= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Konkvistador comments on Equality and natalism - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (105)
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?