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brave new world/elysium
plebs kept comfortable. all citizens possess a single half-right of procreation. two adults may have a child and combine their half-rights to gain government financial support for that child. half-rights can be bought and sold (the government will always buy them.) clinics that reversibly sterilize will pay-out on completion. hard control of reproduction if financial incentives fail. they won't.
almost categorical automation of labor will happen in our lifetimes. if you do not see the behemoth's lesser shadow named AI art you are myopic, or desperately so. 2050 at the latest. too many jobs will be lost too quickly. it's coming right now, shame how yang turned out, he sees the trees but not the forest. we will be able to feed every mouth. clothe and shelter and cure-all every man. outfit all who wish with perfect VR or direct-brain-interface-experience-simulacra to live their lives in dreams. but why structure that to continue without end? all other incentives may be unnecessary beyond making sure people who want to stay plugged in, can.
policy that ensures each generation reduces by half is inevitable, even if we solve the rocket equation and superluminal travel and stellar shipwrighting allows us to annually dispatch a hundred thousand hands offworld.
from their fortress manors, or new zealand, elites will do what they will.
They will. We already have rapidly growing sub-cultures who shun certain aspects of modern civilization and average six children per woman
amish et al. will not factor.
such subcultures who otherwise normally engage in society and civics will bend as government subsidy ceases.
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This has the advantage of being simple within the system(s) you described but also seems really aggressive. Is this really required with people being bored because they're unemployed?
automation will permanently replace >90% of labor by 2100. what few human-necessary roles created by automation will lay within the remaining <10%.
humans have a biosocial capacity for community size. we are biologically fit for communities only insignificantly larger than the number of faces and names recalled by modal memory. large towns and cities are psychically radioactive, chernobyls of the mind, inducing madness. historically "too many people being bored"--bored, restless, purposeless--heralds chaos. in cities where madness already whispers, exploding populations of permanently unemployable young men could see that effect magnified most terribly. technology will solve most issues of the day. it may solve the problem of purposeless young men by giving them lives in artificial reality. if it cannot, disaster will follow.
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