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.
The one child policy article suggests that China mimicked the Western trend of scientific doomerism. Allegedly, it put a missile engineer in charge of population policy, so he tried to apply controls theory. It’s a cute story—“haha, China thought people were electronics!”—which leaves me a little suspicious. It also really leans on one source.
Another article suggests that this was cultural memory of the last century’s horrific famines. It had been 20 years since Mao fucked up the entire economy and caused the deaths of millions. I find it plausible that any middle-aged bureaucrats who came of age around that time were quite determined to avoid a repeat. The fact that lots of Mao-era collectivization policies were torn down around this time supports it. Keep in mind that this is the era of denouncing the Gang of Four and distancing party leadership from the Cultural Revolution.
I would argue that “population=power” didn’t make sense in the 50s. Mao’s attempts to turn that peasant population into industrial capacity were an abject disaster. Subsistence farmers did not provide the surplus needed to support such a population. Any benefit which arose from raising another 10 million farmers was immediately shredded by the inefficiencies of their command economy.
Today an individual farmer can produce a massive surplus, supporting a much larger pool of potential factory workers, scientists, and soldiers. But there are still bounds on how well that population can be exploited! Land usage. Equipment. Training time. Double the size of China’s army, but don’t double their fuel supply, and you get far less than double the return on investment. Population >= power.
China was very hard for Japan to conquer because it was so populated. China lacked modern equipment, funds, good organization and so on in WWII. But they were capable of withstanding horrific casualties because of their high population. In Korea, China used manpower-intensive tactics to largely counter US firepower superiority, things like infiltration tactics and night-fighting. They took enormous casualties but managed to retake North Korea. In the context of a nuclear war, China's large population was advantageous since it would take many many atom bombs to destroy their large, dispersed population.
Even though there are diminishing returns to population size, there are still gains to be had from size. The bulk of China's strength today surely stems from its enormous labour force of about 790 million. If China was a country merely at US size, it would only be a bigger Indonesia and not be much of a threat to the US.
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