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The negative long term societal impact of poor people having children
Some people here may have heard about the short story The Egg by Andy Weir. It's really brief and takes about 2 minutes to read; spoliers below so Caveat lector.
The central premise of The Egg is about a human being ("You", it's written in second person) who just died and is taken to see God. He is told that the whole universe was created specifically as a learning experience for You (who is actually a God in training) and that every single human being is infact a different incarnation of yourself. At the very end God explains to You that "Every time you hurt/helped another you were hurting/helping yourself" with the author's intended moral being something like "therefore you should always help others and be generous etc. etc.".
Naturally being a terminal contrarian I completely disagree. Being someone who wants to minimise the total amount I suffer integrated out to inifinity if I truely knew that I would live eventually every single human life the best thing to do would be to prevent those incarnations of myself most likely to produce progeny who live shitty lives from reproducing in the first place.
Sure, forcibly sterilising people would inflict suffering upon them (and therefore myself) for some small number of years before the reverse hedonic treadmill runs its course, but preventing three kids who were probably going to lead shitty lives were they to be born from existing just saved me two centuries of misery in expectation. This is a trade I'd make again and again until it got to a situation where only well off/intelligent people were allowed to have children for the next generation. By doing this I'd prevent the existance of most of the shitty human lives I'd have lived in the first place, plus the lack of deadweight from these shitty existances needing subsidy from productive humans would mean I could race full steam ahead to grow the economy/research technology without a horde of poors needing to be bribed with gibs so that they don't burn the cities down.
This course of action would basically be the fastest way to create heaven on earth, and when I got to that point I could proliferate an arbitrarily large number of top end humans living in complete bliss (eugenics from controlling who could breed basically filtered out the shitty variants long before this point). Note that the process doesn't require You to be perfectly good at choosing who to sterilize, accidentally sterilizing the wrong people has negative impacts (or even worse, not sterilizing those you should sterilize) but you still get benefits as long as you're dispropotionately sterilizing low value humans.
The story doesn't make You live out your lives in chronological order on earth so basically I could ensure >99.9999% of my time is spent living in one of these complete bliss lives only punctuated by very small amounts of time in a less nice (but still comparatively nicer than if everyone was allowed to have kids, no matter how shitty their lives would have been) existance. All in all it'd be a pretty decent ride, certainly far better than the counterfactual with no forced sterilisation.
I suspect that Weir, who describes his views as "socially liberal" wouldn't quite like this "degenerate" solution to the universe he created. Regardless it remains true that "sterilize shitty people for a better world" is just as valid a moral to take from the story as "help others and be generous".
But this is all just a short story set in a hypothetical universe that doesn't have much to do with our own. However the more I thought about my solution the more I realised it applied to our physical world too, regardless of whether or not we're all secretly one single soul sequentially reincarnating into all the human bodies. For instance right now people on the left complain about "Child Poverty" and how this is a Big Problem That Society Needs To Fix.
The left's preferred solution (like it is often elsewhere) is something like redistribution from those who earn a lot/have wealth to those that don't. This isn't the only solution though, because if e.g. people living below the poverty line all suddenly stopped having kids child poverty would hit 0% very quickly. Not only this but since poors are disproportionately likely to make bad/absent parents this would ensure the average child is more likely to be born into a family situation conducive to good childhood and less likely to lead them into becoming a burden on the state when they grow up.
Of course even suggesting that we should discourage (not even sterilize, merely discourage) poors from having kids is something that makes these very same people on the left quite angry, even though it would go some way towards solving child poverty. Plus the saved money from not needing to subsidise the poors as much could be easily diverted into investment and research, thereby improving humanity as a whole.
Equally people complain about wealth concentration amongst the rich and inequality. Once again if we had a society which encouraged the rich to have children while discouraging the poor we'd get a situation where richer people would on average have larger families and therefore when it came to time for the inheritance to be dished out the wealth of the rich would get diluted while the wealth of the poors would pass on mostly intact.
And of course if rich people had more kids on average compared to poor people we'd get the standard eugenic benefits of the next generation carrying fewer shitty traits on average than the previous one, reverse idiocracy if you will. While the effects of this would be minor on human level timescales when you zoom out to multiple centuries they add up quite quickly.
I've only talked about a few areas here but most modern day western problems can in some way be linked to poor people having kids. We'd all be a lot better off if governments around the world nudged them away from this and instead encouraged the rich to have kids instead. Of course since we live in a fallen world this is basically the opposite of current policy in the UK where if you earn too much your childcare benefits get taken away. Faceplam moment...
