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satt comments on "NRx" vs. "Prog" Assumptions: Locating the Sources of Disagreement Between Neoreactionaries and Progressives (Part 1) - Less Wrong
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That is because they do not currently see dysgenic decline as a problem. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But if they ever became convinced that it was a serious problem...that the only people who were willing to voluntarily restrain their reproduction were the smart ones, and the Earth was getting re-populated only by the less-smart ones on average, to the extent that it threatened the very maintenance of civilization...yes, if somehow you could convince progressives of this (imagine if perhaps the world had indeed turned into a carbon-copy of the world in the movie "Idiocracy" and no progressives could deny it any more...well, what would progressives do? Agree to the social darwinism that the neoreactionaries offer? No way. Plug their fingers in their ears and pretend the problem didn't exist? Not if the problem were self-evidently bad enough. Depend on voluntary initiatives? Then you are right back to the problem. The only way I could see of seriously addressing the problem while remaining true to progressivist principles would be a global eugenics program overseen by a democratic world government. This is the logical endpoint of progressivist principles when applied to this problem. And you know...me personally, I would be fine with such a eugenics program.
This is a good illustration of the difference between how Progressives and NRx approach problems.
First a Neoreactionary would point out the obvious problem with this approach: you have democratic governments attempting to implement eugenic policies which will affect what the future voters will be like. Thus this system has a very strong and undesirable attractor, namely the politicians eugenically breed the kind of people who will reelect them.
The NRx approach to dealing with proliferation of low time preference people is to reduce/eliminate the welfare state and let them die out as a natural consequence of their own short sighted behavior.
As far as I can tell, people with low time preference didn't die out in the past, when welfare states were smaller (when they existed at all). Which suggests to me that the NRx approach wouldn't achieve the goal set by its proponents.