I would work to give people more acute senses, particularly smell. Hearing too sharp could get easily overwhelmed, I suppose, but I feel like it'd be a better-smelling world if more people in it could actually smell it.

Other than that, the things that I would eliminate are generally caused at least in large part by environmental factors that I sadly could not just remove through selective breeding.

Step zero: fund and destigmatize observational research into the correlations between genes and traits-you-like. Make it easy for immigrants with traits-you-like to enter your country and hard for ones with traits-you-don't-like. Consider adding an Australia-esque colony well away from the population you care about to your list of criminal justice options.

Step one: birth control in the water supply (or the air supply, if this is a setting where that's workable). It's temporarily reversible with another substance, and the reversal is freely available to anyone (or maybe it costs fifty bucks to be fertile for a year to cover the cost of materials, whatever) but no one gets unintentionally pregnant without someone going to a lot of really malicious trouble to make them that way.

I think this would do a lot by itself, but:

Step two: you cannot get the reversal if you're female and it would be unsafe for you to get pregnant - too young or old, too sick or drunk, too undernourished or drug-addicted, excess history of miscarriages, injured at the moment, whatever. This can be billed as for the nonrecipient's own good. Some black market in the reversal is to be expected, but probably not that much, and many people who flout the restriction will miscarry or outright die anyway.

Step two and a half (optional): Implement and bankroll a streamlined program of foreign adoption from countries that have orphans running around, so restricted citizens do not spend years wallowing in paperwork and heartbreak. Screen incoming kids, though, before anyone has a chance to get attached to them on your end - for heritable disability and, if they're old enough to tell anything about them beyond their genome, traits you like such as intelligence, conscientiousness, and being super-cute. (Probably safe to let would-be parents filter for super-cuteness on their own, if you can get enough foreign orphans to offer a decent selection.) Encourage the use of sperm and egg banks by people with traits-you-like even if they don't want their own kids. Make it easy to hire surrogates and get mix-and-matched babies ordered up.

Step three: you cannot get the reversal if you have a genetic disease, unless you also want to go through whatever necessary PGD/genetic engineering/depends on tech level to ensure that you won't pass it on. You have to get gene-tested to get the drug; we don't want anyone disincentivized to even find out if they carry muscular dystrophy or something, so that cannot "help".

Step four: now you also can't have been convicted of a violent crime (or some plural number of violent crimes, if you think your justice system turns up lots of false positives). If you wish to be conservative morality police, you also can't get one without being married; that's not particularly eugenic, but you could throw it in. The existing children of violent criminals have a lower threshold for how bad crimes they commit can be before they lose their privilege.

Step five: subsidize and drive down the price of the relevant PGD/genetic engineering/whatever. Offer "scholarships" for it, as a reward for high-status people who probably have good genes, and people whose first (biological) kid(s) do really well at whatever kids do around where you are. Subsidize childcare for people in careers that you want more qualified workers in - if you want scientists, make sure your current scientists can get babysitters.

Step six: you've been funding research into genetic factors in characteristics-you-like all along, right? Legalize genetic discrimination for jobs, implement it for government jobs - you may want to allow individual discretion, so people who manage to be fantastic despite genes that make that seem unlikely don't wind up trapped (presumably you don't have such mad research skillz that you know *everything* about how this works) but economics should mostly take care of this part. Begin spinning relevant genetic interventions that parents can opt into as a safeguard for their children's future. Maybe you were doing that already, but definitely do it now. Have some low-status safety net that people who can't keep up for whatever reason may fall into. Those people do not get the reversal, at least not while they're in there.

Edited at 2012-10-27 07:02 am (UTC)

Huh. If I ever need to sell an insidiously progressing eugenics program to the public in a hurry, I'll know who to call.

But your response is sufficiently interesting that I'd like you to expand upon "traits you like". What traits do you think you would select for if you wanted to build a perfect society, and how would you try to proxy-measure them until the genetic research results came in?

Obvious first thoughts:

The most productive people are hundreds or thousands of times more productive than the least productive. As such, you're going to get a lot more milage out of encouraging reproduction among desirables than discouraging it among undesirables.

I think something like Larry Niven's "birthright lotteries" would be the way to go. People are more likely to have kids if it's looked at as a privilege rather than a burden. Allow everyone two kids, and give people entries into the birthright lottery based on how much additional value they create.

