I want my baby tax, baby tax, baby tax...

Flashback (October 26, 2007):

As y'all know, I'm a big fan of simplistic answers.  Population control sounds good to me.  I'll go as far as to suggest selective neutering.  I'll even volunteer to be the Grand Poobah of Population Control and annoint myself the Grand Decider of who can and can't reproduce.  If you want to reproduce, please apply to me for permission.  You must submit proof of your SAT scores, affinity for sports, hair color and preference for dogs or cats.  I will then use my own arbitrary preferences and a coin flip to assign reproductive rights.  I'm also open to bribery as it shows initiative and belief in Coasian solutions.  I'm pretty sure this would make the world a happier place...at least for me.

This makes a little more sense:

A WEST Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus "baby levy" at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.

Writing in today's Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child's lifetime.

Just a little...or maybe not.

Comments

[DJ]

Though no one wants to talk about it, there is undeniably a link between global warming and population. If the current CO2 emissions must be cut in half, and if they were divided equally among the world's population, that would allow only 2.1 tons of CO2 per person per year-- enough for 1 gallon of gasoline each week and 4 Kwh per day of electricity. All food, clothing, and supplies would be made locally without carbon-based fuels. Travel would be virtually impossible.

What we need to ask ourselves, in fairness, is whether this is an acceptable quality of life-- because it's the best a person could do with the current population.

On the one hand, for us in industrialized countries (and especially the U.S.) to tell the poor of the world that we can't afford for them to improve their lot in life because we need our Hummers is just plain immoral. On the other, it's clear that upward population pressure enforces poverty because the planet cannot support them at a vastly improved lifestyle-- even if we in the North gave up enough to equalize the balance.

[Cervus]

Fertility rates in Australia are already well below replacement level. This tax proposal not only makes no sense, it is entirely unneeded, and it inimical to liberty.

The places where the population is increasing the fastest are also the places where you find the worst poverty.

No children, no future.

[mb]

The average family size in Tennessee dropped during the 1960s from about 5 children to 2. (I'll look for the statistics; I remember this particular one from a newspaper article.) None of this population reduction was coerced. In fact, there was (and is) substantial obstruction to contraception. The Volunteer population dropped, just by people making their own decisions. Many people don't have children at all, and so if a few people have several it all balances out. It helps if people are honest about what they really want in their lives.

The opposition has come not only from religious authorities, but also from insurance companies that would not cover contraceptive devices/pharmaceticals, or tubal ligation surgery requested by rational people with children who have attempted to control their fertility.

This is an interesting topic because people are massively irrational about it. The same people who want high wages domestically, who want carefully controlled immigration, are often unwilling to support UN family planning initiatives. The same people who support feminism and gay rights in the U.S. are unwilling to look closely at those issues in countries where there is massive overpopulation and poverty, where women have to bear sons to have any kind of status at all, where men have to prove their sexual status by making a public display of offspring. It doesn't have to be that way (and in prosperous countries, it isn't that way).

Also, IMHO material wealth, energy waste, Hummers etc. in the U.S. are already way beyond the point where utility was maximized. Most of us are drowning in 'stuff" that is just in our way, and the Christmas shopping season really brings this home. There's nothing I really want besides some free time and space in friendly company. (Maybe a good meal, but let's skip the cookies. I've already had more than I wanted.)

[Michael]

That Tennessee case sounds interesting. I wonder if it's a Kuznets-type effect, i.e. fertility rates begin to drop once income reaches a certain point. If so, can we rely on that effect to moderate population growth given the tremendous amount of resources necessary to raise everyone to the needed standard of living, at least as we presently create wealth?

[mb]

Michael, I think you cannot rely solely on income for fertility to drop (after all, isn't Osama bin Ladin one of 50 children of a very wealthy man?)

Many people move towards monetary/material wealth as a behavioral incentive, but there are other forms of wealth. People also value respect/ admiration/ power to influence (many people value respect MORE than money).

If the only way you can gain respect or social influence is through a display of reproductive activity, you may reproduce more than you genuinely want to. In the same way, many people work more hours than are pleasurable -- to the point where their life occupation is burdensome. Many people also go deeply into debt to pay for "stuff" that is essentially meaningless to them, while skipping activities that they would prefer because of social pressure.

Raising children takes an enormous amount of time, physical and mental energy. When this is acknowledged and people engage in childbearing out of innate motivation -- not in order to meet some outside social requirement -- the birth rate drops dramatically.

[john]

I think a variable of key importance here, as yet unsaid, is the status of women and their ability to make informed choices about fertility. In anticipation of counter examples, as always in social science this is an INUS condition (an insufficient but necessary part of a unnecesary but sufficient condition) for fertility rates to fall.

For example, in Ho Chi Minh City (what was Saigon) last year, by all accounts there was more abortions than live births, effective population control, yes, indicative of maternal choice, maybe, indicative of a higher social status for women, unlikely.

The utilitarian/consequentialist calculus into which must enter as economists doesn't really leave much room for personal choice, does it?

A bitter pill to swallow indeed if our notion of rights and choice might be compromised.

