Nice article. When it comes to birth rates I think they cannot be increased solely by family policies. Family policies can increase birthrates from 1.3 to 1.5 for example (with huge financial costs), but will not be able to increase them to replacement levels. To increase birthrates a cultural reorientation will be needed, rather than an economic one. Israel has high birthrates not because of its economic policies but because of the extinction of its secular liberal social elements.
Even the secular, liberal elements of Israeli society are around replacement. Traditional religion (not the modernized version dominant in the US or Latin America, and formerly in Europe) seems to have major positive externalities.
FWIW, if one supports a eugenic immigration policy (primarily or at least mostly letting in those who are smart and talented rather than the dull and lazy), then it's actually perfectly logical to apply a similar policy in regards to fertility: As in, ecourage the smart and talented to breed a lot through incentives while also encouraging the dull and lazy to breed less through incentives (unless they will breed eugenically with the help of super-smart donor sperm/eggs, in which case an exception might be made for them). In fact, a eugenic policy in regards to fertility, if non-coercive, would actually be an improvement over a eugenic immigration policy because the latter often condemns the dull and lazy to lifetimes of poverty, misery, and oppression while the former simply prevents dull and lazy people from ever being born and conceived, thus ensuring that these potential people never actually suffer. As you said, a eugenic immigration policy is also very often dysgenic for the sending countries, whereas a eugenic fertility policy is more of a win-win. Even the domestic poor benefit from it because their children get larger inheritances due to them having less siblings to share and split their inheritance with.
Explicitly eugenic reproductive policies became taboo in the West around the 1970s. Singapore launched a campaign to increase the fertility of the well-educated (which was below replacement) and lower that of the uneducated (which was high) through various incentives in the 1980s. This was unpopular and very controversial. The campaign was soon phased out but certain soft measures remained in place under the slogan "Have 3 or more children, if you can afford it."
Many official bodies in the West have redefined eugenics to mean something like "coercive/state-led selection of humans/human rights violations." This seems to reflect the now-extreme toxicity of eugenics and the desire to exclude certain procedures from the stigma. For example, testing your fetus for Down's syndrome is reimbursed in Belgium and 95% of mothers with a positive test opt for abortion, but the authorities claim this is not "eugenic" because the procedure is entirely voluntary. This line of reasoning certainly would have surprised eugenicists like Galton and Shockley.
I've also seen a movement in policy circles away from the term "enhancement" for similar reasons. As enhancement has also become overly loaded as a term, avoiding its use lets you debate each different procedure on its own merits. All this terminological chicanery can be rather obtuse but that's where we are.
Frankly, this is why I like the term "*voluntary* eugenics". One could of course argue that screening for Down's Syndrome fetuses is not eugenic because one is simply worried about one's own child's odds of success rather than about the gene pool as a whole, but of course individual decisions that people make to improve the genes of their future offspring do affect the gene pool as a whole, especially if such individual decisions are widespread, as in the Belgian Down's Syndrome example that you mention here.
Immigration policies can certainly be described as eugenic if they are meant to keep out people with undesirable traits and their descendants (whom one can fear will also have undesirable traits). I obviously understand that coercive/non-voluntary eugenics is evil and thus should not be done, but the same logic could apply to immigration restrictions, which condemn hundreds of millions of people to lifetimes of poverty, misery, and/or oppression simply because they're too dull. This is why open borders libertarians such as Bryan Caplan and Ilya Somin condemn present-day immigration policies. But honestly, I think that it's sad that more people nowadays view it as perfectly acceptable to keep, say, poor Indians back at home in India than allow them to improve their life in the West for fear that they and/or their descendants could become a drain on Western social safety nets but also view it as being completely unacceptable for countries to actively (through the use of incentives) discourage the conception and birth of people who are likely to be burdens on the social safety net. The former option actually condemns a lot of people to lifetimes of poverty, misery, and oppression, after all; the latter doesn't. So, why exactly would the former be better than the latter? Because it affects non-citizens whereas the latter affects citizens (the potential parents of dullards)? Because open borders libertarians such as Ilya Somin argue that the citizen-noncitizen distinction is in itself arbitrary and a symbol of hereditary privilege:
You're talking like Nazi eugenics didn't happen (or the institutionalisation of the eugenics movement in asylums, prisons, and other institutions in the early 20th century). Let's not sweep the coercive, human rights-violating history of eugenics under the rug. I don't agree eugenics became taboo around the 1970s, it's (rightly) been taboo ever since the racial policies of the Third Reich. Eugenics was discredited after the coercive, human rights-violating horrors of the 1930s and '40s, and yet limped on into the '70s (and the US is reportedly still conducting coercive or forced sterilisation, particularly of prisoners: https://talkpoverty.org/2017/08/23/u-s-still-forcibly-sterilizing-prisoners/ ).
