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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.
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?
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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.
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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?
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Funnily enough given the large shortage of babies to adopt this would not be an issue nowadays in the west.
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The simple way to do it would be to make the marginal tax rate on female labor and female owned businesses 101%.
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