Of course, this is not a policy that would actually work. But I think it's a promising path to finding one that would work (as long as you go "people would never go for that", you probably still need to refine the idea).

Inheritance might not be simple for achievement.

Here's a thing I've heard-- let's assume it's true-- that the men who achieve the most on their own despise their fathers.

Utility-maximization function based on a prediction market operating off public-source anonymized phenotype data. People buy or sell shares in your prospective offspring's future wealth/illth stream. Ultraprogressive Rawlsian libertarian-paternalism.

This is all stuff we have the basic technology to implement right now.

Edited at 2012-10-27 07:08 am (UTC)

Okay, I was trying to think how to work prediction markets in, and that is one heck of an idea. But wealth? Really? Wouldn't that (in the worst case) just lead to a society of super-ambitious possibly-sociopathic cutthroat businessmen?

Paying undesirables to be sterilised is happening! There's a charity that pays drug addicts £200 to be snipped: Project Prevention. Seems like a good idea to me.

How about a benign eugenics regime that is about preserving diversity of human mental types while minimising disease? Everyone is profiled, and nerdy Aspergers types are encouraged to mate with empathisers rather than other nerds, ensuring that they don't make full on autistic babies. Some of the funniest, most creative people I know are definitely touched by the spectrum and have fully autistic relatives in some cases, so the old-fashioned eugenics response of sterilising everyone who is even vaguely autistic would destroy a lot of human capital.

In general, a eugenics regime that isn't pushing towards a single human ideal, but is aware of the value of diversity, could be sympathetic. Maybe go the other way and have them maintain castes of specially bred ultra-systematisers, ultra-empathisers, synaesthetes, etc. The key to avoiding a retread of Brave New World or Morlocks/Eloi is that the castes are not ranked, and everything is done to make each caste happy. There would have to be safeguards to stop the empathisers manipulating everything for their own benefit - what would those be? At some point, are the castes reproductively isolated? What if there is some slow-motion catastrophe where humans will have to be very different a few generations hence - maybe it becomes obvious that climate change will collapse advanced civilisation and humans have to rebuild from hunter-gatherer level, so it becomes necessary to breed robust humans who'll survive a population bottleneck...

I...actually think I am probably going to donate to that charity next time I get money. Though I'd feel better if it were something more reversible.

Edited at 2012-10-27 07:11 am (UTC)

Supposing that what you are after is an *effective* eugenics program, recall that eugenics is just animal breeding applied to humans (unlike, say, ordinary genetics) in which special traits are picked out for reproduction. Artificial selection involves not permitting those who have undesired traits to breed at all; usually the unwanted stock are killed, but in the case of humans you'd have to do something that wouldn't involve a riot: cattle tend not to revolt. So possibly forced sterilisation. I would propose that you are breeding humans to enter a novel ecology: perhaps an extra terrestrial ecology (including artificial ecologies on other planets constructed through partial terraforming) or an ecotype that has recently formed on earth as a result of human activity. Some appeal to genetics, especially gene splicing, might be used, but this technology is largely unnecessary so long as the desired variation exists in the population (consider the Manx cat). However, from a geneticist's perspective, humans lack variation compared to closely related species like chimps, so possibly even cross-specific gene transfer might be required. Understand I am proposing this hypothetically, and without any acceptance of the morality of this sort of thing.

I think you'd have to have either a homogenous population or one that became more "enlightened" about race relations than this world did way earlier. (Or, in a horrible world version, a population that NEVER got enlightened and committed the most successful genocides ever.) Basically a society that never used eugenics to be racist and therefore did not develop a history of it used for fairly obvious bad things. (Though whether they've used it for morally ambiguous things or even "totally evil but not overtly so," well...)

I'm asking "how would you design a eugenics program?" rather than "how should I do this for my conworld" because I find that if I set out to make a constructed world, my creativity suddenly disappears and I risk falling in to the standard "there are elves and dwarves and dragons, but the dragons are called something different! Like draa'ken!" trap. But then when real people try to think up ideas, they come up with fascinating things like prediction markets and seasteading and Mormonism. Or as some sci-fi author once put it, "the average fictional alien race is less genuinely foreign than the average Chinese person".

