One of the most cruel dichotomies of post-modern life is that reproduction is still an essential part of maintaining the species, but it is also the tool in which human beings destroy themselves. Many of the perilous issues facing the world of my birth are a direct result of overpopulation: the nearly indisputable human influence on climate change, pollution of our major drinking and fishing sources, mining's destruction of ecosystem, forestry's desolation of our carbon-dioxide absorbers and oxygen producers, agriculture's addition of methane and widespread soil erosion, over-fishing and even interstellar garbage. It is clear that the processes of industrial life on such a grand scope are making life intolerable on both a microscopic and macroscopic scale.

With every industrial achievement, there is an equal and opposite industrial failing. With penicillin and antibiotic drugs came super-bugs, mutated bacteria capable of annihilating the entire species. With mining came rock-slides and leaching. With petroleum came tailings ponds and global warming. With nuclear power came radioactive waste and potential atomic catastrophe. With pavement came the super-heating of urban areas and the perpetual excess of suburbia. With agriculture first came malnutrition, then topsoil degradation and finally, the evil of all evils, overpopulation. Industrialization has brought our species and perhaps the entire planet to the brink of collapse; however, that is not the fault of the industry, but of the humans who have been left in charge of industry.

Remember that for the last three hundred years, mankind's quest for energy has nearly obliterated every power source in the world. We nearly chopped down every tree to build our fires. We nearly hunted sperm whales to extinction looking for candle wax. We nearly mined every coal deposit on earth in a search of kerosene. Despite this, the key word in these sentences is "nearly". Human ingenuity always saved us before extinction. The increase in desperation was the vital ingredient needed to discover a new energy source just in the proverbial nick of time. The problem with the world of the present is that our industries have become so bloated that we will exhaust our power sources long before our species has time to unearth a new one. We no longer have the decades of shortages needed to research new concepts. Instead we are left with but a few months of speculative gorging followed by an eternity of the void. It was only a few months ago from the time I wrote this that the world ran out of every natural deposit of helium. Helium, being an inert gas is nearly impossible to separate from its fellow elements and the science required to extract it could not catch up with the rapid depletion of the resource. This extinction doesn't just threaten children's party balloons, but speciality welding which cannot be done under regular air pressure or in air's impurity. Already our industries are scrambling to find expensive alternatives or are leaving the business altogether. It's only a matter of time before stories like these become commonplace, and mankind mines itself back into the dark ages.

A world without industry, on the other hand, where all human beings live in harmony with nature and are unwilling to remove the nutrients and resources of the earth without mother nature's "expressed permission" is no less dangerous to humanity. The pre-Colombian history of the Americas gives us a perfect demonstration of these extremes. The Mesoamerican peoples had access to enough resources and population to rise a mighty empire every thousand years; however, once that empire was established, it overextended itself and inevitably fell, ushering in a medieval period until another tribe that was able to rise above the rabble. The Spanish were lucky enough to attack the Aztecs and Incas when they were past the peak of their cycle. The Plains Indians, however, a people noted for their inclusive thinking and unwillingness to rape the earth lived in virtual stagnation for more than twenty thousand years. Our archaeologists have uncovered more differences in the genetic makeup of these people over their long history on this continent than in their tools and lifestyles. In other words, their genes evolved faster than their societies. These stories give modernity a powerful lesson: overextend your resources and risk extinction; fail to exploit your resources and risk irrelevance.

Industry is inherently a good thing; it promotes a constantly improving and productive society. Over industrialization is inherently a bad thing because although it is ceaselessly efficient and productive, it threatens the very course of life on earth. Although some would resolve this issue by regulating industry or attacking the size of the industrial machine, I believe such actions to be rash and extremely dangerous. Industry is our only hope at feeding, housing and clothing nine billion people and should its arms be tied about its back, we risk another explosion of world warfare or increasingly limited resources. Instead, I would suggest limiting the source of the problem, the human race itself.

