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Eugenics And Reproduction Licenses FAQs

For the Common Good

1. What Is Eugenics?

There are various ways to define eugenics, as it is used in this FAQs:

  • Eugenics is the deliberate social regulation of the genome.
  • Eugenics is about consciously selecting for traits that make people better members of society.
  • Eugenics is about selecting for traits that we value in other human beings, such as intelligence, health, and responsibility; and selecting against traits that we negatively value, such as irresponsibility and propensity to violence.
  • Eugenics selects for traits that are socially positive and selects against traits that are socially negative.
  • Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution. – This definition is historically notable for being a slogan of the International Eugenics Conference, but it’s too vague and inaccurate. In a sense, one could argue that the unregulated reproduction that is occurring today is the “self-direction of human evolution”. The eugenics that we’re proposing must be directed by society.
  • Eugenics is selective breeding or artificial selection, as managed by society. However, “selective breeding” tends to apply to crops, plants, animals, and other organisms used by humans, rather than humans. Another important distinction is that “selective breeding” for non-humans tends to have connotations with top-down eugenics, whereas we’re proposing laissez-faire eugenics for humans.

Regardless, what is considered “eugenic” is always relative to a given environment and a set of values. If the environment in question is not specified, it’s usually assumed to be Modernity or the society that one lives in. No matter what we do, the social environment places selective pressures on the human genome. Pro-social selection is also a feedback loop.

In a biological context that doesn’t involve humans, “eugenic” is usually defined with respect to biological value, from the perspective of an organism. In which case, eugenics is the improvement of genetic qualities through selection, to make organisms more adaptive to their relative environments. But that is not the definition of eugenics that will be used in this FAQs. When we and most other people are talking about eugenics with respect to humans, eugenics is defined according to social value and modern civilization. We believe that eugenics will be necessary to sustain modern civilization.

Different people each define “eugenics” differently, with the broadest (and dare we say more accurate) definitions including the prohibition of incest1 and the selection of desirable traits since those help improve the quality of the gene pool. A gene pool cannot maintain a good quality if it allows a significant amount of incest, so prohibiting incest should count as negative eugenics at the very least.

The definition of Eugenics and people’s opinions of it are affected by the Sapir-Whorf Effect. Some people mistakenly believe that eugenics has to involve race, that it has to be tied to Nazism, or that it has to involve cherry-picking specific traits, and many other misconceptions, so this FAQs page was created to address all these misunderstandings and explain how eugenics can, in fact, collectively benefit society.

The "eugenics tree" is strongly associated with the history and legacy of eugenics.
Figure 1: The Infamous Eugenics Tree (1923)

We are mainly arguing for (eugenic) population control (EPC), above all else. Fortunately, a favorable genetic selection will naturally follow from that, similar to how natural selection improves the fitness of organisms in nature. Depending on how eugenics is defined, the regulations we are proposing arguably don’t count as eugenics after all. If so, then we’re only proposing population control and nothing else. For this reason, many of the sections on this FAQs page will link to the Overpopulation FAQs page, where the questions are answered there.

1.1. But it’s completely subjective what “good” or “better” humans are.

Saying “there’s no objective way to define good” is not an argument against one definition or for another. We could just as easily say “there’s no objective way to define ‘chair’”. It’s just tactical nihilism.

Good genetics is intersubjective, not subjective. Most people can agree that we want smart, healthy, responsible, and productive humans who will make positive contributions to society. That is great criteria for laissez-faire eugenics. From an ideal society’s perspective, majority rules when determining what would be “best” for the society.

Making people better doesn’t sound like such a horrible thing, but it does imply that people aren’t born equal, and so it conflicts with the humanist belief in the intrinsic value and equality of human beings. The racial aspect of dysgenics makes it even more taboo. Not only are individuals unequal, races are also unequal. Eugenics doesn’t require racial genocide, but any race-blind eugenics program would affect racial demographics.

Instead of dealing with the moral and social issues involved, our culture just pretends that evolution doesn’t apply to humans. This is not rational. It is willful ignorance. – Blithering Genius, Dysgenics, Overpopulation and Conventional Ignorance

1.2. Examples of Socially-Acceptable Eugenics in Modern Society

Main Article: You’re Probably A Eugenicist - Diana Fleischman.

There is already popular support for several widely practiced and commonly accepted forms of Eugenics in modern society. Those instances just aren’t called Eugenics when they occur. Some examples include:

  • Outlawing incestual reproduction between close relatives.
  • Aborting fetuses that have severe birth defects.
  • Replacing defective mitochondrial DNA in children conceived via IVF.
  • GMOs and the selective breeding of plants and animals.
  • The prohibition of sperm and egg donations from people who have ADHD, ASD, or do not meet certain height requirements from some donor banks.

We support all those instances of eugenics, except for the last one.

Historically, Eugenics used to have a lot of public support in the early 1900s. So much so, that many Western countries had eugenics laws in the past. If the Nazis never rose power, it’s quite possible that most of the world never would’ve developed such negative (and irrational) attitudes towards Eugenics.

But abortion doesn’t count as eugenics.

Of course it does:

Just as there are no rational arguments against eugenics, there are also no rational arguments against abortion.

Related: Four Beneficial Evolutionary Mutations That Humans Are Undergoing Right Now.

Related: Wikipedia: Familial Natural Short Sleep.

2. Why Should We Implement Eugenics? How Is Dysgenics A Threat To Humanity?

A better question would be: Why shouldn’t we implement eugenics? We live in a time where there is unprecedented evolutionary mismatch between the people living in society and the modern technological industrial environment. Biological evolution is slower than cultural evolution and humans evolve more slowly than pathogens.

The only ways to solve the evolutionary mismatch facing us today are: 1. get rid of modern civilization, or 2. eugenics. We argue that the latter is far more preferable than the former. Either we change the environment back to what it was, or we change our genetics to fit the new environment.

Modern civilization will collapse if we don’t implement EPC. Even worse, if modern civilization collapses, it will probably never recover since the fossil fuels that powered it will already be all used up, and humans won’t have the necessary energy input to restart industrial civilization. The scientific knowledge, technological complexity, social complexity, and economic complexity will all fall apart if that happens.

Evolution is not guided by a human brain. The humans that did get to pass their genes onto the next generation only had to be smart enough to build shelter, hunt and gather food/water, and raise healthy children for the next generation. Evolution hasn’t gone far enough in selecting better humans.

Additionally, if someone is going to insist that eugenics is always bad under all circumstances, then they ought to be against all socially acceptable forms of eugenics as well.


But all selection is zero-sum. Selecting some people can only be done by not selecting others.

That’s not quite true. Humans will never be able to transcend evolution, since it’s part of the human condition. Additionally, eugenic selection would benefit all of society and all of society’s future descendants in the long-run. Eugenics is not zero-sum when considering that.

2.1. But the Flynn Effect proves that Humanity got smarter.

That claim was marginally true for the early-to-mid 20th century. There were major improvements in environmental circumstances up until 1969, but the Flynn Effect has already come to an end in the Modern era. It’s also possible that the Flynn effect mainly reflects that the population became more accustomed to standardized written tests, rather than showing actual increases in intelligence.

To clarify, the Flynn Effect is based on improved environmental conditions, whereas the Reverse Flynn Effect is based rising dysgenics. Although environmental factors may have temporarily increased IQ scores, increasing dysgenics is lowering IQ scores by a larger and faster rate. A Reverse Flynn Effect has been occurring ever since the 1990s.

Read More:

2.2. But intelligence, responsibility, health, etc can be improved by environmental factors.

Nobody is denying that intelligence and personality traits are affected by environmental factors, nor is anybody denying that improving environmental conditions for everyone is a good thing. The point is that they’re determined by genetics more strongly than by environmental factors. Intelligence is estimated to be ~80% determined by genetics.

Moreover, genetics and environments go hand-in-hand. In a sense, we can think of every trait as being both 100% genetic and 100% environmental. We could improve the environment, but past a certain point, we’re not going to see any improvements in society without genetic improvements.

