Misadventures in Baby-Making

In the late 1970's, a math professor, Geert Jan Olsder, at University of Twente, published a paper called"Population Planning: a Distributed Time-Optimal Control Problem."The author was trying to answer: as the population aged, and as longevity increased, what was the right birth rate to prevent an isolated island from being overpopulated? Later, Olsder shared the paper with a Chinese scholar who happened to be visiting the university. The Chinese scholar, Song Jian, was one of the architects of the one-child policy. Therefore, Olsder's paper was believed, ultimately, to be the trigger of the one-child policy in China.

link:http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/10/26/misadventures-in-baby-making-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/