Birth credit

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A "choice-based, marketable, birth license plan" or "birth credits" for population control has been promoted by urban designer and environmental activist Michael E. Arth since the 1990s. [1] Previous iterations of similar transferable birth licensing schemes can also be traced to economist Kenneth Boulding (1964) and leading ecological economist and steady-state theorist Herman Daly (1991) [2] [3]

Population control is the practice of artificially maintaining the size of any population. It typically refers to the act of limiting the size of an animal population so that it remains manageable, as opposed to the act of protecting a species from excessive rates of extinction, which is referred to as conservation biology.

Michael E. Arth American artist

Michael E. Arth is an American artist, builder, architectural and urban designer, and political scientist.

Economist professional in the social science discipline of economics

An economist is a practitioner in the social science discipline of economics.

Contents

Arth offers birth credits in the place of solutions to human overpopulation that may take too long (like economic development and traditional family planning), are impractical (like space colonization), or cruel (like forced sterility, genocide, famine, disease, and war). [1]

Human overpopulation The condition where human numbers exceed the short or long-term carrying capacity of the environment

Human overpopulation occurs when the ecological footprint of a human population in a specific geographical location exceeds the carrying capacity of the place occupied by that group. Overpopulation can further be viewed, in a long term perspective, as existing if a population cannot be maintained given the rapid depletion of non-renewable resources or given the degradation of the capacity of the environment to give support to the population. Changes in lifestyle could reverse overpopulated status without a large population reduction.

Family planning planning of when to have children, and the use of birth control and other techniques to implement such plans

Family planning services are defined as "educational, comprehensive medical or social activities which enable individuals, including minors, to determine freely the number and spacing of their children and to select the means by which this may be achieved". Family planning may involve consideration of the number of children a woman wishes to have, including the choice to have no children, as well as the age at which she wishes to have them. These matters are influenced by external factors such as marital situation, career considerations, financial position, any disabilities that may affect their ability to have children and raise them, besides many other considerations. If sexually active, family planning may involve the use of contraception and other techniques to control the timing of reproduction. Other techniques commonly used include sexuality education, prevention and management of sexually transmitted infections, pre-conception counseling and management, and infertility management. Family planning as defined by the United Nations and the World Health Organization encompasses services leading up to conception and does not promote abortion as a family planning method, although levels of contraceptive use reduces the need for abortion.

Space colonization Concept of permanent human habitation outside of Earth

Space colonization is permanent human habitation off the planet Earth.

Implementation

Arth's plan, as described in his books The Labors of Hercules and Democracy and the Common Wealth , 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.

<i>Democracy and the Common Wealth</i> book by Michael E. Arth

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. Arth attempts to expose what he calls the "dirty secrets" of America's electoral system, and provides a list of solutions that he believes will result in a "truly representative democracy." This democracy would be led by effective, trustworthy leaders, who would be elected by a majority, and who would not have to spend their time raising campaign funds, or catering to paid lobbyists.

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 by some. According to some, zero population growth, perhaps after stabilizing at some optimum population, is the ideal towards which countries and the whole world should aspire in the interests of accomplishing long-term environmental sustainability. What it means by ‘the number of people neither grows nor declines’ is that births plus in-migrants equal deaths plus out-migrants.

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. [4] [ dubious – discuss ]

Incentive and enforcement

According to Arth, a 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, 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. [1] [5]

Tragedy of the commons A theoretical concept concerning the allocation of shared, open access resources

The tragedy of the commons is a term used in environmental science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later due to an article written by the American ecologist and philosopher Garrett Hardin in 1968. In this modern economic context, commons is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as atmosphere, oceans, rivers, fish stocks, roads and highways, or even an office refrigerator.

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. [6] [7]

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 there was reported to be overzealous enforcement of vasectomy and tubal ligation programs in order to meet quotas. The resulting backlash made subsequent family planning efforts more difficult. [8] [9] Also in China, under the One-Child 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. [10] [11]

See also

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One-child policy population control policy which was used by the Peoples Republic of China

China's one-child policy was part of a birth planning program designed to control the size of its population. Distinct from the family planning policies of most other countries, it set a limit on the number of children parents could have, the world's most extreme example of population planning. It was introduced in 1979, modified in the mid 1980s to allow rural parents a second child if the first was a daughter, and then lasted three more decades before being eliminated at the end of 2015. The policy also allowed exceptions for some other groups, including ethnic minorities. The term one-child policy is thus a misnomer, because for nearly 30 of the 36 years that it existed (1979–2015) about half of all parents in China were allowed to have a second child.

Human population planning

Human population planning is the practice of intentionally controlling the rate of growth of a human population. Historically, human population planning has been implemented with the goal of increasing the rate of human population growth. However, in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, concerns about global population growth and its effects on poverty, environmental degradation and political stability led to efforts to reduce human population growth rates. More recently, some countries, such as China, Iran, and Spain, have begun efforts to increase their birth rates once again.

Child benefit is a social security payment which is distributed to the parents or guardians of children, teenagers and in some cases, young adults. A number of different countries operate different versions of the program. In the majority of countries, child benefit is means-tested and the amount of child benefit paid is usually dependent on the number of children one has.

Birth rate total number of live births per 1,000 of a population in a certain period of time (usually a year)

The birth rate is the total number of live births per 1,000 in a population in a year or period. The rate of births in a population is calculated in several ways: live births from a universal registration system for births, deaths, and marriages; population counts from a census, and estimation through specialized demographic techniques. The birth rate are used to calculate population growth.

