Herman E. Daly: Steady-State Economics

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So—along with the potential for cooperation by the conscientious majority—you have to have some systems to coerce all people into living within their biophysical limits. Of course, you don't want these systems to be too coercive, because that would allow the government to meddle too much in everyone's life. Therefore the best regulatory systems would equitably control the total throughput, but leave the allocation of that aggregate consumption flow to free choice, market interaction, and independent decision-making.

PLOWBOY: You're suggesting that government put some external limits on consumption, but let folks have freedom within those borders?

DALY: That's right, have macro stability but micro variability.

PLOWBOY: What sort of system could make this goal possible?

DALY: I've suggested three policies that I think we ought to institute. And let me say out front that my proposals are not presented as a final, ultimate solution . . . I'm merely trying to set a starting point for the debate. I'm just an auctioneer who has to call out a price to get the bidding going.

And here are my bid openers:

First—and I think this is clear to many people—we need to have limits on population growth. Now the simplest, most straightforward way to accomplish this regulation is to give everyone an equal right to reproduce, and to set that right at a figure which corresponds to a replacement level for the population. At this point I tend to favor Kenneth Boulding's scheme that recommends the use of transferable licenses to bear children. If someone can come up with a better idea, I'm eager to hear it, but I think Boulding's plan combines the maximum possible degree of individual choice with the absolute need for total population stability over the entire global surface.

PLOWBOY: Can you explain how transferable birth licenses would work?

DALY: Basically, under such a program, each person would have the right to one child. Boulding suggested making the birth permits divisible into tenths of a unit—you'd have credits equal to one-tenth of a license—in order to make for an easier exchange. The licenses would, of course, be distributed equally, so there'd be no question of allowing some people to reproduce and not others. Everyone would be treated equally.

Then when a man and woman married, the couple would have a total of two licenses, or 2.1 ... whatever figure most accurately corresponds to the replacement fertility level. Of course, some couples will want to have three or four children, while others will want none. So folks would have the freedom to exchange licenses by either sale or gift.

PLOWBOY: There'd be an open market for birth licenses, at a set going rate per one-tenth of a unit.

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