Re: true abundance?

From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Mon Jan 29 2001 - 16:18:25 MST


Michael Lorrey wrote:

> What I'd do is grant birth licenses based on the average education of
> the couple. If the average is high school graduation, they get one kid.
> For every two additional years, they get another kid. Since the data
> shows that child bearing goes down with increasing education levels,
> this should cause average family size to drop to between 2-3 kids per
> couple rather quickly.

Great. We pack college classrooms with breeders. The average has
dropped to ZPG in most western developed countries already.

> If you don't want this to become a dictated law, then you need to
> promote social policies that engineer this result. For example, I'd only

You did not cover why the result is actually so desirable as to be
mandatory.

> grant welfare to individuals and families where the parent, or parents,
> are in school, either vocational or college, and unemployment coverage
> that goes beyond 6 months would mandate that the worker engage in
> retraining classes and agree to move to a region of lower unemployment.

Uh huh. This assumes a "normal world" of job opportunity distributed
across most intelligence levels of the population. What about the
world, by local beliefs coming rapidly, where only the top of the
intelligence pool can be gainfully employed (with a few service jobs to
one side)? Eventually there may not be anything a given worker can be
trained to do that pays a living wage and there may be no region that
requires such workers. What then?

- samantha



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