Before implementing policy decisions based on logic, it is worth checking if a similar policy worked elsewhere. Are there countries or regions now or historically where poor people have fewer children than wealthy ones?
One of the hypotheses for the difference between Europe and the rest of the world that led to the industrial revolution was that they (especially Britain) had greater controls on the breeding of the peasant class via their particular implementation of serfdom in combination with the edicts of the church.
The past? People like Genghis Khan who could afford to have hundreds of concubines, etc. had way more kids. This is a pretty poor example to compare to but it’s the one that came to mind.
Given this community’s decidedly unfirm grasp on most technical concepts from political science and moral philosophy, I don’t think we can assume this. “gwern knows about topic X” is unfortunately not a reliable indicator of the LW knowledge base generally.
Hm… Well, in that case, I’m referring mostly to A Farewell To Alms (available on libgen.info) where he lays out research indicating that in England, Qing China, and Tokugawa Japan, the rich did indeed outreproduce the poor. His recent papers on surname social mobility over centuries in England are interesting but I forget whether they bear on the issue more than AFTA did.
My first impression of the surname mobility research (incidentally, I heard it was reproduced based on university data from other countries) was that it was strong evidence of the heritability of social status / social class, but not necessarily evidence of genetic heritability.
Sure, but the discussion of the question ‘do the rich outreproduce the poor’ doesn’t necessarily entail that either. The surname research could show outreproducing (rich surnames becoming progressively overrepresented over time) but I’m not sure whether this overlaps or is disjunct or identical to the will data used in AFTA.
Before implementing policy decisions based on logic, it is worth checking if a similar policy worked elsewhere. Are there countries or regions now or historically where poor people have fewer children than wealthy ones?
One of the hypotheses for the difference between Europe and the rest of the world that led to the industrial revolution was that they (especially Britain) had greater controls on the breeding of the peasant class via their particular implementation of serfdom in combination with the edicts of the church.
The past? People like Genghis Khan who could afford to have hundreds of concubines, etc. had way more kids. This is a pretty poor example to compare to but it’s the one that came to mind.
I thought we were all familiar with Gregory Clark’s work on this topic?
Given this community’s decidedly unfirm grasp on most technical concepts from political science and moral philosophy, I don’t think we can assume this. “gwern knows about topic X” is unfortunately not a reliable indicator of the LW knowledge base generally.
Hm… Well, in that case, I’m referring mostly to A Farewell To Alms (available on libgen.info) where he lays out research indicating that in England, Qing China, and Tokugawa Japan, the rich did indeed outreproduce the poor. His recent papers on surname social mobility over centuries in England are interesting but I forget whether they bear on the issue more than AFTA did.
My first impression of the surname mobility research (incidentally, I heard it was reproduced based on university data from other countries) was that it was strong evidence of the heritability of social status / social class, but not necessarily evidence of genetic heritability.
Sure, but the discussion of the question ‘do the rich outreproduce the poor’ doesn’t necessarily entail that either. The surname research could show outreproducing (rich surnames becoming progressively overrepresented over time) but I’m not sure whether this overlaps or is disjunct or identical to the will data used in AFTA.
Comment downvoted for being a lousy version of “This link might be relevant”.