"Educate women. Let them work. Provide health care to their kids." But what of all the problems which ripple out from such changes made to human society? I mean providing "education" to all people, conforming thinking and knowledge: it helps drive technological progress, but does it help humanity or Nature? No; homogeneity imbalances, but diversity in behavior stabilizes resiliency. And neither can we put all our eggs in the one basket of stopping human overpopulation: it is not guaranteed to effect the change needed for such a serious crisis.
Putting women to work, getting women employed and away from their children certainly benefits The Economy and the operators who profit from tech-industrial activity, but what does it do for childen and mothers each, who are best served by being in proximity, like mother:child relationships in other ape species. (Imagine anyone suggesting that chimp mothers should go push buttons in a cubicle and give over their kids to zookeepers while mom is working...)
Is it not human nature to have offspring? Isn't it obvious that every species necessarily has a drive toward parenthood? Given the importance of reproduction for each creature, should that be altered among humans by incentivized, 'soft' interventions (even if they could work)? Certainly we do have more humans than can be sustained long-term, but the cause of this must be addressed: wisdom (and efficiency) suggests cutting at the roots, not the branches.
The technological system needed more people in order to advance, and agriculture and technologies allowed for exponential human population growth; now that technology has replaced many more functions humans once provided, and as it approaches its full autonomy, human reproduction is being discouraged. But we should reject and resist further disconnection from Nature and instead embrace our animal nature as breeding hunter-gatherers, a practice which worked wonderfully for about 200K years of our species existence, before the undertaking of agriculture a mere 10K years ago.