But when I try to think about how to do eugenics in the real world, I immediately go to "Don't worry about it, we're getting cheap genetic engineering and designer babies in the blink of an eye compared to how long it would take for a eugenics program to have any effect anyway" :( -ari

It's for Raikoth, they're stuck in their telluric field, and they've been doing it for the past two thousand years. Does that help?

I'm not sure what traits I'd be selecting for, but why not select based on families rather than individuals? Give support to families who consistently show more of whatever you're selecting for and encourage matches between those families.

I'm probably inspired the Howard families in some Heinlein novels. People with four living grandparents got a good bit of money to mate with other people who had four living grandparents in an effort to breed for longevity. (When the series was started, I expect that having four living grandparents at the age of twenty or so was a bigger deal.)

That incentivizes breeding young, which isn't necessarily what you want. (I dunno, maybe it is, but it certainly isn't the same as longevity.)

Advanced computer program calculates ideal genetic matches for everyone, taking in to account the cost of relocation, etc. and offers large incentives to those willing to be monogamous with their "ideal match". Any "monogamy violations" permanently suspend the stipend, but otherwise there's no sanctions. No one is sterilized - even the "least desirable" person has an "ideal match." The programmers have a strong understanding that diversity is importance, so the program focuses on child-happiness rather than "social efficiency".

You could up the "Brave New World" factor by having this result in a very dumb, servile population that obeys the High Programmers - a sort of genetic wireheading. (If you want to be truly silly, mix in 1984 and you get the setting of the Paranoia RPG :))

I'd find it more interesting if the program simply tended to avoid risky deviations - you lose the high-intelligence outcasts, but you still have a smart society, and people are generally a bit more agreeable.

The main part is that there's no sterilization at all - as far as I know, eugenics is about genetic *selection* and doesn't require that. And once you start sterilizing people, it's hard not to see it as a bit dystopian...

I would focus not on general categorisation but on couples earning individual permission to have a child or more children. Side benefit is Stockholm Syndrome. Possible that societal role could build up points to be handed down to generations (more incentivisation) but mostly I'd make it individual. Penalties for violation would be for children to be taken away.

Have you read Heinlein's _Beyond This Horizon_? Ignoring the Social Credit and dueling stuff, most people were eugenic products somehow, what Orion's Arm would call nearbaselines. In the interest of diversity and backup, a population of baselines was kept around, and subsidized (even more than everyone else) to make up for their disadvantages. People with experimental genes also got subsidies, to make up for being guinea pigs. Tattoos let you know who was who.

What are the constraints on Raikoth? People are mentioning computers or magic birth control chemicals. I'd been going to go with IUDs, but I don't know if your fantasy world has even those.

For more specific ideas... I'll come back when it's not 4:30am

Pretty happy to go with real technology or even mild future tech.

I don't think you'd need to do much. Make the tech available to choose individual alleles (or even individual sperm), publish a big list of what genes are useful for what, and let the market take its course.

After all, if there was the option of making your kid 10% smarter then what parent _wouldn't_ take it?

Would you chose to make your child a bright, happy, cheerful child if you could?

What would the societal effect be if all the gloomy, pessimistic types were not around to afford that type some ballast?

Giving people with desirable traits drugs that make them want and like to have lots of children would seem to be highly effective. And while it is evil to manipulate peoples utility function, nobody suffers* because after they have taken the drug they are happy that it happened.

*Exception: people who are infertile but didn't care until they took the drug.

Presumably infertility isn't at all a desired trait, since you want heredity, so why give them the drugs?

My free-market eugenics policy:

1. Eliminate all taxes except the taxes on negative externalities. Instead, each newborn is given a birth-debt: a sum of money they are expected to pay their country, just for being born.

Not everyone is born with the same amount of debt. A team of actuaries looks at your genetic profile, family history, and likely developing environment to assess how much potential you have to make money. Steve Jobs babies get a large birth debt, while Forrest Gump babies get a small debt.* To those who are given much, much is expected.

The birth debt effectively replaces income taxes with potential-income taxes. There’s no more inventive distorting, because you have to pay the same amount of tax no matter how hard you choose to work. That’s great for the economy. It also means the state can create a more egalitarian society than was possible before.

