There was an old woman, lived in a shoe...

This will be sort of stream-of-consciousness, because I only have about ten minutes and I'm working out the implications as I go. Regarding Jon's modest proposal to forcibly sterilize the poor:

I'm not a real big fan of force, obviously, but supposing I were rich. And not just a little rich, but with the fortunes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison and Carlos Slim all rolled together, say. And I could therefore offer fair incentives for poor people to be permanently sterilized. What would be the result?

Well, some would refuse, obviously, regardless of incentive. These would include people with religious objections as well as people who place a very high value on children. I don't think we have to worry about the latter type contributing to a culture of dependency much. What the former do is a larger discussion.

But let's assume most accept. What effect does this have?

Well, excluding immigration, America is already not far above replacement birthrate. So we have three options: increase immigration intake (offering most of the new immigrants the same sterilization option), increase the birthrate among the higher social classes, or allow the population to shrink. That last one also would be a much larger discussion, so we'll ignore it for the moment.

The first two options have essentially the same outcome: an upper class that tastefully has babies delivered by the stork, and a lower class that, by and large, does not. This should improve all sorts of economic statistics, but it should also create a caste system, with the ultimate point of life - reproducing one's selfish genes - apportioned in a way that most people would find creepy at best.

On the other hand, say we had foolproof reversible sterilization and we could incentivize people to delay reproduction until, say, their late 30s? I'm hard pressed to think of a drawback to this other than the obvious up-front cost. There are those who say this is the actual effect of legalized abortion; that is, women have the exact same number of children they otherwise would have but have them later in life, when they are better financially, emotionally, and educationally equipped to handle it.

So I can draw no firm conclusion after ten minutes of thought, but my main objection then is: don't mess with Mother Nature. Or, to sound more pseudo-scientific about it, complex systems evolve to equilibrium for a reason and the default presumption should be that it's bad to mess with them.