This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Fecund privilege and the oppression of those who do everything right
Democratic and progressive ideology assume that each person ought to be valued the same in equations of political power. Representatives are allotted according to the number of inhabitants, presidential elections are dictated by the popular vote of states, and equity calculations are informed by population percentages. The infrastructure of our popular ideology is undergirded by a strange and rather aged idea, that each individual magically gets the same political points of influence at birth, regardless of any greater social concern. Yet this way of thinking breaks down when real world social justice claims are considered.
Imagine a situation like the Rwandan Civil War, where the Tutsi minority were killed en masse by the Hutu and their population significantly reduced. It is not morally sufficient to compensate the families who lost loved ones and to punish individual actors. The loss in political power of the Tutsi demands justice, because their reduction in population along with their impoverishment leads to a real loss of political power. Ignoring the specific details of the actual Rwandan events and political system (for example’s sake), in a basic model of democracy the Tutsi could have their future completely controlled by their genociders forever, because the political power lost due to reduced population/fertility is not compensated. The Tutsi would have a legitimate moral claim to re-exert their old political power, and yet our old “magic value” way of thinking about democracy contains none of the complexity necessary to make sense of the Tutsi claim. Adherents can only glue the justice together with ad hoc formulations, perhaps implementing a regional governance system or property compensation system or something other thing which avoids the real substance of the claim. This proves that there are moral considerations involving democratic power that are not adequately addressed by fecund privileged ideology.
For a second thought experiment, imagine two regions of a nation with different cultural values and interests. As chance would have it, a neighboring country invades one region and a defense is launched, and the invaded region valiantly defends the whole of the nation from the invaders. As a consequence their population is halved. The region behaved perfectly and sacrificed itself for the whole of the nation is now the one who might forever lose its past political influence. Does the “sacrificing” region have a moral claim that their loss of political power should be compensated in some form? If they do not, then the basis of our political system appears capricious and superstitious. A constituency of a nation can do all the right things and be harmed from it, or can be harmed from chance. And this for reason other than the idea that the number of current human lives is somehow inexplicably valued over every greater concern, despite this number being essentially governed by chance and historically untied to production or any good.
Perhaps one last example. Within a tribe of 400 humans, 100 of them decide to spend more time working for the good of society, spending more hours raising up two great children versus their neighbors who have 8 and spend little time with them. Within the current fecund privileged system of democracy, the tribesmen who are putting in effort to make the whole of society better by raising better children wind up worse off than their less-caring neighbors, who inherit more of the tribe, whose families increase in influence, and who proliferate their habits and genes. (Remember that humans are living organisms governed by concerns of gene proliferation as much as a fruit fly or gorilla, and it makes no sense to pretend it isn’t so, but even without genes, we can see how worse habits are proliferated). The tribesmen who make the better decision are punished in influence.
To hit home on my bolded assertion above: A constituency of a nation can do all the right things and be harmed from it, or can be harmed from chance. Our society, implicitly and explicitly, discourages high fecundity among those who do absolutely everything right. Our best and most obedient citizens are pressured toward paths that make fecundity difficult, and are propagandized to actually place a ceiling on their number of progeny. They are told that overpopulation is a problem and they incorporate that idea into their future family plans. They are doing everything right and their ancestors will be punished for it, with reduced political power due to the capricious notion of fecund privilege. Their cultural, behavioral, and genetic legacy is irrevocably worsened for making the right choices.
The children of our best doctors will have their power dwarfed by the children of a random 7/11 attendant who happens to be a Salafist, or a Hasidic person who abuses tax schemes to study only his holy book, or an Amish farmer who contributes little to the polity, or the migrants of a random Nigerian that chose children over more prosocial concerns. The legitimate moral concerns of our best citizens have no way to be expressed through the decrepit ideology of “magical political power allotment” and “fecund privilege”. The result is that the descendants, constituency, culture, genes etc of our best and brightest are oppressed by those who simply ignored the greater moral concerns and popped out more babies.
It's worth considering that in the case of severe civil wars, you might not want a one-state-solution at all. The current international relations regime is very anti-breakaway because it's made up of states that of course don't want breakaway regions to escape.