100 years ago people in most countries, especially the west, were significantly poorer than today. In 1900, 20% of American households had 7 or more children, as of 2020 it's .1%. Those people were far more ignorant and compared to today unbelievably destitute but they marched on and raised civilization to new heights. What would you say changed? If it's the kind of people having so many children, then is poverty the real issue?
The online right talks a lot about genetics as destiny. Putting aside their moral failure to understand if the thing they say is true, and I think it probably is mostly true, it is damnable and must be fixed. I wonder how they square their purview with the most successful, the most attractive, and the most effective people being so uniformly leftist. Alan Ritchson sneeding about Trump stung his Reacher fans for many reasons and I'd think a not trivial one is because 6'3 Aryan chad is attacking them.
Of course the behavior of such people is very easy to explain: going with the flow, kompromat, general evil, apathy, idiocy, but when a discussion starts in such highly reductive territory as "Poor people are clearly the problem, sterilize them" you invite opponents to bring the proportionate reductiveness of something like /r/beholdthemasterrace. It's not a productive discourse. I think there is something to be argued about the impacts of specific policies, one such negative impact of welfare is that certain people dependent on welfare in turn create more people dependent on welfare, and as a great deal of political power is effectively bought from these people, the incentive structure is perverse. But do we blame the impoverished or the exploiting politicians? "Genetics as destiny" wouldn't find blame in sheep, they're sheep.
I think this is also the mistake I see time and again in the political off-by-1 error: if your desired governance has the power to mass sterilize the "genetically undesirable," well surely you've already made abortion and all birth control illegal; abolished welfare and no-fault divorce and so practically ended alimony and child support; revoked the CRA and all of its subsequents; ended the universal franchise; made it generally impossible for women to be educated after high school unless they're becoming nurses; and, I don't know, banned most social media. If casual sex risks pregnancy and there is nothing to stop it and if for many women it would be financially ruinous to have a child if they don't have the father tied down, shouldn't wanton reproduction fall off a cliff?
All that aside, I've written here before how I think hard population control is an inevitability, but I think between us it's for every reason different. It's not healthy to live around more people than names and faces you can remember, the evidence for that piles by the year. Yeah we'll be able to provide for their physical needs, in that Malthus will be forever wrong, but we can't provide for their social needs and a failure to address that will end in total civilizational collapse. Not because of laziness, not some economic issue, just the opposite. Boredom. If tens of millions of young men find no purpose in virtual lives, if they have no real work and not even a prospect for productive labor because AGI is doing all the work the top 10% can't handle, if all they have to do is nothing, they'll get bored, and bored young men have quite the knack for finding a reason to burn everything down.
Why? I cannot imagine where you are coming from with this.
Luxury beliefs. Status signaling. Peacocking. This is a well understood phenomenon.
Do you want children, or already have them? If so, do you want them to be more successful than you or less? If there is a particular group you consider a net burden on society, then knowing BC's sterilization isn't going to happen, would you prefer their children eventually rise to be net gains for society or remain a burden?
Among the online right are people who attach a moral value to intelligence, in so doing they necessarily attach moral value to distance from animal urge. It's animal urge that says kill the other, it's the most base desire that pushes sterilization and eradication and it's not one whit different in heart than warring chimpanzees. Virtue makes neighbor of the other, and just as I want my great-grandchildren to be wildly smarter than me, I want the great-grandchildren of all my neighbors to be wildly smarter than me. And yours, and BC's, and everyone here.
Though neither is it virtuous to tolerate criminal and reprobate behavior. Caring for your neighbor can mean knowing what's best for them even when they don't, and that means punishing those who deserve punishment and withdrawing aid beyond bare necessity for those who waste in it. There must be a new inspiration of healthy respect for the just governor and fear of his righteous retribution. There must also be the pursuit of the virtuous solution to these antisocial populations: by changing their children. Not by the chimp's desire to murder them all, not the mythical and well-disproved social policy of uplift by schoolmarm, but in the technological promise of genetic modification.
There's the moral question of the practice, but it's a very low bar: a person who doesn't want their children to have a better life than their own may be disregarded. There's the practical question of whether it would actually work, fair, and of bad actors claiming uplifting therapies as a façade as they in fact modify to make slaves, also fair. If I were not convinced of its safety, I would vehemently oppose it. But in the moral abstract, if we have the ability to make our children healthier and smarter, we absolutely must.
This is what I target with the paragraph beginning "Of course the behavior of such people is very easy to explain . . . " Though I was unfair in it, I should have included "and people who are personally invested in acting in accordance with what they believe is best for all people" though I think that's the minority.
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