In my Age of Malthusian Industrialism concept (see archive), I explore the possibility of a future scenario in which technology stagnates due to problems becoming harder and dysgenic reproduction patterns. Meanwhile, the demographic transition will be reversed, since fertility preferences are heritable, and ultra-competitive in a post-Malthusian world. This may eventually bring the world population into line with the carrying capacity of the modern industrial economy (which I estimate at ~100 billion).
Since my initial series of posts on the AoMI, I realized that I have enough material to start writing a book on the subject, which I am now in the process of doing.
In the meantime, let me introduce the blogger and futurist Alexander Turok. Inspired by Hanson’s speculations on ems (as was I), he wrote the book Posthumanity: Anticipations of the Next Historical Era [PDF/HTML]. Though I’ve yet to read it*, I understand that it can be seen as an exhaustive socio-economic exploration of the “biosingularity” scenario from A Short History of the Third Millennium, in which bioengineering enables humans to turbocharge average IQ levels.
More recently, he has also come up with his own vision of how the AoMI will look like in an eponymous post: The Age of Malthusian Industrialism. I appreciate it when thoughtful bloggers and commenters take an interest in this topic, and I agree with the good majority of his projections about life in the AoMI. While I’ll expound on all this in much greater detail in the book, this serves as a good template for sketching out the big picture of this future.
(1) Turok starts off calculating how long it will take for the world population to converge to 100 billion people, assuming a starting point of 2070, with a fertility rate of 1.8 children per woman, a population of nine billion, and a narrow-sense heritability of fertility of 0.3. He estimates that the world will take eight generations to hit 100 billion people, and will do so at a fertility rate of 4.2 children per woman.
This is very similar to my estimates which I derived from demographic toy models. However, Turok has found a very elegant way to prove a simple relationship between the heritability of fertility and next-generation fertility rates.
He also notes that there will be a rather big crisis when the previously vigorously growing world population crashes against the world’s carrying capacity c.2300. This may result in some rather interesting geopolitical effects: “Most harmed will be those who reached their own Malthusian limit a generation or two before the world as a whole did and now rely on imported food, the price of which would skyrocket. The food-exporting countries, assuming they have sufficient economic power to sustain their agricultural sectors without trade and military power to resist foreign aggression, will do great, forming islands of relative wealth. However, if they do not control their own population growth rate, they will regress to the planetary average.”
In other words, countries that are currently ~two orders of magnitude short of their theoretical carrying capacity, as opposed to just one for the world at large – this would be Russia, Canada, the Scandinavian regions, with some help from global warming – can be expected to do very well during the onset of the AoMI, all else being equal.
(2) The next section covers some psychological observations and socio-economic observations about “malthdustrials”, as Turok terms this age’s denizens**.
While the strategies are unique, the groups will not be fully separate, rather, these groups will see their children leave the milieus they grew up in, mixing with mainstream society and one another. In some cases, as in their attitude to extra-marital childbearing, the attitudes of these groups will be opposed, while in other cases they will converge in viewpoint, if only for different reasons, such as a disdain for the lifestyle and beliefs of the urban SWPL. If the primary reason fertility is low despite an abundance of resources is because people are trying to climb the latter of social status, trying to get more money and live in a better neighborhood, trying to attract the highest quality of mate, (or quantity of mates) then natural selection will act against those who play this game, promoting the genes of those who do not care about it or those too incompetent to play it well.
This is a very good way of putting it.
An Icelandic study estimated the decline in intelligence per 30-year generation at .9, with 12 generations until the age of Malthusian industrialism, this equates to an IQ decline of 11 points. A decline that is this high will be easily noticeable by any modern time-traveler, and will reduce the quality of institutions significantly.
The round the table drop in IQ will be ~10 points from now to AoMI onset. Though I would note that there will likely be major differences in the rate of decline between different regions (see my blog posts on this).
Just as they will be adapted to resist mainstream society’s status game, they will also resist counter-cultural status games that lead to a lack of reproductive success, such as obsession with art, literature, extreme politics, chess, video-games, or whatever else gets in the way of family formation.
I am not so sure about this. In the AoMI, there will appear a class of ultra-rich oligarchs (a natural consequence of Ricardo’s Law of Rents, which will be very applicable to a world that returns to neo-Malthusian conditions). And like the industrial oligarchs of old, and moneyed noblemen before them, they will still seek to convert their wealth into status. (Indeed, due to technological stagnation, I posit that there will be confluence between the two, with industrial dynasties playing a very large economic role). Funding the arts is a reliable path towards that.
Video games will probably only rise in popularity due to the continued degradation of the natural world. There won’t be many pristine areas left in a world of 100 billion people. Nor will many people have the means to holiday to those areas that remain.
In the AoMI, more effort will be directed into agriculture and food processing, as agriculture will be more intense. However, even if the percentage of the population needed to work on the now more labor-intense farms doubles, it will still be a fraction of the total population, as advanced countries require very little of their labor force to be engaged directly in agriculture.
