Eugenics and slavery, or commercializing reproduction

Those of us who accept that mental characteristics are heritable have noticed a worrisome phenomenon - the tendency of more intelligent and successful people to leave reproduction to those who have, ummm, other special and unique qualities. One cause for this is the much greater investment intelligent parents tend to put into their kids. If they stay at home, they lose a bigger salary. They tend to be the ones who fuss over there kids and get involved in their education, which takes a lot of energy. They feed their kids food that's more expensive than Chef Boyardee. They also tend to pursue their own educations well into, or even beyond, their peak reproductive years, and they are often saddled with huge student loans when they finally finish.

This is not beneficial to society as a whole. To oversimplify a bit, crack whores are having seven kids while a female doctor is lucky to squeeze one out at 39.

Switching gears, lets consider the problem of the tragedy of the commons. To summarize, there's a common good - let's say fish in the ocean. Nobody owns it, but anybody can harvest. There is no incentive to be a good steward of the resource. The rational thing to do is to catch as many fish as you can before the other guy does. It's bad for the fishery, but somebody's going to get it and it might as well be you. The usual solution to this is either privatization of the resource (no commons, no tragedy), or regulation of resource extraction. Or to deny that the problem exists, but I digress.

Dysgenics is analogous to the tragedy of the commons, except that instead of having a motivation to overexploit a common good, you have little incentive to produce a common good - children who have a reasonable prospect of becoming productive members of society. When you go to your doctor, you're benefitting from the considerable effort the parents put into raising their child. The more investment they put into their child, the more likely the child is to grow up into a productive member of society. But they don't receive any direct financial benefit - you and the rest of society do. Economically, it makes no sense to have a child, and the less neglectful you are the less sense it makes. But we're all going to lose when our society turns into Idiocracy as a result of leaving reproduction up to those who are less likely to raise smart, well-adjusted children.

One solution to this problem would be to make it possible for responsible parents to benefit financially from from having children. This is called positive eugenics, and if you favor it, you are an utterly evil Nazi who wants to murder six million Jews. The closest thing we have now are tax credits for college, which only benefit parents of college-bound children, and which are somehow not evil despite the fact that they benefit whites and the wrong kind of minorities more than the underrepresented kind, but these are a pittance. There are also larger tax benefits for children in general, but they benefit the parents of future prison inmates as much as they benefit the parents of future entrepreneurs. In relative terms, they benefit the former more, because they spend less on their children, so they get a larger proportion of their costs subsidized.

Now to the meat of this post. Another option, which I have not seen discussed elsewhere, would be to sell options on children. Suppose you could issue a share in a child's future earnings. Shareholders are entitled to a percentage of the child's wage. This is dangerously close to slavery, but, at the cost of increased risk for the investor, the parents could be held liable, not the children, and we could rely on filial piety to get the kids to pay up. The advantage of this system is that parents get paid according to the expected value of their children. A smart, stable couple could get quite a bit of money, while a crackhead would get next to nothing. A disadvantage is that some asshole judge would probably invalidate your contract.

But, if you're looking for a market-based solution, nothing beats hereditary slavery. That would be the ultimate way to commoditize reproduction. The slaveowner would have every incentive to increase the value of his slaves. It would be in his best interest to breed or otherwise select slaves with the most valuable assets, in order to increase profits.

There is some evidence that Southern slave owners practiced selective breeding, but it appears not to have been done on a large scale. But that was before the age of eugenics, and slaves were mostly used for simple manual labor that required nothing more than some physical stamina.

We are now near to deciphering the mysteries of the human genome. We will soon (probably in a matter of decades) know which genes do what, and, beyond selective breeding, we have technologies like embryo selection and gene splicing techniques. In the South, you were a slave if your mother was a slave, so you could have a Grahamesque breeding program of nobel laureates and female slaves (if you could find nobel laureates with sufficiently flexible ethics). Even if you couldn't find a nobel laureate willing to participate, we're probably not too far from the point at which we could reconstruct a sperm cell from a published personal genome, or from a surreptitiously collected flake of dandruff.

The bottom line is that we could, now or in the near future, create slaves with whatever characteristics we liked.

Imagine an alternate universe where the South had won the Civil War and they still had slavery (no, it would not have been banned eventually as some say. It was built into their constitution, and would have been more sacred to them than gun ownership is to present-day rednecks). Somebody would implement this idea sooner or later, because it would be too damned profitable to pass up. The result would be that you would have slaves who were far superior to their masters. I don't know how this ends, but it can't end well.

It would make a nice science fiction novel. Too bad I can't write that sort of thing. And too bad that the author would be crucified for suggesting that the brain is not magic, heredity actually has something to do with intelligence and competence, slavery has at least some consequences that are not utterly evil, and that evolution has social implications that involve something other than feeling smugly superior to evangelical Christians.

There could also be some perverse incentives. Suppose tobacco companies would pay you to give a kid a gene for nicotine addiction. There would probably be a lot of other results that are no more predictable to us than Rickrolling was to the people who wrote the internet protocol in the 1970s.