China tried that, and it didn’t work. Lots of aborted girls while the parents waited for the boy. Pretty sad situation. They aren’t doing it anymore.
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They didn’t enforce it properly. More machine guns publicly used on the parents would have been effective, or just plain sterilize them
This subject is very unpopular in any United Nations department. A few years ago, a professor WITH TENURE at the University of Toronto publicly said that all of Canada’s foreign aid should be in the form of family planning and birth control. And it was in an address to graduates of a Catholic college there. He was reviled by a large segment of the population and applauded by an even bigger segment.
Sociologists and economists have long said that raising living standards and educating women was all that was needed to stabilize and then reduce population growth. I agree with that observation. Today several countries are actually depopulating, Japan and Russia are examples but for very different reasons. General McArthur enshrined women’s equal rights in the Japanese constitution patterned on the US model and the rest is history with Japanese women deciding how many children, if any, they will have!
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I REALLY hope that this was an attempt at humor.
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Well this is certainly off topic but an interesting one. I believe most of Europe is in a net loss as well as other 1st world countries. But when you get to the 3rd world, part of the issue is they need lots of kids to help support the families. Just like the 1800’s here where lots of kids were needed for farm work. Plus the cultural issue against birth control where some folks have been accused of attempting to de-populate others with birth control. So the poverty just goes on and on with no end. One issue that we face though is when one group has a net loss in births, other groups have lots of kids and the long term result is a total cultural shift.
It was interesting when we were in Paris in July and there weren’t hardly any traditional French around in the restaurants and shops. The French were all on their one month vacations and all the work was being done by immigrants.
Why not voluntary sterilization, with appropriate awards for not reproducing? Stay child-free up to age 25? Your undergraduate college is paid, or a similar cash award for starting a business, building a home, etc. Child-free at age 30? Graduate education, or vacations, or electric car or similar?
Problem is the regulatory intrusions: non-fertility testing etc. Some sterilizations might be reversible, but no guarantee.
Best method? Change in culture to applaud ALL people, parent and not, and maybe training (Licensing?–we require it to drive…) to become a parent?
This might sound unbelievable, but about 40 years ago, India gave men a transistor radio if they would submit to a voluntary vasectomy.
Was that an appropriate reward?
I wouldn’t think so, but apparently some of the poorest peasant men in that country did think so.
However, the program was later dropped, so I suppose that insufficient numbers of men saw the “value” of that proposition.
Can’t speak to the driving on the sidewalks issue, but I can vouch that the “legal way to park” concept is a challenge among many southeast Asian immigrants here in Silicon Valley.
Have you ever seen the way that the French park in Paris?
I was amazed to see how many mini-cars were “parked” on traffic islands and in other inappropriate and clearly-illegal spaces.
More than likely, those SE Asian immigrants are no worse than native Frenchmen/Frenchwomen in their own county.
Double parking, blocking driveways, if done in India, yes, probably nobody would mind. Likely nobody would even notice. Silicon Valley, not so much. I’ve never been to India, but in Thailand it is very common to double park but leave your car in neutral, then the person blocked can push your car out of the way. Seems weird way to do things for us here in the USA, but that is standard parking practice in Thailand, Bangkok area at least, which is very flat. Yes, I’ve seen the “creative” parking the folks in Paris driving those really small cars do; but for the most part the sidewalk and traffic island parking didn’t seem to be blocking other cars, but sometimes this practice impeded my pedestrian-tourist efforts a little.
The thing is all of those incentives are important to people that defer their gratification and are interested in improving their lot in life. Just from a casual response, it seems to miss the mark of what would be an incentive. In some circles it is a status thing to have kids young and school and planning for the future is negative. Changing the cultural narrative is the first step. In the US though, sterilization programs undertaken against certain groups did not end well and no one would dare bring it up again. There are some good books on the whole episode carried out by social engineers. (See eugenics)
I’m replying to Bing’s post, but it’s for the group: can we please keep this more about cars, rather than population control? Thanks.
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Sorry, but there is a direct relationship between cars and population control. As I remember it anyway.
Shoulda added a couple 
In my defense (or defence for you folks over the pond) when a subject does come up that is a little off topic, it sometimes requires a comment especially if it borders on eugenics. You can’t let some of this stuff just hang there, IMHO anyway.
