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Comment by beaunative | Hacker News Reader

Why is population control inherently wrong? sustainable envrionment and forever exploding population is a pair of inherently conflicting goals, at least while we still only inhabit earth. We have to acknowledge there is a maximum which this planet can handle. Even if we do regard having children as a very personal right, we must acknowledge the collective effect is not within our control, not in the near future.

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There is a quite strong correlation between level of education and number of birth per women. The best way to "control" population growth is to give easy access to a good education and birth control solutions (I mean condoms and the pill). No coercion required.

That's true, but this is also an attempt to a moral question with a pragmatic empirical answer. The problem with this is the data can always change.

How would your opinion change if that correlation were found to disappear in the coming decades? Or if it actually began to reverse (for example as populations shift to being more urban where kids are expensive and access to assisted reproduction depends on wealth)?

I don't know.

I'm opining/arguing that if you make this statement:

>The best way to "control" population growth is...

Then provide some level of govt incentive to reach that goal, it's still coercion (or if you prefer, manipulation), even if the incentive is 1st order positive effects, and the stated goal/result is a 2nd or 3rd order effect.

Thinking about it, I keep coming back to preditory lending/selling tactics or dark-pattern manipulation (except the UI is your life choices) as comparisons, but I haven't worked out exactly why, yet, other than it bothers me in a similar way. Moreso, since it's government.

That's a rather strange position to hold. It brings in issues related to both the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons. To whit, each individual reproductive group may desire more offspring, but each successively larger generation consumes more resources. Given a (for the foreseeable future) finite amount of resources, unrestricted population expansion is net harmful to society as a whole, even as large families may be beneficial (i.e. result in greater happiness) for individual groups.

It's a coordination problem. Everyone wants to act in the way that maximizes their happiness/success/utility, but in doing so acts in a net-negative way. One of the premier purposes of government is to solve coordination problems. Why is it unethical for the government to solve this coordination problem?

Or, more concretely, why does my right to have a dozen children trump my children's right to have sufficient resources left to them to live a happy life?

In a sense, law-making is all about providing incentives. How's birth control any different than other aspects of life? I'd say that's a quite broad definition of coercion/manipulation.

There is no manipulation. You offer better choices to people than they currently have, such as access to good education and tools they are free to use to manage their personal life (e.g condoms). As a side-effect it is expected that the number of birth per woman will reduce over time.

People are free to use or not birth controls if they want or not children, same for the education. People aren't tricked in reducing the amount of children they have. Data in developed countries seems to point that when people are better educated and have the tools to decide for children, they get them later in life and in less quantity (without considering other factors, such as religious communities that have more children per woman than average).

That works a little in reverse as well. If you can curb teenage pregnancy you significantly change the demographics of a region and lead to women being the power drivers in a community. It literally reverses cycles of poverty

...and you can only do that with education and contraception, since human nature makes people feel okay to break the rules so long as they aren't being watched. Punishing teenagers for doing teenage things has never worked out anywhere (not sure if that was the intent of your message, but just putting it out there).

Thanks for clarifying, no that wasn’t the intent of the message - contraception and education are key

So I was going to reply to the parent but after thinking a little more I think I have a better good faith interpretation. I think they used "coercion" instead of "persuasion" because it is a stronger word (implying forcing or threatening). So if we read their comment that way I don't think they disagree with you or would be against even encouraging things like planed births and making birth control widely available.

You might not be wrong. Though after rereading it, I'm convinced that it was suggested in that comment popluation control is wrong regardless. Note the paragraph on education. So in that framework, providing education with the intention of reducing birth would be unethical. How moderate or non-coercive of a means are we talking about?

That's true, but hard to tell when the person hasn't responded. I tend to try (key word) to use the strongest form of someone's argument (not that I think you're talking about their weakest form).

But what I was originally going to say is that the language gets really fuzzy really fast. Like you could argue that sex education is a form of persuasion (though I wouldn't say coercion) and is easily argued as a form of population control. But I think many of us would call that beneficial. I'd say the same with free/cheap and easy access to forms of birth control. I'd say that enables more choice. But if we're talking about a counseling center that guilt trips someone into having the child or not having the child I'd call that coercion and I don't think that's right. But others would call that persuasion and education. So I think this gets messy really quick and a bit of expanding on the thought for clarification is needed.

I'm not ideologically opposed to contraception, for what it's worth.

I used the word "coercion" intentionally, although it's not exactly right.

Just as "coercion" implies "force or threatening," "persuasion" implies an "un-forced, freely-made choice." And that is a big part of what I'm questioning depending on particular circumstances.

At what level of deception or trickery or lies-of-omission, does the free-choice become the illusion-of-choice?