Lastly, improving environmental conditions doesn’t solve the problem of overpopulation. Humanity must enforce population control if we wish to have a sustainable future.

2.3. What evidence is there to prove that dysgenics is increasing in the Modern World?

Overview: Dysgenics - Brittonic Memetics

Dysgenics is increasing faster than ever, due to: 1. evolutionary mismatch created by the Industrial Revolution (humans are not well-adapted to high-tech environments), 2. the removal of selectionary pressures on the human genome (medical technologies enable all infants to live to adulthood regardless of self-sufficiency, disabilities and birth defects, etc); and 3. the proliferation of welfare state policies:

  • There is a strong negative correlation between how educated someone is and how many children they have. Less educated people consistently tend to have more children. Source
  • Humanity has been undergoing a strong decline in IQ over the past few decades.
  • Single-Parent Households are rising. In 2020, 40.5% of all newborns in the US were born to unmarried women, the vast majority of whom will grow up in single-parent households, according to the CDC. Decades ago, single-parent households only made up a few percentage points of the population. This indicates that less responsible children are having more children, which is not a good thing. Raising children should ideally be a two-person job.
    • To clarify, this phenomena is caused by a mix of dysgenic and social factors. It’s still evidence of rising dysgenics though, since less responsible people have higher fertility rates.
    • We also don’t believe it matters whether people get married or not as long as there are guarantees that people will take care of their own children without relying on government welfare.
    • Furthermore, although marriage has decayed to only 60% among newborns, many of those marriages are likely to divorce eventually, so the problem is even worse that this statistic suggests.
  • The Nature of Dysgenics in Modern Society - The Untangler.
  • The Internet and other technologies have made it easier than ever for neurodivergent people to meet each other. Since neurodivergent people are more likely to date, marry, and have kids with each other, neurodivergent conditions and disorders are becoming more common among the general population.
  • “The Amish make up only about 10 percent of the population in Geagua County in Ohio, but they’re half of the special needs cases” Source. These special needs cases are caused by the Founder Effect. The Amish are one of the fastest growing demographics in the world, so this problem will only get worse.
  • Near the end of this podcast episode, Dr. Gregory Clark talks more about this with Steven Hsu, and he said that the turning point for when average IQ started to decrease instead of increase was about 1850 for Europe.
    • Edward Dutton has made similar claims that human intelligence has been declining in the West ever since 1850, and that the generations that started the Industrial Revolution were the smartest generations ever in human history.
    • Wikipedia also says that “contraceptives were relatively common among the middle class and upper class” (in the United States during the 1800s).
    • If contraceptive usage was lower among the lower class, and the lower class had lower intelligence than the other classes, then this seems consistent with the claim that intelligence has been decreasing ever since 1850.
  • Sound Reasoning. The genome is not stable without positive selection. Even without dysgenic fertility or selection, the genome would gradually degrade by mutation. Random noise is always being added to the genome by mutation, and it must be removed to maintain the quality of the genome. What removes mutations? Selection, or in other words, differential reproduction. That selection can come from differential fertility or differential survival to adulthood.

It is a serious problem that the global IQ is falling because of dysgenic fertility. IQ is not a direct measure of intelligence. It is just a measure of one’s ability to take IQ tests, and it can be improved with practice. However, it is a good proxy for a certain type of intelligence (abstract reasoning), and it is predictive of social and economic outcomes, such as income and criminality. With other factors taken into account (such as economic system and natural resources), IQ also predicts the outcomes of societies. Higher IQ people create societies that are better by a lot of standard metrics. Lower IQ people create societies that are worse by a lot of standard metrics.

For now, industrialization is still raising the global standard of living (and the global rate of fossil fuel consumption), but a growing population and falling IQ will eventually reverse that trend. Overpopulation and dysgenics both lead inexorably toward civilizational collapse. They lead back to the ancestral condition in which our population is regulated by war, disease and famine.

Modern medicine and abundance bear dysgenic effects because on average, everyone of us is born with 60 or so new, random mutations. Most are situated in non-coding DNA and are neutral. Of the ones that are not, the vast majority are a net negative because they introduce random change in a very ordered, highly functional structure: the human body. In a world with high newborn and child mortality, this “genetic load” is kept at a low level by repeated trimming. In the modern world, however, with very little selective pressure, genetic load simply accumulates and progressively messes up every organ, including our brains. There is still trimming occurring because we can’t save the desperate cases, but the better we are at salvaging dysfunctional bodies, the higher the threshold at which genetic load will stabilize.

Taken as groups, Europeans, East Asians and some others are well adapted to complex, modern societies and have, in that sense, a very high genetic capital. However, the dysgenic effects apply to them too. In the absence of immigration it would simply take longer for them to degrade to the point of being unable to maintain modern civilization, because they have more “capital” to burn through.

To be clear, when I say that some groups are adapted to complex, modern societies, I mean that they are able to establish one and keep it running. Of course, in an evolutionary sense, their current birthrates indicate that they are (if anything) less adapted to the conditions of modern society than overall parasitic populations. “Parasitic” here means free-riding, in the sense that welfare props up their birthrates. – Felix, “Laissez-Faire Eugenics”

Read More: The Collapse Of Western IQ - Thuletide.

Read More: Civilization Becomes Unsustainable Below 97 IQ Average - 1.

Read More: Civilization Becomes Unsustainable Below 97 IQ Average - 2.

2.4. How is overpopulation a threat to humanity?

2.5. What is the connection between Population Control and Eugenics?

We have to distinguish between different proposals for population control. If population control is administered such that every couple can only have a fixed number of children (e.g. the One Child Policy in China), then it would have some eugenic effects since it would limit the proliferation of dysgenic genes, but it would also have dysgenic effects since it would limit the proliferation of eugenic genes.

The laissez-faire approach to eugenics proliferates eugenic genes while limiting the proliferation of dysgenics similarly to how it’s done in nature. When a population exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment (overpopulation), only the fittest organisms will be able to survive since they will outcompete the less fit organisms when obtaining resources. This is no longer happening in the modern world because modern medicine and technology have removed the historical selectionary pressures on the human genome, thus causing ecological overshoot and eventual overpopulation.

Our proposal for eugenic population control (EPC) has two components: 1. legal maximum population limit to give buffer room for avoid hitting the carrying capacity, and 2. reproduction licenses that place new selectionary pressures for increasing the eugenic quality of the human population. The reproduction licenses are necessary for enforcing the maximum population limit, and the licenses are enforced in such a way that the population control helps maintain the human genome. Hence why population control laissez-faire eugenics are compatible and complementary to each other.

2.6. What about genetic engineering instead?

Genetic Engineering (GE) has many potential benefits. One of them is that it tends to conflict less with people’s moral values. People are less likely to associate Nazism and racism with genetic engineering as they typically would for eugenics.

Genetic engineering could affect human evolution to an extent. But even if it does, genetic engineering is still more expensive than natural reproduction, so it would be limited mostly to the educated middle/upper classes of society, who have lower fertility rates. Designer babies will probably never become the most common way of having kids, especially not among the poorer, less intelligent factions of society who tend to have higher fertility rates. Genetic engineering won’t eliminate the need for some form of laissez-faire eugenics, because we cannot transcend evolution.

Designer babies still require top-down regulation of reproduction, since most parents are unlikely to make good choices about their designer babies.2 Whatever traits parents choose would probably have unforeseen consequences as people compete in Tragedies of the Commons to have the most beautiful children, the most athletic children, obedient children, or whatever other arbitrary qualities people would select for in designer babies. It would be similar to how people have selectively bred dogs for thousands of years to have all sorts of different traits across hundreds of different dog breeds. Many of those dog breeds would die out without human support since the selected traits are actually dysgenic to their natural survival in the wild. Similarly, the offspring of uncontrolled genetic engineering would probably have many maladaptive traits that would cause their eventual extinction due to below replacement fertility rates.

Parents, governments, and society all have different desires for what specific traits they would select designer babies to have, so that’s another problem.2 Dirigiste eugenics doesn’t work.