As Gry Wester (Lecturer in Bioethics and Global Health Ethics at King's College London) puts it, we shouldn't see eugenics and new genetic modification technologies as "'solutions' to complex problems such as poverty, unemployment, or poor physical or mental health. We should be wary of biological determinist narratives that blame various forms of disadvantage on individual traits, without acknowledging the importance of social and political factors."
Hello Joe. This is a very sensitive topic. To any reader who wants to know more about the history of eugenics, I recommend the Oxford "Eugenics: Very Short Introduction" and "The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics."
I guess the question is why exactly is it considered acceptable to make eugenic distinctions among noncitizens that we would not consider acceptable to make among citizens.
Also, as a side note, due to the high average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, the majority of the Holocaust was actually dysgenic rather than eugenic. Jonathan Anomaly previously pointed this out in one of his articles:
Are you also against eugenic immigration policies? Such as those of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore? Those countries' immigration policies make it very hard to become a permanent resident and citizen of those countries if you are not smart, highly educated, and/or skilled.
Craig, nice to see you blogging again - I think it's a much better medium than Twitter for intellectual discourse!
You probably won't be surprised to know that I see things very differently. Where you describe yourself as a realist, I'm would call myself a constructivist (I would even call myself a "radical constructivist"). Nevertheless, above all I am interested in dialectic and synthesis, so I'm keen to follow your blog and listen to what you have to say (I will agree with what I agree with, and disagree with what I disagree with). You have a subscriber.
Your mega-trends are interesting to me for what you leave out as much as for what you include. GDP is, IMO, a crude indicator of progress (better to look at wage growth, productivity, Geni coefficient, average longevity / healthspan, environment, climate, educational attainment, skills, amount and quality of leisure time, satisfaction with life, etc., etc.). I have similar issues with the use of patents as an indicator of scientific progress. Mariana Mazzucato has critiqued patents as an indicator of progress extensively, and there was an interesting article on the BBC today about how we measure scientific progress: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220615-do-we-need-a-better-understanding-of-progress
Still, we're basically guaranteed to disagree (given you're a realist and I'm a constructivist), so it might be more interesting to focus on where I agree with you. I do agree we should take a more long-term approach, and I agree that "mega-trends" are worth paying attention to (though my mega-trends might be different to yours). I also agree, I think, with your general solutions ("restoring our continent’s unity, rebuilding Europe’s technological sovereignty and prowess, and wholeheartedly embracing the future through family-friendly policies and renewed confidence in ourselves"). I'd need a bit more definition in terms of what that means in practice, but I agree with the general approach.
I welcome debate between IR schools: keeps them strong and learning. Can you say more on radical constructivism?
Actually, I hold at least one view which I think is constructivist: that through discourse people (including elites) get emotionally invested in certain notions, values, and self-images (including identity and perceived bonds of kinship) in ways which inflect foreign policy. This is a major factor, it seems to me, in the different approaches of France, Germany, and Britain in international affairs since World War II.
I wasn't using GDP as a measure of human well-being but as a proxy for power. Not a perfect measure of this, but perhaps the best single one in our globalized capitalist world. GDP reflects a society's productive and organizational resources, resources that can be used to whatever ends they choose (e.g. development aid, aid to Ukraine, R&I funding...).
I am open to other indicators of scientific and technical achievement other than patents and top scientific articles.
