They can do that already? I mean without scrambling the baby's brains out?

I think, there is so much cultural pressure to aspire to perfection, when it is actually the imperfections that make something unique. It's hard to really come up with an argument against preventing kids from being born with disfigurements, mental illness, disabilities, but at the same time, every time humans aspire to get one up on nature, they fuck things up. What if the very genes that cause a personality disorder are also genes that drive great artists to inspiration. What if children are born with really powerful immune systems, and then after a generation, a great virus evolves that can beat it, and therefore completely obliterates the rest of us? And does that mean that rich people get to have perfect kids, designed to be smart, to be more able, more successful, and therefore these people get the first pick of important jobs...

There is a natural order to things, and while it sucks if you try for a baby for ten years and your kid is born with cancer, well that's horrible but that's the way it is, but really you probably shouldn't be having a fucking kid in the first place because they're going to grow up in a world of food shortages, energy crises, and low quality of life. If all children survive, the world simply cannot sustain that kind of population growth. Sure here in the western world it may seem all good and rosy right now, how much of the food you buy is even grown in your own country. Half? Less? Why should your kid who might have had MS, survive and live a great successful life, when a poor but otherwise healthy kid who lives next to the coffee plantation dies of starvation?

What I was actually saying wasn't about inequality, but more about world trade and economics. Ie. overpopulation in poor areas where people are starving to death and dying, and all the food grown in their countries is being shipped off to us rich countries, we think it's a great tragedy that one kid dies, so when the food shortages really do kick in, people will really be taken by surprise to discover that they can't buy melons in December or their beef is prohibitively expensive, and essentially to have a child in a world already creaking under the weight of this many humans, although it seems fine here, it soon enough won't be fine at all, and if anything ensuring more children survive is a bad thing overall.

I was taking a course on the economic development of lesser developed countries (LDC) and a few things from your argument jump out at me. Firstly the empirical data shows that birth rates in developed countries have been on a steady decline, the population isn't growing because we are having so many kids, the population is growing because of relatively huge declines in death rates. In LDCs the birth rate is still extremely high because the death rate is so high, have to have more kids to ensure one survives. Also the exportation of food is a necessary evil of economic development. Instead of jumping out with a "it shouldn't be this way" line of thinking for a moment accept that capitalism is the way of the majority of the world.

In an LDC there are two labor markets, an informal sector and a formal sector. The informal sector includes agriculture, places where workers are paid based on labor supply and demand, the textbook labor market. The informal sector is where manufacturing jobs exist and are either under minimum wage laws or have unions setting a wage. That wage is much higher than the informal wage (anywhere from double to even more). The single best way to improve the distribution of income and the economic well being of the nation is to move people out of the informal sector and into the formal sector. British economist W.A. Lewis argued that the large number of workers employed in the informal sector gives means that some workers are providing no additional output (marginal product of labor, MPL for that worker is 0). Lewis further claims that because of this some number of workers can be moved out of the informal sector into the formal sector without decreasing informal sector production.

For a factory in the formal sector to expand they need to have labor and capital. Labor, L, is extremely easy for an LDC, unskilled labor is its most abundant resource. Capital, K, is much harder for an LDC to acquire because it most always must be imported from abroad. Early on most LDC firms cannot compete in world markets, or at least not at a level that can finance their growth, and so they must acquire foreign exchange from elsewhere. This is where the exporting of food comes in, LDCs can be extremely competitive in world food markets and the agricultural sector (informal) of the economy can provide the additional foreign exchange needed to fund formal sector capital purchases. Increased K requires increases in L to maintain production and workers are taken from the informal sector into higher paying jobs in the formal sector. Lewis makes it very clear that capitalists (the owners of formal sector firms) do get the biggest gains, but there are still positive gains to the distribution of incomes, moving some workers up in lifestyle.

More on topic, I find the ability to alter children before birth unethical. Eventually they are going to grow up and become adults (that is the hope at least) and to have made changes to them without their permission is not something I can support. What if he would have liked his big nose? What if she would have been much happier with small breasts? Parent's need to make medical decisions for their children when the well being of those children are in danger, but here these changes are not health issues but cosmetic issues and the parent should leave those issues to their children to decide when they grow up.

Joke of the day.