November 4, 2023: Eugenics

Good afternoon. Today we will attempt an unpleasant but important topic: what is eugenics, how has the movement developed over time, and what does it means for us today?

The term eugenics, as well as much of the conceptual background, was developed by Francis Galton in 1883. Literally meaning “good genes”, eugenics aims to “improve” the human population’s genetic stock by encouraging mating between people with desirable genes (positive eugenics) and discouraging mating between people with undesirable genes (negative eugenics). Eugenics draws heavily from Herbert Spencer’s theory of social Darwinism.

In the United States, eugenics had its heyday of political influence from around 1900 to 1930, though even with growing social unacceptability, eugenics continued to be important well after 1930. Charles Davenport, one of the most important figures in American eugenics, led in founding the American Breeders Association in 1903. The ABA was a professional society of scientists in genetics, both with agricultural applications and for eugenics. The ABA has since rebranded as the American Genetic Association and remains active, having long since dropped the eugenics aspect of its mandate.

The cultural cachet of eugenics during this period was much greater than most people realize. To give a few examples, John Harvey Kellogg—best known for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes—financed the Race Betterment Foundation in 1911 and the Eugenics Records Office, actions which helped give the eugenics movement the appearance of scientific backing.

In 1926, the American Eugenics Society was founded by Harry Crampton, Harry H. Laughlin, Madison Grant, and Henry Fairfield Osborn. Among their activities was sponsoring Fitter Family contests. The American Eugenics Society, which rebranded as The Society for the Study of Social Biology and later the Society for Biodemography and Social Biology, survived until 2019. The AES’ main publication, Eugenical News, was later rebranded Eugenics Quarterly, then Social Biology, and then Biodemography and Social Biology. The journal remains active.

Forced sterilization was one of the main products of the eugenics movement. In 1909, California became the first state to introduced a forced sterilization law, and throughout the 20th century, nearly 70,000 women in the United States were sterilized, with the procedure disproportionately performed on Blacks, Latinas, and Native Americans. This practice continued well beyond the stock market crash of 1929, which an American Experience documentary identifies as the end of the eugenics movement’s cultural peak, and well beyond 1945, when the full extent of Nazi atrocities became known. A third of Puerto Rico’s women of childbearing age were sterilized from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is estimated that the Indian Health Service sterilized nearly 25% of Native Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. Of the state eugenics boards that were established in the early 20th century, I believe it was the North Carolina Eugenics Board that lasted the longest, abolished in 1977. Forced sterilization of patients in mental institutions continued well into the late 20th century, and in California prisons, until 2013. The Supreme Court gave this practice its blessing in the 1927 ruling Buck v. Bell, in which Oliver Wendell Holmes, for the 8-1 majority, wrote,

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

In 2003, the historian Edwin Black wrote War Against the Weak, documenting the influence of the American eugenics program on the Nazi racial hygiene policy, which ultimately culminated in the Holocaust. Though Black may exaggerate the case, the collaboration between American and German eugenicists in the 1930s is well documented, including financing from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution, and from the Harriman railroad fortune; as well as Adolf Hitler’s admiration for California’s sterilization policies.

Dysgenics is the flip side of eugenics and is the view that, unabated, modern social pressures cause a decline in genetic stock. A few weeks ago, I mentioned Michael Huemer’s treatment of dysgenics. David Starr Jordan worried that war, particularly the first World War that was then raging, was killing the most genetically fit men of the generation and would lead to a genetic decline. Huemer’s treatment revolves around the the idea that, now that medical science can treat conditions that would otherwise be fatal, more people are surviving to produce children that will inherit those conditions. In 1996, Richard Lynn published Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, which made the argument more thoroughly. Lynn has been described as ascribing to scientific racism, which informs his attitudes on immigration and population control. More on that in a bit. The theme of dysgenics also features in the 2006 Mike Judge film Idiocracy.

In contrast to dysgenic anxieties, the Flynn Effect is the observation that intelligence has been rising throughout the 20th century. Several studies (such as this and this and this and this) find no evidence of a dysgenic effect, at least with regard to intelligence.

Considering positive eugenics and negative eugenics, the concept can cut both ways on overall population. For example,

In 1935 Ellsworth Huntington, president of the American Eugenics Society, stated that the middle and upper classes were not having enough children to replace themselves and needed to be encouraged to increase their reproductive rates.

Then there was Indiana’s Better Baby contests. On the other hand, eugenics had a clear influence on the postwar population control movement, even as the rationale shifted from the quality of the genetic stock to neo-Malthusian anxieties of overpopulation. Forced sterilization to control population, and to control specific populations, remains in practice in India and China.