Genetic engineering doesn’t offer the benefits of reproduction licenses. GE won’t prevent single parent households. GE won’t ensure that parents will take care of their children. GE won’t stabilize the dating market. GE may never be cheap enough to prevent dysgenics from accumulating on a wide scale.

Lastly, genetic engineering would not solve overpopulation, whereas reproduction licenses would. Instead of trying to circumvent the moral stigmas associated with eugenics and introducing an innumerous list of unforeseen consequences, it would just be better to institute the this proposed list of requirements for having children.

Despite all the downsides to genetic engineering, it’s likely that it will probably be used in some capacity in the future anyway. Since GE could be abused in runaway selection contests, GE must be regulated by governments. Any pair of parents who try to conceive children via GE must still fulfill the requirements for having children.

Read More: Gwern’s Page On Embryo Selection For Intelligence.

3. How Are Welfare States Relevant To Eugenics And Dysgenics?

Welfare states are a free-rider problem. They tax productive self-sufficient people in order to subsidize the reproduction of unproductive and irresponsible people who tend to have more children than they can afford to take of. The EPC system that we are proposing eliminates the need for child support and related welfare by guaranteeing that parents have to self-sufficient in order to have children. Having welfare can be justified for the sake of being humane, but the positive feedback loops it introduces (more dependents -> more welfare -> yet more dependents etc) creates an unsustainable system in the absence of a compensating negative feedback loop(s).

With enough generations or so, the inevitable outcome of a welfare state is a population where the majority of the people living in it are irresponsible and unable to take care of themselves. If we reach this point, then society will collapse due to immense irresponsibility, lack of self-sufficiency, increased violence, and financial bankruptcy.

Welfare programs also tend to generate massive amounts of government debt. The current debt of many developed countries are among the highest levels in their respective countries’ histories. Money doesn’t grow on trees, and every penny borrowed must eventually be paid back. Unfortunately, it remains to be seen whether many of those countries will be able to pay back everything that they borrowed. Eventually, many of those countries will have to cut or terminate their welfare programs out of economic necessity.

  Anti-Welfare Pro-Welfare
Pro-EPC Sustainable Unnecessary
Anti-EPC Inhumane Unsustainable

You can’t be truly anti-welfare unless you’re pro-EPC. If you are anti-welfare and anti-EPC, then the only other option is to let impoverished children starve to death, which everyone would label as inhumane.

  • Sustainable: A Sustainable future, fewest moral dilemmas.
  • Unnecessary: Being Pro-EPC eliminates the need for virtually all welfare, except during extremely dire situations (similar to the Great Depression or WWII), so there’s no dilemmas or contradictions here.
  • Inhumane: Impoverished children must starve (to death) since there’s no welfare and no method for preventing their unfortunate existence in the first place.
  • Unsustainable: The status quo, a system that subsidizes irresponsibility and taxes responsibility because anti-welfare is “cruel” and pro-EPC is “evil”.

The best solution to this dilemma is to enforce reasonable legal requirements for people who want to have children, so that we can eliminate the unsustainablility of the welfare state, while achieving the most humane conditions possible.

The welfare state is always sustainable at first, but not at the end.
Figure 2: The welfare state is always sustainable at first, but not at the end.

The only times when welfare can be rationally justified for a society are when it provides the populace with relief from major economic catastrophes (e.g. The Great Depression; earthquake, hurricane, flooding, etc disaster relief). In these situations, there are no free-rider problems, and the welfare would speed up the country’s economic recovery. So, welfare can sometimes be justified during times of dire need.

If welfare is provided to people during non-dire times, then welfare recipients should not have the right the vote, nor the right to reproduce. These conditions are necessary because welfare and democracy don’t mix, and neither do democracy and reproduction (theoretically in the long term).

3.1. What happens if we get rid of the welfare state?

It is technically sustainable to just let people die if they can’t take care of themselves or their children, and this has been the condition that most humans have faced throughout humanity’s history. But this conflicts with most people’s modern moral intuitions. For that reason, this option will probably never be collectively chosen by the majority of people in society, unless Modernity collapses and Humanity reverts to pre-Industrial conditions.

But getting rid of the welfare state will incentivize parents to be more responsible.

While that might be true to an extent, it is inevitable that some parents are not going to take care of their kids, regardless of whether there is a welfare state or not.

Charity is not a long-term replacement for the welfare state either because life is selected to be intrinsically selfish, so charitable memes and genes will eventually die out since altruism is not self-sustaining.

The only long-term solution for getting rid of the welfare state will be to enforce EPC to select for productive and responsible genes and select against irresponsible genes, lest irresponsible people will die from being unable to support themselves and their children. If EPC were enforced today and the welfare state was eliminated overnight, there would probably be enough charity to support most former welfare-dependent people for a while for however long they live, before natural selection wipes out charitable behaviors.

3.2. But most welfare goes towards elderly people, not people of reproductive age.

That is true (for the United States at least), but we still stand by our position that giving welfare and especially child support to people of reproductive age is both biologically and financially unsustainable because it contributes to dysgenics.

Even then, welfare for elderly people should still be opposed because it is financially unsustainable and is not conducive towards a functioning long-term society. The current welfare system is a Ponzi Scheme. Some examples:

Additionally, privatizing the US’s Social Security program and other welfare programs for elderly people and retirees could offer much higher returns for elderly people.

4. Addressing Objections And Questions To Eugenics

4.1. Would eugenics “interfere with the natural order of things”?

That’s a foolish objection, and an Appeal to Nature Fallacy. What is the natural order of things? Until recently, most children died young. Now, with modern civilization (based on fossil fuels) we allow most children to live to adulthood. If eugenics violates the natural order, then so does modern civilization.

We could use eugenic population control to create a new “natural order” of sustainable prosperity. And why shouldn’t we? Nature will not strike us down for using eugenics. In fact, the opposite is true. Nature will eventually destroy our civilization if we don’t regulate our population eugenically. – Blithering Genius, Eugenostate versus Ethnostate

4.2. Would eugenics be horribly authoritarian?

No. It’s no more authoritarian, totalitarian, or tyrannical than limiting the freedom to drive, limiting the freedom to kill other people, or forcing people to pay their taxes. Reproduction has serious consequences that can be harmful to others, so the imposition of social constraints on reproduction is justified for the same reason that social constraints on other behaviors are justified.

No political authority can be trusted to enforce eugenics.

You could make the same argument about anything that a government does:

  • Nobody can be trusted to control the police.
  • Nobody can be trusted to run the military.
  • Nobody can be trusted to collect taxes.
  • Et Cetera.

Anybody who oppose eugenics on the belief that “nobody can be trusted” might as well embrace anarchism, which is doomed to fail. It’s clearly not a rational argument against eugenics.

Also, licenses are already required to adopt children because the public wants to ensure that the children will be placed in good care, so it’s logically inconsistent to not also require licenses for people to have biological children. Almost no one would argue that the rights of prospective adoptive parents are being violated if they are prohibited from adopting children due to not meeting the licensing requirements, assuming that the requirements are reasonable and fair to everybody (including gay couples).

Moreover, higher population densities necessarily lead to more constraints on individual freedom, so population control could make a society less authoritarian by causing fewer conflicts.

4.3. Would eugenics violate human rights?

There are plenty of reasons why eugenic population control would protect human rights, not violate them. To clarify, we’re not proposing that it should be impossible for some people to have children based on predetermined factors. We’re just proposing that there should be reasonable limits on how many children people should be allowed to have. Nowadays, most children live to adulthood, so it’s not as necessary as it was historically to have as large families anyway. Voluntarily low fertility is not a feasible solution for preventing overpopulation.

