This is a potential problem, however, we can only do our best to make governments that work, and which serve the public need rather than serving only their own corrupt officials.  

It's not enough to dismiss the possibilities of abuse by saying that we're doing our best to make governments that work.  When designing a system, you need to be sure that failures are not catastrophic and will cause as little damage as possible.  Letting the government decide who gets to have children is a recipe for catastrophic failure; the damage that can be done by corruption and abuse is enormous.

It is sort of baffling that a government failure could lead someone to conclude that the answer is more government, isn't it?

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

Especially since skeptic is proposing such a radical social change based on one horrible case of personal and institutional neglect, neglecting the vast majority of children who don't get abused and neglected by their parents, much less starved to death.

Yeah, one can easily conjure up a vision where we go from these government "licensing agencies" deciding when people can procreate to a GATTACA horror show.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

My idea is not BASED on one horrible case, I merely used that one horrible case as the conversational opening to allow me raise the idea of regulating the process of human reproduction (in a comment which, I will point out, one moderator actually found to be mildly interesting!)  However, I have thought for quite a long time that such a system is need.  Reproductive anarchy in the world is having a great many terrible consequences.  

There is nothing illogical about the idea that if the government has failed, we need to have better government.  We don't necessarily have to give up on the whole concept of government and embrace anarchism. Similarly, if a farm has failed, we might need a better farm, rather than giving up on the idea of agriculture.  It is true, however, that anarchism remains an alternative to government much as hunting and gathering remains an alternative to agriculture.  But I think you will find that these alternatives present considerable difficulties, particularly in a world of some seven billion people.

You think the answer to this situation is less government?  How would that have helped Danieal?

We had less government here in Hawaii, and that means our high-profile child-abuse case ended with no convictions.

Well of course, if I were actually designing a system of reproductive licensing I would do exactly as you say, and take every precaution to avoid catastrophic failure and to do as little damage as possible.  I am, however, not actually designing a system, that is far in the future (if indeed we ever get to that stage).  At this point I am merely proposing an idea.  If this idea should catch on and become popular, the next step would be proposed legislation to implement the idea, and at that point someone (probably not me, since I am neither an elected official nor a civil servant) would have to actually design a workable system.

You don't need any of that.  All you would have to do to qualify for a Parenting License is raise a puppy to be a healthy (mentally and physically) adult dog.  If you can't do that, you can't be a parent.

Although this is a charming suggestion, I wouldn't really want to implement it.  I do not believe that there is an exact correlation between the ability to raise a puppy and the ability to raise a child.  There is certainly SOME connection, but not an exact correlation.  Some people get along much better with animals than they do with their fellow human beings.  I could mention, biographically, that my father got along much better with our pet dog than he ever did with me.  Dogs can be easier to deal with, since their psychology and needs tend to be much less complicated.  Furthermore, it is somewhat arbitrary to make dogs the standard, when some people prefer cats, some prefer birds, fish, ferrets, and so forth; there are all kinds of pets.  Dogs are very popular, but they are not everybody's favorite.

The only perfect test (which unfortunately requires technology that we do not yet have) would be to put someone into a perfectly simulated virtual reality (by direct neural interface) and let them raise a virtual child, and see how well they do with that.

The correlation doesn't have to be exact, it's only a low bar.  If you can't make it over that minimum requirement, you definitely don't have the skills to be a parent.

It's true, a person who cannot successfully raise a puppy also cannot successfully raise a child.  But it is not true that a person who can successfully raise a puppy can also successfully raise a child.  Children are more difficult.  So ideally, I would use a more accurate test.

"You might, of course, ask how I could guarantee that the system would not be abused"

Actually I wouldn't ask such an absurd question.

"that better educated, successful, and more intelligent people would be considered to be potentially better parents"

You realize this is incompatible with your dream of maintaining the worlds racial balance? Mean IQ in most of Africa is around 70.

I am delighted to discover that there is at least one absurd question that you wouldn't ask me.

And certainly, there could be a change in the ethnic make-up of the world as a by-product of selecting for higher IQ.  I don't object to that, as long as the criteria are not actually racial.  Even if there are a disproportionate number people of African descent who are of low IQ, there are certainly some who are of high IQ, and those people would have the same reproductive opportunity under my proposed system as would a person of any other ethnicity who had a similar IQ (other qualifications being equal).

You realize this is incompatible with your dream of maintaining the worlds racial balance?

Does Skeptic have a dream of maintaining racial balance?

