As most of the comments mention, the initial attempts at avoiding dsygenic fertility must be politically and socially palatable. It's imperative that early programs target generally agreed upon parties and do so through voluntary participation. We can't immediately designate very low IQ individuals because of the incendiary conflict over objective intelligence and how it predicts behavior.
Audacious Epigone linked to this charity: Project Prevention. According to their website:
Project Prevention offers cash incentives to women that are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol to use long-term or permanent birth control. Our mission is to reduce the number of substance exposed births to zero. Because every baby deserves a sober start!Notice the language used in this goals statement. It doesn't pontificate about the doom of civilization or mention NAM drug abuse statistics. It focuses primarily on the unfortunate children and alleviating costs for the parents. They continue:
In doing so, Project Prevention seeks to reduce the burden of this social problem on taxpayers, trim down social worker caseloads, and alleviate from our clients the burden of having children that will potentially be taken away. Unlike incarceration, Project Prevention extremely cost effective and does not punish the participants.
See, they're helping the drug abusers! Not punishing them!
Maybe I'm being cynical here and they're actually being transparent about their goals. However, I surmise many behind this project share our views: that low IQ feritility (found disproportionately higher amongst drug abusers) will unequivocally cause downward trends in economy and culture. I think this represents a good (and possible) start.
8 comments:
Let's think through the politics of eugenics very carefully.
First of all, realize that most Americans are very ignorant of genetics, scared of its potential to revolutionize our society.
For example, take just one huge biological imperative of life, mating and marriage. If genetics were frankly acknowledged in the public sphere, and technologies rapidly developed to exploit them, what might happen if some dating prospect simply ignores one's overtures, and instead "scans" the prospective mate for an unbiased assessment of his/her genetic quality? This scares people, primarily because much of human behavior has evolved to FAKE and SIGNAL desirable traits, that one might not necessarily have. A greater knowledge of genetics without the ability to ameliorate a specific deficiency would create a vast temporal and psychological inequality that it might be too hard for any society, even one as advanced as ours, to bridge.
This is why people are vitally concerned with keeping their genetic information under wraps from insurance companies and the government. It is a not wholly irrational behavior, even there are huge putative benefits from more open research.
I think it is farcical to think there will ever be an *open* acknowledgment of HBD in public society. It is too potentially disruptive to the social fabric.
However, what you can do, is to make the conversation less verboten amongst important groups, including scientists and policy-makers. They are the only ones who have to listen.
They hold the important scepter of discretion; for example, the Supreme Court just used such power to realize its vision of a broadly race-tolerant and cosmpolitan society when it dodged the weighty Constitutional issues begging for redress in Ricci vs. DeStefano. It is these entities and institutions who wield power, not broadly defined "democrats" or voters.
Take immigration policy. One useful tool that stems from the intersection of race and evolution is what I like to term "correlations upon correlations". To prevent low-IQ Mexican immigration, one need not appeal to distasteful and scary notions that discard their moral worth as human beings, but instead appeal publicly to say, pencil-and-paper tests that just as effectively discriminate against their potential paths to citizenship. One can choose "traits" that are only tangentially related to your intended "target", and proceed effectively towards one's political goals in whichever HBD-cognizant philosophy you subscribe to.
Any intelligent economic conservative, which I trust you are, concerned about growth and America's future, knows that people respond to incentives. He realizes that it is hard to change behavior in the intended manner from a centralized perspective, through a germane application of Hayek's "socialist calculation" criticism of communism.
To believe that the US could ever just declare a broad eugenic policy, issued top down from government, is utterly unserious political analysis. People have strong biological imperatives to produce children; in my travels, I've noticed that those same children tend to be the sole bright spots in many of the lives of the poor and uneducated. Few Americans, including myself, could look at anyone of them in the eye, even once stipulating that they objectively "contribute" less to society, and then forcefully denying them such pleasure. Such policy would be to use the ham-fisted thinking of a leftist, before even choosing to ignore the widely lamented mistakes of science in the "genetic policy" which enduringly shaped our remembrance of the Second World War. Indeed, I would loath to employ such dictatorial powers towards my own visions even if they were somehow magically granted to me.
