You know, I was going to reply that obviously the answer is that people don't like intervention in evolutionarily ancient processes like who to marry and how many kids to have. Then I remembered that eugenics was hugely popular in the early 1900s, with only the "backwards, ignorant" Church railing against the "progressive, scientific" idea. This suggests that humans are willing to accept such intervention, at least to a similar extent to which they accept wealth redistribution ("I'll do it if I get to tell other people how to do it, too.")
I wonder if the backlash against eugenics means we've permanently poisoned the well with regards to mating and childbirth intervention, from a baseline where we were actually fairly okay with it.
Maybe our strong instincts are against regulation of sex, rather than childbearing.
But sex is heavily regulated! Just try to have sex with a prostitute, or your sister, or an underage girl, or your employee, or boss, or a mentally retarded person ...
OCP hasn't been the responsibility of the central government for years. The provinces are, predictably, weakening the policy where politically feasible. From wikipedia:
In response to [4-2-1], all provinces have decided that couples are allowed to have two children if both parents were only children themselves: By 2007, all provinces in the nation except Henan had adopted this new policy; Henan followed in 2011.
People see choosing the number of children they have as a personal "right", so any direct intervention is going to be unpopular because of that. China's approach for instance is quite direct (they're not trying to do quite the same thing with the one-child policy, but there's similarities).
The trick is to be indirect. Policies that help poor people avoid children they don't intend to have (e.g. cheaper contraception) and that help rich people have more children (e.g. parental leave) can help indirectly, and are therefore good. The only thing I'd ...
I find it interesting nearly everyone thought of the eugenic angle since I didn't explicitly mention the hereditary argument at all. I suspect this is because people here are familiar with the high heritability and usefulness of traits like IQ. But lets assume for the sake of argument humans are blank slates when it comes to traits that affect income.
In that case the policy isn't weakened at all even if its only upbringing and social environments that matter. Increasing the proportion of children raised by rich people means they are more likely to end up...
An explanation, then a couple thoughts:
We find it justified to take children away from parents who we consider "guilty" - adults who can take on such a serious duty, but who then make decisions which fail to fulfill that duty. Neglect and abuse are considered to be the result of such decisions, while poverty is considered to be (often? always?) the result of bad luck. Teen parents aren't considered candidates for this level of guilt for the same reason that their partners might be considered candidates for statutory rape charges - it's presumed that teens are too young to be making mature decisions about sex.
If you really want to step into all your opponents' shoes, you need to consider that some of their models of the world aren't just "zero meritocracy", they're "moral anti-meritocracy", i.e. "rich people got that way by being more willing to step on poor people".
Specific policy implementation details might be seen as less offensive than the policy they're intended to promote. E.g. a progressive who currently considers you a eugenicist monster might nevertheless already be your ally for a few practical purposes, like subsidized access to birth control, and you might be able to talk them into others, like switching the estate tax exemption level from a per-estate to a per-inheritor amount.
"poor people should have fewer children, rich people more"
This is stated as an imperative on the parents, not as a desired outcome on poor and rich children. State it as, "poor children should have fewer siblings, and rich children more". Doesn't that already feel better? It changes focus from the people controlled by the policy, to the presumed beneficiaries. It hides the gun in the room. How about "Poor children should have fewer siblings so they receive more resources from their parents, and rich children should have more sibli...
A bit too political for LessWrong in my opinion ...
Yet a policy of "poor people should have fewer [X], rich people more" sounds heartless [...]
Indeed it does, any policy proposing new advantages for the rich and disadvantages for the poor sounds heartless, especially if it sounds like it's intruding in people's private lives (and the decision of whether to have kids is pretty darn private).
(I would probably tend to be in favor of such a policy, though a lot depends on how exactly it's implemented, but it's not very surprising that it sounds heartless; it is, but that doesn't make it automatically wrong)
I find it funny that the the policy seemingly advantages the rich and disadvantages the poor, but at this time both sides are totally free to go the other way and tend not to. You can talk about problems with access to birth control, but the rich could definitely have more children and do not.
Why is that?
It sounds like basic "who whom" stuff, as well as status. Saying "rich people should have more children because they're rich" can also seem like a status attack- how dare you assert that rich people are better in any way than poor people!
Until you have a world solution, any local solution that lowers the birth rate for your group simply makes your group less relevant in the future. The world is quite robust to the conclusion that "increasing population means you are winning."
As evidence for the above, consider that the most powerful countries have PILES of poor people (U.S., China, Russia) and the countries with the least amount of poor people are lower in power (Western Europe). Western Europe may be in the early stages of being slowly overrun by more prolific less intellect...
Why is that?
Because it is historically associated with policies of compulsory sterilization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization
Also because Christian morality is traditional against birth control and in favor of unchecked population growth.
Anyway, several countries, including China and India, currently implement policies of financial incentives/disincentives to limit population growth.
Before discussing possible policies, I would like to have some more information about the territory.
Specifically: Do most poor people actively want a lot of children, or is it rather something that happens to them while having sex? Either because they don't have money to use contraceptives, or are too stupid to use them properly, or simply at the moment of passion they forget to think about any related things... In other words, what exactly is the causal chain which creates most poor children? The answer could be different for different groups of people.
No...
Yet a policy of "poor people should have fewer children, rich people more" sounds heartless
To whom?