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

Good question.  I do not have a dream of maintaining any kind of racial balance - indeed, I believe that human beings of every ethnicity are members of the human race, and so even the concept of "racial balance" is a misnomer at best.  My concern, in designing the Reproductive Licensing Board, is merely that it would not be used by some ethnic group in order to gain an unfair reproductive advantage over some other ethnic group, but would instead be used for its intended purposes, which are to guard against unfit parents, and to avoid global overpopulation.  I see no reason to expect that current ethnic ratios would last indefinitely, and there is no reason why they should.  Some ethnicities will become a larger (as a fraction of the total population), some will become smaller, and perhaps if the human race can get over its long obsession with ethnicity or tribal identity, the time will come when ethnic distinctions will cease to have any meaning, which would be ideal.  We could all just be human beings, then we would not have to continue fighting over which tribe is going to have the upper hand over some other tribe.

This 'parenting license' thing you propose is a massive piece of social engineering - that right there should tell you how improbable it is that it will ever be implemented.  If it were ever made into a law - the majority of the worlds population would become outlaws and be absolutely convinced that anyone pushing these intrusive restrictions was pure evil - the political resistance to this idea would be widespread and extreme.

BUT - if I were to play Devil's advocate and try and imagine how this sort of thing could be introduced to the world I'd take my cues from the corporatist dystopias found in books like Queen of Angels,Oryx and Crake, and Snowcrash (these are just a few samples of speculative fiction that suggest the shape of society/economics/civil liberty/and employment in the next 30 years or so).   In these worlds corporate authority has grown while federal authority (and hence democratic means to influence corporate behavior) has diminished.  The differences between rich & poor, enfranchised and disenfranchised, employable and unemployable are more pronounced in these future milieu.  I can easily imagine a circumstance where In order for this 'parenting license/permit' idea to take root - it becomes part of your employment contract vis-a-vis health insurance benefits - no license = no health benefits for those children.

There will then be 2 worlds - one small world where the children of people with 'good jobs' are licensed and insured, screened & protected against disease, mental/psychological abnormality, afforded access to all advantages that modern medicine and science can provide.  These offspring will be the next generation of people with 'good jobs'.   The other world will be people who exist outside of 'the system', they will live or die according to how usefully the serve those within the system (if they serve any economic purpose at all) - their children will be unlicensed and uninsured and receive only such medical access as their disenfranchised parents can afford (not much).  

The corporations will cultivate the minimum number of useful employees (subject to continual cost-benefit analysis and adjustments to their current and future staffing requirements) and since these people represent an ongoing expenditure of resources they will impose proactive quality control regimes on their investments. This will go far beyond the current drug testing and incipient 'live healthy or else' corporate culture we see now - future employers will monitor all aspects of an employees life that have an impact on their job performance.  Strictly controlled drug/alcohol use, mental health, physical fitness, even psychological fitness and 'pro-family social health behavior metrics' requirements will become part of the job - non compliance will not be tolerated, read your contract.  Yet you will remain free, It's your choice, you could always leave the job and venture out into the wilderness of the uninsured and marginally employed or you can do as your told and stay.

None of these measures will accomplish what I suspect Skeptic was hoping - that the human population on this planet could somehow be set to a 'sustainable' level and avoid extreme environmental degradation in the foreseeable future from the rate 'we' will consume resources/pollute our surroundings.  The only way to curb that problem would be to significantly reduce the global population - I think Margaret Atwood had an idea about how to do that.

"...when theft and high crime becomes obscenely obvious to even the blindest beer sucking idiot, it is always the Republicans who are in office." -- Joe Bageant

I agree that if it turns out to be corporations, rather than democratically elected governments, who regulate families or reproduction, the result would be quite unpleasant and would not accomplish what I would hope to accomplish through reproductive regulation, in terms of having more successful families in a less overpopulated world.

It is also true that as with most utopian ideas, the idea of regulating reproduction may never be possible to implement.  Even if we were to attempt to do so, as you point out, there would be lots of people who would attempt to violate the regulations (although I have tried to imagine technological means by which it could be made very difficult to do so - I originally suggested that everyone could be given a reversible treatment at birth making them infertile, so that fertility would only result from a treatment the access to which could be controlled - but as with all attempts to control what people do, there would doubtlessly still be ways to circumvent this arrangement).

Why would I even bother to suggest something that appears to be so difficult to achieve?  Because ultimately, the world is heading toward environmental collapse, and global population control would be an absolutely essential means of reversing this trend.  We spend so much time worrying about how much resources a given individual uses, what their carbon footprint is and so forth, yet as long as the planetary population continues to increase - and even if it just remains at its current, excessively high level - the total resource consumption, carbon footprints etc., will inevitably be too high.  We simply have more people than our planet can support.  That is the first point at which environmental planning breaks down.  There is no way to get seven billion people to live on this planet in such a way as to be environmentally sustainable.  It's not going to happen.

So, although population control is difficult to achieve and may even be impossible to achieve, still, we have to try if we care about the future of our world.  That would seem to be necessary, at least (since you are a fellow SF fan) until such time as we figure out how to open up convenient dimensional gateways, wormholes in space, or other such devices, by which excess population can easily emigrate to new worlds with their own resources, just waiting for us to exploit them.