As for the rest of your argument, you're looking through an interesting lens, but not the one democracy is built around. Democracy is meant to serve living, voting individuals, not ghosts or imagined futures.
just reasserting that each person ought to get one vote doesn’t meet my argument head-on. I know it does. Why should it?
Because dead people's interests can't be served in any meaningful way?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is an obvious weakness of the generalization that all lives are equally valuable, equally deserving of support and of political power. It's open to all kinds of abuses and unintentional failures. But adding to that some system of weighting that aims to compensate for things as nebulous as historical injustice or antisocial behavior or suboptimal parenting would open it up to even more egregious abuses on the parts of anyone who gets to set the weights.
More options
Context Copy link
California has rules about how many women and ethnic minorities must be on corporate boards. We know universities have a bias against Asians, non-legacy whites and a bias for hispanics and especially blacks. We can just use these tools to social engineer our way to encourage higher fertility. At least most people can in principle be parents, while it's somewhat frowned upon if you pretend to be Native American or otherwise 'Indigenous' to get social privileges in university admission or elsewhere in politics.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/10/10/new-law-requires-diversity-on-boards-of-california-based-companies/
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/577722-more-than-a-third-of-white-students-lie-about-their/
We could legislate that companies must have a certain number of parents in high positions. You could improve it further by saying you get a composite score based on X number of children who meet X educational/health/other standards if you're worried about people neglecting their children. I think this would be a good kind of social credit score, perhaps getting additional points for military service or employment in prioritized sectors. If we really need aerospace or semiconductor experts, we should say '+100 social credit for those who meet X standard and work Y years in the sector'. You'd lose points for crime, obesity and maybe other antisocial activities. Your score would be an important factor in whether you get a promotion at work, whether you're hired or get into a prestigious university, it would get you a lighter sentence if you're found guilty of a crime before dropping accordingly. Maybe you'd get lower income tax as well.
Before people attack me about the authoritarian implications, we already have this system albeit informally, distributed between various institutions. This only quantifies it and redirects the energy in a meritocratic direction. It's much fairer for you to be judged on your actions than on your identity. I foresee objections about using the weapon of the Enemy against them, about losing our values. My answer is that sometimes fire must be fought with fire. If they have the Bomb, so must we. The power of the state and bureaucratic, freedom-reducing mechanisms like this is on a secular increase as technology improves and wealth increases. Somebody has to be privileged systematically in society, it's better that the rich and virtuous (or whatever approximation of such can be quantified) are privileged than the rich and tribalist/narcissistic.
What about people who don't have children because for reasons of health problems (physical, mental, whatever) they would be generating more of that inferior stock that OP was concerned about? Would they get credit points for not reproducing inferior children?
Rewarding people for negative action is rarely a good idea, it creates all kinds of distortions. It's the difference between rewarding/punishing and paying tribute.
You'd simply not get credit points for having bad children, or perhaps have them taken away if they're of the kind that has multiple arrests under the age of 18.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You never actually get around to describing what "justice" "demands" in a situation like this one. I don't think you or anyone else can actually articulate a just response to genocide. I think this is a problem, because you're setting up your reasoning around a moral problem that has no adequate solution, and so can be used to justify any inadequate solution.
You've made a reasonable argument that democracy is not actually a general solution to the problem of governance. This is a serious problem to those who take a principled stance that democracy is such a general solution. If such people exist, I do not think you will find them here. Assigning this particular failure mode of democracy "fecund-privileging ideology" gives us no new information to work with, other than you apparently don't like people having kids the wrong way, whatever that is.
Yes. Life is unjust in an infinite number of ways, for arbitrary definitions of "justice". If you and yours die in defense of an ideal, the actual day-to-day upholding is going to have to be done by those who survive you. This is one of the costs of dying for something, and why you want to do it only for things actually worth dying for. Yes, this can be described as "unjust". You are free to bring charges against Causality in whatever court will take the case.
They also decided who to share a tribe with, and how. Maybe they should have made those decision better. No one is entitled to a perfect society. We all receive the society we collectively make together. Sometimes this is deeply unfair to those of us who actually try to build society up, as opposed to those who simply consume and destroy. There are mechanisms to handle this problem; we choose not to use them. If that choice results in bad outcomes, perhaps it was a bad choice?
