Analyses of responses indicated nontrivial support for most of the eugenic policies asked about, such as at least 40% support for policies encouraging lower levels of reproduction among poor people, unintelligent people, and people who have committed serious crimes. Support for the eugenic policies often associated with feelings about the target group and with the perceived heritability of the distinguishing trait of the target group. To the extent that this latter association reflects a causal effect of perceived heritability, increased genetic attributions among the public might produce increased public support for eugenic policies and increase the probability that such policies are employed.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who remarks, “Sad, but not surprising.”
To me, what is sad is that Zigarell strongly implies that suppressing the truth about heritability would lead to better policy outcomes. I may be reading more into those sentences that I should, but I want to argue against suppressing scientific findings about heritability.
The thing is, everyone has an intuition that there is heritability. Humans always have had that intuition, and we always will. Progressive have that intuition just as much as anyone else.
Suppressing the truth about heritability is not a good idea. Some people’s intuition over-estimates heritability, and for them the scientific findings about heritability might actually reduce those over-estimates.
Moreover, suppose that people who favor eugenic policies think that you are lying to them to try to change their minds. That will just make them more difficult to persuade. Instead, if they believe that you are trying to tell the truth, then they will listen to the case against eugenic policies.
As more people become dependent on government support, we are likely to hear more calls for both eugenics and euthanasia (neither word deserves its prefix).
It is interesting that the writer uses a scare word like “eugenics” (implying sterilization) for “policies encouraging lower levels of reproduction” – which probably just means NOT encouraging higher levels of reproduction. Do we really want to encourage people who have committed serious crimes, or people dependent on public assistance, to have large numbers children?
Implicit in the abstract, as in most progressive discourse on domestic issues, is the view that maximizing the portion of the population that is self-supporting, law-abiding, tax-paying and not in need of the attention of social workers is an illegitimate policy goal.
The nature/nurture question is important, but even assuming for the sake of argument that “nurture” is the key factor – we would still have no idea how to change kids’ “nurturing” to significantly reduce disparities of outcomes among different groups. Does anyone really think that more school funding or hiring more social workers is going to change the prospects of kids from housing projects or opioid-ridden Appalachian hamlets?
It’s interesting how quick talk of eugenics goes to death camps and forced sterilization. Since it’s gated, it’s unclear what exact policies these people support. I kind of doubt those are it.
Eugenics could mean something like LKY providing support to help well educated women find mates. Or fidgeting with financial incentives for having children. Or implementing changes to immigration policy. Almost every single country in the OECD has a points based immigration policy that is basically a eugenics policy controlling who gets in.
Abortion could be seen as a kind of eugenics policy. Weren’t Europeans proud that they had “virtually wiped out downs syndrome”.
My view is that domestically the first world we don’t have an urgent dysgenic crisis (speaking only of native birthrates, lets leave immigration aside for now).
It would help to encourage more childbearing by the middle class on up. Some of this could be achieved with financial incentives (but they would need to be a lot bigger), but culture itself is at least as big an issue if not more important. The real shortfall in child rearing comes from liberals. As the country gets more liberal, expect lower childbearing, especially amongst the professional class.
Globally I do think we have a eugenic crisis. I already think immigration is bad enough, but as those smart Asians die off and Africa explodes we are going to have a lot of problems. Either we figure out reliable, safe, cheap-ish, and effective genetic screening/enhancement relatively soon or we might be screwed if they immigrate.
I once took the UN population estimates (which already built in sharp declines in fertility in places like Africa) and tried to model out global productivity under various scenarios (high and low immigration, etc). I assumed China continue to catch up with the OECD, but that it might start to hit a demographic problem in a generation. What I came up with is that things would generally get better for another generation (almost entirely due to China), but then decline as genetic capacity declined. Especially in those countries that allowed immigration. You also saw a decline in what we might call “OECD middle class” as a % of world pop in a generations time, and a lot more “middle income trap” levels of household wealth. The % of population living in extreme poverty (I think I used less then $10 a day, I know some people brag about lowering the number of people living on less then $1 a day…but can you even imagine living on $2, $5, etc…$10 seems pretty damn low to me) didn’t really budge because you just get more and more Africans.
Basically, it was all downhill after 2050. Here’s hoping genetic engineering solves the problem by then.
America’s most significant “eugenics” policy is a project of the Left – the promotion of birth control and abortion to the poor. Apparently, the progressive left hand does not know what the progressive right hand is doing.
Progressives are pro abortion for two reasons:
1) If their little girl gets in trouble, they want an out.
