Once upon a time, eugenics was all the rage. It was nascent during the reconstruction era and persisted into the 20th century. It grew out of biological evolutionary theory and emphasized reproductive fitness. In brief, the theory asserted that there are differences in individual fitness and that the more fit living things will survive better and reproduce, eventually becoming a greater part of the population. The ability to compile and evaluate statistics about various human measurements made inferences hard to resist. Of course, researchers were plagued by small sample size, omitted variable bias, and social biases of the day (for example, phrenology inferred fitness characteristics from skull shape).
People employing eugenic thinking, overwhelmingly, supported theories that their own type of person was among the more fit. Eugenicists didn’t promote theories of their own un-fitness. In the progressive era of the early 20th century, eugenics met the prevailing attitude that government could be employed to resolve social and economic ills. This era is when the income tax emerged, prohibition was enacted, the Federal Reserve was formed, and various labor regulations were enacted.
The result was that policy sometimes pursued greater ‘fitness’ among its populations. Rather than systematically encouraging the supposedly more fit with economic incentives, most policy was geared toward reducing the reproductive success of supposedly less fit people. These included forced sterilization, institutionalization, and economic exclusion. Besides rejecting basics individual human dignity, the harm was all the more tragic given that fitness was often poorly specified. That is, policy criteria weren’t dependably related to fitness. Fatal conceit, indeed!
One of my favorite ways to argue is to grant premises and then change details on the margin to see whether the conclusion changes. Let’s do that. Let’s grant that there are innate differences between people that are related to biological success. Since survivability is related to resource acquisition, let’s grant also that economic success overlaps at least somewhat. Taking that as granted, does pursuit of the historical eugenic policy still follow?
It does not.
There are two mistakes that eugenicists and various sorts of racists and xenophobes made. They assert or imply 1) that fitness characteristics are stable and systematically identifiable, and 2) that policy needed to intentionally select for the fitness characteristics.
Continue reading
Economist Writing Every Day 