As part of a social reform initiative announced last week, China is to “relax” its one-child policy. There have been exceptions to it for years for certain groups, but this makes it officially-approved. Naturally my reaction was dismay (“the environment is now f*cked”). The policy has been criticized by some for being inhumane, but it somewhat it at least kept the country’s already-huge population from becoming even larger.
Someone on r/overpopulation did a rough projection of what population numbers might look like under a worldwide one-child policy. There is a decline to just over 6 billion by 2053, and 3.4 billion by this century’s end. As for a 2-child policy: “If 2 is input, the population would increase slowly until it peaks at 9 billion in 2063 before it slowly decreases, bottoming out at 5 billion in 2373”.