While I take the point on not overstating the validity of economic laws, I’m a bit puzzled by your comment downplaying the link between population size and GDP. For a given level of development, the relationship is self-evident. Of course, it is possible that population decline could be compensated for by higher growth in GDP/capita than other economies, but I have seen no indication this will be the case for Europe going forward.
Relatedly, there are many cases in history of relative population decline being the major factor in power-political decline. I think most notably of France's decline relative to Britain and Germany over the course of the 19th century. In less than a century, France went from being Europe’s cultural hegemon and preeminent military power, somewhat equivalent to the US since World War II, to an unheard of situation of vulnerability to German military power and dependence on British power.
I laud Kate Raworth's efforts to reorient economic policy around planetary boundaries. Her portrayal of economics, not a field I am very fond of, seems overly harsh. Planetary boundaries could be enforced through some traditional economic measures (i.e., taxing environmental externalities, unpopular fossil fuel tax hikes!).
I think she also understates the depth and tragedy of the causes of much inequality and environmental degradation. We have pursued the environmentally-devastating growth imperative globally because people in poor nations want to escape poverty and people in rich nations want purchasing power and (expensive) welfare states. The hedonic treadmill is real.
We have successfully pursued global growth by internationalizing our economies, but in developed countries this has resulted in downward pressure on wages and corporate tax avoidance in low-tax jurisdictions, increasing inequalities. I am often disappointed by progressive economists (like Thomas Piketty) who fail to acknowledge the impact of open borders on inequality in the absence of a global social-democratic state.
It will be interesting to see if “degrowth” can become electable (not a new issue: I recall Plato’s critique of Pericles, one could say he was proposing a kind of political monasticism as an alternative to Athens as a constantly wealth-chasing commercial democracy).
I like what Raworth has to saw on “following the laws of nature.” I think in general we should be more aware of how the evolutionary paradigm applies in human and other systems.
I agree a rebalancing of values in favor of families and intergenerational heritage will be necessary.
Nice article. When it comes to birth rates I think they cannot be increased solely by family policies. Family policies can increase birthrates from 1.3 to 1.5 for example (with huge financial costs), but will not be able to increase them to replacement levels. To increase birthrates a cultural reorientation will be needed, rather than an economic one. Israel has high birthrates not because of its economic policies but because of the extinction of its secular liberal social elements.
Even the secular, liberal elements of Israeli society are around replacement. Traditional religion (not the modernized version dominant in the US or Latin America, and formerly in Europe) seems to have major positive externalities.
FWIW, if one supports a eugenic immigration policy (primarily or at least mostly letting in those who are smart and talented rather than the dull and lazy), then it's actually perfectly logical to apply a similar policy in regards to fertility: As in, ecourage the smart and talented to breed a lot through incentives while also encouraging the dull and lazy to breed less through incentives (unless they will breed eugenically with the help of super-smart donor sperm/eggs, in which case an exception might be made for them). In fact, a eugenic policy in regards to fertility, if non-coercive, would actually be an improvement over a eugenic immigration policy because the latter often condemns the dull and lazy to lifetimes of poverty, misery, and oppression while the former simply prevents dull and lazy people from ever being born and conceived, thus ensuring that these potential people never actually suffer. As you said, a eugenic immigration policy is also very often dysgenic for the sending countries, whereas a eugenic fertility policy is more of a win-win. Even the domestic poor benefit from it because their children get larger inheritances due to them having less siblings to share and split their inheritance with.
Explicitly eugenic reproductive policies became taboo in the West around the 1970s. Singapore launched a campaign to increase the fertility of the well-educated (which was below replacement) and lower that of the uneducated (which was high) through various incentives in the 1980s. This was unpopular and very controversial. The campaign was soon phased out but certain soft measures remained in place under the slogan "Have 3 or more children, if you can afford it."
Many official bodies in the West have redefined eugenics to mean something like "coercive/state-led selection of humans/human rights violations." This seems to reflect the now-extreme toxicity of eugenics and the desire to exclude certain procedures from the stigma. For example, testing your fetus for Down's syndrome is reimbursed in Belgium and 95% of mothers with a positive test opt for abortion, but the authorities claim this is not "eugenic" because the procedure is entirely voluntary. This line of reasoning certainly would have surprised eugenicists like Galton and Shockley.