  1. Population control would prevent billions of deaths that would otherwise be caused by the consequences of overpopulation.
  2. A child that cannot be supported by its parents is either a burden on the rest of society (which harms other members of society), or it will be harmed by neglect. Uncontrolled reproduction inflicts harm on others, so there is a clear ethical basis for socially controlling reproduction.
    Instead of asking why parents should be required to have a license to have children, we should be asking why it should be legal for biological parents to have children if it’s not guaranteed that they will take care of them, especially when single-parent households have been rising at unprecedented levels. Such behavior is extremely irresponsible, and it’s equally irresponsible for society to just let that happen without consequences.
  3. Licenses are already required to adopt children in order to ensure that the children will be placed in good care, so it is logically inconsistent to not also require licenses for people to have biological children. Almost no one would argue that the rights of prospective adoptive parents are being violated if they are prohibited from adopting children due to not meeting the licensing requirements, assuming that the requirements are reasonable and fair to everybody (including gay couples).
  4. EPC would select against any genetic causes of criminal behavior, thus offering further protection of human rights by significantly reducing crimes against innocent people.
  5. It’s often harmful and distressing for people who were born with debilitating genetic disorders to have to live with them. Many would say that it is a grave injustice to be born with such disorders. Eugenics would discourage or prevent such misfortunes.
  6. Rights are whatever people decide they are, and circumstances can cause peoples’ opinions to change on what rights should be, so the only legitimate rights are legal rights, whereas moral rights are nonsense since morality depends on perspective. Any proposed set of rights should be designed so that rights don’t contradict each other, and ideally all the rights proposed would protect and reinforce each other. People may argue that population control violates people’s autonomy, but since the benefit is that it will confer more protection to all other rights via all the ways we’ve just explained, the benefits outweigh the costs and it’s thus a reasonable change to make.

Lastly, it’s important to emphasize that what’s at stake here is whether modern technological society thrives or permanently collapses forever. When a population reaches its carrying capacity, widespread death become inevitable. For anybody who a thriving prosperous future for humanity, what could be more important than maintaining that for humanity’s future? If Industrial Society does collapse, there’s a strong possibility that it will never recover and that the world will be eternally stuck living an 18th-century lifestyle.

But Eugenics has been used to justify killing, segregation, genocide, etc.

This a Guilt by Association Fallacy. Just because eugenics was used to partially justify killing, segregation, and genocide in the past, that doesn’t mean that it has to be associated with any of those things in the future.

Moreover, most of those things that you mentioned were motivated by racism, not eugenics. Those are two completely different things.

4.4. Would eugenics create a caste-based society, similar to Gattaca?

In the 2004 democratic transhumanist book Citizen Cyborg, bioethicist James Hughes criticized the premise and influence of the film Gattaca as fear-mongering, arguing:

  1. Astronaut-training programs are entirely justified in attempting to screen out people with heart problems for safety reasons.
  2. In the United States, people are already screened by insurance companies on the basis of their propensities to disease, for actuarial purposes.
  3. Rather than banning genetic testing or genetic enhancement, society should develop genetic information privacy laws such as the U.S. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act signed into law on May 21, 2008 that allow justified forms of genetic testing and data aggregation, but forbid those that are judged to result in genetic discrimination. Citizens should then be able to make a complaint to the appropriate authority if they believe they have been discriminated against because of their genotype.

The text above was copied from the Gattaca Wikipedia Article, under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

More to the point, most people underestimate how much social status is determined by genetics. Humans have essentially lived under social caste-based societies with low, stable social mobility for nearly all of human history. We essentially already live in a world where intelligence, fitness, social status, socio-economic mobility, etc are all mainly determined by genetics. Hence, there would be no reason to fear or believe that accepting eugenics and race realism would lead to a Gattaca-like world that’s much different from the one that we currently live in.

Read More:

5. Race And Eugenics Questions

5.1. Didn’t the Nazis enforce Eugenics?

The association with Nazism is the main reason why the Eugenics movement declined in popularity during the 20th century. Pointing out the support for eugenics among Nazis as an argument against Eugenics is an Association Fallacy. Nevertheless, Eugenics ≠ Nazism. To the contrary, the Nazis failed to implement eugenics on a rational, scientific basis. In some cases they even promoted dysgenics:

  1. There is absolutely no scientific evidence that blonde hair, blue eyes, white skin, and other “Aryan” characteristics cause higher intelligence. Intelligence is affected by mental characteristics, not physical ones.
  2. The Nazis murdered millions of people from one of the most influential and productive ethnic groups in history relative to its size: the Jews. Given the Ashkenazi Jews’ strong historical record of making scientific accomplishments and contributing to human progress, killing millions of them is the opposite of eugenics. Positive eugenics is supposed to increase the reproduction of people who are more intelligent, physically-fit, etc than the average human, but that’s the opposite of what the Nazis did.
  3. The Nazis’ conception of “eugenics” was dirigiste, not laissez-faire. Top-down eugenics causes just as many problems as it solves, so it’s actually as dysgenic as it is eugenic. Our approach to eugenics would not prevent physically disabled, mentally disabled, diseased, etc from reproducing as long as they satisfy the list of requirements. Not only is our approach guaranteed to work better, but it’s also more liberal.

The Nazis used racism, propaganda, and pseudo-science as a justification for mass murder during the Holocaust. What we are advocating for is real eugenics under a laissez-faire approach, i.e. policies that are backed by reasoning, scientific evidence, and non-partisanship. We would like to strongly emphasize to the fullest extent possible that racism is not eugenics.

As an aside, the Nazis frankly weren’t any more “evil” than the Allied Powers were. Both sides committed crimes against humanity.

5.2. Would Ethnostates Promote Eugenics?

See: What are Ethnostates, and how practical are they? - Philosophy of Race FAQs

In theory, an ethnostate can also be a eugenostate, as long as it enforces eugenic policies. There are multiple definitions for “ethnostate”. If the ethnostate promotes racial homogeneity, then it will be harder to achieve the requisites of a eugenostate since it would have to accomplish two potentially conflicting goals at once. But if the ethnostate only promotes the interests of its most dominant ethnic group, this likely wouldn’t harm its objectives for enforcing eugenics. In order for an ethnostate to qualify as a eugenostate, it must enforce eugenic reproductive control.

An advantage to ethnostates is that they are more likely to have cultural traditions that are unlikely to change over time due to adaptive coherence, since it would exclude ethnicities that have different genes that could affect the memetic and cultural traditions of the society. This could increase the society’s stability. By contrast, if an ethnically homogenous state like Japan was no longer an ethnostate and it has mass foreign immigration, then the culture would change. This would make the country’s future less stable and more unpredictable.

Ethnostates could pass laws prohibiting race-mixing. Race-mixing isn’t necessarily dysgenic, and whether it is considered eugenic or dysgenic can only be compared with an existing population genepool. For example, in a country where whites tend to have average IQ scores of ~100, if the Europeans were to race-mix with any other race besides Ashkenazi Jews or East Asians (which have average IQs estimated to be ~108 and ~106 respectively), the average IQ of the resulting children would be lower than 100. If the country desires to maintain a high IQ, it would do them well to prevent the population from race-mixing with races that have lower IQs, except in the case of statistical outliers. Eternal Anglo has an interactive map and post that arguably shows where countries should source their immigrants, based on IQ.

Depending on the goals, it could be reasonable to oppose race-mixing when it lowers intelligence (and other associated, well-correlated factors like delayed gratification, personal responsibility, lower crime rates, etc) and biological fitness. Since IQ (a proxy for measuring intelligence) tends to be approximately normally distributed in populations, and since the greatest intellectual and technological ideas tend to be produced by the far right side of the distributions, race mixing two populations with different intelligence will have a strong negative impact on what geniuses or great people can be produced by the population. For example, the race-mixing between Europeans and American Indians in the New World, which resulted in the ethnogenesis of mestizos. The average IQ of the mestizos is between the Amerindians and Europeans. Latin America’s average IQ is lower than Europe’s average IQ, and this helps explain why those societies failed to create many inventions or notable ideas.

However, if the races being mixed have similar intelligence and won’t result in much decreased biological fitness, then it’s not worth prohibiting it. In a multiracial society, there may not be much benefit to preserving distinctive races as long as the population has eugenic qualities, and since race mixing is inevitable to some extent.

