"As these example suggest, population control is ultimately out of sync with history. Neither West nor East required government-mandated family-planning programs during its period of rapid demographic and economic growth. (One can only imagine the public outcry if anything along the lines of a state-mandated condom distribution program had been attempted in Victorian England.) Yet leaders of the developing world are not told these obvious truths from our own history and experience. Instead, they are misled into thinking that lowering their country's birthrate will jumpstart economic development. 'Look at us,' we say. 'We have small families and are wealthy.' What we do not tell them is that this argument slyly reverses cause and effect. Declining fertility in the West was not the cause of economic development, but rather its unintended consequence."
-Steven Mosher in Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits.
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