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Athrelon comments on Equality and natalism - Less Wrong
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You know, I was going to reply that obviously the answer is that people don't like intervention in evolutionarily ancient processes like who to marry and how many kids to have. Then I remembered that eugenics was hugely popular in the early 1900s, with only the "backwards, ignorant" Church railing against the "progressive, scientific" idea. This suggests that humans are willing to accept such intervention, at least to a similar extent to which they accept wealth redistribution ("I'll do it if I get to tell other people how to do it, too.")
I wonder if the backlash against eugenics means we've permanently poisoned the well with regards to mating and childbirth intervention, from a baseline where we were actually fairly okay with it.
I think a large majority of Westerners are ok with mating intervention.
A better framing is that a large majority of Westerners who can vote and to be elected are ok with intervening in the mating of ones who can't.
We have plenty of those in the modern world. Consider the one child policy or various laws that specifically target abuse in relationships.
It may depend of which "we" you're talking about. The Chinese seem mostly fine with it.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/7wj/get_genotyped_for_free_if_your_iq_is_high_enough/5s85 comes to mind.
Yeah, that's a good data point as well: people grumble but don't resist - kind of like how we treat the TSA.
Maybe our strong instincts are against regulation of sex, rather than childbearing. The two were tightly coupled in ancient times so we wouldn't need redundant intuitions.
I also rather like the alternative hypothesis of "Rich Western cultures are freaking insane."
But sex is heavily regulated! Just try to have sex with a prostitute, or your sister, or an underage girl, or your employee, or boss, or a mentally retarded person ...
China has a long tradition of collectivism and strong central government. Contrast this with the western (especially Anglo-Saxon) tradition of individualism.
The one child policy is far from uncontroversial.
Yet it is sufficiently entrenched that the Chinese government shows few signs of dropping it soon even with the 4-2-1 problem looming.
OCP hasn't been the responsibility of the central government for years. The provinces are, predictably, weakening the policy where politically feasible. From wikipedia:
It doesn't merely have to be the backlash against Eugenics, in general saying "Group X shouldn't reproduce so much" correlates with saying "group X are bad," which worries us.
Historical quibble, was there ever really mass support for Eugenics? Yes it was a fad in the 19th Century upper class/intellectuals but they hardly constituted a majority.