The problem does seem dire and your forecast for environmental collapse in spite of SOME (or even many) people getting it into their heads to live more sustainably due to the inexorable ever increasing weight of sheer population volume seems depressingly reasonable.  Until that collapse there will be a period where a greater and greater percentage of the world population will be slowly starving to death - preyed upon by the 'strong' who will hunt for advantage in the ocean of human misery.  Reproduction licenses really aren't going to have much impact in places where poverty and want are already the norm.

I love far out science fiction tales a lot.  Wormholes, new worlds, dimensional gateways, magical portals that offer some kind of last minute escape for us 'frogs' from the slowly boiling pot of water which is our global environment - unfortunately my cynical dark side already is staring at the obvious solution.  You didn't run with my Margaret Atwood remark so I will describe it more plainly.  There will be a massive human die off at some point in the future, and I think it will be the result of a deliberate action taken by a word government/perhaps a corporation/or even a terrorist group.  Someone with the ability to 'solve' the global overpopulation problem will take action.

A massive global pandemic is the most obvious and efficient means to effect a sudden 'die off' - the weaponized versions of horrific and super-deadly diseases already exist in numerous location around the planet.  Someone will pop open a canister in a public place, insinuate it in a building/public water supply, infect themselves and go on vacation somewhere popular and the doomsday ball will be set in motion.  Plenty of authors/movies have visited this topic - Stephen King: The Stand, Michael Crichton: The Andromeda Strain, 28 Days Later, 12 Monkeys, Outbreak.....Moonraker.  

It is conceivable that with enough of the world population hovering above starvation, their immune systems weak, the next super plague could emerge from the sickening seethe like a bad roll of the evolutionary dice.  In that event there would be no conspiracy or maniacally laughing villain to blame - just 'bad luck'.  

(I see Condoleeza Rice on TV saying "Nobody could have foreseen...[the inevitable result of repeatedly refusing to take responsibility]")

 

"...when theft and high crime becomes obscenely obvious to even the blindest beer sucking idiot, it is always the Republicans who are in office." -- Joe Bageant

It does seem likely that some kind of massive die-off lies in the future of the human race.  It could well involve the spread of some catastrophic pandemic, either of accidental or deliberate origin, as you imagine.  Global warming, with consequent melting of the polar icecaps and flooding of the coastal regions and islands, is also a likely candidate, particularly as any such flooding will lead to a huge and uncontrollable refugee problem, and desperate food shortages, which in turn will lead to extremely destructive global warfare and ethnic conflicts as everybody desperately tries to ensure that their group is the one which has access to scarce resources.  

Nuclear war, the apocalyptic scenario that we have feared since 1945, remains a distinct possibility, because desperate nations are prone to desperate measures, and if it should occur, most, or possibly all human beings will die either of the initial blasts or of the subsequent radioactive fallout, and even if the nuclear weapons do not kill everybody, they would certainly leave the world in ruins, making it impossible for any substantial population to procure the necessities of life.  Nuclear winter is also a very real possibility; there could be as many as thousands of nuclear explosions, which collectively could put so much dust in the atmosphere as to block out most of the sunlight and create a catastrophic and persistent winter everywhere.  It is somewhat ironic that both global warming and global cooling are real possibilities for the world's future, and possibly we will have both, warming first, followed by cooling, with major catastrophes resulting in both cases.

If the human race is mostly but not completely destroyed by the catastrophes which seem to be on their way, the (metaphorical) slate would be wiped clean, giving the survivors a chance to re-invent human civilization and, who knows, even to learn from the mistakes that lead to the great die-off.  Perhaps something new and beautiful could arise from the remnant of humanity, as Margaret Atwood suggests (somewhat implausibly; I don't really believe that scents in human urine would in the long term be an adequate substitute for the ability to fight off attackers, whether animal or human).  

Then again, perhaps there would be no human survivors.  Possibly some other species would eventually evolve to fill the evolutionary niche that humans would have vacated.  The octopus, for example, already has remarkable intelligence and fantastic dexterity; it just needs to evolve the ability to colonize the land, and it's on its way.  But it is just as likely that rats, as suggested by Stephen Baxter in his novel "Evolution" would be the next big evolutionary winners (he even has the highly evolved rats using devolved humans as domestic animals, a particularly horrible thought).  Not that we can really predict such outcomes.  It could be something that no one would ever have predicted.  A world ruled by intelligent snails.  Or, equally well, a world in which technological civilization never appears again.  Maybe the post-apocalyptic world will become very peaceful and bucolic, a world of forests and marshes, in which animals go about their business in an essentially instinctive manner, with little conscious thought.  The great accomplishments of the human race might be forgotten forever, with no successor civilization to wonder at the amazing ruins left behind.  It's very hard to predict.

