Cap-And-Trade vs. Carbon Taxes
| Fri Jan. 9, 2009 9:32 AM PST
CAP-AND-TRADE vs. CARBON TAXES....Exxon's CEO call for a carbon tax:
The chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp. for the first time called on Congress to enact a tax on greenhouse-gas emissions in order to fight global warming.
In a speech in Washington, Rex Tillerson said that a tax was a "more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach" to curtailing greenhouse gases than other plans popular in Congress and with the incoming Obama administration.
Is this good news? Hard to say. It's certainly good news that Tillerson is in favor of something, and favoring a carbon tax puts him on the side of Al Gore and lots of academics, who think that a tax is the quickest, cleanest, and technically most efficient way of pricing carbon, thus reducing GHG emissions and slowing the progress of global warming.
But it's bad news if his goal is mainly to roil the waters. Barack Obama has called for a cap-and-trade system, not a carbon tax, and most green groups have backed cap-and-trade as well because they feel that a tax is a political nonstarter. But if Exxon can help gin up a big fight between tax advocates and cap-and-trade advocates, who knows? Maybe nothing will get passed at all. If that's Tillerson's calculus, then his newfound support for carbon taxes is just a cynical ploy.
Technical and political issues aren't the only big difference between taxes and cap-and-trade, either. Both raise money (the tax directly, cap-and-trade by selling emission permits), but with a tax you don't know for sure what effect it will have. You have to guess. So you set a carbon tax of, say, $50/ton, with the goal of reducing carbon emissions 5%, and then cross your fingers and wait a few years. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Conversely, cap-and-trade works on the theory of a hard cap. If you want to reduce carbon emissions by 5%, then you auction off credits equal to 95% of current emissions and you're done. You're taking a chance on what the price of credits will be (something that businesses hate since they like price stability), but you know for sure that you'll meet your cap as long as your have adequate enforcement mechanisms in place.
This alone is enough to make me a cap-and-trade advocate. Not only is it more politically feasible than a tax, but it's more attractive to the public since it focuses on the thing they really care about: a hard cap on carbon emissions. Price instability is a legitimate issue, but I don't think it's a big one: energy intensive companies already have to deal with considerable instability in gas and oil prices, and Wall Street will eagerly help them hedge against future instability in carbon permit pricing if it's really important to them.
The "trade" part of cap-and-trade is attractive because it makes the whole system more efficient. But it's the "cap" part that's really important. In my mind, that makes it a better solution than a tax for the carbon pricing piece of a broad climate change plan.
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Comments
Alex is right about cap-and-trade in Europe.
That said, having protested outside multiple annual eXXXon shareholder meetings here in Dallas, there's no way Rex Tillerson has looked at the green light and seen anything but Jay Gatsby's orgiastic future.
Best case? He thinks this will save his corporation more money than a cap-and-trade system.
Not so good case? He thinks that either, or all of the above below:
? He can get a tax watered down as hurting the economy in today's environment;
? he can muddy the waters of public consumption and have that become fallout in Congress;
? He can play some sort of either bait-and-switch or moving the goalposts after Congress says OK to the tax idea.
Submitted by Yellow Dog (not verified) on Fri Jan. 9, 2009 9:35 AM PST.
The Exxon CEO faking green-ness in a cynical ploy to obstruct new policies to reduce oil dependence?
Nah.
Perhaps ExxonMobile has realized that they will, under a cap-and-trade system:
1. Have to account for, track, and report their carbon footprint. (Burdensome and leaves them vulnerable to protest.)
2. Will have to compete for scarce permits.
Under a carbon tax:
1. Their customers will pay the tax, and they'll be able to avoid the costly and difficult carbon accounting. (The actual incidence will depend on the price elasticity; who is legally responsible to pay for it will be the carbon-burners, presumably, who buy the gas at the station.)
2. There is no or low volatility of the carbon cost-- the tax will be relatively stable, and can be lobbied like any other policy. The cap-and-trade permits, however, might have volatile prices, and are sheltered from congressional meddling at the same scale as tax policy.
3. There is no upper limit on carbon emissions... their gas customers will have a fixed per gallon carbon tax. A permit system implies an increasing cost as you move further out on the demand curve-- as permits become more and more scarce at the margin, their price will increase.
