What's Wrong with Classical Eugenics?

We're missing 30 IQ points because nobody listened to Galton

We should probably condemn our ancestors for not launching a strong classical eugenics program.

Back when Harvard was WASP, they could have required marriage and 4 kids to get your diploma.

For just IQ, we could have easily gained 15 points in the 20th century.

The math here is the breeder’s equation

Even 30 per century is possible with some grit.

Instead, we lost about 10 points in the 20th century. 10 points is an understatement, because, as any economist knows, the real costs include opportunity cost! With a 15 point opportunity lost, we’re down 25 to 40 IQ points relative to the eugenics counter-factual.

What does this mean in concrete terms? Uncorrelated estimates that we will lose 18 years of innovation over the next 75 years relative to a counterfactual of genetic equilibrium due to IQ dysgenics causing a 5 point drop.

Assuming his model is linear, that’s 24 years per century for every 5 points. That means we’re 120 innovation years behind right now due to the failure to do classical eugenics. Roughly speaking, classical eugenicist society would have had the internet and computers in the 1960s. We would be 60 years into AI right now.

Think of all the death and suffering the failure to do classical eugenics has caused due to the lack of progress. Now weigh that against the typical arguments against it: “it’s kind of mean to tell people how much to breed.” So? China had a national one child policy. Why can’t we have a one child policy for the bottom half of the bell curve? We have to be a century behind on technological development because someone might get offended?

And there’s no excuse for it. Only a committed libertarian can consistently disagree with classical eugenics. The coercive horrors of modern day education and credentialism are far worse than any reasonable classical eugenics program, and the net result of the former is wasted resources. I haven’t even begun to address modern war, taxation, thoughtcrime laws, and so on. The majority of people support all of these; we live in a democracy after all. The only reason they reject classical eugenics is their own selfishness and envy — they don’t want to envy the future and honestly could care less about it. If it’s not a widget that they can use to get a leg up personally, they don’t want it.

I would say the failure to enact classical eugenics swiftly and at scale is the worst mistake humanity has ever made.