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 -
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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