Kevin Drum: 0
Exxon CEO: 1
Ok, Exxon is probably just playing a game, hoping that a tax is unpalatable.
Kevin, look at Europe's cap-and-trade. It's a joke that's accomplished almost nothing. The grandfathering was absurd. Do you think the US and its gov't for sale will be any better? In practice, international trades (e.g. with China) are ridiculous too. A triumph of bookkeeping nonsense over real action.
Instead, levy a carbon tax and return every penny collected in the form of an equal payment to every man, women and child in America. Just like they do with the oil money in the People's Republic of Alaska.
Here's an idea: the $350B left in TARP is over $1k per American. Cancel further sweetheart loans to incompetent bankers and send $1k to every American as a pre-payment for the estimated carbon tax they'll pay in the next year. You could cut the checks within weeks. Bingo, economic stimulus when we need it most and a real step towards reducing GHG.
Right. That's the political risk. The GOP will propose their own "Carbon Tax" that guts the real thing.
I like something less wonkish and easier to understand.
1. Big ole gas tax.
2. Money used to defray cuts in payroll tax to put enough money in pockets to pay for it.
3. Sell it as a "screw the Ay-rabs tax."
jerry: We don't have an efficient market.
Sue we do. We keep a few in the storeroom right next to the frictionless surfaces and the perfectly elastic billiard balls.
What I want to know is, if physicists can move beyond high school level models, why can't economists?
What I want to know is, if physicists can move beyond high school level models, why can't economists?
In my rants, I've said exactly the same. I had a bit of physics (major) and a bit less of econ in grad school and at the height of the dotcom bubble and in the Bay Area I got to hear lectures about efficient marketplaces at the same time Netscape was being sold for $400 per share.
Of course, *since then*, my econ profs have thought otherwise and today they try to sell to us alums $3000 seminars where they will tell us all about their new theories. (I figure it's a seminar they owe us for free as partial repayment for malpractice.)
So you set a carbon tax of, say, $50/ton, with the goal of reducing carbon emissions 5%, and then cross your fingers and wait a few years.
Better to set the rate so it increases each year. Doing so would give businesses both time to adjust and knowledge that at some point the tax is really going to bite.
Their customers will pay the tax, and they'll be able to avoid the costly and difficult carbon accounting.
The customers always pay, eventually, but having the producers collect the tax would be better. There are already extensive reporting systems - and royalty systems in some cases - in place for oil, coal, and gas. There are reporting systems at the other end, but a heck of a lot more reporters.
Ultimately that's why I'm for a carbon tax - it could be implemented next week. Cap-and-trade would require all kinds of new procedures and processes and places for financial parasites to suck out some fees.
There's a huge technical difference between the two as well that makes a tax more easily implemented. The key issue becomes: how much CO2 are we emitting now, and how much should we allow? Actually measuring the CO2 emissions is hard, and we don't have reliable data right now, we have estimates. We also have millions of small local sources that must be worked into the system.
I've been following the creation of the WCI cap-and-trade system, and this is easily the most important issue facing the proposal. As some commentators have pointed out, the EU-ETS system has essentially failed since they watered-down and mis-estimated the amount of CO2 emitted. That's why a simple carbon tax can be more effective, implemented faster, and also more easily brought online. It's simplicity means it's also resistant to tampering by Republicans who oppose the whole system. Just look at John McCain's "plan" from campaign '08 and see an example of a cap and trade system once Republicans have had their chance to pick it apart.
Submitted by Bill Harshaw (not verified) on Fri Jan. 9, 2009 10:16 AM PST.
Remember whatever is adopted, a bunch of very smart people are going to be hired to figure out ways to game the system, whether by clever lawyering and accounting or by getting loopholes inserted by friendly Congresspeople. And government bureaucrats are going to be playing catch-up. So the issue to me is very much which approach is more difficult to game. I think the tax route, but I'm open to persuasion.
"This alone is enough to make me a cap-and-trade advocate. Not only is it more politically feasible than a tax, but it's more attractive to the public since it focuses on the thing they really care about: a hard cap on carbon emissions."
_________________
No, what most people want is cheap energy and they'll resent anything that artificially raises cost. Cap and trade is more politically feasible because it will become a shell game in which nobody can be blamed but everybody pays.