[Evan Herrnstadt]

Wouldn't it make infinitely more sense to tax the carbon-intensive goods that the child is consuming? I guess I understand the initial charge, because having a kid is sort of a commitment to some level of emissions, assuming the parents wouldn't just let their child die of exposure and hunger. But the article doesn't really explain how the annual fee would work. If it's just a lump-sum tax based on number of children, then it provides more incentive for infanticide than for carbon abatement (insert "Australia was a convict colony" joke here).

[David]

Everyone seems to be taking this proposal a little too seriously. As I read it it's a satire of what actually exists in Oz at the moment - a lump sum "baby bonus" (sometimes described as a "plasma TV bonus" - does anyone still buy plasmas?) of $4000+, paid by the government, whenever you have a kid.

I think the proposal is meant to be ridiculous - to make you wonder whether the current baby bonus isn't also ridiculous.

[mb]

I take population growth very seriously because it is tied into a whole raft of other political and human rights issues. A huge supply of unskilled or underskilled labor = slave wages and near-slavery human rights conditions.

There are many countries where population growth has dropped dramatically and voluntarily. Europe and Australia are two such areas, and in those places "baby bonuses" are being given in recognition of the hard work and physical costs of gestation, childbirth and the first few years of parenting. Women in Europe and Australia have abundant access to contraception, multiple employment options (notice the opportunity costs of childbearing) and are in a social position to demand that sexual partners respect their health, i.e. do not cause pregnancies carelessly. Consequently the birth rate dropped dramatically and -- most importantly -- VOLUNTARILY, without the heavy hand of government interference and wholesale abuse of human rights. The birthrate has gone so low, voluntarily, that they are now trying to provide incentives for childbearing!

Women in many other areas of the world lack access to contraception; foeticide or infanticide of female offspring is common; females have few social rights/ability to make demands to better or protect their health; and because the costs are overwhelmingly borne by a class of people who have minimal power and ability to change their situations, we get population growth that is WAY beyond optimal for everyone concerned....low wages for the majority of people...and huge power disparities with accompanying human rights abuses.

So far as carbon taxes on the immediately-destined-for-landfill objects marketed in prosperous countries -- yes Evan H.

[john]

I agree with MB in principle.

But, there is more than one way to skin a cat. China's one child policy has been successful in the sense that China has been able to move rapidly through its demographic transition.

Vietnam's two child policy has been less stringent and less effective but there it is still stated government policy to discourage large families (population growth rates are highest amongst ethnic minority groups who tend to eek a subsistence living in upland areas and apparently face some kind of Malthaussian crisis), still it also seems to be going through a relatively rapid demographic transition.

Japan, as am sure you all know has something of a demographic crisis, but not necessarily due to higher status for women, more choice for women maybe.

Eastern Europe, seeing high population growth rates when there was no much conspicuous consumption under the communists, has in many places seen a collapse in fertility rates (especially in Russia).....

Regions like DRC historically had larger populations than they have now as they have been denuded of their populations by conflict.

The next pandemic maybe avoided, but maybe natural systems will correct human over-population in some other, more catastrophic way - before we can manage it ourselves (as the Chinese were forced to).

I wonder whether without the one child policy China would have been able to achieve its remarkable level of development? A consequence of this may well have been a lower-carbon economy...but immeasurably greater human suffering? (Just thinking out loud)

[mb]

John, it's my understanding that Chairman Mao was giving Chinese women incentives and rewards for bearing seven (7) children. That was not so very long ago. (I'll have to find the cites for that, but I've read it in several places...any experts on China around here?)

Then at some point their central government changed policy, and suddenly there was a drastic, brutal turnaround enforced by the same centralized government that had been pushing in the other direction, shortly before. Whiplash.

The same thing was true in Ceaucescu's Rumania. Women were pushed to have at least four children, because their understanding was that more soldiers and more workers would give them a position of power. As it turns out, Rumania's huge teenage population did not give them wealth, only social instability (as happens elsewhere, too... teens tend to be risk-takers).

[mb]

I'm looking in JSTOR right now for a "1960 Marxist Critique of Neo-Malthusian Theory".. the first pages quotes an early declaration of Chairman Mao claiming that a several-fold population increase is a good thing.

At some later point he changed his tune, in a characteristically drastic way.

The point is that Chairman Mao -- and other chairmen -- shouldn't be given the power to determine any more than their OWN family size. When family planning services are not obstructed or enforced, there is a tendency for things to level out on their own.

What we definitely DO need is for political organizations to stop obstructing health services that provide voluntary family planning assistance by propagandizing voluntary medical help as "genocide" etc. For example, is it true that the Peace Corps was recently banned from Bolivia for advising the use of condoms to prevent AIDS? A student interested in the Peace Corps recently told me this. If it's true (again, I don't have a cite) then that's an example of backwards propaganda at its finest.

[mb]

Correction: In the Bolivian situation described above, the student told me that encouraging the use of condoms to prevent AIDS was equated with "genocide" because the condoms would discourage conception and population growth as well as AIDS. Go figure.

[john]

Dear MB

Yes, you are quite right this was a post-Mao policy (I guess the encouragement of population growth must have been part of the 30% he got wrong....), the point I made still holds.

I am as skeptical as you about the neo-Malthusian stuff, as with many things in social science (the horror) even economics, the position one holds seems to depend much more on political orientation than on the world.