Overpopulation
The elephant in the room (or, the 6.78 billion inhabitants of the earth)
Rewarding no-child families in an effort to halt population growth
It's no secret that the Earths population is following a steadily rising trajectory with global population doubling in the last 50 years.
The exponential growth in the number humans, like any exponential system operating in a constrained and finite environment (ie the Earth), is destined to run into limitations, sooner rather than later.
One of the major problems facing society today (and one of the least mentioned) in the share numbers of our species and the fact that we must share a limited set amount of resources. While our numbers continue to grow we seek an ever higher standard of living with greater consumption of material and energy resource.
This is mostly due to our success in 'conquering' nature (in the short term) with technical innovations in food production and health care, enabling us to support larger numbers with lower death rates and longer lifespans. The side effect of this is that the population is exploding, in turn leading to serious environmental degradation making the planet less habitable for those already here and yet to come.
In 1978 China introduced its famous "one child policy" to help tackle social, economic and environmental issues. While this top down imposed approach is not without its problems authorities claim that the policy has prevented more than 250 million births from its implementation to the year 2000.
At present the NZ government (on behalf of the tax payers and voters) is subsiding the cost of raising a family through tax credits under the "working for families" package. This essentially incentivises or encourages people who may otherwise have chosen not to have children to contribute to the population problem. In effect we are all paying to add people to the planet. The majority of the tax credits go to low income families who tend, in general, to be less educated, less healthy...
Governments benefit from higher tax revenue due to population growth while the wealthy (corporate capitalist) elite enjoy reduced labour costs, increases in property and commodity values while the rest of us suffer, for the same reasons.
It is my belief that we should turn this logic on its head and issue tax credits or other incentives to couples who choose not to reproduce and who are thereby contributing to a reduction or slowing of world population. I realise that this proposal is perhaps offensive to many of my readers. This is not be surprising considering everyone alive today are offspring of couples who did have children, weather by choice or not, whose genetics remained in the gene pool while those without children were eliminated continually re-enforcing the social pressures around reproduction despite it becoming increasingly detrimental to our species and planet.
One way of achieving this is to combine the management of reward funds with those of superannuation or pension. While couples remain childless their bonuses are added to a fund that will become, providing they are still childless, accessible at a designated age. Those who do procreate will lose any accrued bonuses which will be divided amongst those still without children.