2) Being pro-abortion is wrapped up in being pro-sexual promiscuity.
I agree that being pro-abortion makes their views on human rights seem really nonsensical and hypocritical to a lot of people.
Outside of things like aborting people with Downs Syndrome, I’m not overly convinced abortion is eugenic. It could easily be the case that having a get out of jail free backup leads to more reckless sex and more pregnancies, at least some of which end up going to term. Abortion laws don’t seem to affect overall fertility too much.
Regardless, fertility amongst the poor is barely above 2.0. Absent immigration it would not be a worry.
I agree with all that, but by their own lights, progressives are engaging in racist eugenics by promoting birth control and abortion to racial minorities. African Americans do have a higher abortion rate than other US racial groups. The left’s various agendas don’t always cohere.
The blacks want to abort their own babies. So they don’t take offense.
Abortion laws don’t seem to affect overall fertility too much.
????? Most developed world passed abortion laws in the 1970s and birth rates dropped in the 1970s. Reasons why abortion laws lower fertility:
1) Nate Silver Political Opportunity Cost plays a big role here. So with legal abortion, Ross Douthat conservatives don’t spend as much time arguing against birth control and thus legal abortion ensured the population easier access to birth control.)
2) It is a way out of getting into trouble.
Condoms are cheap and widely available. The problem is when people are too impulsive to use them.
Fertility fell in countries that didn’t legalize abortion (like Ireland) and fell before abortion was even a medically sound practice (France in the 19th century). There just isn’t much evidence that abortion effects fertility rates.
Regardless, fertility amongst the poor is barely above 2.0. Absent immigration it would not be a worry.
Remains a problem if the wealthy have a circa 1.4 fertility. The mix of the population drifts downward.
Yes, but “we need to encourage smart people to have more kids, which they already state they desire” isn’t exactly Auschwitz.
A lot of this makes the assumption that Africa birth rates don’t continue (slowly) to fall and Far Asia doesn’t take more Immigrants. However, the alt right dream of dirty Third World focused on India not Africa and at this point India is near/equal to replacement level fertility with the the middle class South leading the lower birth rates. In fact, most estimates suggest the peak population will be ~2050 so a lot of this may almost invisible hand work itself out.
Yes, if Asia takes more immigrants things could get a lot worse. I assumed that they would remain at higher productivity levels but would start to have lots of retirees. If immigration lowers their productivity that could be a negative. I think that Asians will protect themselves, but I could be wrong.
African fertility is stubbornly high. I used the UN projections, which include a large decline in fertility in Africa, and it’s still not enough (and could easily be worse than the projection). Africans are the bottom of the barrel, perhaps they won’t even follow the middle rungs fertility patterns.
I don’t know what the “alt-right dream” is. Camp of the Saints was written in 1973, long before I was born. I would think the brown people in the novel are interchangeable, and Africans will do as well as Indians.
India itself seems to have a problem where the (better) South has a consistently lower fertility than the (worse) North, even as they both decline.
Regarding the suggestion that “‘policies encouraging lower levels of reproduction’…probably just means NOT encouraging higher levels of reproduction”, the encouragement items were phrased like this:
Which policy do you prefer in the list below?
* Encouraging poor people to have fewer children
* Encouraging poor people to have more children
* Neither of the above
And if the suggestion is that I used the word “eugenics” to imply sterilization, I used the term “eugenic policies” to describe policies that cannot reasonably be pursued via sterilization, such as encouraging intelligent people to have more children and encouraging wealthy people to have more children.
I challenge anyone to come up with a morally valid use for heritability estimates and eugenics other than prophylactic medicine.
Easy.
Any situation which some preference can be gleaned from genetic predisposition, and where individual judgement isn’t possible. Total utility should be higher using statistical discrimination over a random selection.
Consider, families are applying to move to Mars. Many have babies whose preferences are unknown. If we know some traits are heritable and correlate with being unhappy on mars, we should reject those who have too much of that trait. Additionally if you are planning to have a baby you should do PGD selection to ensure your baby will thrive in the new environment.
Just wondering. Are you unhappy there?
Tom: cute, but Matthew wins the argument.
So let me get this straight. You believe his morally valid use case of filtering who is likely to be happy moving to Mars wins the argument?
Perhaps you were more persuaded by his fist two sentences:
“Any situation which some preference can be gleaned from genetic predisposition, and where individual judgement isn’t possible. Total utility should be higher using statistical discrimination over a random selection.”