I agree with this. Agriculture as a percentage of GDP will go up from 1-2% in the rich nations to perhaps 5-10%.
Malthdustrials will still live better than their pre-industrial ancestors. They will suffer minimally from infectious diseases, globalization of trade will assure that famine deaths, except in the poorest countries, will be minimal.
I am not sure about the former due to antibiotics resistance. At the end of the day, the births/deaths equations do need to be balanced somehow, especially during the crisis at the beginning of the AoMI. A series of pandemics on a malnourished populace would be one of the likelier ways for that to happen. Another would be social adaptations, such as mass female infanticide, e.g. as in late Qing era China.
Malthdustrials will eat a mostly vegetarian diet, but nutritionists will act to make sure it is a healthy vegetarian diet.
The ideological predicates for this are already being put into place already, interestingly enough.
~2 years ago on @razibkhan blog I predicted meat-eating would be target of next big moral crusade.
What I got wrong:
1. Thought it'd occur over next decades (or centuries), not years.
2. Thought it'd be driven by concerns over animal sentience, not climate change hysteria. https://t.co/pYSkBdsq3A— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) August 13, 2019
During the world wars in advanced countries, most implemented rationing, which implies that rationing ought to be expected during the AoMI. Rationing will prevent the iron law of wages from lowering wages completely to subsistence, as if a group of workers is currently making more than subsistence wages, they will not be able to use the extra money to buy more food and birth more workers, though excess rationing may end up causing so much economic distortion as to make the situation worse. Rationing will be connected to population control, with nations that do not impose a clear limit simply giving people a share of ration-cards that, beyond a point, does not grow with the number of children in the family. Rationing, and the black markets which will grow to evade it, will be a ubiquitous theme in Malthdustrial culture.
This is a very interesting idea that I have not considered. I am not sure why it would be more likely than other forms of redistributionism (e.g. subsidized bread and games as in Roman times). For a start, rationing is very hard to impose in non-emergencies, politically. The AoMI will be the new “normal”, not an emergency. And I expect governments will be weaker, with less legitimacy, than today (see just below):
Democracy in the pre-industrial era was rare, and it’s tempting to think that, with the backsliding in wealth, it should become just as rare during the AoMI. However, there are factors which make democracy easier today that will still exist during the AoMI, such as cheap communication and travel over distances, widespread literacy,(which will be needed for most jobs) cheap-record keeping to assure fair elections, and labor unions which demand expanded suffrage. On the other hand, the decline in IQ due to dysgenics will make the maintenance of democratic institutions harder. All told, we should expect less democracy during the AoMI than during our own time, but more than during the farming era. What democracy exists will be more corrupt and clientistic.
Agreed.
Whether or not inequality in dollar terms will be higher or lower during the AoMI, the practical outcome of equality in access to food, healthcare, and leisure time will be much greater. This indicates that more social conflict should be expected, but not necessarily a permanently revolutionary atmosphere. The poor will see no point in rebelling if they expect the result to be several years of violence and disruption followed by the institution of a regime that is every bit as exploitative as the one they overthrew.
I expect it to be a very unequal society (see above). That, coupled with the corruption and clientelism, should indeed result in regular “color revolutions”, jacqueries, pogroms, pronunciamientos, and so forth.
Making war for economic reasons will be more attractive in a poorer world, so we on this fact alone it should be expected to be more common than it is now, just as it was more common in the farming era. However, wars in the farming era were not as destructive of economic potential as wars are today, providing a greater incentive to avoid them. For the latter reason, I think the Malthdustrial equilibrium will be a series of great powers with client states arranged against one another, with nuclear and other WMDs in order to provide deterrence. This deterrence will not be foolproof, brinkmanship, accidents, and civil wars spilling over borders may turn the cold wars hot.
Reasonable take… though only assuming the current geopolitical structure remains more or less impact during the transition to the AoMI.
Jobs during the AoMI will require higher IQ floors than farming-era jobs, which will enforce some level of meritocracy which was absent during the farming era… Then, as now, the labor of an engineer will be more valuable than the labor of a manual laborer, and in a natural market his wage would be higher. Because of this, we should expect efforts to suppress the wages for these kinds of jobs, justified by egalitarian rhetoric.
This is also why I expect the “Farewell to Alms” effect to happen quicker after the onset of the AoMI.
A poorer society will care less for abstract political principles like liberty, privacy, diversity, tolerance, abstract forms of equality, (as opposed to clear-cut economic equality) respect, and empathy… Malthdustrials, thus, will be more open to policies which would offend moderns due to actual or perceived violations of these abstract principles. Although a poorer society cannot afford 1984-style surveillance, it will have less concern about the surveillance that does exist. Some Malthdustrial governments might force everyone to wear an identity badge on their clothing, similar to how we force cars to have license plates. Others might force auto-manufacturers to make cars which cannot exceed the speed limit; the fact that automobiles will be used less for personal transportation will also reduce their resistance to such a measure. Some countries might force everyone to provide a DNA sample to the government. Others might ban physical cash transactions to better collect taxes and prevent black-market trading.
