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army1987 comments on Equality and natalism - Less Wrong Discussion
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To whom?
Well... to me? And my model of the average person.
It doesn't sound heartless to me, and I don't trust my model of the average person enough on this issue.
Maybe someone should ask a bunch of random people “Do you think that encouraging rich people to have more children, and poor people to have fewer children, would be a good idea?” I'd expect (i.e. p > 50%) that the fraction of people answering yes would be between 5% and 95%.
Not just generalizing from one example and the typical mind fallacy, I'd be willing to bet that uni educated people are less likely than the general population to consider this a good idea, nearly everyone in my social circles is uni educated.
Why? Does that have to do with the “politically correct” bias I hear is widespread in certain parts of academia?
When phrased like that, it sounds heartless to me too. When phrased as a call to encourage wider availability and use of contraceptives among the poor, it definitely doesn't sound heartless.
Remember wider availability and use of contraceptives isn't the thing that provides much improvement in itself, it is mostly instrumental in "poor people having fewer children, rich people having more". Maybe it is masked by "yay contraception! yay giving stuff to poor people!" memes/heuristics?
Indeed under some circumstnaces giving free contraception to poor people could result in more children born to the most irresponsible subset of poor people. If this effect is strong enough it makes the average child of poor parents worse off! If this sounds utterly implausible, pause to consider if lower class norms on not having sex if you aren't materially and socially ready for marriage from the 1950s where stronger or weaker than 2010s lower class norms on using contraception if you aren't materially and socially ready to provide a good life for your children.
I think that's exactly what's happening.
Stronger in terms of how many people broke them, or in terms of how much people found to break them were frowned upon?
Well, I'm not really sure that "poor should have less children" is inherently linked in conceptspace to "the rich / successful / intelligent should have more children". I'm not sure they're even very close to each other with a linking idea like "It is a good thing for the birth rate to be sufficiently large to maintain or increase the population of society"
We already penalize those poor who have excessive children in a variety of ways. For example, TANF doesn't provide for an automatic increase simply for having another child. Why wouldn't we wouldn't implement additional penalties to go with our new "Free Contraceptive Shots" program?