At least two political movements that are strong today were heavily influenced by the eugenics movement.

Margaret Sanger, who founded organizations that would later become Planned Parenthood, wrote The Pivot of Civilization in 1922. The extent to which Sanger’s work was motivated by eugenic considerations is controversial, but I think it is clear from skimming the book that it was. Defenses that Sanger was merely casting her argument in terms of what was a fashionable idea at the time are not very credible.

Restricting immigration was a high priority for the eugenics movement, such as for Harry Laughlin. This culminated in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which was one of the most restrictive immigration laws in American history. Eugenicists were concerned that immigrants to the United States were disproportionately of poor genetic quality, which would have a dysgenic effect on the United States.

As eugenics become socially unacceptable, legalized contraception/abortion and immigration restriction found ideological basis in population anxieties, and as population control also became socially unacceptable, these movements have continued to thrive on other bases. They are interesting case studies in how political movements, as well as the policies that result, can greatly outlive the social conditions that produced them.

In 1957, Julian Huxley published New Bottles for New Wine, which popularized the term “transhumanism”. Huxley would soon become the president of the British Eugenics Society, and other major roles include secretary of the Zoological Society of London, first Director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund. His brother, Aldous Huxley, published Brave New World. There is plenty of overlap between transhumanism and eugenics, and among other goals, Huxley wanted eugenics to transcend its racist history and to modernize it to later scientific discoveries (it is easy to forget that the heyday of the eugenics movement predated the discovery of the double helix). However, transhumanism is a broad concept, and it would be overly reductive to present it has repackaged eugenics.

Like most observers today, I’ve been critical of the eugenics movement and contemporary attempts to bring it back. But we should be precise on why. There are two major problems.

First, though eugenics is portrayed as a scientific ideology, the scientific basis for the movement’s claims are lacking. Eugenicists sought to control traits as vague as “feeblemindedness” and “criminality”, as well as epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism. We now understand that environmental factors are at least as important as genetic factors in these characteristics. But even with the science of the early 20th century, eugenicists should have known better. Gregor Mendel, for instance, found that while some traits in pea plants can be explained through straightforward laws of heredity, many traits could not.

The second problem is that eugenics is an inherently collectivist ideology. It seeks to elevate an abstract concept, in this case is the genetic endowment of humanity, over the wellbeing of the individual. It is no surprise then that serious human rights abuses would follow.

With all this said, however, there is a danger of overlearning lessons. There is a faulty syllogism that goes like this:

• Eugenics is bad.

• (X) is associated with eugenics or similar to eugenics in some way.

• Therefore, (X) is bad.

There is a risk of falling into a kind of bio-Luddism that carries its own share of problems. Instead, evaluate (X) on its own terms.

Quick Hits

It has been a busy week for artificial intelligence regulation with a new Executive Order. Here is a summary. Andrew Ng of the Batch argues that the EO erroneously targets foundational models when most of the issues that the EO intends to target are at the application level. James Pethokoukis, Ronald Bailey at Reason, and Adam Thierer at the R Street Institute all wrote incisive commentaries on how the EO will stifle innovation. I maintain the view that “AI Safety” is not a useful concept, as it lumps together a wide range of disparate problems that call for different solutions, or in some cases are not actually problems. It distresses me how little we’ve learned from experiences with regulation of nuclear power.

A few weeks ago, Martin Gurri wrote a piece on declining birth rates worldwide. His statement, “[b]ut identifying hard causes is difficult,” is spot-on; Gurri proceeds to prove the point by attempting to identify causes in a way that is far from convincing.

As recently discussed on Marginal Revolution, a 2021 paper by Atsushi Yamagishi finds,

I analyze the effect of minimum wage hikes on housing rents using exogenous variation in minimum wages across local labor markets in Japan. I estimate that in low-quality rental housing market, a 10% minimum wage increase induces a 2.5%–4.5% increase in rents. Minimum wage hikes benefit workers in light of a spatial equilibrium model showing that changes in housing market rents work as a sufficient statistic for measuring utility changes arising from changes in minimum wages. The increase in housing rents also implies an unintended benefit for homeowners.

This is not an anti-minimum wage paper, but it does show the importance for considering second-order effects of a minimum wage hike.

Holman Jenkins published The Earth Is Warming, but Is CO2 the Cause? in the Wall Street Journal. I thought we were past this kind of stuff, but after years of increasing, surveys find that the percentage of Americans who view climate change as a major threat has dropped since 2020. Global warming skepticism, which often has a pseudoscientific and conspiratorial basis, has been a major impediment to the emergence of a credible, market-oriented approach to climate change.