I've also seen a movement in policy circles away from the term "enhancement" for similar reasons. As enhancement has also become overly loaded as a term, avoiding its use lets you debate each different procedure on its own merits. All this terminological chicanery can be rather obtuse but that's where we are.
Frankly, this is why I like the term "*voluntary* eugenics". One could of course argue that screening for Down's Syndrome fetuses is not eugenic because one is simply worried about one's own child's odds of success rather than about the gene pool as a whole, but of course individual decisions that people make to improve the genes of their future offspring do affect the gene pool as a whole, especially if such individual decisions are widespread, as in the Belgian Down's Syndrome example that you mention here.
Immigration policies can certainly be described as eugenic if they are meant to keep out people with undesirable traits and their descendants (whom one can fear will also have undesirable traits). I obviously understand that coercive/non-voluntary eugenics is evil and thus should not be done, but the same logic could apply to immigration restrictions, which condemn hundreds of millions of people to lifetimes of poverty, misery, and/or oppression simply because they're too dull. This is why open borders libertarians such as Bryan Caplan and Ilya Somin condemn present-day immigration policies. But honestly, I think that it's sad that more people nowadays view it as perfectly acceptable to keep, say, poor Indians back at home in India than allow them to improve their life in the West for fear that they and/or their descendants could become a drain on Western social safety nets but also view it as being completely unacceptable for countries to actively (through the use of incentives) discourage the conception and birth of people who are likely to be burdens on the social safety net. The former option actually condemns a lot of people to lifetimes of poverty, misery, and oppression, after all; the latter doesn't. So, why exactly would the former be better than the latter? Because it affects non-citizens whereas the latter affects citizens (the potential parents of dullards)? Because open borders libertarians such as Ilya Somin argue that the citizen-noncitizen distinction is in itself arbitrary and a symbol of hereditary privilege:
https://reason.com/volokh/2018/07/07/the-hereditary-aristocracy-of-citizenshi/
You're talking like Nazi eugenics didn't happen (or the institutionalisation of the eugenics movement in asylums, prisons, and other institutions in the early 20th century). Let's not sweep the coercive, human rights-violating history of eugenics under the rug. I don't agree eugenics became taboo around the 1970s, it's (rightly) been taboo ever since the racial policies of the Third Reich. Eugenics was discredited after the coercive, human rights-violating horrors of the 1930s and '40s, and yet limped on into the '70s (and the US is reportedly still conducting coercive or forced sterilisation, particularly of prisoners: https://talkpoverty.org/2017/08/23/u-s-still-forcibly-sterilizing-prisoners/ ).
As Gry Wester (Lecturer in Bioethics and Global Health Ethics at King's College London) puts it, we shouldn't see eugenics and new genetic modification technologies as "'solutions' to complex problems such as poverty, unemployment, or poor physical or mental health. We should be wary of biological determinist narratives that blame various forms of disadvantage on individual traits, without acknowledging the importance of social and political factors."
https://theconversation.com/the-eugenics-debate-isnt-over-but-we-should-be-wary-of-people-who-claim-it-can-fix-social-problems-132055
Hello Joe. This is a very sensitive topic. To any reader who wants to know more about the history of eugenics, I recommend the Oxford "Eugenics: Very Short Introduction" and "The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics."
I guess the question is why exactly is it considered acceptable to make eugenic distinctions among noncitizens that we would not consider acceptable to make among citizens.
Also, as a side note, due to the high average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, the majority of the Holocaust was actually dysgenic rather than eugenic. Jonathan Anomaly previously pointed this out in one of his articles:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6096849/
Are you also against eugenic immigration policies? Such as those of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore? Those countries' immigration policies make it very hard to become a permanent resident and citizen of those countries if you are not smart, highly educated, and/or skilled.
Craig, nice to see you blogging again - I think it's a much better medium than Twitter for intellectual discourse!
You probably won't be surprised to know that I see things very differently. Where you describe yourself as a realist, I'm would call myself a constructivist (I would even call myself a "radical constructivist"). Nevertheless, above all I am interested in dialectic and synthesis, so I'm keen to follow your blog and listen to what you have to say (I will agree with what I agree with, and disagree with what I disagree with). You have a subscriber.
