Kriswest wrote:This proposal has another major flaw other than what you mention,, how do you stop breeding and monitor it?? Especially worldwide? No way I can think of .
Carleas wrote:(ignore for now details of how this is enforced; it may be relevant later)
phyllo wrote:One wonders why a system to control the right to reproduce is necessary. What problem is it addressing?
If overpopulation is the general problem, then birth rates can be reduced by providing a social safety net for the sick and elderly and educating and empowering women. These are known solutions.
phyllo wrote:One wonders why a system to control the right to reproduce is necessary. What problem is it addressing?
phyllo wrote:If overpopulation is the general problem, then birth rates can be reduced by providing a social safety net for the sick and elderly and educating and empowering women. These are known solutions.
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?
You ask a bunch of social and economic questions without specifying the culture and economics of the society or the original justification for the system.How does this affect your reponse? Take a few test cases and explain what difference it makes in your answers to the questions in the OP. I think I can see how this would change responses, e.g. if it's a question of limiting population (e.g. a generation ship), we might choose some values, and if it's a question of changing who reproduces (e.g. avoiding Idiocracy), we might choose others. But not sure exactly which way this would move things.
phyllo wrote:You ask a bunch of social and economic questions without specifying the culture and economics of the society or the original justification for the system.
If you limited it to the current USA, you would still get a huge variety of responses depending on region, religion, ethnicity, etc.
Carleas wrote:
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?
how would it change society if parents had to pay that in order to reproduce?
PavlovianModel146 wrote:E1: I guess if you could determine the net worth of the lowest person that could buy a bond assuming every bond could theoretically be sold at that monetary value (or higher) then that would be where you would start the bidding.
Tab wrote:Hey people.
Tab wrote:I argue that the lowest threshold a society can reach before collapsing is the point where (most) people can no longer realistically guarrentee the well-being of any existing children, or more to the point of the OP, envision ever being able to have children at all. It is at this point there is no real benefit to the populace of the current regime, to my mind, to adhere to the laws governing them.
Tab wrote:Interesting statistics, worldwide, every second, roughly 4 babies are born (2 people die every second too btw). Good luck to any institution dedicated to enforcing the birthing regulations...
Tab wrote:Second thought, how about a less punative bond system - the cost of the bond is held by, rather than simply paid to, the government, and put towards the nurturing of the child of the bond-holders.
Tab wrote:However, this too fails as it would be too easy for the super-rich to skew the average upward - putting in an amazingly high bid - effectively giving them some control over which demographs reproduce. Tricky. The average calculations would have to be weighted by a particular bid's fraction of the would-be parents income or something to even the odds.
Tab wrote:Third thought, perhaps (reversable) sterility would be more palatable. In that person X could trade their fertilty in for Y benefit at some point in their lives, and regain it for cost Z in the future.
Tab wrote:To be honest though, any society implementing any policies concerning people's rights to reproduce would be massively prone to unrest, not to mention utterly draconian in nature for it even to arise.
Pedro I Rengel wrote:The real darker side of these thought experiments is, students with their youthful cum-fullness and desire to achieve, or maybe tiredness of the uselesness of old people, will take them literally and seek to apply them
This sounds like you're thinking in terms of a traditional option, i.e. start low and raise the price until no one will bid any higher. But a dutch auction is the reverse: you start low and lower the price until someone buys. Or am I misreading you?
This might also help to clarify e2: since people value a bond differently, some people will buy sooner than others. Some will be willing to pay a lot, others will wait for the price to come down. So you end up with a distribution of prices across which people buy, presumably with some narrow tail at the high end and likely clustering at the low end; on reflection, the question is probably pretty boring when the bond is transferable, but may be more interesting when we consider a non-transferable bond.
Pedro I Rengel wrote:"S3: Again, it depends on what the population goals are."
What whose population goals are?
Ok, now I'm going.
Carleas wrote:Ah, I see what you're saying Pav, I think this was a comprehension failure on my part. To simplify further, just so I'm sure: If there only 5 bonds being sold, and the top 5 wealthiest people have $10m, $9m, $8m, $7m, and $6m, respectively, no one will buy for more than $6,000,000.01 because they can still guarantee they'll get a bond at that price. Is that the idea?
I can see a few problems with this. First, where the bonds are transferrable, the there might be speculative value in buying at a higher price. So if the wealthiest person can buy multiple bonds at a higher price, they could hold them in anticipation that people will be able to buy at a higher price later. For example, if the bonds are expected to maintain their value and other assets are expected to have negative return, the bonds could act as a hedge.
Second, as I mentioned in my reply to Tab, people may pool their resources to buy bonds, so several people whose net resources are blow the current price could buy one bond together (e.g. parents and granparents on behalf of their child).
Third, in practice there isn't full transparency between buyers, so buyers can estimate how much others have to spend, but they can't know and will sometimes rationally overpay when they're uncertain about what other people can/will pay.
Fourth, I don't see any cost to starting the bidding too high. If you start it too low, you leave money on the table, because people that would have purchased at a higher price instead purchase at a lower price.
I agree with your final point, that adding in all the realistic considerations complicates the question a lot. But dutch auctions are used in the real world to do things like IPOs, we could probably find a rich literature on how those sales behave in practice -- do you think that the reproduction bond auction would function the same way? My gut reaction is yes, but I could also see it being sufficiently different. I'll try to find some case studies.
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