The energy heavy industries will be able to tell the difference. Their ultimate gaming of the system will be to leave it for friendlier locales, taking their jobs with them.
Of course, this is entirely aside from the question of whether the theory is correct about CO2 being the cause of global warming. The behavior of that bright ball in the sky might have something to do with it.
Beyond the absolute fact that cap and trade just doesn't work, is the problem that such schemes favor large, entrenched businesses over small upstarts. The entrenched interests can 1. refuse to sell excess credits, and 2. bid up credit prices to exorbitant amounts, stifling innovation. Furthermore, while it's nice to attempt a national solution to a global problem, the reality is that either idea simply drives more businesses offshore.
Clearly the winners in a cap and trade scheme are the largest polluters and the market makers, while the losers are the rest of us. A better system, and one that has a chance to succeed, is a global carbon tax, imposed at the wellhead. implementation and verification could be difficult, but worthwhile endeavors are rarely easy.
trashhauler: this is entirely aside from the question of whether the theory is correct about CO2 being the cause of global warming. The behavior of that bright ball in the sky might have something to do with it.
Trashy, is that the same BBITS (bright ball in the sky) that every serious climate scientist takes into account as an obvious primary factor before even considering anything else. You know, the one who's output we've been accurately monitoring from satellites since at least the 1970's (and terrestrially before that, for centuries in fact using the sunspot proxy) so that we have an accurate and precise record of its output for decades, which is always factored into climate models? The one that any serious climate scientist will tell you is a factor in global climate change, but which can be readily shown to be much less than half of the observed change? Is that the BBITS you mean?
The problem with cap-and-trade is that it presupposes a relatively steady level of output.
For instance, if we had promulgated a cap and trade system in 2007-early 2008 when the economy was running at full tilt and energy prices were high, we'd have auctioned off substantially more permits than are necessary now, the price of permits would have dropped through the floor, and we'd see no movement to conserve energy.
This is precisely what happened in the EU under Kyoto. Permit levels were set relative to emission levels in the early 90's the Russian economy collapsed, and they had permits to spare, and the price of a CO2 permit dropped to the point that it had practically no effect in deterring emissions.
A carbon tax, for all of it's downsides provides a reliable way to increase the cost of emitting CO2. It's true that we don't know how to accurately set the level in the first place, but if we start with a modest tax and ratchet it up over time, I suspect that we'll be able to get the desired effect.
It seems to me that a carbon tax would be a lot simpler, and assume much less government omniscience, than cap and trade. With cap and trade, there seems to be a lot of scope for screw-ups and corruption as you're creating something with real value.
"we have an accurate and precise record of its output for decades, which is always factored into climate models?"
____________
Yep, that's the one. Of course, your faith that the sun's output vs the effect of cosmic rays has been correctly weighted in the models is touching. What effect water vapor has on the earth's albedo is an interesting question, don't you think?
trashhauler: What effect water vapor has on the earth's albedo is an interesting question, don't you think?
Sure is, but that's an effect that happens on the little blue and white ball, not the solar output variability that you alluded to.
Here's a helpful hint: if you're going to throw spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, at least limit yourself to the well cooked spaghetti.
It's good to have this substantive discussion about how to most effectively and most quickly reduce CO2 emissions.
Too bad the discussion is polluted with the fake, phony pseudo-science denialist "Climate Science According to Rush Limbaugh" bullshit that trashhauler is posting.
Submitted by s9 (not verified) on Fri Jan. 9, 2009 12:19 PM PST.
GOddamn it. Again.
The other main reason you go with a cap-and-trade system is because you believe the trading part of the system will be more efficient at computing the price at which liability for emissions will change hands than the political process which sets the carbon tax rate.
Basically, Tillerson is coming out in favor of Soviet-style economic planning and against the idea of free markets.
Can we hit these people where it counts when they stand up so blatantly and beg to punched, plzkthx.
A carbon tax works is not just by incentivizing people to emit less carbon but, more important, by enabling carbon-free alternatives to compete on price, which will then drive investment and innovation. There's no need to worry about what the "right" tax rate is, so long as it's high enough to make cleaner alternatives attractive.
Compared to the administrative nightmare that a cap-and-trade system could entail, a carbon tax seems like a no-brainer.
