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The driving force of eugenics was not merely racism or bogus theories of genetic fitness for living a full life, as the American Society of Human Genetics claims. The core was a broader assertion that one scientific consensus should override human choice. And that consensus implausibly centered on issues of human health: one central agency knew the way forward whereas regular people and their choices in life represented a non-compliance threat.
Eugenics, Then and Now
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Experts have their place and can be extremely valuable in those places, this no doubt being one reason for the old expression, “Experts should be on tap, not on top.” For broader social decision-making, however, experts are no substitute for systemic processes which engage innumerable factors on which no given individual can possibly be expert, and engage the 99 percent of consequential knowledge scattered in fragments among the population at large and coordinated systemically during the process of their mutual accommodations to one another’s demand and supply.
Intellectuals and Society
Thomas Sowell
Given that some of the big political visions of the twentieth century led us to Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Great Leap Forward, maybe we are better off in the hands of petty-minded bureaucrats. Mixing godlike technology with megalomaniacal politics is a recipe for disaster. Many neo-liberal economists and political scientists argue that it is best to leave all the important decisions in the hands of the free market.
Homo Deus
Yuval Noah Harari
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