Can we afford classical eugenics?
Yes, but it's still expensive
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It costs about $20,000 per year to raise a child in the US. We’ll use this as our theoretical minimum payment per year that would get couples to have another child they otherwise wouldn’t have. For convenience we can assume that $20,000 per year is given for 20 years per child. That makes $400,000 per child over 20 years.
To figure out if we can afford this, we need to figure out how many eligible couples there are, and what number of children we want them to have. Then we can know our predicted yearly expenditure. Because we are doing classical eugenics and not egalitarian fertility boosting, only a minority of couples are eligible for child payments.
There are 340 million Americans, making about 170 million potential couples. If we let the top 10% be eligible for payments, that makes 17 million couples. Let’s say we want them to have an average of 5 children, that’s 85 million payments, which makes $34 trillion per 20 years, or $1.7 trillion per year.
The US spends $1.5 trillion per year on just social security, so with some budget cuts this is affordable. If you noticed, the explicit design is purely positive eugenics, but with budget cuts we’ll be doing some hidden negative eugenics, because we’re basically going to cut dysgenics programs like low IQ welfare (SNAP, WIC, project housing) and low IQ liberal retirement pensions (i.e. old people who did not save, and did not have children) and let bad people fall by the wayside.
Our program would also be more effective if people who aren’t eligible for payments have a 1 child policy. We’ll assume this will lower their mean fertility to 1 or generate enough income through taxation for extra children to increase the eligible couple fertility proportional to the extent to which the ineligible couple fertility is above 1.
Now let’s talk about other budget cuts. We have $230 billion per year from getting rid of high school, and $863 billion per year from getting rid of dysgenic welfare. Making these reforms will generate money, as high school teachers and most high school students (all who cannot form eligible child payment couples — those who can will likely undertake further study) will be productive. This will also get rid of about 80% of university students which will save further money. Getting rid of dysgenic welfare will have a negative eugenics effect, and we can introduce indentured servitude to try to make those people somewhat productive. So by just counting the money from cuts, we’re getting a lower bound for how much revenue we would find for eugenics.
We now have at a minimum $2.593 trillion for eugenics.
But wait, eugenics also produces revenue in the future. Every mean IQ point gained causes roughly $430 billion in economic growth. This is probably an under-estimate as currently low IQ people are expensive, so having less of them also removes burden from the economy.
Over time, this eugenics program is partially self-funding.
According to this simulation, it would increase the mean IQ by 3.62 points per generation, which will grow the economy by $1.5 trillion. Therefore in funds 1/20 of itself initially.
Why didn’t we do it yet?
This is likely an under-estimate of how self-funding eugenics is, but it’s clear that the first few generations requires a large investment. It’s more expensive for less payoff than I previously though — it’s plausible that, holding human nature constant, if we were richer and the selection response to classical eugenics were higher, we would have had a successful classical eugenics program by now. The high cost of classical eugenics is potentially half the reason, other than humans being too egalitarian and self-interested (meaning, most people are shitty, and mostly interested in banding together with other shitty people so they can have more fleeting utility, and better types tend to be too tolerant of this behavior because they’re too egalitarian, i.e. tolerant of shitty people).
This changes my priors towards increasing wealth being more important in the short term than I previously thought. With boosts to the efficiency of eugenics through embryo selection (this can be combined with classical eugenics for maximum results) and boosts to human wealth through AI and other inventions, eugenics becomes easier to manifest.
This is neither here nor there in light of the entire article. It's more just a question I have about this 20k figure. Honestly, who are these people requiring this amount of money to raise a kid? *I get that if a mother works full time and focuses on career, that is an insane amount of money - and it'd add up. But on the whole, that is not where the figure comes from is it? One has kids and one gets on with it. The problem isn't that people can't afford kids. It's that they THINK they can't and they're TOLD they can't. We should spend time focusing on that.
Clothes... I'm thinking if one has relatives and hand-me-downs and a few new things, etc. honestly - it's like maybe $600 a year (and that gives one new shoes, new things every season, a new swimsuit, etc. - backpacks, soccer shoes even). Housing would be different without the kids, sure, but not a ton different. Still need to live somewhere with your partner in crime - so maybe add another $500 a month. *And if you double up on kids, it's more like $250 more a month each. Lessons - soccer, guitar, whatever - add another $600 a year (unless your kid is in comp whatever, then add another $2500). Birthdays, bikes, etc. - add another $500. Food... kk depending on age of kid anywhere from $20-$300 more a month (and, again, if you have more than one kid - it's less than this). Gas here and there, maybe another $100 a month - but, again, carpooling and more kids - it's maybe less. Project, funds for school, etc. - another $300 a year. Misc = $1000 more a year. Insurance - dentist, etc. supplements, etc. - k another $500 a year.
TOTAL: $12,000 ish - and one gets a few tax breaks. And that's for an expensive child imo. It's likely more like $6000 - $10,000 a year - and NOT per kid. I come from a huge family. I have over 60 first cousins. I'd say at least a third of the family raised their kids on lower minimum wage and blue collar wages. My own parents did that for about 20 years until my father finally was able to be a financial success. There's no way they spent even $1k a year on each of their brood (in 80s and 90s $). This is dumb. One has kids and one gets on with it. The problem isn't that people can't afford kids. It's that they THINK they can't and they're TOLD they can't.
I am raising three kids right now, and they do not even cost me $20k collectively, at least in direct costs. “$20K per year” comes almost exclusively from daycare/private school costs. There are other overhead costs that kids can incur - healthcare, housing, auto - but these are hard to estimate and very variable based on family. In terms of direct costs - food, clothing, toys - kids are pretty cheap.