The stop-at-two policy was more of GKS's idea. LKY supported and
when along with GKS.
In the 70s, population control was the intellectual fad and
Singapore followed the trend.
Monkey see, monkey do.
The Population Bomb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
POPULATION
Scapegoat of
the ’70s
The rate of world population growth peaked at some
point around the middle of last decade and has since stalled.
Latest estimates from the UN Population Division suggest that total
world population, which now stands at just over 4 billion, will
touch 6 billion by the end of the century.
At the very beginning of the 70s it was widely believed
that rapid population growth in the developing world was the most
important cause of continuing poverty. The population ‘explosion’,
it was argued, was wiping out any economic development which the
developing countries managed to achieve. ‘No other problem casts a
darker shadow over the prospects for international development than
the staggering growth of population,’ said the Pearson Commission
Report on ‘Co-operation for Development’, published
in 1970.
But as the decade progressed this view began to give
ground under repeated attacks from a Third World which was
profoundly suspicious of the convenient Western argument which laid
the blame for poverty at the feet of the improvident poor.
The counter-argument ran like this. Large families and
rapid population growth are in themselves a result of poverty. In
the absence of social security, unemployment pay, sickness benefits
and old age pensions, poor people need children to look after them
when they are out of work, sick or old. Secondly, the millions of
poor people who live in the rural areas of the Third World need
children to help with the daily ‘survival’ jobs of collecting wood
and water and looking after animals, which commonly take up to
twelve hours a day every day and which children can and do perform
throughout the developing world.
http://www.newint.org/features/1980/01/01/development/
