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army1987 comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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Well if you want to use wealth as a proxy for intelligence, one approach would be to dramatically raise the tax exemption for children. This would have little effect on poor people, since they generally do not itemize their deductions -- if they owe taxes at all.
Still if such a measure were proposed as a way of encouraging smarter people to have more babies, you can bet that a lot of people will scream racism.
I was thinking about solutions which wouldn't significantly affect the total fertility rate, but now that I think about it, increasing it wouldn't be a “seriously undesirable side effect”, at least in (say) continental Europe or Japan.
Now that I think about it, the fertility of lower classes could be decreased by giving out contraception for free and subsidizing abortions, but the latter could be very unpopular. (It shouldn't affect the fertility of upper classes because the price of contraception/abortions isn't one of the reasons why they're not having fewer children.)
(Why was the parent downvoted, BTW? I guess because the downvoter thinks continental Europe/Japan are already overpopulated so sub-replacement fertility there is not bad.)
Possibly because brazil84 is perceived as a troll - someone might be downvoting the entire thread.