How best to reduce world population

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Dwindling resources will take care of population levels. Just give it sufficient time.

Serious. Many regional cultures died out, from local tribal cultures like the Anazasi over expeditionary colony cultures like many polynesean islands or the Vikings on Greenland, to huge empires like the Mayas. They often died by starvation until the very last man, because they bred more people than they could feed by the environment within their reach, and that which was within their reach, collapsed due to excessive exploitation. Or sometimes the supporting home cultures stopped to support their colonies due to own collapse or dying interest, cutting the colonists off from vital supplies whose lack sealed the colonists' doom.

We are doing the very same on global scale now, we - as a global population - consume 3-4 times as many of nature's resources than it can replace. The weak countries will suffer and collapse first, the richer later.

^ This. It's a perfectly natural population control point, alongside natural disasters and disease. Mankind is striving to predict natural disasters and is learning where not to build, and medicines are removing disease...however short of inventing replicators (the Star Trek version, not the Stargate one) we will eventually run out of food, it's already happening, food prices are at an all time high. Before we run out of food though, we will run out of oil, and just about everything we use has oil in it in some form, be it plastic or petrol. It's like a nuclear reaction, it's begun and it cannot stop, short of some kind of 'Children of Men' style mass sterilisation. Which is something I suspect will be done to some nations by others, or by some nations to their populace before the century is out. Other options include, the good old Soylent Green, or basic nutrient food pills and Japanese capsule hotel style living accommodation, drugs and mass entertainment to dull the senses of the populace, draconian measures to curb unrest.
So enjoy the moment, you may complain about Obama but compared to what's coming, he's absolutely nothing, you'll see.