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Notes -
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...
Wild animals live in extreme poverty. They are crappy parents by human standards and give birth to stupid kids.
Perhaps wild nature is in fact a giant suffering engine that should be abolished in its current form.
Perhaps we're all fallen creatures and everything has been getting worse since we were banished from the garden of Eden, even if almost everybody thinks things have actually been getting better (sometimes this belief has been called the Cult of Progress)
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