Your mega-trends are interesting to me for what you leave out as much as for what you include. GDP is, IMO, a crude indicator of progress (better to look at wage growth, productivity, Geni coefficient, average longevity / healthspan, environment, climate, educational attainment, skills, amount and quality of leisure time, satisfaction with life, etc., etc.). I have similar issues with the use of patents as an indicator of scientific progress. Mariana Mazzucato has critiqued patents as an indicator of progress extensively, and there was an interesting article on the BBC today about how we measure scientific progress: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220615-do-we-need-a-better-understanding-of-progress
I also shudder at the idea that "economic decline mechanically follows" from anything. I think that language risks trivialising a non-linear system (i.e. saying input A mechanically produces output B). Kate Raworth says it better than me: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/apr/06/kate-raworth-doughnut-economics-new-economics
Still, we're basically guaranteed to disagree (given you're a realist and I'm a constructivist), so it might be more interesting to focus on where I agree with you. I do agree we should take a more long-term approach, and I agree that "mega-trends" are worth paying attention to (though my mega-trends might be different to yours). I also agree, I think, with your general solutions ("restoring our continent’s unity, rebuilding Europe’s technological sovereignty and prowess, and wholeheartedly embracing the future through family-friendly policies and renewed confidence in ourselves"). I'd need a bit more definition in terms of what that means in practice, but I agree with the general approach.
Anyway, subscribed!
Hello Joe, happy to read you!
I welcome debate between IR schools: keeps them strong and learning. Can you say more on radical constructivism?
Actually, I hold at least one view which I think is constructivist: that through discourse people (including elites) get emotionally invested in certain notions, values, and self-images (including identity and perceived bonds of kinship) in ways which inflect foreign policy. This is a major factor, it seems to me, in the different approaches of France, Germany, and Britain in international affairs since World War II.
I wasn't using GDP as a measure of human well-being but as a proxy for power. Not a perfect measure of this, but perhaps the best single one in our globalized capitalist world. GDP reflects a society's productive and organizational resources, resources that can be used to whatever ends they choose (e.g. development aid, aid to Ukraine, R&I funding...).
I am open to other indicators of scientific and technical achievement other than patents and top scientific articles.
While I take the point on not overstating the validity of economic laws, I’m a bit puzzled by your comment downplaying the link between population size and GDP. For a given level of development, the relationship is self-evident. Of course, it is possible that population decline could be compensated for by higher growth in GDP/capita than other economies, but I have seen no indication this will be the case for Europe going forward.
Relatedly, there are many cases in history of relative population decline being the major factor in power-political decline. I think most notably of France's decline relative to Britain and Germany over the course of the 19th century. In less than a century, France went from being Europe’s cultural hegemon and preeminent military power, somewhat equivalent to the US since World War II, to an unheard of situation of vulnerability to German military power and dependence on British power.
I laud Kate Raworth's efforts to reorient economic policy around planetary boundaries. Her portrayal of economics, not a field I am very fond of, seems overly harsh. Planetary boundaries could be enforced through some traditional economic measures (i.e., taxing environmental externalities, unpopular fossil fuel tax hikes!).
I think she also understates the depth and tragedy of the causes of much inequality and environmental degradation. We have pursued the environmentally-devastating growth imperative globally because people in poor nations want to escape poverty and people in rich nations want purchasing power and (expensive) welfare states. The hedonic treadmill is real.
We have successfully pursued global growth by internationalizing our economies, but in developed countries this has resulted in downward pressure on wages and corporate tax avoidance in low-tax jurisdictions, increasing inequalities. I am often disappointed by progressive economists (like Thomas Piketty) who fail to acknowledge the impact of open borders on inequality in the absence of a global social-democratic state.
It will be interesting to see if “degrowth” can become electable (not a new issue: I recall Plato’s critique of Pericles, one could say he was proposing a kind of political monasticism as an alternative to Athens as a constantly wealth-chasing commercial democracy).
I like what Raworth has to saw on “following the laws of nature.” I think in general we should be more aware of how the evolutionary paradigm applies in human and other systems.
All the best!