And of course, the choice of how to have children, the choice of who to have them with, and the choice of how to raise them are likewise all extremely important. Choosing poorly has serious consequences, for oneself and for others.
It seems to me that you're groping around the idea that humans have a responsibility to those around them to make good choices, not just from their own selfish perspective, but in some greater, more "objective" sense. I think it evident that society as a whole is coming around to this idea, but both you and society are doing so in a completely backward and counter-productive fashion, and for much the same reason: neither of you want to accept that the old conservative formulations actually worked, and what we've replaced them with does not. Democracy works when values are homogenous and coherent. It stops working when values drift to incoherence. "we're all in this together" works so long as there's a meaningful "we". There's no need for "fecund privilege", especially since without fecundity there is no future to be concerned about.
Framing something as a moral failure doesn't actually make it a moral failure, and there is no guarantee that any given injustice can actually be made whole in any meaningful sense. Failure to recognize these two truths results in much moral confusion.
I’m not sure if “genocide is fundamentally unsolvable” cuts it. Were we to ask the Tutsi what moral demands they have, one of them would surely be the reinstantiation of their past political influence. And so a model that de-prioritizes births as a metric of power is already better justice than the democracy model. We note that the Tutsi as a cohort were harmed, that they are a group whose power was unjustly cut, and we address that harm against the cohort. This is already moral progress!
The Tutsi are ALREADY back in charge. They got right back up on that tiger.
as I specified in my OP we are discussing a hypothetical example based on the Rwandan genocide
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why is that an acceptable demand? Why is that a sufficient demand? How do we distinguish it from "we have to do something, this is something, so we have to do this"?
You're claiming that reinstatement of past political influence moves us from less justice to more justice, but I submit that a similar claim could be made for nearly any action, and with a near-identical amount of rigor. I don't see how "reinstatement of past political influence" actually solves the problem of genocide in any meaningful way. The problem with genocide isn't loss of political power, it's all the people that get killed. How does giving people who didn't get killed more political influence straightforwardly address that problem?
I don't concede that there is a way to solve the problem of genocide; it's not axiomatically obvious why there should in principle be any such solution at all. Counter-genocide or mass enslavement approach the magnitude of the crime, but are themselves unacceptably monstrous. Anything less seems grossly insufficient, at which point the argument isn't about justice, but rather about things we want for other reasons. You can't demand something through an appeal to justice if it doesn't meaningfully secure justice.
I don't see how. It's not obvious to me that apportionment of democratic power is itself necessarily moral in any meaningful sense. Are all non-democratic societies inherently immoral? I certainly don't think so.
Births mattering is contingent on the populations having values-incoherence. If the populations were values-coherent, there would be no genocide and birth-rates would be irrelevant. But if the populations are values-incoherent, how does "de-prioritizing births as a metric of power" help to solve the resulting conflicts?
The basic problem you're looking at is that different groups of people have trouble getting along. I agree that democracy doesn't actually solve this problem, as it just encourages people to frame one of the most basic and necessary functions of society, the production of future generations, as another front for tribal warfare. What I don't see is any argument why the majority in an established democracy should cede power to a minority because the two groups don't like each other. That's... not really how people work, and vague claims that it's "moral progress" seem unlikely to bridge the gap.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not clear to me why some group of people (genetic or cultural or whatever) has a right or is otherwise entitled to retain the same relative political power they have compared to other groups at some time T into the future.
Hell it's not even clear to me that groups of people have any rights.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are we sure that having more children is anti correlated with being a productive member of society in any kind of strong way? Church attendance is strongly correlated with all kinds of good outcomes and pro social behavior, after all. While Hasidic mooching is a legit problem, you haven’t actually presented any reasons that the other two aren’t productive members of society whose children will contribute much more than Boston brahmins’ will.
More options
Context Copy link
Okay, so what are you doing? Are you having 2-4 children? Or are you writing social media pieces about "me and my kind are the natural superiors of the species, evolution has proven it, so the inferior types should be prevented from having kids because I don't like that my choices as to having more money and time to spend on myself now mean that I have no descendants"?
It's simple: if you think the problem is "the people who do the right things, think the right things, behave the right way and are the right people" are being out-bred, get married and have kids. "Oh I can't do that because...." No, you can. If someone can have eight kids living on a farm or working in a convenience store, there is nothing stopping you.