In conclusion, ethnostates could help improve eugenics, prevent dysgenics, and increase societal stability, provided that they prioritize eugenic reproductive control and aren’t obsessed with maintaining racial homogeneity to the detriment of their populations’ eugenic quality. Whether it’s feasible to create them or not is a different question that depends on the circumstances.

Nevertheless, ethnostates are not necessary for implementing eugenics. They are completely optional. There are also good arguments that ethnostates could interfere with implementing eugenics. Since it’s not always possible to create ethnostates, some eugenostates will never have ethnostate policies. Fortunately, this isn’t a problem for implementing eugenics.

5.3. Would some races be more reproductively successful than others under a Eugenostate?

See: Why would underperforming demographics benefit from accepting biological realism? - Race FAQs.

First, we do not advocate that some race(s) be given greater legal privileges than other races. We believe that all people from any race should be entitled to the same legal rights as anyone else. We advocate for a eugenostate that would treat all races equally under the law, but there would be competition regarding who is authorized to reproduce who is forbidden. It is likely that some races (i.e. Europeans and East Asians) would be more reproductively successful than others under a eugenostate since some races have higher intelligence and greater economic productivity (on average), and are thus better adapted to modernity than others. However, this does not mean that Asians and Europeans would always be better than all the other races in all situations. If the eugenostate that we support did exist, it could not forbid anybody who meets all of the listed requirements from having children, regardless of what their race is. Eugenostates value equal opportunities, not equality of outcomes.

If anything, acknowledging this is actually a good argument for eugenics. If some races aren’t as intelligent or successful as other races, then eugenics could put the less intelligent races on (more) equal footing as other races. The most intelligent races became intelligent in the first place due to natural selection, and the same would have to happen to less intelligent races in order for their intelligence to increase. Eugenics is the best (and only) way to truly eliminate the achievement gaps and discrimination between races within merit-based social systems, once and for all.

Our theory of how intelligence evolved differently in different human races is that intelligence depended mainly on the level of civilizational complexity. That is, higher intelligence tends to be selected by higher levels of civilization (and vice versa, except for modernity). 2000 years ago, Germanic people were barbarian iron age farmers. Nowadays, they have some of the most intelligent and technologically advanced countries today. Many societies in precolonial Africa had similar levels of civilization as well as noticeably lower intelligence, most likely because their civilization hadn’t advanced enough to select for comparably high intelligence. We see no reason to believe that intelligence can’t be selected for in Sub-Saharan Africans (or any race), similarly to how it was done for Jews, Europeans, and East Asians over a couple of millennia. It should be theoretically possible to create high populations of Sub-Saharan Africans with comparable intelligence to Europeans, if the selectionary pressure for intelligence and population growth are both strong enough after 10 generations or so (give or take).

How would eugenics affect the Great Replacement of White People?

It would raise the average fertility rates of white people (and also Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians), and other people with productive and child-bearing genes.

Immigration policies are equally important for creating eugenostates, so tightening immigration into Western Countries would help prevent the Great Replacement. We already have limited resources, so there is no reason to allow more than a trickle of useful immigrants into the West.

We also propose these ideas for raising Western fertility rates as well.

Read More: Philosophy of Race FAQs.

6. Why Not Have A Top-Down Eugenics System Instead Of A Laissez-Faire Eugenics System?

It’s not feasible nor reasonable to have a body of bureaucrats to micromanage a huge population. They won’t have the information or the incentives to make effective decisions that would benefit the entire system as a whole. Top-down / dirigiste eugenics3 would fail for the same reason why Communism always fails.

  1. If a eugenics policy is biased towards people who are suited towards one type of occupation over another, then the genes of people who work important occupations die out, and there will be no one left with optimal genetics for doing those occupations. This would devastate society.
  2. Most traits are polygenic and non-Mendelian, so it’s difficult to precisely measure whether genes have positive or negative effects on the human genome.
  3. Dirigiste policies would restrict who people can and cannot marry. Such policies are easier and more likely to be abused, so they would increase conflict in society.
  4. Not everybody can agree on what traits count as “good” or not.
  5. Not everybody can agree on what counts as mental or physical illness or not. No matter how it’s decided, it would still cause potentially desirable genes to be removed from the gene pool.
  6. Dirigiste eugenics isn’t as flexible for preventing overpopulation or population collapse. By contrast, laissez-faire eugenics uses population control in order to increase the eugenic quality of the genome, so it’s more adjustable for preventing both overpopulation and population collapse.
  7. Dirigiste eugenics is significantly more authoritarian than laissez-faire eugenics, so people are less likely to support it since most people tend to value having individual freedom.

By contrast, this reasonable set of requirements would create a healthy population with plenty of desirable genetic diversity, aside from traits that make people prone to be less cooperative, less intelligent, less productive, more violent, etc. We want our population to have enough genetic diversity so that an unpredictable change to the environmental circumstances will ensure that our population will be able to adapt to the changing circumstances.

Over time, the laissez-faire requirements would cause the ability to pay the reproduction tax to become the primary selectionary pressure since the demand for reproduction licenses would gradually increase over time while the supply stays the same, since we already have a sizable populace who is capable of meeting the other requirements.

Most (maybe all) prohibitions on people breeding due to genetic reasons would be largely unnecessary, and even detrimental to the laissez-faire system we want to achieve. As the reproduction tax gets higher and higher, the competition to have healthy biologically fit children will increase in the population, thus causing most (if not all) unfavorable genes to be eliminated over time. The reproduction tax would essentially be a modern-day replacement to the pre-industrial competition in nature that selected for human fitness.

Read More: Eugenics - Brittonic Memetics.

Read More: Survival & Reproductive Strategies - Brittonic Memetics.


Generally, top-down eugenics only makes sense for selectively breeding non-humans. Selectively breeding can be thought of as top-down eugenics applied to non-humans. When humans breed plants and animals, they typically do so for their own use and benefits. Since humans control the breeding of those organisms and have specific uses for them in mind as tools, there’s no need to worry about things like which genetics are “good”, overpopulation, or whether genetic diversity will be negatively impacted (since selectively breeding groups of some groups won’t impact other groups). So, the problems of top-down eugenics that would apply to humans don’t apply to plants and animals that are selectively bred by humans.

6.1. Why not select for IQ or intelligence instead?

Like many things, it is impossible to directly measure intelligence, so indirect measurements of intelligence (like IQ) are the next best information that we can collect and analyze. Nevertheless, there are multiple problems with using IQ as a standard for eugenics:

  • IQ is not a stable metric. It can vary across lifetimes and across historical periods.
  • IQ can be affected by environmental factors, such as the causes of the Flynn Effect.
  • IQ is susceptible to Regression to the Mean.
  • IQ is not a direct measure of intelligence.
  • IQ is susceptible to Goodhart’s Law.
  • IQ doesn’t measure other mental characteristics, like emotionally stability.
  • IQ doesn’t measure physical fitness.
  • Selecting for IQ might make the population more intelligent, but it wouldn’t select for the ability to rear children, especially since smarter people tend to have fewer kids. There are many tradeoffs between IQ and other factors that improve fitness.
  • A society needs people with different abilities, including different levels of intelligence.

Additionally, all the general problems with dirigiste eugenics apply here as well. Auctioning off the right to reproduction licenses would indirectly select for intelligence, but also many other traits.

Read More: Understanding g-Factors.

6.2. Would Eugenics select for aesthetics or beauty?

It’s not reasonable to directly select for aesthetics. Eugenics is about pro-social selection, not about selecting for certain traits, such as beauty or intelligence. Since beauty is an idealistic concept, it’s partially defined by what’s not beautiful. Hence, beauty is a zero-sum game because it mostly devolves into a competition between individuals, rather than pro-social cooperation. Beauty also isn’t a quality that society needs to function.

It’s also difficult to measure aesthetics. Not everyone can agree on the best aesthetics, although it is intersubjective to a great extent. Since bad aesthetics tend to positively correlate with undesirable traits, eugenics would indirectly select for better aesthetics that most (or nearly everybody) would favor.

