Equality and natalism

I recently read an article by Steve Sailer that reminded me about something I have been puzzled by for a long time. Relevant paragraphs:

If intellectuals could afford to have a lot of children, we might live in a world where they could sell enough heavyweight books to afford to have a lot of children. But we don’t.

So what should policy be?

In a recent article in the Boston Review, Heckman began, “The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today,” then went on to endorse the usual expensive “interventions” in poor families. Should we perhaps instead strive for a country with fewer accidental births?

All of Heckman’s data suggest that we should aim for fewer—but better—poor children. Encourage poor people to conscientiously concentrate their scant parental resources on one child rather than three or six.

The government has had a policy of dissuading teen births, which have indeed been declining. Why not try to similarly investigate ways to slow down the rate at which impoverished unwed mothers reproduce? For example, why not invest in R&D for better, easier-to-use long-term contraceptives? The FDA’s approval of an injection contraceptive in 1992 appears to have helped bring about both fewer teen births and fewer abortions. Wouldn’t continued improvement—and, just as importantly, continued encouragement of contraceptive use—be a win-win strategy for all of us?

Poor people having fewer children means that the children have more resources available per capita making the children better off. Rich people having more children actually increases equality in society since it reduces the per capita resource advantage their children have. Rich people giving to their children is also one of the few cases where the redistribution of wealth doesn't reduce incentives for wealth creation. Rich people care about their children too.

Since programs aimed at reducing teen pregnancy rates do seem to have had some effect, we known something like this is possible without being horrible to the potential parents it targets.

Yet a policy of "poor people should have fewer children, rich people more" sounds heartless despite increasing general welfare both by making poor children better off and by reducing the privilege of rich children thus increasing equality which we seem to think is ceteris paribus a good thing.

Why is that?

Edit: To test the source of the reader's intuiton (assuming he shares it with me), I encourage the consideration of two interesting scenarios that may depart from reality.

I recently read an article by Steve Sailer that reminded me about something I have been puzzled by for a long time. Relevant paragraphs:

If intellectuals could afford to have a lot of children, we might live in a world where they could sell enough heavyweight books to afford to have a lot of children. But we don’t.

So what should policy be?

In a recent article in the Boston Review, Heckman began, “The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today,” then went on to endorse the usual expensive “interventions” in poor families. Should we perhaps instead strive for a country with fewer accidental births?

All of Heckman’s data suggest that we should aim for fewer—but better—poor children. Encourage poor people to conscientiously concentrate their scant parental resources on one child rather than three or six.

The government has had a policy of dissuading teen births, which have indeed been declining. Why not try to similarly investigate ways to slow down the rate at which impoverished unwed mothers reproduce? For example, why not invest in R&D for better, easier-to-use long-term contraceptives? The FDA’s approval of an injection contraceptive in 1992 appears to have helped bring about both fewer teen births and fewer abortions. Wouldn’t continued improvement—and, just as importantly, continued encouragement of contraceptive use—be a win-win strategy for all of us?

Since programs aimed at reducing teen pregnancy rates do seem to have had some effect, we known something like this is possible without being horrible to the potential parents it targets.

Why is that?

Edit: To test the source of the reader's intuiton (assuming he shares it with me), I encourage the consideration of two interesting scenarios that may depart from reality.

Until you have a world solution, any local solution that lowers the birth rate for your group simply makes your group less relevant in the future. The world is quite robust to the conclusion that "increasing population means you are winning."

As evidence for the above, consider that the most powerful countries have PILES of poor people (U.S., China, Russia) and the countries with the least amount of poor people are lower in power (Western Europe). Western Europe may be in the early stages of being slowly overrun by more prolific less intellectual moslems. Even Israel, with plenty of poor people, faces an Arab Moslem majority in the next few decades.

From consideration of the powerful countries, the key to winning seems to be to co-opt your poor prolific non-intellectuals. The U.S. is a rather comfortable place for non-intellectuals, I think one can conclude that from using 250 channel cable television as a sampler of US culture, but I can personally conclude it from many hours spent jet skiing and four-wheeling around the desert.

Intellectuals are in an excellent position to completely overestimate their importance to the human endeavor. After all, their special skills include 1) making convincing arguments, 2) focusing in on something to analyze it in depth. Sure, part of the skills of making convincing arguments is a great ability to actually figure things out. But focus renders this trickier at being globally accurate than one might at first realize.

For example, I have read plenty of intellectuals who think the "unique" talents of the inventor are the thing that drives production, and the labor that implements the inventions is practically a given, something that grows out of the woodwork in our society. But this territory is equally well mapped by thinking that it is labor that produces value, and that some small proportion of labor which is lazy is also lucky enough to be clever enough to do intellectual tasks that support the value of labor. Labor can be the focus, and invention can be the thing that naturally arises from a desire to avoid labor.

Intellectuals generally do a good idea of having more than a median amount of resources available to them. But the lesson of the industrial and post-industrial world it seems should be that intellectuals are a side show, and real power and production comes from people who are not primarily intellectual. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Gates, Jobs, and so on. To the extent any "captain of industry" was part of an intellectual structure, they all ultimately abandoned it for something more productive.