If you want to fight climate change, why not simply stop using all petroleum products and derivatives?
The individual impact from doing so is absolutely negligible
It only works if everyone does it at the same time
The costs of doing so unilaterally are significant in a system that assumes petroleum products are the only/dominant method for transport, materials, fertilizer, energy...
You can't complain about "fecund privilege" and then say that it's different if you don't have any kids. If OP is worried that the future will belong to the inferior masses who spawn without caring, then having kids is doing something about it. If he doesn't have any kids, then the future won't affect his hypothetical genetic lineage since it won't exist.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
“Be the change you want to see in the world” is not the right fit for the discussion of politics and culture. People debate these things to determine the truth and the right path forward. It’s pretty important to have the right outlook on life, is it not? And the whole concept of a forum is predicated on the value of persuasion. Like, you can easily criticize several millennia of theology and philosophy with this kind of idea.
What’s more, some sort of Malthusian breeding competition would be a tragedy for the entire world and completely ignores that pollution/resources/etc are a factor of population. If it is the case that overpopulation is a problem, “stop thinking and knock up baddies” is poor advice that runs into serious problems longterm.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Idiocracy: The Motte Post Adaptation
But seriously:
The main issue with your Tutsi and Hutu example, and the first part of your argument is you completely sidestep liberalism. If you're going to discuss this issue you really need to address liberalism directly at some point. Your argument is predicated on the primacy of the social group collectively. The classical liberal perspective have very little to say about groups or identity, and pretty much exclusively focused on the individual. So what if there are less Tutsis? Ethnic social categories like Tutsi and Hutu are (or rather, wishfully) obsolete under the liberal framework. There is merely the primacy of the individual. You need to rebut liberalism. Why, when we live in a liberal world, should we care about things 'cultural, behavioral, and genetic legacy'. They do nothing for me as an individual, except what utility they can provide me in the here and now, not when I'm dead. The future belongs to those who show up, and who shows up depends on who cares who shows up when you're gone.
Secondly, the people who 'did everything right' actually didn't do everything right. They forgot to have children. You're kind of using 'everything right' here to have two meanings. You're using it to be tongue-in-cheek by using the word 'right' to mean 'everything society told them was right'. Which fair enough, I think people have been deceived into an atomized, individualistic, hedonistic lifestyle that I think is both morally wrong and ultimately unfulfilling. But they also bear some personal responsibility in the path that they have chosen.
But you also seem to be unironically using 'right' to mean actually morally right, because you actually do seem to think they are right by evidence by your distain of those who actually do have children as lessers. They can't have it both ways. Either they're an atomized liberal individual who doesn't care about their 'legacy' or social units other than the self, making your whole point moot, or they do care about those things, so they should and probably will actually have children then. Your complaint seems to be that the educated, liberal, intelligent people aren't having enough kids. In that case your focus should be telling them them to go have kids rather than just complaining about 'fecund privilege' that the 'lessers' are actually doing the right thing by having kids.
More options
Context Copy link
There are many non-majoritarian institutions which address your general concern, including consociationalism and the various limits on majoritarianism enshrined in the US Constitution
See also the work of Lani Guinier And, no, her arguments explicitly apply to all minority groups, including, eg, evangelical Christians, not just to racial minorities.
You are making a lot of unwarranted assumptions here, including 1) that the legitimate moral concerns of our "best citizens" generally differ in any substantial way from the the legitimate moral concerns of our not-so-best citizens; 2) that, even if they are in the minority, the concerns have "no way of being expressed"; 3) that somehow the descendants thereof will be "oppressed" simply because they are outvoted; and 4) that the descendants of members of each group will have interests, moral views, etc, identical to those of the members themselves.
Re 1, my sentence was unclear — the first moral concern is “creating healthier/better humans versus abundant humans”, a concern of many wealthy westerners, and the second moral concern in the sentence is just that fecund people get privileged legacy, influence, and control in democracy. Re 2, this concern over downstream consequences of fecund privilege has no way of being expressed with the dogmas of democratic ideology, I argue (I see no evidence the concern can be expressed). 3, being stripped of your influence for capricious reasons is itself oppression.
