Scott has posted a discussion of the conversation about eugenics, framed as an actual conversation. I found it thought-provoking, as he made better arguments for both sides than I am used to seeing from either.
A: Given that mild, consensual forms of eugenics have historically led to extreme, horrifying versions, we have reason to believe the topic is a slippery slope which ought to be avoided outright.
B: This proves too much, as there are plenty of other ideas with similar history but much higher body counts. Thus eugenics ought to be carefully investigated rather than tabooed outright.
In the footnotes, he also presents C: Ehrlich did nothing wrong, and sometimes expected-value calculations don’t plan for the long tails. Democracy, as a form of distributed consent, is our best way to square this circle. This (correctly, IMO) leaves Scott uncomfortable. I appreciate that he included it.
I was not at all familiar with Ehrlich’s work, or with the quintessentially-McNamara history of Indian aid programs. Both add some valuable context for the argument. Oh, and I guess Scott talks about HBD a little bit; that’ll be catnip for this community, but it’s really secondary to the main thrust. Seriously, just read the article for a better version than anything I can write.
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Notes -
If anything, it's worse than that. From Ehrlich's Population Bomb, a book that sold 2 million copies:
Who can say how much of this stuff seeped into popular culture, how many children weren't born in the West due to the influence of this ideology? The overpopulation theory and Club of Rome stuff was also influential in China:
There is some debate about how accurate this is (other historians say the Party decided before asking scientists) but it's interesting that Maoist-era China used to be ideologically pro-natal on the simple logic of population=power. That still makes a lot of sense today. Why would they suddenly change their minds in the 70s and 80s?
It's silly in general terms to implement population control for fear of mass famine - food supply constraints automatically reduce population growth. People suffering malnutrition are less fecund. That's the regime we lived under for millennia. Population only grew like 0.1% a year or less in pre-industrial times.
Related discussion of news that the Chinese are refusing to have children.
Plus obligatory Is Yudkowsky the False Prophet Ehrlich was?
Why? Maybe because modern family life, especially modern Asian family life is nothing than endless pain and misery with no light spots and no happy end in sight?
Maybe when you tell people: "You spent half of your life as prisoner, now you have to spend the rest as prison guard", they will start doubting the whole idea?
Maybe the way to make people breed more is to find a way how to make family life more enjoyable and happier?
Or you can double down on "The Chairman Orders You To Breed For The Party And The Race!", this will certainly work this time.
And maybe it's easy to come up with a why that validates your political biases? Anyone's biases, really? Progressives don't want to subject their children to the horror of the environmental catastrophe, and Nazis tell me they won't bring Aryan children to suffer under the yoke of ZOG, and Yud says getting paperclipped is too cruel a fate, and Americans don't want to perpetuate corporate drudgery, and you've got your exploitation stories, and the Chinese have their millenia-old folksy sayings to the effect that the Confucian family unit is irredeemable Hell – sayings which have not dissuaded dozens of generations of their ancestors from acquiring the reputation of disgustingly fecund people in Western eyes. Maybe narratives ought to be checked.
Greer:
And on one hand, there are weird things about this specific form of antinatalism, but on the other I think the boring answer is the correct one. Children aren't worth it. To a childless person in a low-fertility atomized modern society, the benefits of having a child are either invalid (bloodline, dynasty, demographic competition with muh enemies) or unobservable, or dependent on other children in their environment; but costs are obvious and ruthlessly reinforced in public imagination by all responsible people, who only wish to warn you of the potential pitfalls.
Maybe the Party ought to make Kaplan mandatory reading or something. I don't know if that will trickle down to the policy level, though. All Kaplan says concretely is that our way of thinking about it is moronic, our anxious attempts at micromanaging life outcomes have extremely bad consequences, and we should take it easy. This doesn't, as a rule, persuade bureaucrats. Nor PMCs, nor women.
Also, roughly up until the Second Industrial Revolution, or whatever it's called, children normally were net economic producers after reaching the age of 8 or so.
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