There is a Facebook group called New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens, and some things I’ve learned from it are:
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Car culture is a very American phenomenon. A lot of people in other cultures would rather have access to good mass transit than a car, and frankly, I get it. A monthly transit pass is a lot cheaper than the cost of owning, maintaining, insuring, and driving a car.
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From an urban/suburban design standpoint, the automotive industry has really done a number on us, and we’ve let them lead us on a path that is pretty destructive and hostile to bicyclists and pedestrians.
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The young people in that group seem to be embracing both mass transit and the social-democratic (small “d”, not the political one) principles that are associated with it, and they’re rejecting all aspects of car culture, not just car ownership.
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In terms of legacy, boomers and we gen-Xers have given millennials an infrastructure they dislike and actively reject. It spills over into issues like fair housing and materialism.
I don’t dare venture to guess whether the young people in that group are representative of their generation or how big of a percentage they are, but they face an uphill battle by living with transportation infrastructure that doesn’t suit their needs or their desires.
I can only speak about it from a suburban perspective, that’s where I grew up. The automotive industry didn’t have to do anything to persuade us to buy into the car culture. Cars are necessary to do most anything and a rite of passage for independence. Like the comedian that said there is no such thing as a drug pusher- these things sell themselves! 
As far as being hostile and destructive to both bicyclists and pedestrians, that is a shared ownership IMO. There are rules and controls in place to make it work for everyone. But if people don’t follow the rules, then we have conflict. There are numerous sins on both sides of this equation too. It would be an interesting discussion to take cars out of the picture. Do you think there would be animosity between pedestrians and bicyclists? I’m betting there would be if bikers ran red lights and stop signs, didn’t stop for crosswalks, speeding etc and pedestrians just walked out into the street willy nilly without looking for bicycles…I know, hard to envision 
Does your suburb even have sidewalks? How do you think it ended up that way?
You seem to be conflating people with infrastructure.
Henry Ford flooded the market with a cheap dangerous tool that shaped where we built our homes and determined which we would build, sidewalks or roads. That changed our world drastically, and you can see the difference in other countries, particularly in Europe, where the roads were designed and built long before cars ever came along.
In order to see this perspective I describe, you have to get out of your head (EDIT: the royal you, not you personally) and see the world in a different way. I suspect not many of us have that kind of imagination anymore, that lets us see how our world has been shaped based on an agenda.
Too much there to possibly respond to without writing a book but the area and conditions of Europe compared to the US such as the vastness and no war reconstruction make us a little different.
At any rate lets look back to 1900 and see what the auto industry actually gave us. Roads instead of muddy cow paths for one thing. It was hard to ride a bike on those gravel and dirt roads. Mobility to allow one to go where they please for another. You no longer had to live within blocks of where you worked or on a street car line. So you could have a home with a yard and a garden and elbow room cried Daniel Boone. Let’s not forget what happened to the ordinary working person suddenly earning $5.00 a day at the Ford plant and from then on all of the economic activity in the next hundred years.
And materialism? Yes we work to improve our lives and buy products to improve our lives like food, air conditioning, houses. electronics, tools, bicycles, and so on. Someone needs to make them and some prefer meaningful work than having a glass of wine at a patio cafe reading books on philosophy. I feel sorry for people that have not spent time putting in a hard 8-12 hours a day of productive work and can look back at all that was accomplished that day.
I can’t say I’m surprised that you aren’t trying to examine this issue from a different perspective.
Having said that, the beauty of describing someone else’s point of view is that I don’t have to defend it.
I will defend them from your characterization that they are lazy though. That’s low even for you.
This is a big country. Do you think everyone could live in big cities or large enough metropolitan areas to support mass transit? It takes a lot of people to support such infrastructure meanwhile we have a very large country with vast spaces and farmland. Ford did not create the environment, he built tools that made it easier to live within. We did not have sidewalks for a very good reason. No one is laying sidewalks so you can walk 5 miles to the grocery store. Cars enabled the population outside of the big cities to survive and thrive not the other way around.
Why are you insulting? Get out of my head? Why not read my perspective and consider it respectfully rather than demeaning it and insulting me because you don’t agree with it? I’m out…
I think the country you describe was shaped and molded over a long period of time, and without cars it would be shaped very differently.
Don’t Ireland and Italy have farms and countryside too?
Whether Ford intended to shape our environment or not, I dare not speculate, but in the end he did.
I didn’t intend to insult you, and I apologize if I did. I just see you entrenched in one perspective that is very car-centric.