I prefer a carbon tax to cap-and-trade, basically because -- and I never thought I'd ever say such a thing -- I agree with ExxonMobil's CEO that a carbon tax is a "more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach".
Commenter Tillerson says that a carbon tax is "Soviet-style economic planning". I don't see how that's more true of a carbon tax than of any other tax. Moreover, a cap-and-trade system would require much more big-government administration and oversight than a simple tax. A carbon tax doesn't involve "central planning" of "the economy". It simply forces polluters to internalize the costs of their carbon pollution. They then pass that cost along to the consumers, so the price of their products goes up to where it really should be, and the market does the rest.
Having said that, given the urgency of the global warming crisis, we need more than a carbon tax.
We need, among other things, an immediate ban on the construction of any new coal-fired power plants, and a definite date, not more than ten years from now, at which time all existing coal-fired power plants and all coal mines must be shut down, permanently.
We also need to replace the "corporate average fuel economy" (CAFE) standard to be replaced with a minimum fuel economy standard, which should be aggressively phased in, so that by date X it shall be illegal to manufacture or sell any fossil-fueled vehicle that gets less than X miles per gallon. I think a minimum fuel economy of 50 MPG within ten years is reasonable.
And while we are taking these sort of aggressive steps to phase out fossil fuel use we also need policies to aggressively promote the fastest possible deployment of
state of the art efficiency and renewable energy technologies. Good news for "conservatives" is that this can be done largely through tax cuts to encourage private investment.
Submitted by Matthew G. Saroff (not verified) on Fri Jan. 9, 2009 12:54 PM PST.
I could not disagree more.
The idea of cap and trade is not that there is some sort of hard cap, but that because there is a market, that the Wall Street geniuses will be able to create efficiencies....Like they did with mortgage backed securities.
Cap and trade is about Ivy Leagers (in the US, Oxbridge in England, etc.) creating an employment program for their college classmates who works in finance at the expense of the taxpayer.
Someday there will be a scandal bigger than Enron and Madoff put together. Countries/factories will be discovered to have sold their carbon-producing rights on the open market and and then produced the carbon anyway.
That's when cap-and-trade will die.
Alex is right about cap-and-trade in Europe.
That said, having protested outside multiple annual eXXXon shareholder meetings here in Dallas, there's no way Rex Tillerson has looked at the green light and seen anything but Jay Gatsby's orgiastic future.
Best case? He thinks this will save his corporation more money than a cap-and-trade system.
Not so good case? He thinks that either, or all of the above below:
He can get a tax watered down as hurting the economy in today's environment;
he can muddy the waters of public consumption and have that become fallout in Congress;
He can play some sort of either bait-and-switch or moving the goalposts after Congress says OK to the tax idea.
SecularAnimist: I agree with ExxonMobil's CEO
Fact is stranger than fiction.
We need, among other things, an immediate ban on the construction of any new coal-fired power plants
A sufficiently high carbon tax would accomplish that. As you and our new found CEO buddy point out, a carbon tax is simple and easy to calculate the costs of. That's an enormous advantage over the uncertainty of cap-and-game-the-system. Plug the tax into your spreadsheet and, if it makes coal plants uneconomical, they won't be built.
What we need though is major upgrades to the grid. Solar obviously works better in the Southwest than here in the cloudy Northeast. On the bright side (pun intended) the Atlantic coast from roughly Cape Cod to the Carolinas is one of the best wind power areas there is. You need a better grid though to ship power here when the wind isn't blowing, and elsewhere when it is.
Expect the biggest howls about an upgraded grid to come from folks who currently enjoy cheap locally generated power (i.e. near major hydropower sites). An upgraded grid would tend to equalize power prices across the country.
"Sure is, but that's an effect that happens on the little blue and white ball, not the solar output variability that you alluded to."
_________
They go hand in hand, Alex. As the sun's output varies, it's effect on cosmic rays varies. As the theory goes, when the sun is more active, it blocks more cosmic rays from hitting earth, resulting in lesser cloud formations. Surprised you hadn't heard of it.
trashhauler: Surprised you hadn't heard of it.
Surprised you hadn't heard that all the studies of the effect of cosmic rays on cloud formation have shown it to be negligible. In all fairness to the originators of this idea, they were astrophysicists who studied cosmic rays, and then speculated that they might affect cloud formation. Atmospheric scientists have since taken advantage of known short term cosmic ray variation to study its effect on cloud formation. A number of independent studies have shown that it's somewhere between negligible and nonexistent.