Again, please come up with a scenario when that particular set of conditions exist. Show me a single instance where:
“some preference can be gleaned from genetic predisposition”
and
“individual judgement isn’t possible”
morally valid use for heritability estimates and eugenics
Is maintaining modern industrial society morally valid?
If you want to maintain the electric grid; modern medicine; a court system; etc; you need to maintain a base intelligence level in the population; and this includes attention to heritability.
This isn’t an argument or an example. You are simply asserting you are correct.
Modern industrial society emerged without such maintenance, and there is no evidence to suggest the concept is even valid.
Does anyone here support central economic planning? Does anyone think some form of top down genetic planning would be easier?
Physical and mental performance is heritable and important.
You already admit medical reasons; why reject other reasons?
You are asserting that all men are created equal; life experience dictates otherwise.
“Physical and mental performance is heritable and important.”
Yes they are. They are also complex, chaotic assemblages. Your position presumes some sort of useful scientific command over complex heritability. That is not in evidence.
“You already admit medical reasons; why reject other reasons?”
Sometimes, specific medical issues have a set of causes that are possible to isolate. When that can be proven, it can make sense to address a specific set of genes, which we do know how to manage. That is not true for highly complex trait sets like intelligence and character.
“You are asserting that all men are created equal; life experience dictates otherwise.”
When did I assert that? Let me help you. Never.
What I asserted is that heritability as a social science tool is junk science because it is weak data with no use case for it. I’m still waiting for a someone to come up with a valid use case.
What I asserted is that heritability as a social science tool is junk science because it is weak data with no use case for it. I’m still waiting for a someone to come up with a valid use case.
So, when data and a good case comes in, you will be on board?
Twin and adoption studies that link heritability with a suite of useful social traits is one of the better social science findings. Rejecting such while waiting for more perfection is engaging in a fallacy.
Bomag –
Twin studies provide a natural control for exact genetic matches, across their entire genetic profile. So you can measure a complex social trait directly on studies of twins and see that it has a certain heritability.
But the logic only goes one way. You couldn’t look at a twin’s DNA only and predict which twins will have that trait. So we know DNA matters, but we have no way to decode it. We can catch some of the simpler correlations, but complex stuff like personality traits is impossible.
Progressives have been suppressing the truth on heritability for decades.
In 1994, the book “The Bell Curve” stirred great controversy on this subject. Suppression basically worked back then. In hindsight, I’m sure that the other voices making similar points were more completely suppressed where I never heard their names. “The Bell Curve” is the one time that IQ herititability broached into mainstream consciousness and it was widely considered a dark taboo.
Today, as Martin Gurri famously notes, “Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites”. Today, hertitability is more widely discussed in “alt-right” or “alt-light” or IDW circles, and it’s more obvious, that yes, the progressive left has been deliberately suppressing the truth, and it’s generated distrust and resentment.
Kling normally strains to avoid making partisan points, but in the past week or so, I count four rather strong anti-left Kling posts beyond this one:
1. “I think you have to strike directly at the cultural institutions.” regarding left-wing dominance of cultural institutions such as the universities and media and entertainment.
2. Kling criticizes the racial and political radicalization of teacher education programs.
3. “I cannot support a moderation that amounts to serving the left’s victuals course by course.”
4. “I think that for the next ten to fifteen years, the most important threats will come from the left.” Along with a link likening today’s progressive left to (fictionalized) Hitler Youth.
Leaving behind all strong political points, is the technocratic competitive economy driving the average person to have less children. And note:
1) US single motherhood has dropped from 45 to 38% since 2008.
2) The biggest falls in fertility have been Hispanic- and African-Americans since 2008.
So it seems the political-economic system is driving the right behavior here.
Anytime someone tells me Eugenics is bad because the Nazi practices, I like to point out Hitler was a vegetarian. It’s the same argument.
Death camps and forced sterilization are never justified, that doesn’t mean we can’t offer free PGD in-vitro to folks with undesirable traits and ensure they are not passed on.
Everyone chooses their mates. In their personal lives they choose eugenics, saying I will have a child with this one, not that one. Ultimately because of traits they care about.
What people are against is coercive and or deadly use of state power. These things do not have to be connected.
The modern developed world sort has a soft eugenics type econo-political system to them and most developed nations have low birth rates in them. (I still believe the long term drop in crime rates were a function of slower family formation that occurred in the 1970s. For a while, the stats showed the impact of abortion rights here that was the break of the early family formation in Europe, US and various historical points with Asian Tigers.) It is literally becoming the richer the society the less they can afford children.