Homo sapiens are one of the only species that doesn't control its reproduction to match available food resources. Instead, we increase our numbers as a direct relationship to scarcity (it has been well documented that poorer women bear many more children than their wealthier counterparts). Not only does this perpetuate the issue of starvation, but it also means that the world replicates more farmers, janitors, and factory workers when it really needs doctors, engineers and researchers. If we are to continue as a functional human race, we must reverse this trend. The intelligent and laborious must reproduce more often than the stupid and the lazy, and everyone has to reproduce less overall.

Being that a chronimistic society remunerates the clever and hardworking more than their dullard compatriots, the easiest way to accomplish this goal is to levy a "child tax" on couples considering conceiving. Greater tributes would be levied in areas where the population is too large and smaller taxes would be payable in those areas where population is sparse, with rebates for beneficial gene combinations. The purpose of the policy is not simply to decrease the surface population, but to be certain that those humans left behind are more evolved than their parents. A poorly orchestrated reduction in the populace can be just as catastrophic as a random influx. Humanity's experience with the collapse and dismemberment of the classical empires of Rome, the Indus Valley and Han China clearly demonstrated this. The rapid depopulation in those civilizations as caused by war, disease and starvation led to the Dark Ages in Europe and tumultuous periods in South Asia and India as well. In order for our industrial economy to function, there needs to be either enough people doing manual labour or agricultural work to support the specialists, or enough engineers and scientists to decrease the number of manual workers and farmers required to keep the system aloft. The latter is easier to maintain, especially from a resource perspective.

Moving from a resource centred to a knowledge based economy is one that requires more than just population control. It makes an effective and easily accessed education system paramount and a basic right of civilization. As a result of the Western population learning to read and write in the early twentieth century, democracy was put into the hands of the majority of the people, social mobility was reinvigorated and their society entered a cultural and economic  golden age. By attaching an enormous price to high quality education, access is limited to only those wealthy enough to afford it. Because there is a direct correlation between one's level of education and wealth attained in the workforce, it means that a person born rich can stay rich forever, not because he is more suited to his affluence than his fellow man, but because he is luckier than his fellow man. If only the prosperous can afford to educate their young, they will continue to replicate their wealth without any concern for social reward, defeating the purpose of capitalism and chronimism alike. Even those who work hard enough to pay for their education will always be at a disadvantage, being that the wealthy can afford to school themselves without working and will pay closer attention to their studies. Those people who try to circumvent formal education by inventing a product or starting their own business will inevitably need investment and guidance from the educated and wealthy, still opening the path to exploitation and unearned reward on behalf of the rich.

In order to avoid this, the new generations must all have equal access to all levels of education from kindergarten to doctorate. However, being that all members of a chronimistic society must be responsible for the resources they themselves use, there must be some cost associated with the enormous social responsibility of universal education. Although the government theoretically has inexhaustible holdings, without realistic restrictions, governments will become just as destructive as excessive industry. It is doubtful that mankind will ever be able to administer a doctorate to each of its citizens. The saturation of education in the Soviet Union did not lead to a more advanced workforce, after all, but a crumbling social structure and millions living off the teat of government without ever contributing an iota to their nation's collective success. Therefore, in addition to giving each citizen equal access to education, they must restrict the level to which each person can achieve education. In essence, it is the chronimistic government's responsibility only to provide equality of opportunity in access to education. A certain level, preferably literacy and basic maths, sciences, history and geography must be delivered unto each human being in the interest of democracy and providing a base for social mobility, but from that point onwards schools can discriminate on intelligence and interest in their admissions. Thus, schools would slowly weed out those who were unable or uninterested in learning after each level, keeping only those whom society could afford to completely educate. In the pursuit of maintaining competition in each field, it would be preferable for all learning institutions to graduate one percent more people than are required to work in that field, and to accept a higher number of applicants for their programs, forcing the intelligent to compete against each other in order to graduate and to find success afterwards as well.