While easier, more accessible contraception would help, it wouldn't curb the reproduction of the most irresponsible people - those who don't think this stuff through at all, religious fanatics who believe God demands that they have more children whether or not they can support them etc.
You can safely make arguments for contraception by talking about having children later, but actively recommending how many children different subsets of people should have smacks of eugenics.
But wait recommending people have children later de facto significantly reduces their total fertility too.
Are we really that hypersensitive to eugenics? I think eugenics is a great idea, yet this feels a strange policy to promote despite this. I think there is something more primal going on with the weak link to eugenics being just a rationalization for it.
Eugenics wasn't considered crazy during its first wave of popularity.
And given that it was associated with the single biggest evil that modern society acknowledges - indeed, the only thing you can straight-facedly call "evil" without seeming really old-fashioned and unsophisticated, wouldn't it make sense that modern culture, having extirpated the offending government root and branch, would then proceed to salt the surrounding memetic ground within a 200 mile radius?
Heck, we now even have "creepy" associations with large well-coordinated military style ceremonies, something that every other country in the world did at the time.
It's because when you say "eugenics," most people hear "Nazism." The Nazis are the most mentally available example, and then the affect heuristic kicks in, causing people to despise the whole concept.
Obviously not. The number of people mentioned as affected in that article is tiny relative to the population, tens of thousands of people affected over a century in a country with a population of almost ten million today, and millions at the policies' peak. Fluctuations in immigration policy, nutrition, education, pollution, subsidized childcare, and gender equality would collectively dwarf any effect of those policies on Sweden's population composition.
Our current policies already mess with the human gene pool. A strong case has been made by some experts that humans have been self-domesticating for the better part of the last 10 000 years. You would actually need better knowledge of genetics to craft policies that don't mess with the gene pool than to craft policies that mess with it in likely desirable ways.
You don't really need to understand genetics very well to do eugenics see animal husbandry, the unintended consequences of it have proven to pretty manageable in animals (except in some breeds where targeting a certain appearance rather than temperament, physical ability or intelligence is the primary goal).
That's actually a really fascinating observation. Why is it okay to tell groups of people "You should delay childbearing by several years" but not okay to tell them "You should have fewer children"?
I wonder if this is because in near-mode, people model themselves as immortal, so sacrificing a few years is just consmuption-shifting and not an actual opportunity cost.
Distributing free contraceptives, without requiring people to posess or use one, only increases the range of options open to people. From any kind of utilitarian standpoint, this looks like helping people to achieve what they want (if they choose to use contraceptives, they don't want children) while also achieving what you want for them to do, which is a clear win.
Of course, from an American cultural and political point of view, this wouldn't fly, because the permissibility contraceptives is a big point of blue-green politics there. Even if only a minorit...
I was thinking about the idea of mandating that everyone above a certain age carry a condom at all times, the way in certain countries it is mandated to carry an identity document. This could help with one-night stands not using condoms due to the trivial inconvenience of getting one. (No idea of how widespread a problem that is, but I can see no obvious downside to this except the reaction of certain religious groups.)
Before implementing policy decisions based on logic, it is worth checking if a similar policy worked elsewhere. Are there countries or regions now or historically where poor people have fewer children than wealthy ones?
Given this community's decidedly unfirm grasp on most technical concepts from political science and moral philosophy, I don't think we can assume this. "gwern knows about topic X" is unfortunately not a reliable indicator of the LW knowledge base generally.
I recently read an article by Steve Sailer that reminded me about something I have been puzzled by for a long time. Relevant paragraphs:
If intellectuals could afford to have a lot of children, we might live in a world where they could sell enough heavyweight books to afford to have a lot of children. But we don’t.
So what should policy be?
In a recent article in the Boston Review, Heckman began, “The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today,” then went on to endorse the usual expensive “interventions” in poor families. Should we perhaps instead strive for a country with fewer accidental births?
All of Heckman’s data suggest that we should aim for fewer—but better—poor children. Encourage poor people to conscientiously concentrate their scant parental resources on one child rather than three or six.
The government has had a policy of dissuading teen births, which have indeed been declining. Why not try to similarly investigate ways to slow down the rate at which impoverished unwed mothers reproduce? For example, why not invest in R&D for better, easier-to-use long-term contraceptives? The FDA’s approval of an injection contraceptive in 1992 appears to have helped bring about both fewer teen births and fewer abortions. Wouldn’t continued improvement—and, just as importantly, continued encouragement of contraceptive use—be a win-win strategy for all of us?
Poor people having fewer children means that the children have more resources available per capita making the children better off. Rich people having more children actually increases equality in society since it reduces the per capita resource advantage their children have. Rich people giving to their children is also one of the few cases where the redistribution of wealth doesn't reduce incentives for wealth creation. Rich people care about their children too.
Since programs aimed at reducing teen pregnancy rates do seem to have had some effect, we known something like this is possible without being horrible to the potential parents it targets.
Yet a policy of "poor people should have fewer children, rich people more" sounds heartless despite increasing general welfare both by making poor children better off and by reducing the privilege of rich children thus increasing equality which we seem to think is ceteris paribus a good thing.
Why is that?
Edit: To test the source of the reader's intuiton (assuming he shares it with me), I encourage the consideration of two interesting scenarios that may depart from reality.