1) I would recommend calling it the Singapore/Sanger solution in which competitive capitalism will protect the poor as long as they are married and have one child. (I am purposely naming it after Singapore because that is the nation with libertarians love most and has among lowest birth rates.) We are seeing this in the US slowly as the single motherhood births have dropped since 2008.
2) I still don’t get how social conservatives can call liberals on eugenics as the prime driver of this birth drop is people are growing more technocratic and more careful on family size. Also, social conservatives want high birth rates but offer no economic incentives.
social conservatives want high birth rates but offer no economic incentives.
Does it have to be explicit monetary incentives?
We need rational decisions within the system we have.
I don’t object to telling people that intelligence is heritable. But there’s an interplay between that and other ideas, like the tendancy to stereotype by population averages over often arbitrary features like race, and then conclude that, for instance, an entire group should be discouraged from reproducing because their average IQ will be heritable. Averages are not heritable. You inherit your traits from your individual parents, not from your ethnic group. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who don’t understand that, and will come to the conclusion that if intelligence is heritable, and group A has on average lower intelligence, then the children of group A will be less intelligent, and then will tend to support policies that nudge group A to reproduce less. (And nudges can become shoves if the nudge doesn’t seem to be “working”). Instead of having a uniform policy of discouraging reproduction of less intelligent people in general, many people will start pushing policies that target outgroups that test lower on various measures of intelligence. We can’t count on everyone out there to be well meaning – there are plenty who harbor racial animosity and they vote, and they may well outnumber the outgroups that could be targeted.
Keep in mind this is not just a clinical academic discussion, and there’s a trade-off between changing the minds of people who support eugenics policies, and preventing policy outcomes that will negatively affect people that are alive right now. Right now we have a pretty good status quo in which government is (wisely) forbidden from engaging in anything resembling eugenics. Is changing the minds of a bunch of people who are currently well outside the overton window on this subject really worth destabilizing that status quo?
Who are you referring to that’s well outside the Overton Window? Those that believe all demographic groups must, a priori, be asserted to have the same average intelligence? Because those are the people that run nearly everything, while the slightest suggestion that different groups have different average intelligence can ruin almost anyone’s career. The truth here is well outside the Overton Window.
Here’s a suggestion: encourage people to embrace this reality rather than avoid it because, by avoiding it, you’re giving rhe People you most despise a monopoly on the truth. That weakens your position in the long run; and as the science settles, it’s going to get harder and harder for the people opposed to genetic explanations to persist in their mistaken premises, and they won’t be equipped to defend their values anymore.
Counterpoint: The science is already settled and it doesn’t matter. Social enforcement and institutional coercion determine the social truth that 99% of people and policy will end up conforming too.
I think Hazel has this correct. He can get away with supporting a truth that benefits him at others expense, so why shouldn’t he.
I’m talking about “people that favor eugenics policies” as Kling mentions in his final paragraph.
People that favor eugenics policies are right now well outside the overton window. Also those that believe in racial differences in intelligence, which is probably a good thing too.
Why is it a good thing if the most likely hypothesis is outside the Overton window? Are you a Straussian who believes we ought to shame people who reject the Noble Lie into being pariahs?
You know we could also render social Darwinism and genetic determinism socially unacceptable by rejecting evolution, why not do that?
To reiterate the problem with your view: when you insist on separating the world into 1) people who believe differences in intelligence are entirely socially constructed and 2) evil White supremacists who should be ostracized from society, then as scientific evidence that position 1 is false mounts and mounts, you will have effectively vindicated white supremacy.
There are people on the left like Peter Songer who take a different route: who argue that moral worth is not determined by IQ, and yes different groups probably have differnt IQs, abd that’s perfectly consistent with moral egalitarianism.
Their view actually has a chance at surviving the scientific evidence in the long run. The workdview of those who just stick their fingers in their ears does not. Choose wisely.
“…then as scientific evidence that position 1 is false mounts and mounts, you will have effectively vindicated white supremacy.”
But this assumes that the truth of heritability will be plain for all to see. It won’t. Smart people obscuring the truth to reduce social tensions can go on here indefinitely, I think. The weird autodidact who sees what these people are doing will remain lonely and booed, while quietly being confirmed by institutional gatekeepers. I don’t see a breaking point where truth collides with a pretty lie. Not on this front.
The case against eugenics isn’t that all demographic groups must have the same average intelligence. The case is that the demographic perspective is both largely useless and dangerous, because THERE IS ALWAYS BETTER DATA.
Haven’t you ever met someone who is impressive, but has a foolish sibling? Would you hire someone for a critical job because you met their cousin and they were very bright?