2. The state pays each woman a share of the birth debt.** This makes having children much more affordable, especially if you have good DNA. Fathers and egg-donor are, by default, not entitled to a share of the birth debt nor expected to pay child support. However, they can sign legally binding contracts with the mother to change that.***

Advantages of my eugenics policy:

A) No more incentive-distorting taxes. Once a person is born, they can’t affect the amount of tax they’d have to pay, so there’s no substitution effect. The state could even make everyone’s [lifetime income – birth debt] equal, without causing everyone to stop working.

B) Although the most talented people have the most incentive to reproduce, almost everyone**** has some incentive. Reproduction is currently an undersupplied good. It gives the recipient a $10 million surplus, but potential parents are reluctant to supply that good because it will cost them $.2 million (cost of raising a child). In a free-market, parents would be compensated for the $0.2 million cost of raising a child. But there is no free-market, because nonexistent children cannot bargain potential parents to for existence. Hence, the state needs to provide incentives.

C) Less government coercion than other eugenics proposals.

*A few poor souls would have a negative income potential. For example, people with severe disabilities that require state assistance. They would have a negative birth debt, which means the state owes them money.

**We might have to factor the child potential to create externalities too. If a woman gives birth to a child with a murder-propensity gene for example, that might reduce her share of the birth debt. But most people contribute more to the world than they take away, so most mothers would make a profit.

***To reduce the risk of inbreeding, there might have to be a limit on how many times an individual could reproduce. But that limit, probably around 20 or so, would be much higher than the number of children people normally want to have today.

****The exceptions being people who’s children are prone to having a negative birth-debt, or creating enough externalities to remove their share of the birth debt. (See the first and second footnotes)

"The state could even make everyone’s [lifetime income – birth debt] equal"

Except you get the dystopian edge cases where the government predicts wrong; the system relies on some very, very accurate predictions and a world with no accidents (wouldn't it suck to have the Steve Job's Child tax rate and then get in a car crash that leaves you unable to do any high paying work?)

Using gamete selection even the gnarliest couple of subhumans can probably produce a reasonably clean baseline, just heavily subsidize the technology for "gene cleaning". No one gets sterilized, everyone gets checked, undesirable traits get wiped out in short order. Tah dah, everyone's happy.

I'm imagining a society with voluntary eugenics, based on selection of sperm/eggs/zygotes by the parents. The government just pays for it all - reproduction is almost all medically assisted, with genetic screening, and free for the parents. Rhetoric about the topic emphasizes warm fuzzy liberal things like parents' choice, reproductive rights, equal access to technology, and having a child that shares your idiosyncratic strengths & values. Selection in part for IQ/health/etc. is so obvious that it's taken for granted that everyone will do at least some of it (and largely based just on mutational load). Some more details:

- How is all reproduction medicalized? Everyone is "sterilized" at puberty (made unable to conceive), but getting "unsterilized" is easy and free - it's paid-for by the government, and anyone of-age can do it whenever they choose. But almost no one ever chooses to do it, because even "sterilized" people can reproduce with medical assistance. That medical assistance, including genetic screening, is completely free (paid-for by the government). Genetic screening of sperm/eggs/zygotes gives parents a great deal of choice in terms of what their child will be like.

- The initial movement towards this system came from a mix of people including "think of the children" types (don't want children having babies by accident), liberal egalitarians (upset about only the rich people getting designer babies), and fiscally responsible folks (funding these services ends up saving the government money from lower incarceration, higher taxes collected, etc.). But the standard accepted rhetoric emphasizes warm fuzzy stuff about parents' choice about their child.

- Almost everyone wants their child to be healthier/stronger/smarter/more attractive; there is no need for special encouragement and it is generally just taken for granted. This is primarily accomplished by selecting for low mutational load, and everyone does it to some extent. The values that everyone talks about treat that as obvious background, and emphasize other things like having a child who shares key idiosyncratic features/strengths with a parent. Because the reduced genetic diversity from selecting against idiosyncratic mutations could be problematic (for purely genetic reasons and because of lower diversity of skills etc.), advertising by the government (and organizations that depend on the government for their funding) emphasizes the warm fuzzy value of having a child that shares your key features. This has made research into more sophisticated genetic selection popular and relatively warm-fuzzy, since figuring out how to give a child specific traits shared by its parents is harder than selecting for low mutational load. Arms race dynamics on various specific traits push parents who have & value those traits to focus their selection pressure there - the more extreme forms of this are the "dark side" of the genetic selection system which are the focus of articles (involving either hand-wringing or biting criticism) in classy liberal magazines like the New Yorker.

