Endless reproduction would hamper any such effort in earnest, by siphoning off resources no matter what policies you are willing to enact for crowd control. But guided sterilisation, eugenics/genetical manipulation of the human brain (say implanting the gene that gives some species of birds a brain with as many or more folds as ours), and the dying off of those deemed unnecessry except as raw materials is an idea that originates in the mid-19th century, approximately. Plato would be so proud.