6.3. How would Eugenics increase the productivity of a society?

As the reproduction tax gets higher and higher, the competition to have healthy biologically fit children will increase in the population. This would increase the selectionary pressure for people to be productive, because more productive people would have be more able to pay the reproduction tax.

The psychological need to go through the Power Process strongly incentivizes many people (myself included) to not steal things that we desire or cheat/slack off on the job in life. The eugenic selection of people who have this strong psychological need would naturally reduce crime rates and improve the progress society is capable of.

6.4. How do you separate environmental and genetic factors?

A merit-based society is the best way to separate genetic factors from environmental ones. Societies won’t always be as meritocratic as we’d like them to be, but we should strive for them nonetheless. Some good first steps would be to enact economic reform, eliminate all forms of rent-seeking, reduce corruption and enact political reform.

Read More: Meritocracy, Genetics, and Social Mobility - Brittonic Memetics.

6.5. Would eugenics decrease genetic diversity?

It depends on what kind of genetic diversity we’re talking about. Laissez-faire eugenics would decrease the frequency of genes that cause people to be dumber, more violent, less productive, etc, but that’s exactly what we want. There’s no downsides to removing those genes from the gene pool.

The goal of (laissez-faire) eugenics isn’t to increase or decrease genetic diversity, generally speaking. But it could potentially increase genetic diversity of some rare, desirable genes. For instance, a eugenics policy could alter the proportions to which certain genes and alleles exist within the population, not to completely eliminate one gene in favor of another. If two hypothetical genes A and B exist in a population at percentages 80% and 20% respectively, eugenics could be to cause those genes to exist at 50% each, since we’re proposing a policy that isn’t biased towards against any useful traits.

As a more specific example, most humans have trichromatic vision, whereas tetrachromatic vision exists in very few humans, perhaps only women exclusively. If a eugenics policy directly or indirectly increased the percentage of people with tetrachromatic vision in the population (without necessarily depleting the population of genes for trichromatic vision), then this would be another example of eugenics leading to an increase in genetic diversity, perhaps even a favorable one.

Alternatively, a eugenics policy might aim to modify the genetic composition to be more uneven, like modifying genes A and B to exist from 50% each to be percentage ratios like 70/30, 80/20, or even 90/10, but not to 100/0% where one of the genes would be completely eliminated from the population.

7. The Requirements For Being Granted A Reproduction License

In the interest of preserving modern civilization and preventing war, disease, and famine, the country must enforce a maximum population limit. As a consequence, anybody who wants to have children shall be required to obtain a reproduction license for each child that they want to have. A reproduction license will be granted to every couple of parents who manages to meet all of the following requirements:

  • The parents must be law-abiding and have no criminal record.
  • The parents must have a high school education [at least] and be a legal adult.
  • The parents must sign a contractual legal agreement with the government pledging responsibility for raising the child by themselves, and both parents must meet all of these requirements.
  • One of the parents in the child-bearing agreement must be employed in a full-time job.
  • The parents must be unlikely to die during the child’s childhood. They must be reasonably healthy.
  • A degree of consanguinity between the parents that is too low is forbidden (incest1 is prohibited).
  • The parents must have paid all their taxes (if any).
  • The parents must pay the reproduction tax for having a child, which is set according to market rates with respect to the supply, demand, and price of reproduction licenses.4
  • Genetic Engineering is optional, but still subject to these requirements and other applicable regulations.

The social control of reproduction is not a new idea. It is a very old and almost universal practice. In the past, reproduction was controlled by the institution of marriage. Almost every society had some form of marriage that regulated human sexual behavior. Sex outside marriage was not allowed. We abandoned the traditional control of reproduction without understanding its function or the consequences of abandoning it. We are now seeing the consequences (and paying the costs) of abandoning marriage. It is time to replace marriage with a modern form of reproduction control. – Blithering Genius, Eugenostate versus Ethnostate

Read More: The Georgist Approach To Eugenic Population Control.

Read More: Why Laissez Faire Eugenics Is Best.

7.1. What if someone can’t meet these requirements?

Then they shouldn’t have children, but there should be no controversy on this. These requirements are very easy for people to meet. Any responsible person who is serious about having children could meet the requirements if they put in the effort to meet them. Anybody who’s going to have children ought to prove that they will be able to take care of them. If we want humanity to have a sustainable, comfortable, and humane future, then we have to enforce these requirements.

If these are “easy requirements”, then why do they even need to exist in the first place? Why should the entire population be required to meet them, due to the supposed ill actions of a few people?

Reproduction license requirements have to be enforced on everyone because overpopulation is a free-rider problem. The only way to resolve a free-rider problem is to exert force on everyone.

Furthermore, it’s already socially acceptable for everybody to meet a similar set of requirements for adopting children, so it’s illogical for society to not have similar requirements for people who want to have biological children.

7.2. Why can’t we have eugenics without these requirements?

Eugenics requires selection by definition, so if a society has no way of guaranteeing selection in favor of desirable traits, it’s not a eugenostate. The requirements proposed here are already as minimal as possible, so it’s unlikely that a eugenostate could arise by proposing anything less than that. Top-down eugenics would fail.

Sorting people into different groups in a single generation isn’t enough to maintain modern civilization. Selection must occur in every generation. To exist in the long run, a society must select for the genes that make that society possible. In other words, those who make a positive contribution to society should have more surviving offspring than those who make a negative contribution.

7.3. Would biological parents be required to get DNA testings?

There are both good and bad consequences for requiring prospective parents to get DNA testings. Some may argue that anything that gets measured is also bound to be controlled by the government.

On the other hand, it’s anti-knowledge and anti-truth to not collect any statistics at all. Refusing to collect statistics about X is equivalent to choosing to be deliberately ignorant about X. We would never have the statistical evidence for deciding the truth about race realism (one way or the other) if it was forbidden to collect statistics on how different races and immigrants perform regarding education, crime rates, income levels, etc. Deliberately not collecting statistics deliberately limits our knowledge of reality. There are many benefits to DNA testing.

Fortunately, most prohibitions on people breeding due to genetic reasons will be largely unnecessary, except for trivial things like preventing incest.


Side Note For Generations In The Distant Future
Modern medicine and technology enable genetic diseases to accumulate and persist in the population without being selected out (e.g. cystic fibrosis). After many generations of breeding (hundreds of years at least), these genetic diseases could eventually become a problem since the requirements don’t apply any selectionary pressures for removing those genetic diseases. If the dysgenics grows so much to the point where it becomes a huge cost to society, the requirements could be amended to take this into account. But if it’s cheap to fix the disease, then it’s not really a problem. It’s all about whether amending the requirement would make a positive net contribution to society or not.

If such an amendment ever had to be made to the reproduction license requirements, everybody who’s alive today would probably be dead by then. Once again, it would take at least hundred of years before something like this could ever become a problem, so this is not a restriction that would concern anybody who lives during the first several generations of the eugenostate’s existence. A few generations after the first implementation, the pricing of reproduction licenses could eventually take predicted health, lifespan, and longevity into account as well. A human being is an expensive machine to create, and the longer it lasts, the more those costs are amortized over a productive lifespan.

7.4. Won’t eugenics be too difficult to enforce?

If a meteor was heading towards Earth, would you argue that we shouldn’t destroy or redirect it, merely because it would be “too difficult” to try that? If it is absolutely necessary to enforce population control in order to prevent unprecedented apocalyptic scenarios, then any argument that population control will be too difficult or morally objectionable to enforce does not constitute a valid refutation against population control. The proposed methods for implementing population control on this FAQs page may be undesirable for many people, but we have proposed them nonetheless because we strongly believe that they are less undesirable than the alternative.

It would be more productive for people who are opposed to population control to make sound arguments that it is unnecessary to be cautious about overpopulation. If they can successfully prove this, then we will concede that there is no reason to enforce population control and no reason to debate how population control should be implemented. Until the opposition provides a sound and convincing argument why population control is unnecessary, that is the primary topic to be debated.

