Posted: Jun 10, 2019 2:01 pm
juju7 wrote: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.
Interesting. You declare it 'wrong' then proceed to attempt to substantiate that with a non-sequitur.
What exactly is supposedly wrong, and how does your follow up sentence have anything whatsoever to do with anything I wrote?
How did they invest 'more'? More compared to what? More per child than if they had 4 children? Perhaps. More overall? Are you sure? How would you go about substantiating that?
juju7 wrote: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.
And in this notional world, were there 4, 5, or 6 times as many urban workers with greater desires for material goods, and consequently even larger economy, what they would have been the effect on the ecological footprint?
You can't have your cake and eat it. We can't hop between a notional world that never happened and the historical one that did whenever it takes your fancy. A whole suite of occurrences happened during the time of the One Child policy: you can't put them all down to that policy - or if you want to, then you're going to have to do a bit more legwork than asserting a single sentence.
juju7 wrote:How much larger?
The economy might have doubled as it did in India that had no restrictions on family size.
Or trebled, quadrupled, or more.
juju7 wrote:Clearly the correlation between population growth and ecological footprint doesn't follow a simplistic population model.
Unfortunately, you haven't shown this. The correlation between numbers of humans and human impact on the environment is already established and hasn't been challenged or discussed in this thread.