Part IV -- Implementing Rapid Population Decline.

We are going to have fewer humans on earth. Yes, our global population will climb a few 100 million in the next decade but this, as William Catton points out in his book "overshoot," is just the last expansion of a system that is like a rocket gaining altitude on its upward momentum, before falling back to earth. The human experiment will stop expanding its footprint and fall back to the size that can be supported by what the earth produces annually.

The earth's population can only be what can be sustained after fossil fuel is exhausted or not used by aggreement. And any estimate of a sustainable population has to adjust downward to allow individuals improving their wellbeing and individuals stratificating their wellbeing. Without these adjustments the human experiment would still increase scarcity and trigger social conflict and civilization collapse.

Barring escape from worldly constraints (jumping off the planet or transitioning into other dimensions) human population will decline rapidly. People with resources will use them to support whatever lifestyle they can. Technology may adjust resource availability through efficiency or some completely new. However, people with too little resources will sink below subsistence and die. Wars or markets will determine who dies and who lives and at what level of wellbeing.

There are three processes that can modify the above scenario so that starving or killing play a lessor role. Each includes some implementation of rapid population decline driven by low birth numbers. (There maybe other pathways forward that include yet unknown changes in science and technology or alien or supernatural intervention but these are not discussed here.)

The first rapid population decline process discussed in this section depends on universal upgrades in cognitive process. That is, we find a process that upgrades everyone's common sense.

People do not normally drive their cars into trees because the consequences are predictable and unpleasant; normal cognitive processes, normal common sense will not let them. Having babies that do not reflect available resources, reflect a defective level of cognitive process. When the accompaning undesirable consequences of having children, civilization collapse and the injury of most people, reflects underdevelopment of common sense.

The cognitive processes that we have in our intellectual tool boxes do not give injuries, which are only abstractions before they are experienced, influence in the baby decisions. So the first process is to change the norm cognitive abilities so the resulting common sense selects not having children until the global outlook does not contain scarcity, civilization collapse and die off.

For example the new cognitive abilities would be able to overcome the prisoner's dilemma paradox -- a decision to not have a child is one small part of the billions of similar decisions. The new cognitive abilities do not allow defection from proper behavior for reasons of complex causality in time and space. That is the person that is injuried is hidden by markets which transfers the injury far out of sight in either time or space. Civilization collapse injuries, experienced in 10 or 50 years to progeny, are given the same meaning as if it happened to them last month.

The second process considered in this section for imposition of birth limits is top down. That is an autocracy enforces the limit. This autocracy can be one man - king, dictator, war load, or pope or it can be a dysfunctional democracy which imposes birth limits on a constituency that does not see the policy's utility. That is, each member sees only the birth limit policy's liability not its benefits. If a constituent vote was held on the limited birth policy it would not be passed. In a dysfunctional democracy, policy is passed, over the constituency's objection. A vocal, well funded, organized minority purchases persuades representatives to cast votes on these policies that do not align with their constituent base.

The third process considered in this section for implementing a birth limit policy is a bottom up. This process creates an enlightened majority constituency that sees a need for imposing birth limits on a genetically, culturally, or cognitively blinded minority.