Per 4, they need not be identical to qualify as oppressed — it is sufficient that they share in culture, behaviors, habits, and/or genes which all children and parents have in common to some significant degree. And indeed, the parents are oppressed for having their legacy reduced in influence.
Well you see, it's kind of difficult for "the voters of the future who never came into existence because their potential parents preferred to have fun summer vacations in trendy Lonely Planet spots and go out to dinner every night in the quaint ethnic restaurants of their multicultural big city never bothered to have them" to get to vote on things or take control or do much of anything, seeing as how they're non-existent.
"Oh no, my non-existent grandchildren will be overwhelmed by the seventy grandkids of those low-class people who had babies and whose babies grew up to have babies!" I cry salt tears for your pain, I do. If only there were something you could have done, like having kids of your own to bring up in the values you espouse as the only right and good ones. But of course, that would have meant having kids and raising the brats and all that trouble and bother.
Your entire argument presupposes fecund privilege, whereas I’m arguing against it. You are saying “they are blamed for not having children, which is how I measure political power in democracy”. I am saying that it’s a poor and capricious measure of political power that doesn’t satisfyingly answer moral concerns. So, yes, we could blame them, if we wanted. Or we could not, and instead consider a better way to disperse political power. Democracy is not some ingrained facet of human nature, like genetic and behavioral legacy.
Ah, you mean have a special caste of self-selected people who are so much brainier and nicer and all the rest of it, so they should set out how the world runs for the rest of us? And just by sheer coincidence, they get to decide that what members of their caste like and want happens, and their caste gets all the goodies first?
Yes, that'll have no problems at all!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That seems a very odd definition of "oppressed." Are people who are pro-choice oppressed if the majority of their neighbors elect a pro-life representative to their state legislature? Or if a ballot initiative banning abortion passes? My values are almost certainly different than those of my grandfather; is he oppressed thereby? if so, your definition of "oppressed" reduces the term to a triviality that carries little moral weight and hence is irrelevant.
If I arbitrarily take thousands of dollars from someone and their family, and they have no recourse, it would be an oppressive action and they would be said to suffer from oppression. If I arbitrarily take their property, it would be oppression. And so this same idea of oppression is merely extended, to something more important than money or property, which is the ability for people to fairly and justly have influence over political matters and the future of their community.
Pro-choice voters would be oppressed if pro-life voters had extra points allotted to their vote. And fecundity places extra points on groups and “kinds of people” capriciously.
Granted, but there are strong trends of political interest by demographics and families, and so while in your case you “accidentally” happen to be unaffected, that doesn’t mean others aren’t negatively affected. There are also other ways in which your influence is reduced — not at all the polls but still in the polis. If you have to transfer your resources to others with worse values and behaviors, or your children attend a school in which worse students negatively affect your children, or you have to pay more for policing. Now I suppose we can construe these things to also be political opinions (“I am pro all welfare and redistribution”), but it takes the bite out of the moral claims underlying these things, and then it’s the question of “is a slave who loves his slavery really a slave?”
You have that influence right now. If you want to continue having that influence once you are dead, then yeah, it depends on your descendants. You don't get to moan about "fecund privilege" if you can't have a dead man's hand control over the future, which you never invested in by having children, because you only cared about the right-now.
I do not want humanity to become a dystopian baby- making competition. And I see no reason why births or babies should have anything to do with political power. And so I get to argue against it because I think it’s a bad philosophy. And you get to moan about my arguing against it.
Well, see, it's because people. People only come about via births and babies. No people, no reason for politics or political power. "I have no kids and will be dead in thirty years but I should get to set the course of society long after I'm dead" isn't much of an argument. If you're dead, you no longer have an interest in society. The people alive at the time have that interest. You may think that such-and-such a system will mean a better future for all, but once you're dead, the people carrying out that plan will be those who, you know, are the result of births and babies.
If you have no babies, then the people who do have babies are going to end up with the political power, because they are the people who are going to be around and alive when it comes to politics.
More options
Context Copy link
There are nations. nations have borders. Within those borders, they have distinct cultures. Cultivate a good culture within your nation's borders, and if you build something worthwhile, don't allow people from incompatible cultures to enter in too-large numbers. Perhaps more importantly, recognize that culture isn't just something that happens, and take the control and shaping of your culture very seriously.