Which is, I would argue, a restatement of the Hayekian case for markets making better use of data at a decentralized market than a broad central rule (eugenic or otherwise) can.
The status quo is that each generation is worse than the last, and the society becomes worse. Perhaps leading towards some tipping point of rapid decline. Status Quo usually implies “stays the same”, not permanent decline.
Then of course there is the issue of blaming each other for the decline, but not being able to actually discuss the reason.
There is also the issue that the status quo is one in which large swaths of our society achieve dramatically lower fertility than their stated intention. That seems like a pretty big failure to me, and nobody seems very satisfied with it.
Policy always effects someone negatively. When Canada puts a points system in place for immigration it benefits some and hurts others. When an education policy assumes human uniformity that will hurt some people because it won’t be accurate. Etc.
Hazel Meade is the progressive committed to suppressing the truth that Kling is referring to.
> Averages are not heritable.
On average they are. That’s the whole point.
How about height? Or skin color? Of course, the averages of those traits are heritable.
> arbitrary features like race
Race is precisely a generalization of heredity, it’s not “arbitrary” in relation to heredity at all.
> the tendancy to stereotype by population averages
“stereotype” is a political phrase used to attack any kind of statistical pattern or generalization.
> Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who don’t understand that, and will come to the conclusion…
You have a political dislike for the conclusions that other people are making.
No, averages are not heritable. I got my genes from my mother and father. Not from the average genes of Irish people and German people.
The fact that you don’t get this proves my point.
As a libertarian, I don’t think the government should be involved in trying to manipulate the genetic makeup of the population (among other things the government should not be involved in). Thus the status quo in which the government does not do such things and everyone finds the idea of the government doing such things pretty abhorrent is a pretty good status quo to me. I don’t know why anyone would want to disrupt it. Keep the government’s fingers out of who should and should not reproduce.
> The fact that you don’t get this proves my point.
No, I understood your point. You do get your genes from your mother and father, not from a statistical average. You are making a correct argument against a straw man argument. No one claimed or implied that individuals inherit genes from a statistic instead of a specific mother and father.
Yet, we can collect data on large numbers of individuals, all of whom got their genes from a specific mother and father, and see statisitical patterns and draw our own inferences and conclusions from that.
> As a libertarian, I don’t think the government should be involved in trying to manipulate the genetic makeup of the population
That’s a valid argument that I partly agree with. I’d love to explore and discuss that further, but for this comment thread, that is a tangent.
I’m making the simpler argument that government, schools, and intellectuals shouldn’t suppress truth because they feel people will form political beliefs that they dislike. I suspect you are in that direction.
No one claimed or implied that individuals inherit genes from a statistic instead of a specific mother and father.
I wasn’t claiming that anyone here was claiming that, but rather that there are people out there who will think that, or something equivalent to that. They will misinterpret statistical averages as evidence for the universal inferiority of various outgroups, and start advocating policies aimed at reducing reproduction of the outgroup. Not everyone is operating at the intellectual level of Arnold Kling.
Whose going to behave that way? I’m not convinced that even KKK members didn’t think there were some smart blacks out there. This is a straw man used to scare people so the various identity politics rackets can keep on looting.
> They will misinterpret statistical averages as evidence for the universal inferiority of various outgroups
Your concern is that if ethnic/religious/demographic group X has low intelligence score averages, that people will misinterpret that as evidence of group-wide universal inferiority.
There is an easy, honest, direct, and convincing counter point: Regular people typically have regular-range intelligence scores, and they don’t consider themselves inferior to people with better scores. Also, the people that most people love or value in real life aren’t typically those with the highest intelligence scores. I love my mother, although I suspect she would perform terribly on intelligence tests, for example. That is common.
Notice that this explanation is honest, genuine, and doesn’t try to hide or suppress data. Once you say, I don’t like what you’re going to think so I will hide the data or manipulate and trick and confuse you in various ways, you build justified resentment and distrust.
But you acknowledge that people if different ethnicities tend to have different heights, because they tend to have genetic differences, do you not?
If opposition to eugenics with respect to height doesn’t compel you to commit to the fiction that differences in height are socially constructed, it shouldn’t for anything else. (And no, genetic differences in ethnicity aren’t only in ‘physical’ characteristics; the medical community widely accepts ethnic differences in predisposition to a host of neurological and psychiatric diseases. In fact, those Nazis even discriminate: they will screen people of ethnicities that tend to be predisposed to certain neurodefenerative diseases.