-Unnamed

I can imagine a lot of contrived and not very interesting policies, like only people who get a certain IQ score can reproduce, or criminals can't reproduce, and things like that. But I feel like there should be something more interesting and less obviously "The government is going to subvert this to kill off dissidents, isn't it?"

Well, lots of people apparently don't realise the downside, so that's not actually that implausible. The interesting bit is how we end up with that sort of thing in the real world: probably not by one sweeping law that mandates it, but greater and greater social norms that you have to have follow government "guidelines" for the sake of the children, and then a reorganisation that shoves people who don't out of normal hospitals into special "free thinker" hospitals that then have their funding cut off, something like that.

But in the spirit of the question, what would I do, if I had to support as much eugenics as I could stomach? I'd permit screening gametes for individual diseases as much as possible -- individual parents could take that up as a personal choice.

I'd do everything I could to ensure there was still a wide genetic mix, so I wouldn't want to control all births. If I did want to control who could breed, I'd look for something like the birthright lotteries, where everyone is guaranteed 1-2 children, and you get extras for various sorts of achievement. Remember, population in developed countries is peaking, so we're not facing a population crisis locally unless we want to cut population. But the same could be done to ensure as many "good" offspring as possible: you could say that everyone has a right to children, but any beyond the first have to come from gene banks not their own DNA.

Also notice that contraceptive technology, while still depressingly invasive, has improved: twenty years ago, a government probably couldn't plausible force people to not get pregnant, except by threatening them with consequences. Now it would be somewhat more plausible to "encourage" everyone to have some of the forms of contraception other than the pill and condoms, taken regularly from a young age, and require a license to get pregnant[1], and even if enforcement wasn't perfect, it could change the "normal" state.

[1] Apparently America actually DOES do something like this? And I think, ensuring people are ready for children is a good idea, but I'm somewhat horrified by potential for abuse if permission were ever refused.

" Apparently America actually DOES do something like this"

Like what? Require a license to get pregnant? Hell no. Obamacare has started providing free birth control of all kinds, which may mean an uptick in the use of IUDs and implants that have high up-front costs, but we're nowhere near Beta Colony with all teen girls getting implants.

I would set up free, non-compulsory, government funded centres which would:

confidentially genetically screen people for desirable qualities

allow them to chose whether to make these results available to potential partners

be a dating agency between people who match each others desirable qualities for producing offspring

provide free long term but not permanent implanted birth control

and other sexual health services as necessary.

The market can take care of the rest :-)

As a background note, I live in Finland, where we have pretty good welfare program, you get monthly something up to 2000e to support your children. For 1 child, I think it's something like 500e/month, and it increases up to 5 children.

First of all, I'd use that system, but I'd make the system cap on two children, so you'd max out maybe 750e/month, 500e for your first child, 250e for second, or something like. This gives incentive for poor people to not reproduce overtly. Abortion would be entirely legal, and in cases where you are obviously not in position to take care of the child, abortion is recommended.

That's just the first step. This would cause a dent on the average well-being in my country, but nothing too severe I think. With this step, I intend to just lower the average fertility rate, so that the next step is more efficient.

Now, the eugenic step here is something more radical. We'd have a national bank for sperm and eggs of excellent quality. Succeeding at something, you'd get to have your genes passed onto this bank. Also, if you carry a baby that has genes from this bank, you get better welfare. Donation itself is without monetary incentive, it's done for the good of the country alone. This I feel is necessary to keep the actual donation part free of corruption, so people aren't as incentivized to modify the criteria based on which you can donate to this bank of excellency.

We'd have a strict rule that rulers themselves cannot, under no circumstances, themselves donate to this bank. I don't view this as a loss of any consequence, and again, it would remove any personal incentive rulers might have to mess with the system we have here.

So how would the bank work? You get to donate eggs or sperm to this bank if you manage to do something that demonstrates excellency of your phenotype. Doctorate of any kind, excelling at sports or anything of competitive nature, or passing a special test devised to measure your IQ and other kind of mental and physical aptitude would make you eligible to donate. Doing this would be heavily marketed as one of the greatest services one can do to their country. Carrying and/or raising a child that has genes from this bank bypasses ordinary welfare restrictions to some degree. Your welfare would be larger, too.