In order to reflect the cost of education, it is important that individuals do eventually pay back the debt society has granted them in building schools, hiring teachers and creating evaluation systems all for their benefit. Without this form of payment, the intelligent people can continue to drain the education system and live off of nothing more than the offerings of others. That being said, as I already discussed, when such payments are made up front, as in the costly tuition of private schools of universities, it limits access to those who cannot currently afford it. The easiest way to avoid both situations is simply in the accumulation of student debts, not only in during post-secondary schooling as it is currently, but also during elementary, middle and secondary schooling. These debts will replace the taxes paid by parents and give each student accountability for their own future and their personal decisions, as they will be liable to repay these loans, not their guardians. Therefore, if a child wants to learn more than the bare basics, they must do so with the assumption that they themselves will be paying for their increased time in school. If a child wants only to a farmer like his father, for example, he can choose to leave school after he has learned everything that required for his trade, knowing that in his chosen field it will be easier to pay off elementary and middle school knowledge, which was necessary for him, than high school and university knowledge, which would have been unnecessary. The choice to limit or expand one's horizons are the child's alone, and the state and parents will have the obligation to teach the child only to the point where they can make these decisions wisely and unassisted.

In the spirit of placing more responsibility and individual accountability on youth, it is of prime importance that the next generation pay off the tremendous resources assumed in their bearing as well. The continuation of a family name or trade may have sentimental value, but it means nothing on the greater scale of humanity. Being that inheritance will also be a thing of the past (see the proceeding chapter), children will not be able to continue or expand the exploits of their parents. They will be complete individuals, judged purely by their own competencies and their own work ethic. No outside factors will help or hinder them. They will evolve humanity on their own accord.

As such, the expensive process of child rearing must be financed by the child in question, not by the parents who have nothing materially to gain from bringing flesh into the world. Humans will inevitably pair-bond and procreate, but in a chronimistic milieu, the raising of the next generation requires a far less emotional approach, and generally makes certain that the child is brought up in a relatively standardized environment. Chronimism doesn't support either the nature or nurture philosophy, proposing instead that each individual have absolute choice in determining their destiny. The process of child-rearing, then, is simply to create an adequate platform in which an individual can best perform and evolve. Although this, to some extent, does require immeasurable resources such as love and affection, it also necessitates the spending of significant tangible assets in pursuit of infantile perfection. Primarily, children must be well nourished, well clothed, well housed and have access to an abundance of knowledge or rigorous physical activities in order to focus on their studies or bodily improvement. These will be initially compensated for by the state, not the parents, who may range in income and intelligence and child-raising strategies. In order to pay for this, children will also rack up debts as they grow older in addition to those associated with education. If a person cannot pay back these debts society granted them before reaching the age of five years before the average life expectancy, severe penalties must be wrought. This will ensure that the individual actually bothers to service these debts at some point, opposed to simply dying in the red. With the exception of the payroll tax and the child tax, the chronimistic society is one of virtually no tariffs and in order to sustain that model, individuals must take personal responsibility for every stone they misplace, every grain they consume, every screen at which they stare and every lungful they breath. The debts of child-raising and education seek to do this. 

In order to make the debts incurred in child raising more fair, it's important to have some possibility of an "opt-out" system. If a child feels they can have achieve a better environment at a lower cost through their own labour, they must be encouraged to seek it out. Bureaucratic systems are by their very design inefficient, and a private solution is always encouraged. The only piece of childhood which anyone, young or old, is always entitled too, free of charge, is access to information. School curricula, publicly funded research, news media and whatever else individuals choose to put in the public domain must always be accessible for free anywhere in the world and in any language that is being spoken or read. Without this, democracy cannot function aptly as the electorate will be too uninformed to make an adequate choice and social mobility cannot flourish, for even those who were turned away by formal institutions can have a chance to educate themselves if they are willing to make the effort. With this source of information, human beings also have a chance of making the teacher and their incredibly wasteful systems and infrastructure obsolete, saving civilization immense resources in the process. One day, a student may be able to complete a doctorate in their own home, at their own pace. All that would stop them is their own intelligence and work ethic: the very values the chronimistic system strives to foster.