And the genes that impact predisposition to neurological diseases have largely been found to be associated with intelligence too unsurprisingly.
The country is at an interesting place. We are supposed to believe:
1) There is no such thing as race.
2) However, people do treat people differently based on their race.
3) Therefore, we must keep statistics on a racial basis (and in most cases, people find it easy to slot someone into a particular racial box).
4) There is no inherent difference (on average) between the people in each racial box.
5) Therefore, any differences (any “gaps” any “disparate impacts”) are caused by things done to the poorer performing groups, by discrimination against the poorer performing groups.
6) Justice then demands that people in the better performing groups must be discriminated against in order to achieve what would have happened if there had been no discrimination in the first place.
6a) People in the higher performing groups should feel guilty until every box does equally well.
If you find authoritarianism creepy, then the best public policy is to avoid dysgenic programs as strongly as eugenic ones.
I’m the author of the article. Regarding the original post, I don’t think that my suggesting that increased genetic attributions can produce negative outcomes should be read as my strongly implying that suppressing the truth about heritability would lead to better policy outcomes or that the truth about heritability should be suppressed, especially when I didn’t indicate that belief in heritability would produce only negative outcomes and didn’t indicate or suggest that suppressing the truth about heritability is possible or would be effective.
—
I linked to a postprint version of the manuscript on my website, on the “Research and replication” page.
“if they believe that you are trying to tell the truth”
That ship has sailed. Skepticism equals sentience. Read, question, analyze, is the only responsible to approach to any argument no matter how well intentioned its proponents.
Probably a good thing too. Establishment elites coasted for far too long on lazy appeals to authority.
Pretty rich for Cowen, who openly advocates denying medical care to the elderly in order to save money, to be moralizing to others.
No one is clean on incorporating eugenics into their social engineering agendas. Progressives seem to have a deep thanatophilic streak. Abortion – coreced or volunatry, infanticide, compulsory prenatal screening and pressure to abort “the defective,”coerced suicide, opposition to vaccinations, opposition to access to electricity for the poor, etc etc. Gotta crack a few eggs seems not too far off. It all came out in the open most memorably I think when Sarah Palin had her Downs baby and it was if the left was completely united on mandatory abortions for infants who fail genetic screening tests.
Conservatives seem to have historically embraced the notion of social Darwinism. Charles Murray doesn’t seem particularly conservative even if some conservatives have picked up the implicit notion that throwing more money at schools, training programs, and higher teacher salaries is going to make much difference in the failed public school system. He is only demonized because of the threat he represents to the gravy train. Most conservatives today are what once would have been center left, or, are just the remnants of “just leave me alone” libertarians who have expunged from that movement by the hard core social engineers who have taken it over. Take for example Bryan Caplan’s recent call for financial penalties for parents whose children and others who advocate devoting the most education resources to those children who test high for intelligence.
And I suppose everyone is guilty of assortative mating which is really just a form of eugenics.
By all means conduct and publish research on heritability. But more importantly question and challenge. With the vast number of genetic markers and their unfathomable complexity and interrelationship with each other, I suspect that much research being published will soon be found flawed. Genetic expressions at this point seem very much like expressions of opinion: the results are more a result of framing the question in the survey than anything substantive.
Markets already tend to allocate cost appropriately to some extent. Poorer people would be less able to afford kids and would ignore that fact at their peril. There’s no need for eugenics to accomplish its own ends; not subsidizing having children you can’t afford would be enough.
It’s also not clear that we should want fewer stupid people. Sure we want the most smart people, but it’s likely the average below IQ person still produces a net surplus for society. Would society be better off if only people with IQs > 160 could reproduce? It’s not just quality that matters but quantity as well.
Mark,
I have called this the Singapore/Sanger solution with soft eugenics in which most rich developed world learning to avoid early or large poor families long term.
Probably the biggest issues are basically Japan the last 28 years.:
1) This long term hurts labor supply and I believe the US Grumpy 4% unemployment is because there is a cheap labor shortage. (Notice the number unemployment claims is below the 1990s go-go years so less people are being laid off.)
2) Less labor supply will also mean less new firm long term.
It’s also not clear that we should want fewer stupid people.
ok. I would draw it back to to Kling’s main point: don’t suppress the truth because you dislike popular opinions and perspectives.
The article’s focus on support for “eugenics” is a scare tactic – no “eugenics” policy is on the horizon, nor would any such policy even be constitutional if it involved class discrimination. What the author and like-minded good-thinkers are worried about is that telling the truth about the heritability of intelligence and other behavioral traits will make it harder to sell phantom “implicit/systemic racism” as the cause of any racial disparity they don’t like, which would make it harder to justify the increasingly draconian and destructive “affirmative action” measures the Left is demanding.
