Caplan, a yank economist kicks things off with a defense of what he calls a "maternal division of labour:" (emphasis mine)
High-achieving women like Kerry Howley have premium eggs, but they'd want a mountain of money to spend nine months pregnant on a stranger's behalf. Women willing to endure a pregnancy for a reasonable rate, on the other hand, rarely have eggs in high demand.
In response to these preferences and technological progress, the market splits apart three jobs joined together throughout history. The egg comes from a young woman with great genes, the womb from a woman who doesn't much mind being pregnant, and the mothering from a woman who wants a baby. From an economic point of view, it's Adam Smith's pin factory all over again. To some, it's repugnant. To me, it's not merely logical, but life-affirming.
Controversial, no? A former GMU prof asks: "Does it matter if the parents love the child?" Caplan responds:
Baby-selling is a solution to abuse, not a cause. Most of the horror scenarios that Morse [the GMU prof] poses - like child prostitution - are far more likely to involve kids raised by their biological families in the Third World. The same goes for child labour.
Discuss.
The views and opinions expressed in this post and any linked articles are my own or those of the respective author(s) and do not reflect current or planned Libertarian Party policy.
8 comments:
This topic can be filed with drugs, guns, prostitution and various others under "You will never have a rational debate on this, but it really needs one"
Well... Arguably the Right Thing is objectively correct -- whether you believe prostitution to be morally wrong or not, the best way to discourage it is with a heavy tax, not prohibition -- minimising DWL.
A hypothetical Rational Government would be entirely justified in implementing it anyway.
Well, from a Libertarian perspective, whatever people wish to do with their own bodies is nobody else's business, and so if women want to divide their labour this way, fine, go ahead.
But we should also note that anybody who starts on about some people having "great genes" is a dangerous nutter who needs stuffing in a sack with some concrete blocks and flinging in a lake.
Eugenics is one of those progressivist madnesses that will not die, a bit like the Jew Conspiracy, ruralist romanticism, and so on.
"Great genes". Makes my fucking blood boil, really does. "Great" by whose definition?
Ian B: Granted, genes which control aesthetics are prone to subjective value judgments akin to Aryan supremecists / Nazi eugenics. However, this is only a problem if a third party (ie: neither the foetus-carrying mother nor a person themself) decree that genetic trait X is undesirable.
If a pregnant woman wishes her baby to have blue-eyes and there is a procedure available to her to reach this end, so be it - I genuinely couldn't care less.
This would be the cosmetic branch of genetic engineering. The mainstream would be for eradictating genetic predispositions to diseases, etc., which would have more general agreement.
In both cases, it's when A. N. Other comes along and starts forcibly coercing free-will that the problem occurs.
Gary, it's not about blue eyes though. Physical traits are somewhat a matter of fashion, but nonetheless something we can be somewhat objective about. But the assertion that Ms. Howells has "great genes" and "premium eggs" is clearly not an assertion about her looks. She seems appealing enough, but she's not a supermodel.
It's clear that the assertion is psychological in nature. She's a successful career woman and the presumption is that this is (at least partly) a result of her "good genes". There are two huge problems with this.
Firstly, we have only a rudimentary understanding of the biology of psychology. We don't know how the brain works, we don't know what mixture of nature and nurture pertains, we don't know how genes interact to produce particular psychologies.
Secondly, and more importantly, the assumption is that the woman's success within our current social structures is a proxy for some good genetic mix. Taking a libertarian view, most libertarians are appalled by our current society, which is oligarchical, collectivist and exploitative. If we drop Ms. Howells for a moment and consider, say, Tony Blair- well, Blair is a huge success. Is that because he has "good genes" or because (if we presume that what makes Blair Blair is his genetics) merely genes that prosper in a socialist oligarchy? That is, genes for being a ruthless social crawler? His "good" genes may well be utterly "bad" in a free society, in which productive utility is the advantage rather than slimy backstabbing and greasy pole climbing.
When we look at somebody successful in our (from a lib perspective, warped) society, we can't say that success is a proxy for "goodness" of genes. We can only say that nothing succeeds like success. People like Blair, or Gore, or Toynbee, or Monbiot, or any of the other oligarchs are certainly successful. I shudder at the idea that they are a template for Homo Superior.
And I shudder in general at the idea of rating some people as psychologically genetically superior to others. In a free society (should we ever achieve it) the great thing is that everyone will have an outlet for whatever talents they have, in all kinds of diverse ways. But the thinking in this argument is dismissive of most of humanity, it seems to me, particulary separating Homo Superior with their fab genes, and the drudges fit only as rent-a-wombs. Kerry hasn't got time to be a mere breeder, she's too busy being fabulous. Somebody else, some Homo Inferior, can do the messy part.
Hmm. I think that that kind of separation of humans into classes of worth is a dangerous kind of mindset. You find it commonplace among progressives- "I have a degree in political science, I'm middle class, I'm inherently better than the guy flipping burgers" which then leads to "why should he get to vote?" and then the natural lapse into support for oligarchic technocracy in which H. Superiors run things because the H. Inferiors aren't capable of making their own decisions.
I think Libertarianism rejects that kind of snobbery, or at least it bloody well should do. I've no objection to seeking to make us all beautiful. You start selecting for people who can succeed in our present society, you may well end up with a civilisation comprised solely of media studies graduates.
Oblivion and extinction would surely follow.
Ian B. You're absolutely right, even the "state of the art" in genetic analysis is embarrassingly primitive.
Yet if some schmuck wants to fork over $100 000 for some "good genes" who are we to stop them?
Certainly the potential harm is not sufficient to prohibit the activity entirely.
I didn't say it should be prohibited. I was just saying that I think people who'd do so are wrong in a scientific sense, and not the kind of people I'd want to mix with. And, if everybody did do it we'd probably end up with some kind of hellish society full of Golgafrinchan B Ark types.
I think there's also a pretty good, "conservative" rather than libertarian, argument that a woman who doesn't want to carry her baby probably isn't going to be much cop as a mother either, but that's a different argument entirely.
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