But to answer the question: No. Population control would be easier than enforcing many current laws, including traffic regulations and the law against murder. Law against murder can be difficult to enforce because it is difficult to identify the murderers, so some murders go unsolved. No one uses this as an argument that murder should be legal. By contrast, it’s much easier to identify people who have unlicensed children than it currently is to identify murderers. It’s very difficult to conceal a child. They will be found eventually, especially if there’s bounty programs (these would only be used if it’s necessary).

Furthermore, there’s already historical evidence that it’s perfectly possible to enforce population control. China managed to enforce population control from 1979 to 2021, except that it was unnecessarily authoritarian and it had a combination of eugenic and dysgenic effects, rather than purely eugenic effects. If China was able to enforce population control, there’s no reason why eugenic population control can’t be enforced around the world in general, especially if it’s done with comparatively far less authoritarian measures and a worldview that is better informed of population dynamics and evolutionary biology.

Additionally, the eugenics system doesn’t need to work in every single case, just on average (although we would do everything possible to increase its efficiency). It doesn’t matter that some hypothetical person finds a way to abuse a given system, as long as it isn’t a systematic problem. For instance, you can have a few or even most murderers who get away with it without making “being a murderer” into a viable strategy, as long as it is less adaptive than the alternative it will not be selected for.

7.5. Are you saying that the ends justify the means?

The known consequences of not enforcing population control are global civilizational collapse, billions of deaths, and a permanent Dark Age. Unless anyone is actually insane enough to be in favor of this apocalyptic scenario, then the ends do justify the means.

It would be more productive for people who are opposed to population control to make sound arguments that it is unnecessary to be cautious about overpopulation (and dysgenics). If they can successfully prove this, then we will concede that there is no reason to enforce population control and no reason to debate how population control should be implemented. Until the opposition provides a sound and convincing argument why population control is unnecessary, that is the primary topic to be debated.

Life is intrinsically violent. Force is built into the nature of life, and the only way to escape violence within a society is to impose the threat of violence if the laws are not followed. In this case, we can either choose between violence in the form of famine and war caused by unregulated overpopulation, or the more peaceful and sustainable option of enforcing population control laws. We might as well apply force on society in a controlled way that eventually leads to less violence over time, as genes that cause higher crime rates are removed from the gene pool via this proposed selectionary process.

There are also plenty of reasons why population control protects more human rights than it violates.

8. Reproduction License Questions

8.1. How would eugenic population control affect family structures and people’s lives?

The proposed requirements require couples to sign a child-bearing agreement together with one of them being employed in a full-time job. This would likely have the following effects:

  • Marriage rates would increase and happen at earlier ages, which would reverse the current trend where more and more children have been born to parents out of wedlock in recent decades. This would instantly eliminate single-parent households, thus resulting in a society with much more desirable family structure and greater social stability.
  • While we favor monogamous marriages, we don’t necessarily want to require this because we value individual freedom, and our primary concern is that legal responsibilities are imposed on the parents. This would leave it entirely up to individuals to decide how to arrange their love lives, and it would only regulate reproduction.
  • Population control would redefine the role of women in society, compared to what it has been traditionally (raising children and housekeeping). Since women would raise fewer children on average, they would spend more time doing other things, like working paid jobs in the economy.
  • Having children would become higher status among both men and women, since population control would make it harder to have children. In modern society, having children has become lower status since it’s become more socially acceptable for people to not have children. Enforcing population control would reverse that trend since people, especially men, are socially driven to pursue higher status.
  • The sexual market would balance out. Since it would be illegal to have children without another parent who is legally contracted to help raise the child, there would be no more single mothers, who are undesirable for men to date for a number of reasons. This would increase the number of women for men to date.
  • Women wouldn’t be liberated from men anymore. By contrast, the modern welfare state and culture of modernity have liberated women from men (i.e. women no longer need men to help them raise their children when they can depend on welfare instead).

8.2. Why should parents have to be married in order to get a reproduction license?

The parents don’t have to be married necessarily, but they do have to sign a contractual child-bearing agreement together with the government pledging responsibility for raising the child by themselves. As long as they satisfy the contract, they can do whatever they want with romantic / sex lives.

Of course, if someone wants to raise someone else’s child, there would certainly be a legal procedure for arranging that and assigning them the responsibilities for the child’s care instead.


The Historical Functions and Benefits of Marriage
This is a list of the historical functions of marriage in human societies.

  • It protected women and children from being abandoned.
  • It protected men from being cucked.
  • It protected society from having to care for fatherless children.
  • It promoted male investment in family and society.
  • It reduced violent competition over women.
  • It promoted male productivity.
  • It reduced sexually transmitted diseases.
  • It created a balanced sexual market.
  • It solved the problem of consent.

– Blithering Genius, The End of Marriage

If the would-be parents want to have kids, then they just need to sign the child-bearing contract, submit it to the government, and they’ll be granted a license if they meet the requirements. None of the ceremonial traditions of marriage are necessary as long as the legal contracts guarantee that the parents will raise the child together.

8.3. Why is it necessary to tax reproduction?

Main Article: Georgism And Population Control

  • It’s necessary to enforce population control. The reproduction tax rates are determined by supply and demand, with the supply being fixed. This ensures that only a finite number of people will have children.
  • It is the fairest and least authoritarian way to determine who can have children and who cannot.
  • It has positive eugenic effects on the population, since the most productive members of society would be able to afford the most reproduction licenses, assuming that the society completely eliminates rent-seeking.
  • It eliminates the need to directly prohibit people from breeding due to genetic reasons, and it would essentially be a modern-day replacement to the pre-industrial competition in nature that selected for fitness in organisms (humans in this case).

Side Note: If people only have to pay the reproduction tax just once, then it’d be better to call it a reproduction license fee (like a driver’s license fee), instead of a reproduction tax. Taxing only once per child is probably the best way to go about that, but it’s probably also not the only way that it could be done. “Tax” is more general than “fee”, so I think that’s why it was chosen for these FAQs, since there’s multiple options for creating a reproduction tax.

A supply and demand graph showing the effects of land value taxation.
Figure 3: On this graph, the supply curve is a straight vertical line because there is a fixed supply of reproduction licenses.

8.4. Why not require a certain level of income instead?

Requiring a level of income for applying for reproduction licenses is a secondary way to limit the number of people who have children, gradually increasing the eugenic quality of the next generations of humans (assuming that people with higher-incomes are more likely to have good genes). The main benefit to requiring a certain level of income for each child is that it would ensure every pair of parents has a sufficient amount of wealth to raise their children in comfort. However, we theorize that this may face more complications, compared to what we’ve proposed:

  • Since it’s possible for people to have more than one child, it would be necessary for the government to set different income brackets regarding how many reproduction licenses each parent could have. I suspect that this would be more prone to corruption, analogous to price-fixing.
  • It would require calculating cut-offs based on who’s applied for reproduction licenses, the current available supply of licenses, the incomes of the people who have applied, and how many reproduction licenses each parent already has. By contrast, it’s much simpler to set a fixed price for each license according to its supply and demand.
  • Pricing reproduction licenses according to supply and demand probably makes it easier to adjust for preventing population booms and population collapses since it requires simpler calculations.
  • Setting the price of licenses according to supply and demand utilizes free-market principles, which tend to work more effectively.
  • It seems less “unfair” to control the cost of licenses according to supply and demand, compared to saying “only these people with X income” may be granted a license this year.

8.5. How is Georgism related to Eugenics?

Georgism and Population Control both aim to conserve natural resources that exist in fixed supply. As a result, the two both compliment each other extremely well, and not by coincidence if we expand the notion of “natural resources” to also include the finite supply of organisms that can theoretically exist within a finite environment. Since life is a zero-sum competition game for energy when a population reaches its carrying capacity, anybody who has children in such an environment would be doing so at the cost of preventing other people to have children as well. This is similar to how anybody who occupies a parcel of land prevents other people from using that parcel.

TL;DR: Georgism implies Population Control, which implies Eugenics.