Hypothetically, in Xinjiang, if (and I get that this is an extremely unlikely "if" for obvious reasons) if we presume the actions are exactly the same (provide/offer/compel education), and the end results are exactly the same (results in suppressed Uighur birthrate, but educated),

Then does the government's good or bad intent matter?

What's the difference between these scenarios, if

1) China govt being honest and trying raise the QoL in Xinjiang to be equal with the rest of China, or

2) China govt lying, and using education as a pretense because of the low birthrate result that they desire?

Bonus: China just relaxed it's "one-child" laws in the rest of the country, in an attempt to increase the country's birthrate. Does this change your mind about the 2 scenarios above?

It's wrong because we own our own bodies. The confict of expanding humanity does not go away when you manage the population, people will want to expand.

Giving the state arbitrary powers to limit population growth is a form of violence. Having a state sactioned sterilization on excess children is just as horrific as a war, without any of the spoils of war.

The problem lies in the fact that the gov is the last body left to resolve our deepest conflicts as we are no longer free to commit acts of violence on our own behalf. Making it through life used to be materially difficult and death was far more common. Living in our current heaven-like atmosphere has far darker implications for the age-old conflicts.

Historically when governments have executed it the concept has ended in genocide? I'm not trying to accuse you of ill intent or supporting such a position, but once a government is given these tools the inevitable outcome has been such once the willing political party takes power.

This is "population control" targeted at a specific ethnic and religious minority, not population control in general. China is trying to crowd out the Uighur population by settling ethnic Han Chinese from elsewhere in the country and by imprisonment and forced sterilization of the population. This campaign meets the UN criteria for genocide.

It was very clear that the one child policy targeted the whole population, and ethnic minorities are generally allowed more leeway than Han Chinese.

China's Uighur policy isn't "One family one child."

It's sterilization, so that Uighur families can't have children.

EDIT: HN won't let me respond, probably due to the automatic moderation controls kicking in on this article, so here's an example of the forced sterilization policy indiscriminately targeting all Uighur women: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/04/muslim-minorit...

Where did you read that? If I read it correctly, they used sterilization on couples who already have children at the limit allowed. I won't call it can't

But the question is, _why?_ What's their incentive to apply more cruel population control on one ethnic group over others? We're talking about a repressive government, but not a race-based regime like Nazi Germany was. Indeed from their own propaganda they seem like they bend over backward to trumpet the well-being of their ethnic minorities, and you'll hear of cases of the Great Firewall censoring outpourings of nationalist/racist sentiment.

The more boring explanation is the simpler one I think; that they're bringing policies toward minorities in line with policies toward the majority -- i.e. ending a form of "affirmative action" they used to have.

You can argue that population control of _any_ kind is wrong and cruel, and I think that's a totally defensible argument, but there's a rhetorical sleight of hand going on here where people equate China's controversial population control measures (that have been ongoing for decades) with the elimination of a particular ethnic minority, Nazi-style.

But the question is, _why?_ What's their incentive to apply more cruel population control on one ethnic group over others?

It's a culture- and religion-based form of oppression. The ethnic Uighur people are Muslims, for the most part. They form a distinct subculture within China. The Communist Party sees their nonconformity as a threat to social harmony. That's why, in addition to forced sterilization and forced birth control, the government has imposed forced re-education in concentration camps.

Their goal is to destroy the Uighur population's distinctiveness as a subculture in China. It is deliberate ethnocide (by forced internment) and genocide (by reproductive suppression).

I understand that's the claim, but on the other hand, the biggest Muslim ethnic group (Hui) aren't repressed.

Which makes you ask, what's the difference between Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups like the Hui? Well, the biggest as far as I can tell is the influx of new, extremist ideologies like Wahhabism that are actually quite _incompatible_ with the indigenous culture. The reasons why that happened seem complex, but maybe you can say it's an unfortunate outcome of US and Russian meddling in the region over decades.

It's absolutely true that there's increased security and surveillance targeted at Uyghurs in the region, I've seen a lot of videos taken by travelers from the area that confirm that. There's also a coordinated and systemic program of re-education, as admitted by Chinese authorities. I'm sure there is a non-zero amount of abuses as part of this whole program, but I don't think that's the same thing as genocide. & I think the stated reason in their propaganda for _why_ this is all happening passes the smell test... Otherwise, wouldn't they be repressing Hui Muslims as well?

(Also see Tibet -- people said the same thing about Tibetan culture 20 years ago, but it's pretty well-understood now that there were foreign-funded separatist elements back then)

Even though Hui is considered to be a ethnicity, Hui are actually just Han Muslims

While sterilization has jumped up several times, one cannot actually effectively commit a genocide by performing sterilization operations on an entire population. Most of what's going on is coercion and soft power.

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