Birth credit
Encyclopedia
A "choice-based, marketable, birth license plan" or "birth credits" for population control
Population control
Human population control is the practice of artificially altering the rate of growth of a human population.Historically, human population control has been implemented by limiting the population's birth rate, usually by government mandate, and has been undertaken as a response to factors including...

 has been promoted by urban designer and environmental activist Michael E. Arth
Michael E. Arth
Michael E. Arth is an American artist, home/landscape/urban designer, public policy analyst, advocate for the homeless, futurist, and author. He was a candidate for the governor of Florida in 2009 and 2010.-Art:Michael E...

 since the 1990s. Previous iterations of similar transferable birth licensing schemes can also be traced to economist
Economist
An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...

 Kenneth Boulding (1964) and ecological economist
Economist
An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...

 Herman Daly
Herman Daly
Herman Daly is an American ecological economist and professor at the School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park in the United States....

 (1991)

Arth offers birth credits in the place of solutions to human overpopulation
Overpopulation
Overpopulation is a condition where an organism's numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat. The term often refers to the relationship between the human population and its environment, the Earth...

 that may take too long (like economic development and traditional family planning
Family planning
Family planning is the planning of when to have children, and the use of birth control and other techniques to implement such plans. Other techniques commonly used include sexuality education, prevention and management of sexually transmitted infections, pre-conception counseling and...

), are impractical (like space colonization
Space colonization
Space colonization is the concept of permanent human habitation outside of Earth. Although hypothetical at the present time, there are many proposals and speculations about the first space colony...

), or cruel (like forced sterility, genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...

, famine
Famine
A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including crop failure, overpopulation, or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality. Every continent in the world has...

, disease
Disease
A disease is an abnormal condition affecting the body of an organism. It is often construed to be a medical condition associated with specific symptoms and signs. It may be caused by external factors, such as infectious disease, or it may be caused by internal dysfunctions, such as autoimmune...

, and war
War
War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...

).

Implementation

Arth's plan, as described in his books The Labors of Hercules and Democracy and the Common Wealth
Democracy and the Common Wealth
Democracy and the Common Wealth: Breaking the Stranglehold of the Special Interests is a 2010 book by urban designer, policy analyst and artist Michael E. Arth...

, is a way to precisely set human population levels while still preserving choice. Birth credits would allow any woman to have as many children as she wants, as long as she buys a license for any children beyond an average allotment that would result in zero population growth
Zero population growth
Zero population growth, sometimes abbreviated ZPG , is a condition of demographic balance where the number of people in a specified population neither grows nor declines, considered as a social aim....

 (ZPG).

If that allotment was determined to be one child, for example, then the first child would be free, and the market would determine the cost of the license for each additional child. Extra credits would expire after a certain time, so these credits could not be hoarded by speculators. An advantage of the scheme is that the affluent would not buy them because they already limit their family size by choice, as evidenced by an average of 1.1 children per European woman.

Incentive and Enforcement

According to Arth, woman may collect the value of one credit if and when she decides not to have children. If the desired average number of children is one per woman, then a woman can have one for free. If she has additional children, she will be required to buy one birth credit for each child. The incentive to society is the prevention of an overpopulation-related tragedy of the commons
Tragedy of the commons
The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this...

, including an immediate reduction in unwanted children. The incentive to individuals is that their economic and educational levels would tend to rise as there is an inverse relationship between net worth and the number of children one has. As with traffic laws, enforcement of birth credits could be through fines, tax levies, or loss of privileges.

Cost

The scheme would pay for itself by rewarding those who choose not to have children, and charging those that have more than their allotment. The actual cost of the credits to those opting for more than one child would only be a tiny fraction of the actual cost of having and raising a child. Therefore, the credits would serve more as a wake-up call to women who might otherwise produce children without seriously considering the long term consequences to themselves or society.

Balancing Collective vs. Individual Rights

The choice-based marketable birth license plan was offered as a way to balance the collective right to live in a world with a sustainable population against the individual right to have as many children as one can commit to raising, while also reducing the number of unwanted or irresponsible births. Some previous attempts to limit population growth in India or China, which appear to have this same intention, have in some cases met resistance because they focused on limiting the number of children that each family may have without taking into account the differences between individuals in the number of children desired. During India's state of emergency between 1975 and 1977, under the direction of the son of then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhara was an Indian politician who served as the third Prime Minister of India for three consecutive terms and a fourth term . She was assassinated by Sikh extremists...

 there was reported to be overzealous enforcement of vasectomy
Vasectomy
Vasectomy is a surgical procedure for male sterilization and/or permanent birth control. During the procedure, the vasa deferentia of a man are severed, and then tied/sealed in a manner such to prevent sperm from entering into the seminal stream...

 and tubal ligation
Tubal ligation
Tubal ligation or tubectomy is a surgical procedure for sterilization in which a woman's fallopian tubes are clamped and blocked, or severed and sealed, either method of which prevents eggs from reaching the uterus for fertilization...

 programs in order to meet quotas. The resulting backlash made subsequent family planning efforts more difficult. Also in China, under the One-Child Policy
One-child policy
The one-child policy refers to the one-child limitation applying to a minority of families in the population control policy of the People's Republic of China . The Chinese government refers to it under the official translation of family planning policy...

 (instituted in 1979 to limit the number of children born to urban dwellers to one child) there were also overzealous officials who were jailed for enforcing sterilization or using forced abortions in order to meet population quotas.

See also

  • Zero population growth
    Zero population growth
    Zero population growth, sometimes abbreviated ZPG , is a condition of demographic balance where the number of people in a specified population neither grows nor declines, considered as a social aim....

  • Childfree
    Childfree
    Childfree also known as "voluntary childlessness" is a form of childlessness. The term was coined in the English language late in the 20th century and is used to describe people who have made a personal decision not to have children. The term childfree also describes domestic and urban...

  • Eugenics
    Eugenics
    Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...

  • Michael E. Arth
    Michael E. Arth
    Michael E. Arth is an American artist, home/landscape/urban designer, public policy analyst, advocate for the homeless, futurist, and author. He was a candidate for the governor of Florida in 2009 and 2010.-Art:Michael E...

  • Overpopulation
    Overpopulation
    Overpopulation is a condition where an organism's numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat. The term often refers to the relationship between the human population and its environment, the Earth...

  • One-Child Policy
    One-child policy
    The one-child policy refers to the one-child limitation applying to a minority of families in the population control policy of the People's Republic of China . The Chinese government refers to it under the official translation of family planning policy...

  • Population Control
    Population control
    Human population control is the practice of artificially altering the rate of growth of a human population.Historically, human population control has been implemented by limiting the population's birth rate, usually by government mandate, and has been undertaken as a response to factors including...

  • Logan's Run
    Logan's Run
    Logan's Run is a novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Published in 1967, it depicts a dystopic ageist future society in which both population and the consumption of resources are maintained in equilibrium by requiring the death of everyone reaching a particular age...

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