I was dismayed to read about “… likely to be the single most important bill of the 116th Congress for the country’s poorest residents,” in Vox today. What is it about?
… if enacted, the bill would slash child poverty in the United States by over a third in a single stroke. Passing it would enact a child allowance in the United States, bringing us in line with our peers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and most of the rich world in guaranteeing a basic payment for the care of children.
Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? I would certainly think so. So why am I not inclined to support it?
If, like me, you’re convinced that the world is over-populated, and, again like myself, are not inclined to indulge in fruitless mass-murder in an attempt to save it, then it’s necessary to look to more subtle, natural methods. Like economics.
Professor Turchin’s book Secular Cycles happens to mention that the peasant birth rate begins to decline sharply during the degenerative phase of a secular cycle, and pins it squarely on the approach and overrun of the land’s carrying capacity; that is, there are too many people for the land to support. The dearth of food, I suppose, is the leading signal.
I’d modify this slightly to add in the peasants’ perception of carrying capacity. Now let’s apply that modification to this proposal and note how it reduces the importance of carrying capacity in the economic decisions of potential parents. By guaranteeing the potential parents of children that there’ll be some minimum allowance for supporting their offspring, the actual problem of making enough money to purchase the food, etc, becomes less a factor in the actual decision to have children, and thus encourages those potential parents to become actual parents. And thus we just end up with burgeoning over-population, damaging the environment more and more.
Is it fair to the children in the poverty-stricken class? Of course not. They did nothing to earn such a burden. They exist because of misperceptions concerning economic conditions, in many cases enforced by religious precept, all backed up by the primordial life urge to reproduce. Here we’re running into the old scalability problem, wherein morality which works towards survival at one scale is working against us as we near, or exceed as some would argue, our own carrying capacity scale.
In ages past, as Turchin points out, there were solutions to his conundrum. Conquering nearby lands, killing off their peasants, and thus making them available to your own populace would dramatically increase arable lands, which would then lessen the burden on the average carrying capacity of the land, if only temporarily. So was reducing your own population, but that was a bloody mess. The late Professor Hawking urged humanity to make starflight its top priority, with the assumption that if we can’t perform a mass migration to the stars, then at least survivors will still exist after humanity implodes on Earth.
I personally don’t yet see a good solution to this conundrum which doesn’t include mass suffering, but I fear this proposal is adding its little bit to the fire.
