The New Eugenics

Eugenics emerged as a popular cultural force in the late nineteenth century, riding in on the coat-tails of the new science of genetics. Even though eugenics developed in very unscientific directions, it continued to influence people and governments later in the twentieth century than might be supposed.

If there were grains of truth in the obsessions of the eugenicists they were well and truly lost during the period of Nazi Government in Germany. Yet Sweden continued to practise eugenics until 1976, routinely sterilizing people of reduced intelligence or disability, those of mixed race, even those who had descended into anti-social behaviour.

For decades, understandably, eugenics was not considered seriously, consigned to the realm of scientific curios along with trepanning and leeches. It took a Danish economist, Carsten Steffensen, to bring the subject back into the public sphere.

In the late 90s, Steffensen asked a Swedish colleague if any studies had been made to verify the results of that country’s fifty year experience with eugenics. His colleague reacted with horror, but like any true economist, Steffensen was interested in quantifiable data – he wasn’t suggesting the human cost was worth bearing, but he wanted to know if it had achieved its end.

Intrigued by the knee-jerk response to the term, Steffensen started to look at the underlying principles of eugenics, then looked at the incentives and disincentives to reproduction that currently existed in various western countries. His conclusion was startling.

Steffensen concluded that high-tax welfare-state economies had been inadvertently carrying out a form of negative eugenics since the end of the Second World War. Even worse, he believed the effect was becoming more amplified with each generation.

The first foundation of Steffensen’s argument was the lowering of barriers to education which had happened in many European countries mid-century. The percentage of students who were the first in their family to attend university fell steadily year on year as “the bubbles rose to the top” – in other words, the increased social mobility was increasing the correlation between intelligence and social position.

Controversial as it was, Steffensen pointed out that the entire purpose of universal education was to ensure that the professional classes today are, on average, more intelligent than they were fifty years ago, and that the working classes are, on average, less intelligent because of what might be called “bright-flight”, the escape of more intelligent workers into the higher strata of society. Indeed, he cited as evidence, the growing underclass in western societies and predicted that this class would become more entrenched in the coming decades.

Given that model, Steffensen looked at the way society treated its various classes with regard to reproduction. His conclusion was that the underclass, dependant on welfare benefits, often had little understanding of the responsibilities of parenthood, nor of the cost. With each new child, parents in the underclass were certain not only of receiving healthcare and schooling, their benefits were also increased proportionally. The least intelligent, and more importantly, the least productive members of society were actually being given, relative to their circumstances, considerable incentives and no disincentives to have children at a younger age and in greater numbers than their middle class counterparts.

Conversely, working people existed on a sliding scale with few incentives to have children and ever greater disincentives the more educated they were. To take an average university-educated couple, they have already fallen behind their counterparts in the underclass, many of whom will have had children during the couple’s student years. But graduates then go to work, and many have little choice but to put off a family until well into their thirties. When they do have children, the professional couple have to weigh the consequences of each additional child very carefully, not least in the cost of childcare or in the cost of one parent giving up work. The result, understandably, is that people have fewer children later in life the more educated and productive they are.

In short, Steffensen argued that a system that was introduced for very good reasons in the middle of the last century is actually reducing the average intelligence of the population in European society at a time when intelligence, even down to the level of skilled workers, is becoming paramount.

Steffensen’s solution to this problem was the New Eugenics. Half of his model was aimed at removing incentives to reproduce among the underclass. Mothers who were dependent on benefit would receive assistance with a first child, but there would be no increases in benefits for subsequent children and parents would be reminded of this fact – the idea was to instil a sense of individual responsibilities. As people in this social class are often uneducated as well as being of lower intelligence, he also proposed that benefits were tied to a course of education in childcare, parental responsibility and birth control.

The other half of the model centred on those in the working population and here Steffensen not only suggested a bolstering of existing legislation to support parental leave and childcare facilities within the workplace, but also suggested dramatic tax breaks for those with children. He also argued for those tax breaks to be transferable for those couples where one parent wanted to give up work to raise the children.

Steffensen predicted another knee-jerk reaction to New Eugenics and to some extent he got one. Critics argued with the underlying basis of his theory, claiming that there was no proof of an intellectual chasm opening across the classes, often citing school exam performance as proof. Others argued that he was penalizing the poor whilst rewarding the rich.

But whatever the merits of his underlying arguments, fewer people were ready to criticize his policy recommendations, perhaps because it’s difficult to argue with the logic of them. Certainly, his policies with regard to easing the path to parenthood for professionals and working people chime perfectly with concerns over falling birth rates across the western world. And although there was less open endorsement for his suggestions regarding the underclass, there was little criticism of a system which sought to enforce a greater sense of individual responsibility.

Ultimately, whether or not the New Eugenics ever works its way into the policy framework, the lesson that Steffensen reinforces is a sound one. If you make changes to any complex system, the results will never be restricted solely to the sphere you seek to influence, and the ultimate consequences may even be worse than the problem you were trying to fix.

As Steffensen himself said, ‘People tell me its dangerous to try to engineer society – they don’t understand that welfare benefits are a form of engineering and so is tax. We’ve made so many mistakes because we didn’t understand that.’

(coming next - villages first)