Time to cook more spaghetti!
"Too bad the discussion is polluted with the fake, phony pseudo-science denialist "Climate Science According to Rush Limbaugh" bullshit that trashhauler is posting."
________________
I'm not a denialist, SecularAnismist. I believe that global warming has been happening and that some portion of it is probably anthropogenic. I might suspect your own allegiance to the scientific method ended as soon as you ran into a theory that fit your intended socially engineering. But heaven forbid that I openly accuse you of it. You'd declare me a heretic or something.
Pretend all you like that scientific inquiry is ended on the subject - you'll only look more foolish in the end.
"Surprised you hadn't heard that all the studies of the effect of cosmic rays on cloud formation have shown it to be negligible."
_____________
Then you either knew that there was a linkage and your first comment about spaghetti
was a dishonest attempt to pretend otherwise, or (more likely) you needed time to google for the latest rebuttal so you wouldn't sound silly.
I don't much care which it was, anyone saying that the science is finished on the subject is speaking from faith rather than any true understanding of how the scientific method works.
Resources for the Future, an environmental think tank, notes that you can implant a safety valve on to cap 'n trade. The government could agree to auction off additional permits if the price hits, say, $70/ton.
The possibility for technical and political fixes is boundless.
trashhauler wrote: "Pretend all you like that scientific inquiry is ended on the subject ..."
Earlier, at 1:22pm you posted some denialist BS about "... the question of whether the theory is correct about CO2 being the cause of global warming."
"Scientific inquiry" on that question, is, indeed, ended.
Human activities, principally the burning of fossil fuels, are in fact releasing large quantities of long-sequestered fossil carbon into the atmosphere. Human activities have been doing so for more than a century. Human activites continue to do so, at an accelerating rate. These are facts.
Those anthropogenic emissions have in fact dramatically increased the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and continue to do so, at an accelerating rate.
That anthropogenic increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is in fact causing the Earth system to retain more of the Sun's energy, and get hotter.
These are empirically observed facts. Not speculation. Not hypothesis. Not "theory". They are empirically observed facts.
You can blather all you want about cosmic rays and other baseless speculations for which there is no evidence whatsoever. It's irrelevant and stupid but go ahead if you like. And you probably will, since "conservatives" are by nature fond of the irrelevant and stupid.
trashhauler: knew that there was a linkage and your first comment about spaghetti
was a dishonest attempt to pretend otherwise
Actually I knew that there wasn't a linkage, which was where the spaghetti comment came from.
anyone saying that the science is finished on the subject is speaking from faith
Strawman. I never said that, nor have I ever heard of a climatologist who has.
By contrast, endlessly throwing discredited objections to the AGW theory is hardly evidence of a healthy respect for the scientific method or appropriate skepticism.
trashhauler wrote: "I don't much care which it was, anyone saying that the science is finished on the subject is speaking from faith rather than any true understanding of how the scientific method works."
It is an established scientific fact that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are causing the Earth system to get hotter. That you still question that is not a problem with the science. It's a problem with you.
Anyone who pompously blathers about "true understanding of how the scientific method works" while spewing long-discredited denialist talking points about cosmic rays that they picked up from Rush Limbaugh, who picked them up from some ExxonMobil-funded propaganda mill masquerading as a "conservative think tank", is speaking from faith that anything Al Gore says must be wrong.
@Measure for Measure
I agree 100%. That was a major problem with the McCain plan and others that have been put forward: they use small innocuous sounding policies to undermine the entire system. I sat in on meetings for the WCI, and repeatedly heard stupid proposals from industry that were all disguised as "safety valves" and other euphemisms that were all in essence means to limit the effectiveness of the whole system. The American political system is too vulnerable to corporate lobbying and lawyer-created loopholes to think that a complicated cap-and-trade system will be as successful as a carbon tax. A carbon tax is a simple means to an end: enact a tax on the emission of carbon and set the rate for a short period (say 3 years) and then have a review committee look over the data and suggest by how much it should be increased (or, in the massively unlikely scenario that it's too successful, decreased). Make that all upfront so that business and everyone can plan for the costs of their emissions. Also, refund almost all of the revenue from the tax to the people (not the corporations); and use a small remainder to assist lower-income people in making the transition to low-carbon economy (things like insulation and trading in gas-guzzling cars). Simple, likely to be popular (if it had a national champion the way cap-and-trade has gotten), and also very feasible. I'll support a cap-and-trade over nothing, but this is my preferred solution to lower the US's carbon footprint.
