# Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [January 6, 2025, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655 "2025-01-06T20:41:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 56

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**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2025, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/56 "2025-01-07T02:02:27Z")

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> [@We\_re\_wolves\_not\_werewolves](#):
>
> Can you explain more why you think this and what you think would be an ideal human population for the Earth?

People produce amazing things, like art and science and technology. If we had 10x the number of people (roughly 100B), we could produce amazing things at 10x the rate. And all of those amazing things would be shared across the _entire_ population, so it’s actually a 100x improvement: 10x the number of people enjoying 10x the amount of cool stuff. That’s 10x the production of Einsteins and Feynmans and Ramanujans.

Of course, people think 100B people would be some kind of dystopia, and it _would_ be if we handled resources like we do today. But that’s only because we’re complete fucking dumbshits about absolutely everything. The reality is that we can give 100B people an American quality of life if we were just better about how we did stuff. Mainly, that means _much more_ energy use–mainly from solar. Energy solves every other problem, whether water supply or food or transportation or recycling.

As one example of how stupid we are, if _all_ we did was convert the land used for corn ethanol (a totally counterproductive attempt at making fuel more sustainable) farmland to solar panels, the US would have _ten times_ the amount of energy production. Not just electricity. Everything. That’s more than enough on its own to make absolutely everything (transportation, etc.) electric and still leave plenty of room for growth.

And to counter @Zoobi 's unfounded accusation, I was posting about this [10 years ago](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-be-the-ideal-world-population/715150/10). Or [even longer](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-kids-more-tax-breaks-why/576999/87), albeit indirectly.

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