More options
Context Copy link
This seems like the astronaut gun astronaut meme, humanity always has been a baby making competition. The gigantic change we're reeling from over the last two generations is technology that makes it relatively easy for women not to regularly make a baby during their fertile years.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Now you are using more terms (arbitrarily, unjustly) without defining them or explaining why they rise to the level of oppression.
You are completely moving the goal posts. Your claim was that "parents are oppressed for having their legacy reduced in influence" -- i.e., that my grandfather is oppressed by my rejection of his values, not that I am.
Democratic ideology already acknowledges that, were a power to take the property of a citizen without good reason, it would constitute oppression. I’m arguing that fecund privilege is arbitrary because it reduces the power of cohorts of citizens, whether we’re looking at cultural or genetic cohorts etc. It is arbitrary because it reduces the power of a cohort for something out of their control —in some cases the antisocial actions of others — and which has no bearing on the functioning of the polity (the number of children of others). As the examples have shown, a cohort that does all of the right things will have their power arbitrarily reduced.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arbitrary
As my claim is that children are connected to their parents in identity (well-acknowledged across domains, and even in progressive ideology), a grandchild shares in the oppression of their grandfather just like a Tutsi in the fallout of genocide. If a Tutsi has to live under a society governed by Hutu because they committed genocide against his grandfather’s generation, that Tutsi is oppressed. Also, my argument answers why your grandfather would be oppressed: “there are strong trends of political interest by demographics and families,” and “shared values and behaviors”. His influence over the polity is reduced in a Democracy-filled polity, even if you vote totally different.
We already have a system that allows for inheritance of power, concentration where you have fewer kids and disbursement when you have more: it's called property.
Why turn votes into property?
More options
Context Copy link
Well, speaking of arbitrary, you are arguing that my grandchild should be given more political power than someone else's, simply because of decisions their grandparents made. That is the quintessence of reducing the power of someone for something out of their control.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This sound really similar to the "cities are IQ shredders" argument. IMO the only way to fix this is by gov't fiat since the benefits from incentivizing eusocial/high IQ people to reproduce accrue to a society as a whole over a long time period rather than to a specific company or individual, and so they are not selected for in a liberal, capitalistic, relatively hedonistic society.
How are you going to have government make the eusocial/high IQ people have children? You can't pay them enough to give up time for having babies. Look at all the fear-mongering about 'forced birth' due to the Roe versus Wade decision on abortion. A woman who thinks becoming pregnant and becoming a mother is going to ruin her life is not going to be enticed by "we'll give you a free childcare place for every baby you pop out". She doesn't want any babies in the first place.
Have fun being compared to Ceaușescu when the government tries to bring in pro-birth policies:
You sure about that? How much do you think it would cost?
More options
Context Copy link
I wasn't specific enough in my post. No need to tell me to "have fun being compared to Ceaușescu." I don't think it's a good idea for the governments in present day western democracies to try to implement pro-natal policies for exactly the reasons you described in your post. These policies wouldn't address whatever phenomena are causing men and women to delay or forgo having children. You would first need to fix those issues. What I was trying to get at in my previous post was that even if you fixed those issues you wouldn't be able to rely on the market or individuals to encourage high IQ people to reproduce. Individuals (absent religious belief, and sometimes even with it) and the market have short time horizons. You would need a state, a church, or some institution with deep and secure foundations to invest in something that will only show dividends after several human lifetimes.
More options
Context Copy link
You could tie corporate advancement to the number of children someone has. California has rules about how many women and ethnic minorities must be on the board.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/10/10/new-law-requires-diversity-on-boards-of-california-based-companies/
You could legislate that companies must have a certain number of parents in high positions. You could adapt it further by saying you get a composite score based on X number of children who meet X educational/health/other standards if you're worried about people neglecting their children.
I reckon this would have enormous impacts in East Asia, where kids study for ages to get good exam results, good university scores in the hope of getting a good job, where they then work really hard for very long hours. They obey incentives. If they were told to have children, they'd probably do that too. Shouldn't it be easier to make people have unprotected sex than study calculus?
More options
Context Copy link
Funnily enough given the large shortage of babies to adopt this would not be an issue nowadays in the west.
More options
Context Copy link
The simple way to do it would be to make the marginal tax rate on female labor and female owned businesses 101%.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link