If you obsess about demography for long enough, eventually you find all sorts of off-speed proposals to deal with the world’s falling fertility rate. One of which is called “Demeny voting.”Named for demographer Paul Demeny (who is now the editor of the Population Council’s Population and Development Review) the idea goes something like this: One of the (many) problems of sub-replacement fertility is that as more people forego having children, the political constituency for natalism shrinks, leading to further evolutions in the law which increase the burden on prospective parents. Which would be fine–this is how politics works, after all–except that children, or more accurately, future taxpayers, are essential for the continuation of the welfare state.
Demeny proposes that children be given a form of voting rights before they reach voting age, through a proxy. Each child would count for some fraction of a vote, and these fractions would be halved and exercised by the parents.
