Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think

by Bryan Caplan

Most people find my prediction frightening. Some paint GE as a pointless arms race; it’s individually tempting, but society is better off without it. Others object that GE would increase inequality; the rich will buy alpha babies, and the rest of us will be stuck with betas. But there’s something fishy about these complaints: If better nurture created a generation of wonder kids, we would rejoice. Suppose you naturally conceived an amazingly smart, healthy, and accomplished child. Would it bother you? If your neighbors had such a child, would you forbid your children to play with him? If your neighborhood were full of wonder kids, would you move away? On my office wall, I have a picture of my dad at his high school graduation, towering a foot above his grandparents. Such height differences were common at the time because childhood nutrition improved so rapidly. I doubt that the grandparents who attended that graduation saw height as an “arms race” or griped that rich kids were even taller. They were happy to look up to their descendants—and we’d feel the same way. Deep down, even technophobes want their descendants to surpass them. They just think that picking embryos is a vile way to make it happen.

this misses that the issue is the distribution is not close to uniform...