies with the fewest children per household consume the largest portion of our resources, at the greatest rates (which is, plainly, what it means to be wealthy or affluent in the first place....not sure why you'd want to increase that if you wanted to decrease the rate of resource consumption).

This is why it would be unreasonable, even though it seems intuitively true that fewer people means less consumption, to expect a reduction of children per household to reflect itself as a reduction of resource consumption or consumtion rates. We here in the US, for example....without any monetary giveaways, without forced sterilization, without child limits, -with education-...have dipped below the replacement rate...we have done what you're suggesting, we have limited our average number of children per household to a number less than 2....
-and yet.......

(you might want to calm down with telling the poor that they ought to stop breeding because they're poor..btw..it may sound like great advice to you, but it probably isn't. Won't motivate them either, lol, we love kids more than we love money...dontcha know? Might also want to come to terms with the fact that if we're going to talk about the cost, potential and actual, of having a child - then we're pricing all but a select few out of the child making business.)