I feel that it should be required that even if a woman qualifies for the bank of excellency, having her own child shouldn't bring these additional benefits. This is to avoid creating class tension. People themselves shouldn't be thought of as better than others, rather, they get additional welfare by using this eugenic system. That's an important distinction. Everyone is equal as a parent of their own child, and equal as a parent of a system child. Also, it obviously should be kept confidential if the child you have is adopted from the system or if you are a biological parent yourself. Again, we want to give monetary incentive to use this bank, but don't want to divide the people.

That's pretty much it. You can adjust this system by applying restrictions to ordinary reproduction, or adjusting monetary incentives involved, to make it faster or slower. Financial penalty for having more than 1 child of your own would make the system pretty good at quickly selecting the brightest, but it could meet heavy opposition, so you can play with these parameters in accordance with popular support

-Jonii

Actually your cap would discourage having children only among those with enough foresight to see what having more children would do.

I wrote a response, but it got too long for an LJ comment, so I posted it as a blog post: http://www.drmaciver.com/2012/10/designing-a-eugenics-program/

It appears to be very difficult to post a sufficiently detailed answer. I wrote a response, it was too long, so I posted it as a blog post with a link to it, which then got marked as spam. :-)

If you're looking for an applause light, a decision-making system that makes people feel like they can assume it'll make everything turn out alright without worrying about the details or its mediocre track record, democracy will have wider appeal than prediction markets.

Anyone who wants to enter in the 2013 America's Next Top Breeder competition must donate a bunch of gametes, then go on birth control for the duration of the pageant. Americans vote each year on what eugenic criteria to use, and competitions are built around that. Anybody who does very well, or amusingly poorly, becomes an instant B-list celebrity. A few official winners are eventually selected, but everyone who participated gets a score based on both their own showing and their gene-level similarity to the winners. The women with negative scores may then opt to bear the children of the competitors with positive scores. Children who come out of the competition are vaguely higher-status.

Here's my best attempt at finding a dividing line where eugenics becomes unsympathetic:

The most offensively eugenic (in the sense of effect, not necessarily intention) programs I've ever heard of that don't seem to offend (progressives) are subsidies for temporary/reversible contraception and subsidies for abortion. In both cases the lack of offense (and support, for that matter) applies for subsidies up to or equal to the cost of the product or procedure - I suspect the pro-eugenics aspects either don't register or are considered to be nothing more than a social-conservative talking point, but offering subsidies in excess of cost would probably give the game away.

On the other side of the line:

http://www.metafilter.com/96771/Dont-spend-it-all-at-once

Project Prevention is the least offensive eugenic program I've ever heard of that will get a majority of progressives calling you scum. The main objection here seems to be the permanence of the procedure, though; I suspect if you were offering $300 for drug addicts to sterilize themselves for N years rather than forever, the fraction of participants who sober up and find themselves unwanted-ly sterile might then be considered to be a lower cost than the fraction of non-participants who find themselves with unwanted and/or drug-damaged babies.


These are just explicitly non-eugenic policies that happen to have noticeably pro-eugenic relative outcomes. I don't think you can design any eugenics program more explicit than "we've identified some genetic diseases, and parents can choose for their kids to avoid them" without it (and possibly you) being called scum by large numbers of people.

(Or if you don't mind being called scum by large numbers of people, let me know; my assumption to the contrary is preventing me from providing links to your relevant posts when "Friend zone" discussions come up on Metafilter)

Analyzing the "demographic of disaster" -- which are the best indicators that the children will end up dead, criminal, uneducated, unemployable, etc. Include such factors as education of parents, martial status of parents, martial status of grandparents, whether the parents were raised on public assistance and whatever else proves to be relevant. (Use DNA testing on the children.)

Target the demographic with the worst outcomes. Take the first child as an infant and examine the parents to see if they really are sane -- that is, able to control themselves; the presumption is that they are not. (Having children while in the demographic of disaster is sufficient proof they are a danger to others.) Having two children in it becomes an irrebutable presumption that they are no; institutionalize them, which not only prevents their having more children but protects them from themselves.

Also, for the more fortunate classes, you predicate the reception of old age benefits partly on how many descendents the elderly have, who are neither in jail nor supported on welfare.

At the moment, evolution is working overtime selecting for philoprogentiveness; I don't see how much can be done against that force.