Early Socialists were in love with eugenics. In the 1900s-1920s, the cool thing was to be a feminist Socialist who was into eugenics. Or a Socialist eugenicist who was into feminism. Or any other combination of the same three things.
So how did it all work?
These non-Soviet Socialists were genuinely worried about poverty. Why did so many people live in such terrible, subhuman penury? What was causing this? Oppression, obviously, was the Socialists’ answer. But what made this oppression possible?
The poor had too many children, was the answer. They were too stupid to control their procreation and ended up having large numbers of children. Their children were as dumb as their parents because of heredity, and there were so many of these congenital morons that it was impossible to introduce any rational, progressive measures into society.
These aren’t my ideas, of course. I find this kind of thinking not only immoral but unsupportable. As we can all see, neither contraception not collapsing birth rates eliminated poverty.
But back then this seemed like a plausible explanation. So the way to eliminate poverty was to have feminists convince women to stop procreating that much, which would gladden the eugenicists by improving the quality of the human stock, and that, in turn, would please Socialists because the resulting higher-quality humans wouldn’t be so poor.
The crimes of the Nazi Germany made it impossible to wish openly to get rid of lower-quality human beings in favor of higher-quality ones. So now the intellectual heirs of those early eugenicist Socialists claim that there should be fewer people because people are bad for the nature.
But you can see how the underlying ideas haven’t really changed that much.
Clarissa's Blog 
[sigh] …
You missed the opportunity to invoke John le Carré with “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” …
“The crimes of the Nazi Germany made it impossible to wish openly to get rid of lower-quality human beings in favor of higher-quality ones.”
There’s a quality of its own that quantity has, so don’t believe that for a moment.
So I’ll do the Carré thing for you!
Socialist, Eugenicist, Feminist, Anti-Natalist
But it’s still early in this process because anti-natalism hasn’t been normalised into a single word.
Why genocide the present when you can genocide the future?
[TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE]
The Zik Zak Corporation — KNOW FUTURE
… and those of you who get the reference are my people. :-)
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Well, a eugenicist with modern-day scientific knowledge would actually support having smart people reproduce a lot. It’s the dull people reproducing a lot that they would have a problem with. And to be fair, dull people’s kids are, on average, probably a significant net burden on the state during their lifetimes. Not merely in terms of things such as higher welfare use, but also in terms of things such as higher crime rates (which require more policing) and incarceration rates.
It has actually been some voices on the Right in recent years and decades who have been advocating in favor of things such as making welfare access contingent on Norplant usage for women. I suppose that they would similarly insist on Vasalgel usage for men if men will want welfare once Vasalgel will actually become available. Their views haven’t become dominant in the Republican Party yet, but who knows what time will hold for us.
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Increasing a population’s average IQ is indeed likely to make this population–and their country–more prosperous. If the increase in average IQ is significant, then the increase in average prosperity can be quite significant as well. Garett Jones’s 2015 book Hive Mind covers this.
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