Total fertility rate of a woman of child-bearing age; average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime

The total fertility rate (TFR), sometimes also called the fertility rate, absolute/potential natality, period total fertility rate (PTFR), or total period fertility rate (TPFR) of a population is the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime if:

  1. She was to experience the exact current age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) through her lifetime, and
  2. She was to survive from birth to the end of her reproductive life.
Sub-replacement fertility

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Compulsory sterilization, also known as forced or coerced sterilization, programs are government policies which force people to undergo surgical or other sterilization. The reasons governments implement sterilization programs vary in purpose and intent. In the first half of the 20th century, several such programs were instituted in countries around the world, usually as part of eugenics programs intended to prevent the reproduction of members of the population considered to be carriers of defective genetic traits.

Iran had a comprehensive and effective program of family planning since the beginning of the 1990s. While Iran's population grew at a rate of more than 3% per year between 1956 and 1986, the growth rate began to decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s after the government initiated a major population control program. By 2007 the growth rate had declined to 0.7 percent per year, with a birth rate of 17 per 1,000 persons and a death rate of 6 per 1,000. Reports by the UN show birth control policies in Iran to be effective with the country topping the list of greatest fertility decreases. UN's Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs says that between 1975 and 1980, the total fertility number was 6.5. The projected level for Iran's 2005 to 2010 birth rate is fewer than two.

Katō Shidzue Japanese politician

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A two-child policy is a government-imposed limit of two children allowed per family or the payment of government subsidies only to the first two children. It has previously been used in Vietnam. In British Hong Kong in the 1970s, citizens were also highly encouraged to have two children as a limit, and it was used as part of the region's family planning strategies. Since 2016, it has been implemented in China, replacing the country's previous one-child policy.

Family planning in India

Family planning in India is based on efforts largely sponsored by the Indian government. From 1965–2009, contraceptive usage has more than tripled and the fertility rate has more than halved, but the national fertility rate remains high, causing concern for long-term population growth. India adds up to 1,000,000 people to its population every 20 days. Extensive family planning has become a priority in an effort to curb the projected population of two billion by the end of the twenty-first century.

Chad is a source and destination country for children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically conditions of forced labor and forced prostitution. The country's trafficking problem is primarily internal and frequently involves parents entrusting children to relatives or intermediaries in return for promises of education, apprenticeship, goods, or money; selling or bartering children into involuntary domestic servitude or herding is used as a means of survival by families seeking to reduce the number of mouths to feed. Child trafficking victims are primarily subjected to forced labor as herders, domestic servants, agricultural laborers, or beggars. Child cattle herders follow traditional routes for grazing cattle and at times cross ill-defined international borders into Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Nigeria. Underage Chadian girls travel to larger towns in search of work, where some are subsequently subjected to prostitution. Some girls are compelled to marry against their will, only to be forced by their husbands into involuntary domestic servitude or agricultural labor. In past reporting periods, traffickers transported children from Cameroon and the CAR to Chad's oil producing regions for commercial sexual exploitation; it is unknown whether this practice persisted in 2009.

Population planning in Singapore

Population planning in Singapore spans two distinct phases: first to slow and reverse the boom in births that started after World War II; and second, from the 1980s onwards, to encourage parents to have more children because birth numbers had fallen below replacement levels.

On June 2, 2012, Feng Jianmei was forced to have an abortion in Zhenping County, Shaanxi, China, when she was seven months pregnant with her second child. Local officials had demanded that Feng and her husband pay a 40,000 yuan fine for violating the nation's one-child policy. When they were unable to do so, authorities arrested Feng, made her sign an agreement to have an abortion, and held her down while injecting her with an abortifacient. Feng was reportedly traumatized by the incident and in poor health afterwards.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-01-05. Retrieved 2011-11-30. Interview with Michael E. Arth by Alex Birch
  2. ↑ Philip A. Lawn, Toward Sustainable Development, Lewis Publishers, 2000, ISBN   1-56670-411-1 p. 299.
  3. ↑ Joseph Cox, Will Charging People Money to Have Kids Save the World From Overpopulation, VICE United Kingdom, 24 June 2013
  4. ↑ Arth, Michael E. (2010). Democracy and the Common Wealth: Breaking the Stranglehold of the Special Interests. Golden Apples Media, ISBN   978-0-912467-12-2, pp. 352-361.
  5. ↑ Joseph Cox, Will Charging People Money to Have Kids Save the World From Overpopulation, VICE United Kingdom, 24 June 2013
  6. ↑ http://laborsofhercules.org/ The Labors of Hercules Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems-Labor II: Overpopulation
  7. ↑ Arth, Michael E. (2010). Democracy and the Common Wealth: Breaking the Stranglehold of the Special Interests. Golden Apples Media, ISBN   978-0-912467-12-2.
  8. ↑ "The Indira enigma". Frontline. May 11, 2001. Archived from the original on 2006-11-10. Retrieved 2006-07-28.
  9. ↑ "Male involvement and contraceptive methods for men". Frontline. September 1996. Retrieved 2006-07-28.
  10. ↑ "China acts on forced abortion". BBC. September 20, 2005. Retrieved 2008-07-08.
  11. ↑ Joseph Cox, Will Charging People Money to Have Kids Save the World From Overpopulation, VICE United Kingdom, 24 June 2013
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