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ACX: Galton, Ehrlich, Buck

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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.

Discuss.

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If anything, it's worse than that. From Ehrlich's Population Bomb, a book that sold 2 million copies:

The Ehrlichs float the idea of adding "temporary sterilants" to the water supply or staple foods. However, they reject the idea as unpractical due to "criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area."

They propose a powerful Department of Population and Environment which "should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment."

In the rest of the book the Ehrlichs discuss things which readers can do to help. This is focused primarily on changing public opinion to create pressure on politicians to enact the policies they suggest, which they believed were not politically possible in 1968.

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:

In 1980, the central government organized a meeting in Chengdu to discuss the speed and scope of one-child restrictions.[26] One participant at the Chengdu meeting had read two influential books about population concerns, The Limits to Growth and A Blueprint for Survival, while visiting Europe in 1980. That official, Song Jian, along with several associates, determined that the ideal population of China was 700 million, and that a universal one-child policy for all would be required to meet that goal.

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.

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.

I don't understand your argument. Why try to prevent famine when you could just have people die from famine? Why improve living standards when we could just live the same miserable lives that people lived for millennia? Really?

I am also sceptical of the claim that "food supply constraints automatically reduce population growth". The poorest and most famine-prone countries also have the highest population growth rates. Not fertility rates – net growth rates after child mortality and all that. Don't bring up food aid because nutrition is still inadequate even with food aid, yet this hasn't stopped the growth.

Why try to prevent famine when you could just have people die from famine? Why improve living standards when we could just live the same miserable lives that people lived for millennia?

Preventing famine by irrigating, storing food better, investing in green revolution tech, educating farmers on better techniques... is all great. Pre-emptive totalitarian population control and forced sterilization (by Alex-Jones-was-right-tier chemicals in the water supply) is not worth it.

Ehrlich made out apocalyptic famines to be a near-existential threat that needed massive government intervention to fix. It's not an apocalyptic-tier problem.

Finally, food supply constraints must automatically reduce population growth is on the same level as thermodynamics. There's clearly plenty of margin where population growth is possible despite having few calories per person, or low quality calories lacking in some vitamins. But a certain amount of calories must be produced to keep people alive. It's physically impossible for the population of Niger or the US for that matter to grow beyond what food supply can be found to meet it. Population growth has a hard cap in terms of food supply but for all modern countries the primary factors are things other than food costs.