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Notes -
Alternative to UBI:
Each person receives a resource allocation block (representing some bundle of ownership of society's stuff and thus resulting rents). When they have a kid, their personal block is split with their kid after a period of time.
When someone dies, their block is distributed evenly to all other living citizens.
This technique was designed to deal with monopolization problems with pseudo-immortality, but it also has the effect of punishing natalism when the overall birthrate exceeds the growth of society's resources. The practical effect is that the impact of natalism hits early, hits hard, and hits those most involved in pushing the world towards Malthusian suffering. On the other hand, if no one else is having children, your kids will get a larger total share of the resources as the others die in boating accidents, landslides, etc. (Children of extreme natalists have to work for a living, but that's the future the natalists would choose for everyone else, so it's just arriving early for them.)
In this scenario, nothing prevents someone from renting their allocation to someone else. That's the capitalist angle - you can live at a higher standard of living by renting additional stuff by providing value to others, but you can't accumulate ownership of whatever the resource allocation block is composed of.
That proposal reminds me a bit of John Roemer's A Future for Socialism. From Cosma's review:
In a steady state society (no productivity growth; pseudo-immortality; the marginal birth results in decreased average productivity since existing labor is already deployed to the most productive uses), your proposal seems like a decent approach. I'd prefer something like purchasing a birth license: to have a child, a parent must purchase the right to one with a portion of their allocation, roughly equal to the amount that every person is entitled to at birth. That would require substantial reproductive coercion, but this avoids punishing children for their parents' social irresponsibility. Particularly, the entire point of having a roughly equitable distribution of resources is to avoid immiseration; over time, though, those who have children will become more and more impoverished, and it will pass down through generations. Ultimately you'd end up with a two class society, between the Methuselahs (those who received a significant initial resource allocation block and have grown by countless death dividends) and the Children (those who start out with a zero or minimal block and have received fewer death dividends than the Meths). I'm not convinced the disincentive of causing suffering to their children would prevent those who want them from having children.
Yeah that's the whole bit there - it's specifically designed to avoid direct reproductive coercion like that. Instead it just feeds people the environment limits early.
The other trick is that because whatever you didn't split with your kids/heirs while you were alive (+ x years for early deaths) gets redistributed, you're basically encouraged to have a kid/heir at some point.
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