Some of us are concerned that statistical discrimination will result in feedback loops that will tend to produce systemic racism even if none currently existed. If lots of people are judging others by their group average then above average people from below average groups will tend to be at a systemic disadvantage. Which will result in an amplification of those group differences. If you believe in having a society where people get treated like individuals and not as representatives of racial categories, it’s better to maintain the (possible) fiction that there aren’t any average differences. Especially because do don’t actually know that it’s a fiction. Nevermind that our entire system of law and justice is essentially based on the idea that we’re all created equal. There have been plenty of societies in the past premised on the idea that people were divided into distinct heritable classes with different heritable abilities. They just weren’t western enlightenment societies.
The information is necessary to determine the appropriateness/ validity of programs like affirmative action programs and legal tests like disparate impact.
For example, enforcing representation proportional to the population assumes the various populations have materially similar mean and standard deviation on important contributors to outcomes like IQ (as an example).
If they don’t then the programs will be discriminatory to populations that are right-shifted (mean) and probably to those with flatter curves (since more individuals in that population will be in high-positive-SD portions of the curve).
Our legal frame work currently does not treat people as individuals in many cases. Large portions of employment law for one example. Also, beyond a certain threshold, which we appear to have reached, any diverse population will tend to devolve to identity-based politics. That ship has sailed. You can measure disparate impact using some sort of objective metric or you can measure it on gestalt and feelz.
And this “There have been plenty of societies in the past premised on the idea that people were divided into distinct heritable classes with different heritable abilities. They just weren’t western enlightenment societies.” is just foolish. The idea that everyone all around the world is exactly the same and deviations from that happy state are discrimination of some form are a relatively recent…progression.
I’d prefer to not enforce representation by population, but rather continue to have a norm of treating people like individuals, and letting the statistical chips fall where they may. The problem is that if people think that there are average group difference,s then they are going to discriminate based on the group membership of individuals, instead of treating people like individuals. And then the statistical distributions that come out of that are going to be skewed.
And I for one have not given up on a society where people actually treat each other like individuals instead of as members of ethnic clans.
>I’d prefer to not enforce representation by population, but rather continue to have a norm of treating people like individuals, and letting the statistical chips fall where they may
So would I. That is not the situation that obtains in the real world. The left side of the political spectrum is actively, aggressively, and successfully atomizing society into groups, so it’s not going to get better. What’s your plan B because plan A has failed.
>And I for one have not given up on a society where people actually treat each other like individuals instead of as members of ethnic clans.
Are the members of the other ethnic clans returning the favor?
Libertarianism has failed. I say that as someone who self-identified as small-l libertarian most of my adult life. Get over it and figure out what’s next. A clear eyed understanding of reality is necessary for that. Hiding from reality because of what someone might do with the information…or what it might force you to think…will only worsen the eventual reckoning.
This is a demonstrably false, apparently politically self-serving claim. Do people treat short people as morally infereior, because they (we, actually) tend to have on average lower IQs? When people learn that someone was raised by a single mother, do they typically treat them as less equal? There’s a strong movement to stop discrimination on the basis even of criminal record. If institutions increasingly don’t treat people they *know* have negative traits like being an ex-con less than equal, then there’s no reason they’ll insist on treating people of different races unequally on the basis of mildly predictive general traits. Group-based thinking is what keeps such attitudes going.
And guess what? Insisting on the ‘useful fiction’ that group difference don’t exist perpetuates racial group-based thinking, because it means any residual disparities will automatically be attributed to discrimination by an out-group. Ans while you may be happy to part with some of your income as affirmative action to uphold the fiction, many people – quite reasonably – won’t be so willing to endure disadvantages to uphold the fiction, and will in turn resort to their own group-based ideology.
If you want to get past racial group-based thinking, you’re ‘useful fiction’ is the diametrical opposite of the way to go, if only because it would require the active suppression of scientific evidence to keep the preponderance of people believing it, many in spite of their own interests.
The ideal isn’t a world where we all think we’re all the same. That’s impossible, because it’s obvious we aren’t. The ideal is getting to a point where people think the characteristics with which IQ or income may happen to vary are morally and politically irrelevant academic curiosities, like how we think of height’s correlation with IQ. The ‘useful fiction’ is clearly itself a cause of the persistence of racial collectivism, not a solution to it.