Submitted by Legacy on Fri Jan. 9, 2009 6:31 PM PST.
Tim: It's true that a tax is more straightforward from a policy perspective, but I'd be very wary of thinking that it's less susceptible to lobbying and loopholes. I'd guess exactly the opposite, and it's one of the reasons I favor cap-and-trade. Taxes are notoriously open to endless fiddling and special interest lobbying, while C&T is fairly bulletproof if you can just stick to one big promise: all permits are auctioned.
Other technical aspects, like banking and safety valves, aren't necessarily that bad. In fact, they can actually be quite positive. Offsets are the big loophole to watch out for, and that's one place where the possibility of abuse is so large that I'd prefer to not allow them at all.
Taxes are notoriously open to endless fiddling and special interest lobbying
Income taxes are, with deductions and exemptions and credits and whatnot, but it's hard to build loopholes in an excise tax assessed at the wellhead or dock or mine shaft.
Endless fiddling is why we should bag the corporate income tax and institute a VAT, but that's another discussion.
There's no reason not to do both carbon tax and cap and trade. Belt and suspenders. Set the carbon tax at $14 per ton and auction of 95% of desired emissions. Beauty of this discussion is that it is correct and progressive public policy period. We do not need to know the outcome of the debate on climate change for this to be the correct policy. Hypothecate the revenues to support investment in alternative energy producing technologies, make it revenue neutral by reducing taxes on smaller businesses and let her rip.
Submitted by Legacy on Sat Jan. 10, 2009 9:18 AM PST.
Tom: That's roughly my preference, though in a slightly different way. I like the idea of downstream cap-and-trade with full auction of permits for stationary sources, combined with gas taxes for cars and trucks. But I'm open to better ideas.
I've got a piece in the next issue of MoJo that goes into all this in greater detail. The political picture, however, remains sort of murky.
And this is where you tap into my hobby horse--if we keep the discussion fairly limited (in other words, without bringing in the climate change discussion) you have much more political room to manoeuver within. Don't know if you'll ever get Inhofe's vote ;), though. How do you think California's new legislation will impact national efforts (or do you address that in your upcoming piece)?
How about ending immigration? Makes little sense to cut average usage of oil if you increase total population. Population growth is the real threat to non-renewable resources such as oil, air, water, and farmland. While peak oil is an immediate problem, population is perhaps most devastating to farmland as it is a quadruple whammy. More people mean faster using up of farmland from conversion to suburbs, parking lots, highways; loss from erosion (always a part of farming, no matter how carefully done); loss of non-renewable irrigation supplies such as the Ogallala Aquifer or diversion to non-farm usage; over-grazing, and so forth. Not an immediate problem of course, but if we look only to the short term, such as doubling the population to provide workers to pay for Social Security for the Boomers, then we must sacrifice the long term survival of the nation.
air water and farmland are renewable
Submitted by Plains (not verified) on Sat Dec. 5, 2009 4:43 AM PST.
quote: "Population growth is the real threat to non-renewable resources such as oil, air, water, and farmland."
You got one out of those four right. Air is renewable. It is constantly renewed every day by plants after we use it. The air cycle has limits, of course, yes.
Water is effectively renewable. After we use it, it goes downstream and into the oceans and then evaporates and goes back over the land as rain.
Farmland is reusable. Renewable? Effectively, yes. You can plant crops on the same plot of farmland for hundreds or even thousands of years.
quote: "Makes little sense to cut average usage of oil if you increase total population. "
Apparently, several efforts have been under way to reduce global population. Ethanol subsidies for example have raised crop prices so that many starvation borderline populations were pushed farther. Look into Africa for example. Also there are claims that AIDS was intentionally put into injections sold to said populations to reduce their counts. Also there are claims that the flu vaccines interfere with fertility and overall health.
But perhaps the better population control measures in place have been in the first world in the form of socialized retirement so that people didn't have to produce many children to assure their later years. etc etc etc..
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