8.6. Under what conditions would the Reproduction Tax not be applied?

If EPC is enforced in a country, and the supply of reproduction licenses (the number of babies that can be born that year) is higher than the number of applicants for reproduction licenses, then there would be no tax on reproduction. In this case, the society and government want to raise the birth rates of the country, so it makes sense to not tax reproduction licenses. This is akin to how there’s no need to tax land or natural resources if there’s enough resources for everybody. There’s no tragedy of the commons if there’s plenty of resources and reproduction licenses for everyone.

If the developed world transitioned to Georgism this proposed EPC scheme, Georgism would increase the carrying capacity and the supply of reproduction licenses of the West. The West currently has below replacement fertility and a declining population, and since the supply of reproduction licenses would be higher than the demand, there would be no taxes on reproduction. Reproduction probably wouldn’t be taxed for at least a few decades, until there are more people applying for reproduction licenses than the legal supply of reproduction licenses, whatever year that starts to happen.

If there is no reproduction tax, then there is only negative eugenics. Positive eugenics doesn’t occur until the reproduction tax is applied, and it starts to increase.

Related Reading: Ideas For Boosting Western Fertility

8.7. What happens if a parent’s child dies before adulthood?

This depends on the child’s cause of death. If the criteria are met, the parents can get a refund on the Reproduction Tax that they paid for the year that the child was conceived. If the parents are still eligible, they may have another child using the reproduction license that authorized the deceased child’s birth.

8.8. What happens if one of the parents dies?

This depends on the parent’s cause of death. If a parent(s) dies while their children are still minors, then it’s debatable whether the government should provide welfare and/or orphanage support to help raise their children. If the parent(s) died due to environmental causes or causes that are unrelated to their lifestyle choices, then there’s a better (eugenic) case for the government providing welfare to their children.

For accidental or unintentional causes of death, anybody who kills a parent will be legally liable to pay child support for all of that parent’s child’s expenses until the children become legal adults or 18 years old. This includes drunk drivers and people who text while driving, if they accidentally kill a parent.

9. Glossary

Eugenics
See: What is Eugenics?
Dysgenics
The opposite of eugenics. The accumulation of traits that make people/organisms less adaptive to their environments, thus resulting in Evolutionary Mismatch. Dysgenics usually arises when selectionary pressures are removed.
Evolutionary Mismatch
When evolved traits that were once advantageous become maladaptive due to changes in the environment. As it relates to humans, nearly all the evolutionary mismatch in the modern world is caused by rapid technological advancements that occurred during the Industrial Revolution. See: Catepillars and Philosophy.
Dirigiste (Top-down) “Eugenics”
The supposed improvement of human hereditary qualities through overly selective breeding, thus causing a dramatic reduction in genetic diversity. It can be done by either positive eugenics or negative eugenics. Ironically, top-down “eugenics” would actually make people less adaptive to their environments, hence why the term is used with quotes.
Laissez-Faire (Bottom-up) Eugenics
The improvement of human hereditary qualities by requiring reproduction licenses (which have minimal requirements) in order for people to have children. Laissez-Faire Eugenics during Modernity would be the re-introduction of reasonable selectionary pressures on the human genome.
Positive Eugenics
Encouraging or subsidizing people with good genetic qualities to reproduce more.
Negative Eugenics
Preventing or discouraging people with bad genetic qualities from reproducing.
Eugenostate
A state that enforces Eugenic Population Control, Laissez-Faire Eugenics, and Immigration restrictions, regardless of race or ethnicity.
Ethnostate (v1)
A country populated by, or dominated by the interests of, a single racial or ethnic group.
Ethnostate (v2)
A sovereign state of which citizenship is restricted to members of a particular racial or ethnic group.
Ethnostate (v3)
An ethnonationalist state that enforces racial or ethnic homogeneity.
Ethnocracy
The same thing as an ethnostate, except there doesn’t necessarily have to be a single ethnic group that populates the majority of the country.
Geostate
A state with a Georgist economic policy and taxation system.
Welfare State
A state that provides welfare by taxing productive citizens in order to subsidize unproductive citizens. Welfare states have dysgenic and unsustainable practices.
Racism
Irrational prejudice or discrimination based upon race or ethnicity.
Reproduction License
A legal document that affirms that the citizen who possesses the title is legally authorized to have X number of children, given that they meet the legal requirements and have paid for the license.
Georgism
An economic philosophy stating that natural resources belong equally to all. It achieves this by placing a single tax on the value of natural resources, which pays for all government expenses. See this page for more info.
The West
Countries that have majority European populations and/or have been influenced by Western Culture, including Europe, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Sometimes I use this term more generally to also include Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan since those countries have also been influenced by Western culture, and have decent genetics for modernity, as far as our policy objectives are concerned.
The Great Replacement (of White People)
The phenomenon where white people are being replaced by foreign ethnicities within Western countries. It is very real and in several decades, it is projected to be finished by the end of the 21st century.
White Preservationism
A movement to counter the Great Replacement by increasing white fertility rates in the Western World. From a eugenics standpoint, the goal of white preservationism is to preserve (most of) the (good) genes of Europeans, not necessarily to preserve white people as a distinctive race.
White Nationalism
An ideology that promotes ethnostates for white people, perhaps as a way to support white preservationism.
White Supremacy
The racist belief that white people are superior to all other races.
Malthusianism
The theory that potentially exponential population growth can surpass the linear growth of an environment’s carrying capacity (including its food supply and other resources), which eventually causes members of the population to die off until settling back down to the carrying capacity.
Neo-Malthusianism
The theory and concern that overpopulation (and overconsumption) may increase resource depletion and/or environmental degradation and lead to ecological collapse or other hazards. Neo-Malthusianism is often coupled with advocacy of human population planning to ensure sufficient resources for current and future human populations as well as for other species.
Cornucopianism
The pseudo-scientific theory that overpopulation, overconsumption, and environmental problems faced by society either do not exist or can be solved by technology and/or the free market.
Overpopulation
An excessive number of occupants (people, animals, plants, etc.) in a particular area; specifically, when the number of occupants exceeds the ability of that area to provide for them.
War, Disease, and Famine
The main traditional ways how overpopulation have historically been solved in human societies. The vast majority of deaths throughout human history can be attributed to War, Disease, and Famine.
Birth Control / Contraception
The main force of population control in Modernity. Birth Control is responsible for causing countries all over the world to have below replacement fertility rates, temporarily in the grand scheme of things.
Population Control
The practice of preventing the size of a population from growing past the carrying capacity, in the interest of avoiding an Overpopulation Crisis. For humans specifically, population control must be done by either artificially via Birth Control (and immigration restrictions), or naturally via War, Disease, and Famine.
Eugenic Population Control (EPC)
Population Control via mandatory Birth Control and (Laissez-Faire) Eugenics via Reproduction Licenses.
Overpopulation Crisis
When the carrying capacity is so high above the carrying capacity, that War, Disease, and Famine start to occur.
Carrying Capacity
The maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available.
Population Buffer Space (PBS)
The estimated difference between the Carrying Capacity and the LMPL.
Legal Maximum Population Limit (LMPL)
The maximum population limit of the society that the population must avoid exceeding, in the interest of avoiding an Overpopulation Crisis, as set by a eugenostate. The LMPL is always lower than the Carrying Capacity, with the Population Buffer Space being the quantitative difference between them. The LMPL is meant to be a target population the society should stay below, but if the population does rise above it, the Population Buffer Space gives the eugenostate some flexibility, as it still avoids exceeding the Carrying Capacity.

Footnotes:

1

To clarify, I’m not against people having incestuous relationships between each other. I’m only against people reproducing in incestuous relationships. And even then, I believe that should depend on the degree of consanguinity between two partners, and possibly some genetic counseling as well.

2

This paragraph paraphrases text written by Blithering Genius on Discord.

3

To clarify, EPC is a bottom-up process for Eugenics, and a top-down process for Population Control. Population control has to be top-down, whereas eugenics won’t work unless it’s bottom-up. Fortunately, both can be accomplished at the same time.

4

Under certain conditions, reproduction would not be taxed at all. For more information, see: When would the reproduction tax not be applied?.

Last Modified: 2024 November 21, 07:49

Author: Zero Contradictions