<quote>It was a little sickening, but whadda ya gonna do? People are animals.<quote>

Howzabout rip the moral equivalent of a loud fart in a crowded elevator - by way of your comment on this thread?  

Empathy - try reading about it and you may find the answer to your question.

'People are animals' - sometimes they seem that way and MANY of those times despicable acts are beyond the reach of any reasonable means of prevention or intercession by others, but in this case it wasn't beyond the reach of reasonable means to intervene/prevent - there was a symphony of moral squalor and negligence blaring away for a good long time with an audience of civil servants whose job it was to intervene  - they conspicuously failed to do so.  Outrage is an appropriate response IMO.

I am unwilling to accept that people are animals and leave it at that - it is suspiciously easy to excuse all manner of immoral crapulence by framing ones view of human nature in 'laws of the jungle' terms where human animals are somehow obeying a behavioral absolute of  'nature, red in tooth and claw'.  If that were true there would be no modern world, we wouldn't be here jabbering on the internet, human history would have been a couple hundred thousand years of small bands of hunter/gatherers/cannibals bashing each others heads in with rocks and impaled heads on stakes as home decor.  Empathy and Morality are far more than the behavioral codes spelled out in the garbled rats nest of nonsense language typically found in any religious text, they are the basis of cooperation between groups of people larger than an extended family.  Both are characteristics that can be instilled in humans as they develop - they are learned behaviors.  I supposed there has always been a societal rift in opinion as to weather one can exist without the other - IMO both are required if either is to effectively inform/influence individual action.

I am reminded of the story in Jaws where Quint tells of his experience with sharks as a survivor of the World War II sinking of the USS Indianapolis.  The sharks in that story are animals - the men in the story are not.  The reason that scene is so chilling is that it evokes audience empathy for the doomed sailors and for Quint - whose characteristic fatalism/cavalier attitude about risking death and grim obsession with sharks and the sea have an apparent genesis from the transformative experience of surviving the sinking of the Indianapolis.  NONE of that story is comprehensible/compelling without the audience being capable of empathy.  It makes me wonder if sociopaths and complete narcissists (and other profoundly empathy challenged persons - the GOP leadership perhaps?) are capable of enjoying hearing a story/identifying with anyone else?

We are not animals.  Some individuals are simply capable of barbaric savagery extreme cruelty/ and a revolting lack of empathy for people who might be affected by the choices they make.  Some individuals believe that it is possible to work collectively to combat/mitigate the effects of such moral paucity by empowering societal agents to seek out and intervene in situations like the one discussed in this thread.  Other individuals categorically oppose 'collective action'  as it might lead to government/societal agents interfering in their immoral/empathy challenged economic (or whatever) activity (and TAXES to pay for that bleeding heart shit!) so they attack/reject the root concepts for collective action in an attempt to nip that sort of thinking in the bud, before it gets big enough to cause them any trouble (populism/class consciousness/belief in the power of democracy/taxes to pay the societal agents).  For the last 30 years or so the strategy has been been paying off pretty well for them, politically speaking - taxes/regulation and any sort of 'public sector/government agency' thing providing goods or services are greatly diminished in favor of privatization.

Saying 'people are animals, but whadda ya gonna do?' excuses you for not caring.  Saying 'I don't care, and I wont do anything about it' would be more straightforward.

"...when theft and high crime becomes obscenely obvious to even the blindest beer sucking idiot, it is always the Republicans who are in office." -- Joe Bageant

Empathy and Morality...are learned behaviors

Nope.

We are not animals

Yes, we are. Or are you some sort of religious fundamentalist who denies the plain scientific truth of evolution?

For the last 30 years or so the strategy has been been paying off pretty well for them, politically speaking - taxes/regulation and any sort of 'public sector/government agency' thing providing goods or services are greatly diminished in favor of privatization

Ah, so it's because the city of Philadelphia relied partly on a private firm to monitor the girl's welfare that she died? Well, you solved that problem right quick, didn't you? Kudos for sure!

But wait...the story said that,

DHS receives its first complaints about MultiEthnic Behavioral Health, the private agency that would later be hired to check on Danieal Kelly: Company workers were not making home visits as required, and were falsifying records, according to the grand-jury report. DHS takes no action.

That was four years before Danieal died. Whoops!

But wait...there's more:

A DHS worker briefly visits the Kelly home - failing to even enter Danieal's bedroom...

That was a mere month before Danieal Kelly died. (DHS, I suppose I should point out to you, is a government agency.)

D'oh!

Saying 'I don't care, and I wont do anything about it' would be more straightforward

What would you have me do? Move to Philadelphia so I can vote in the local elections there and clean up the system?

Isn't the burning tip of a cigarette sometimes called a coal?

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine