Posted: Jun 10, 2019 1:53 pm
Spearthrower wrote:juju7 wrote:What effect did this have on the carbon footprint?
I'm not really sure how to answer that question because there's no way of knowing how many extra people there would have been if the one child policy wasn't in place, and China albeit a very populous nation, still only accounts for 20% of the world's population. In general terms, had Chinese people continued to have 3, 4, 5 or 6 children per couple per generation, then the effect on the ecological footprint would have been larger.
Wrong. It is precisely due to smaller families that Chinese parents invested more per child - in education, food, clothes and so on.
It created a new class of urban workers that were more efficient and also had greater desires for the material goods, so the economy grew. The output of China quadrupled in those years.
How much larger?
The economy might have doubled as it did in India that had no restrictions on family size.
Clearly the correlation between population growth and ecological footprint doesn't follow a simplistic population model.