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Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's avatar

Seb Jensen did a meta-analysis of international rates of dysgenics. Sweden is not eugenic, but it's only weakly dysgenic. https://www.cspicenter.com/p/are-we-getting-dumber

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Sebastian Jensen's avatar

Some of this is with outdated data. I'm not sure what the new statistics would look like.

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Craig Willy's avatar

Do you think this can be squared with this data? I would think the 25% richest would be significantly brighter than the 25% poorest.

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Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's avatar

Yes. Income itself has a positive effect on fertility (probably causal), but intelligence and education, overall, are negatively associated (slightly).

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Philip Skogsberg's avatar

Is this because people with more income think they can afford more children? Or some other indirect effect of higher incomes?

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Julia Haston's avatar

It would be interesting to see the same numbers for France. The policy of having double deductions on income tax for the 3rd child is only of benefit to the 50% of the couples that pay tax. The higher one's tax rate, the larger the incentive

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Peter Gerdes's avatar

I have 2 kinda opposite issues with these discussions.

1) People have no fucking idea if the reproduction they see selects for or against intelligence.

It's totally plausible that even if we select against high educational attainment in fact intelligence is the result of many many genes and it's still true that on the margin they are selected for: eg the guy who has a few more of those genes is a bit more likely to keep narcan around when he shoots up, to surrender and ask for a lawyer not shoot at the police when he gets caught in a crime or just be a bit more effective in sleeping around.

2) Eugenics is such a dumb fucking argument against a policy or approach. Sure, awful things were done by people who called themselves eugenicists but that's like pointing out the Nazis were really into nature so nature is bad. Just analyze the actual picy don't do guilt by name association.

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