No, one must focus on the incentives (and correlations), and only those incentives, all the while taking care to manipulate the public rhetoric to belie a singular focus upon them. Any effective eugenic policy must be removed, abstruse, and personally detached from its intended "targets". I think it is most obvious that it cannot focus on any racial group per se. For example, Reagan may have chosen to focus on welfare reform as simple moralistic principle, but likely unwittingly to his magnanimous nature, he also obviously "attacked" Black livelihood in the specific as well, as long-suffering Democrats from that era will often attest. And even more unwittingly, or perhaps not so much in others' more enjoyable and Machiavellian fantasies, he at the same time lowered Black total fertility rates through such policy. It is possible to aim for an effective eugenics by first carefully investigating, and then manipulating, the thin puppet strings that often demarcate individual and group differences.
Find the incentives, find the structure, and only then can one find the possible promises of any sort of eugenics.
Hello, Billare.
:)
Find the incentives, find the structure, and only then can one find the possible promises of any sort of eugenics.
In the below response, I argued that one incentive structure is low future time orientation.
I argued it would be worthwhile to explore "indirect" eugenics by focussing on manipulating the underclass' future time orientation with the offer of financial incentives - offered over regular intervals of time - so the underclass makes better reproductive decisions.
HBD, Social Engineering, and Does this Contradict Individualism?
The Undiscovered Jew said...
Eugenics can come in a wide variety of forms beyond simply sterilization.
The primary causes for the underclass' breeding habits are
1) low future time orientation
2) welfare incentives to reproduce
Obviously, we should remove all welfare incentives for poor women to have children at taxpayer expense.
But even if we removed financial incentives to reproduce, we still have to deal with low future time orientation among the underclass.
Plenty of dirt poor third world countries have high birthrates despite the fact their women get few, if any, financial benefits from having kids.
Underclass women are just more likely to make bad decisions and they will have too many kids even with no welfare incentives.
Eugenics programs ultimately try and solve the future time orientation problem.
In the case of sterilization, the problem of low future time orientation is solved by simply removing the woman or man's ability to reproduce. Removing the ability to have kids makes low future time orientation irrelevant because no matter how many bad decisions they make, they cannot have kids.
But there are other ways to attack the low future time orientation problem that may be more politically palitable.
We could target the underclass' low future time orientation by financially incentivizing good reproductive behavior through financial measures.
For example, there is a new program that pays teenagers in North Carolina not to get pregnant that does not involve sterilization:
Program Pays Girls $1 Per Day To Not Get Pregnant
By using the carrot of future financial rewards, we can improve NAM future time orientation (behaviors such as future time orientation are much easier to influence than any measure of intelligence).
We could expand upon this North Carolina program by threatening to garnish the welfare benefits of underclass women if they have children out of wedlock.
Or, we could promise a large cash bonus to underclass women at the end of every, say, 5 years if they refrain from having children out of wedlock during this time period.
None of this involves sterilization, but it does involve giving incentives to NAM women to behave better.
6/27/2009 1:25 PM
Yes, that's exactly what I mean, TUJ. Government welfare could be more directly linked to the parental responsibilities we try to require of the underclass. Those ideas don't immediately suggest Hitler! the Nazis! Stalin! to the general public, so they are more likely to be put to work.
Regardless of how 'indirect' your methods, you still run into the problem of defining a target - in this case, 'underclass' women you deem unworthy of childbirth. From what I understand, the maternity nurse who started this particular program limits it to girls whose older sisters have gotten pregnant. Because clearly if she offered it to just any girl she would soon run out of money...
I admit to being somewhat fascinated by these sorts of discussions, though I'm skeptical and not yet hep to all the terminology.
"One can choose "traits" that are only tangentially related to your intended "target""
This was exactly my point. The reason why ProjectPrevention might have success with a larger population than sterilization is because everyone agrees babies shouldn't be exposed to drugs in utero. This isn't debatable.
But by targeting drug abusers, we're also targeting individuals with very low IQ and very bad judgment. This is the objective I wish to pursue (decreasing low IQ fertility), but it's done by targeting individuals amongst whom low IQ people are highly represented.
"Eugenics was originally conceived by Sir Francis Galton, Darwin's brilliant polymath cousin."
Modern eugenics was conceived by Dalton, but ideas relating to eugenics have been around since at least the ancient Greeks - in his day Plato recommended that eugenics should be implemented by the state.
That most of the women who participate in PP's program are white helps make the charity's activities more politically palatable as well.
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