[NB: What follows is a thought experiment, and not a policy proposal.]
Suppose we had a system in which the right to reproduce will be strictly controlled globally, and permission granted as follows: the right to reproduce is purchased from a central authority, which conducts periodic auctions for a transferable bond redeemable at birth. Each parent needs to own a bond, or the birth would be prohibited (ignore for now details of how this is enforced; it may be relevant later).
The auction is conducted as a dutch auction of a pool of birth rights bonds, where the price of one bond is set at some high price which is gradually decreased. Buyers may buy at any time during the auction, whenever the price is low enough for them, and the pool is depleted over time. Assume funds raised will displace taxes and go towards status quo government spending.
There are several interesting questions to consider, in two broad categories: economic and social.
Economic questions include:
e1) At what price should the auction start?
e2) What will the distribution of purchases in the auction be?
e3) What will the bonds be worth on the open market following the auction?
e4) What percent of the bonds will be exercised, as opposed to held or traded as an investment?
Social questions include:
s1) What size should the pool be?
s2) Who will reproduce under such a system?
s3) What would the genetic and social consequences be? Eugenic? Disgenic? Will poor countries benefit?
Some additional assumptions are necessary to answer most of the questions. First and foremost, this is a thought experiment, so rejecting the premise is boring. Assume that this policy is going forward, and we are trying to find the best values for the various variables. Second, we may want to assume a more governed world, so that government spending is more equal. It may help to think of this in terms of a toy world resembling the modern US in terms of distribution or resources and population, and with the spending being something like federal spending in the US system.
Some tentative thoughts and responses:
e1: The auction price should start high, say at total government spending over the period between auctions. This would ensure that the starting price is higher than the highest strike price (i.e. the highest price at which there exists a buyer willing to pay).
e2: Institutional buyers would make up the majority of purchases. Some wealthy individuals and families would buy bonds at high prices, and most of the population would be priced out to speculation. This would change over time and depend on the size of the pool, and how the pool size changes year over year (a restrictive pool would sell higher; a pool that grew year-over-year faster than population would make speculation less profitable). There would also be those who buy the bonds to influence the reproduction of others, e.g. eugenicist causes, religious institutions, localities who want to entice their populations to grow.
e3: I would have paid thousands for such a bond. Maybe as high as $10,000. I might only have had one child. Others would pay much more; many parents would pay a substantial amount to provide such a bond to create grandchildren. And of course, many would not be willing to pay at all.
e4: My guess is that use would be low. Reproduction is uncertain under normal circumstances, and people planning to use the bond will only be partly successful. Other bonds would be saved and banked for future use, e.g. parents for children. And speculators would of course hold them in anticipation of future demand.
s1: I favor increasing global population, so I wouldn’t want the total pool to be lower than current global population change over a similar period. It would likely suppress reproduction even at that level, because of the number of bonds that aren’t exercised. If we wanted to gut the program, we could set the number arbitrarily high, so that the market price is zero, although institutions might still decide to hoard bonds to artificially increase their price or to control who reproduces. This might have the effect of producing an effective floor of price.
s2: Who reproduces would likely change (so long as the price were not zero), and radically so. Income is negatively associated with fertility, so there would be a collapse in fertility among the very poor. However, this may be less than expected: in agricultural societies, children are an economic resource, and so people may invest in having more children despite the price, while in wealthier places the ability to buy many bonds would not necessarily correspond with the desire to have many children. Resources are not the bottleneck now, so they might not be in the auction world either. However, if children become more of a status symbol, that might change.
s3: Though the world of this thought experiment seems eugenicist, there is good reason to think that it would substantially disgenic. To the extent that it provides the rich with the ability to procreate, it would encourage incestuous practices like cousin marriage to keep wealth centralized. And because older generations are wealthier than their children, it would give parents and grandparents more power over their children’s procreation, encouraging arranged marriage and incest as a way of maximizing the value to the person who pays for the bond (grandparents may prefer cousin marriage, since they have a stake in ensuring reproduction on both sides of the arrangement).
This doesn’t strike me as a good policy, not least because it would be impossible in practice (though that will change with increasing surveillance). But the thought experiment gets at some interesting ideas. What is procreation worth, and how would it change society if parents had to pay that in order to reproduce?