This. We’re ALREADY treating people not as individuals but as members of racial categories for the purpose of public policy. So that makes knowledge of heritability relevant. Not to mention realms outside that of “science”-style policy, namely in education and wrt pop culture sensibilities, wherein racial taxonomy with varying levels of positive and negative emotional valence attached reign supreme.
The heritability thesis + racial category could threaten to explode that currently existing non-individualist paradigm, but by replacing with a different non-individualist paradigm Hazel finds perhaps more threatening than the status quo.
What you’re proposing – closing off areas of scholarly inquiry and public debate, sacralizing fictions, demanding that societal goods be doled out on bases other than individual merit – does not look much like a “western enlightenment societ[y]” to me, either, unless what you had in mind is East Germany. And, sorry, I do think what seems to be your theory – that cognitive and behavioral traits are naturally present in the same proportions in every demographic group, so any disparity in result is necessarily the result of “bias” by whichever group is dominant – is a fiction.
Your use of the term “statistical discrimination” is not intellectually honest, and I think you know it. And nobody here is arguing for judging any person by a “group average,” but for judging each person as an individual on the merits (making allowances for the quite substantial preference we already give to certain historically disadvantaged groups). I don’t think this condemns us to sliding back into the racist abyss of, say, the 1920s – even if the Caltech physics department does not look like America (or even Vermont).
I’m not advocating that be societal goods be doled out on the basis of something other than individual merit (where did you get that?)
In fact, I would like a society where people actually get treated like individuals and where identity politics is less prominent in the culture. I don’t think that arguing about which identity groups are smarter or stupider than the other identity groups is going to produce that outcome. I think that’s likely to lead to more identity politics, more inter-ethnic conflict, and less treatment of people like individuals.
If it’s not genes, then it’s environment.
If it’s environment then someone is to blame and something must be done.
Hence AA, disparate impact, calling each other racist, and all the progressive nonsense.
There is no way around it. If disparities exist, and you can’t point to genetics, then something else has to fill the void.
Arguing about which groups have a higher or lower average income or incarceration rate is just as useless. People don’t earn their races average income, after all.
Sorry, but it’s the insistence that differences in group aggregates in income or other variables are, eo ipso, proof of oppression that makes inquiry into the average intelligence of different groups politically relevant. If you want such discussions to be politically irrelevant, it’s easy to make them politically relevant: get the state out of the business of ‘correcting’ for aggregate differences via corrective racism. This eliminates almost all of the incentive to care. There are plenty of demographic groups defined by any number of variables that have lower income than other groups that no one ever thinks about. The insistence on race-consciousness or gender-consciousness etc. in public policy are what keeps these issues at the forefront of people’s minds. Most people would probably be happy to let them die and become as irrelevant as hair color or zodiac sign, yet you seem most sympathetic to those who insist on fanning the flames.
“If lots of people are judging others by their group average then above average people from below average groups will tend to be at a systemic disadvantage.”
It’s not that hard to distinguish yourself. It’s unclear that whatever hardship might come about here is greater then the hardships caused by its denial. I understand that the higher end of the lower groups HAVE A LOT TO GAIN by pushing this narrative, but its a zero (negative) sum game versus those they are jobbing.
“If you believe in having a society where people get treated like individuals and not as representatives of racial categories, it’s better to maintain the (possible) fiction that there aren’t any average differences.”
The most harmonious semi multi-racial society I’ve ever been to was Singapore, and it was run by an out in the open race realist who stated his views publicly.
+1
If you believe in having a society where people get treated like individuals and not as representatives of racial categories, it’s better to maintain the (possible) fiction that there aren’t any average differences.
I wish that were true. It isn’t. See my comment at March 7, 2019 at 1:42 pm above. Many institutions have become increasingly race conscious BECAUSE they cling to the idea that there aren’t any average differences.
“Many institutions have become increasingly race conscious BECAUSE they cling to the idea that there aren’t any average differences.”
That seems like a non-sequitur. If there aren’t any average differences, what is the point of being race conscious? No, they’re definitely well aware of average differences, just of the societal outcome type. Moving the discussion to something that precedes that genes, will just get you a different kind of race consciousness. It won’t overcome it.
If you think that 1) there are no inherent differences but 2) there are different results, the obvious reason is that privileged groups have made it that way. Thus, people in more privileged groups should feel guilty and should be discriminated against to restore things to what they would have been absent the privilege. Justice demands it.
We exist via eugenics, selective mating. I dunno what else to say, we keep on evolving, sorry, it is a biological condition.