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by nmrm2 3960 days ago
> Singapore's rise over the last 50 years

You mean conducting eugenics experiments on low-income women?

Or did you mean encouraging only educated people to have children?

If you really think sterilizing and performing experiments on the poor without consent constitutes social progress... I don't really know what to say.

Anyways, it's a pretty far stretch to say that Singapore's eugenics program had anything at all to do with its economic performance over the past 50 years. More-over, the changes to reproductive rates in Singapore are pretty uniform throughout the population. So even if population control has helped Singapore, it was just the population control -- not the class-centered eugenics schemes.

And all of this is discounting the fact that it's not even effective when judged on its own terms... turns out governments don't make for very good PD controllers.

> with practically the entire economics profession

This is obviously not true. It is not the case that the majority of practicing ecnomists support eugenics...

Second, even if this were true, it would be irrelevant. Economists are not geneticists, biologists, anthropologists, etc. They are absolutely not trained to make the sort of assessments I'm talking about above.

1 comments

Most economists agree that Lee Kuan Yew did a better job at increasing his people's prosperity than almost every other developing-country leader of his era. An increasing number of African leaders (Rwanda's Paul Kagame is an especially vocal example) see him as a primary role model.

You are free to believe that LKY's worldview was totally inaccurate and that he owes his success to a ridiculous amount of luck. (As you note, his views on human group differences were not a random eccentricity, they had a major impact on his policy choices in several domains.) Fortunately, those who are doing the most to increase African prosperity today reject your position, and tens of millions of people are benefiting.