Wouldn't mass adoption solve world problems?

[revots33]

Well the birth rate is barely at replacement level already in many of the wealthier countries (and actually below it in some countries).

Link to birth rates by country.

So what you seem to be advocating is for the couples from the wealthiest countries to stop having children of their own, and instead adopt some of the excess babies from the 3rd world. This is not only unlikely (as the majority of couples who want to be parents want to have their own child), but doesn't really solve the overpopulation problem.

[bunny]

I think one problem that would be exacerbated by your adoption plan is that rich countries consume more per head of population than poor countries by a large margin. An admittedly out-of-date statistic which did the rounds in Australia in the early eighties was that we used sixty times the resources per head than India. So adopting an indian was like adding 59 indians to the world population.

Obviously these numbers are now probably wrong (if they were ever correct), but although I agree with you that overpopulation is a large cause of environmental problems, it is more complicated than just measuring the number of people. How much limited resources they use is also relevant (obviously there are mitigating factors - ie rich people consume more, but also use cleaner and better technologies, etc)

[Metric]

There is an unfortunate paradox here -- the people most likely to listen and ponder the logic behind this proposal carefully are precisely the type of people I'd like to encourage to reproduce.

I agree it would be great if the slack-jawed [censored] of the world would choose to adopt rather than crank out large numbers of genetic copies, but by their nature they simply will not be inclined to do it.