Much of this is already happening, including many First World nations, so not sure to what extent this would be outgrowth of Malthusian Industrialism per se.
It should be obvious that a poorer society will spend less on decoration and fashion. Clothing and architecture will be more functional and less decorative.
I suspect that it might be the opposite (at least amongst those with money).
The ghastly utilitarian urban design of the 20th century was in part a response to very fast urbanization. The AoMI will be a period of macro-stability and concentration of wealth. This has often been associated with higher aesthetic standards in architecture.
Less money will go to subsidize education and what subsidies it receives will be steered to teaching “practical” subjects. More of it will occur through the internet and less in-person. There will be movements to shorten the hours of primary and secondary education. Summer vacation may come under attack, with proposals to replace it with year-long education and then, taking advantage of the newly available instruction time, shorten the number of years of education.
Agreed.
The obvious exit strategy for the AoMI is population control through a one-child policy or similar. Less obvious exit strategies are the development of advanced technology such as artificial intelligence, though if this didn’t happen before the AoMI, it’s unlikely to happen during it unless it lasts for a far-longer period of time.
I expect that it will happen when IQ levels recover, new technologies start getting developed, and carrying capacity begins to increase again. I expect this recovery to be much quicker than the millennial period that the Clark-Unz effect demanded.
- Incidentally, Alexander, any chance you could make your book available in epub/mobi?
** I haven’t actually thought up of my own name for them. Malthdustrials is OK, though it’s not as brilliant/succinct as “ems” (emulated minds).
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
I don’t see the point of such speculations about the year 2300. The central idea behind this scenario of a triumph of “breeders” who will indefinitely continue having large families, no matter changing circumstances, also seems very speculative to me.
In any case, I doubt the world’s population will hit 100 billion. Before that happens, some movement will arise which will substantially cull humanity. Maybe even some eco-terrorists who regard humanity as a pest and will genetically engineer a virus for a deadly pandemic, like in that movie 12 monkeys from the 1990s. Might actually seem like a good idea if this AoMI scenario became reality.
https://alexanderturok.wordpress.com/2019/08/22/hbd-as-compared-to-agw-denial-and-intelligent-design/
Wth does he mean by this?
Extrapolating to 2300?
Has the model been backtested with data from 1346 and 1491?
@German_reader
You’re too kind. It’s not only that there’s little point, one must also take into consideration the fact that TFRs in just about every modern industrial country are well below replacement, and that there’s absolutely no indication that things are going to rebound. Instead, even countries on the fringes of civilization are now exhibiting signs of a fertility collapse. (Papua New Guinea’s TFR has dropped by 30% over the past 19 years, and is now not far from replacement.)
Turok himself notes that his simple equations “[don’t] seem to have predicted the past very well.” He should have tried to take prior and existing conditions into account — and these conditions couldn’t be more stark. We’re more likely to see a 2300 A.D. with a population of 1 Billion than 100 Billion.
1.8 to 4.2 children per woman, in one short paragraph? What am I missing here?
Isn’t this actually the lifestyle of many today, the reason that birthrates are stagnating or reversing in the west today? Millenials already have a reputation for a poor work ethic and don’t seem to be to concerned about “status”. What’s going to change these attitudes and habits?
The Thorfinnssons of the world will rise up and rebel against the purveyors of this meatless world! I may even join them (no need for Worcestershire Sauce, what a ghastly thought). 🙁
I think they’re just fun. They’re also pervaded with personal biases, but since they can’t easily be refuted, these biases go largely undetected. So these speculations about the distant future should not be taken too seriously.
For my part, I predict/hope governments of the future will be characterized by ruthless demographic realism.
The UN’s low population projection is the only one that uses realistic reproduction rates. Today, virtually every region except sub-Saharan Africa has below replacement level reproduction. The expected result is that world population peaks at about 8.5 billion around 2030, and it declines thereafter, dropping to a few billion by 2100.
If you are going to argue against this, you are implicitly assuming that black Africa overwhelms the entire world, and all countries become predominantly or even overwhelmingly black. In that case, the world’s average IQ drops from its present value of around 85 down to around 70, or so. Any sort of industrialization, or education, or advanced agriculture, or medicine is impossible under those circumstances. A world population of 100 billion is about ten times greater than a savage black population could sustain.
And it would be a primitive, neolithic, black world with no chance of any kind of civilization.
Your views are not dystopic enough.
Broke: Yellow Peril
Woke: Black Peril
I wonder how it might vary for Papuans according to political entity.
If you step back, the low TFR is just a result of an interaction of human biology, society, and modern conditions. The idea is that “breeders” (those who breed in an industrial society) would become an ever larger share of society. Of course present day populations with a TFR of 1.2 were also breeders under different circumstances. So “breeder” is a bit misleading, it should be something like “breeder under industrial conditions” as opposed to “breeder under pre-modern or early modern agriculture but non-breeder under industrial modernity.”
So basically what is happening today is simply a population adapted to different circumstances not reproducing under the present circumstances, until it will adapt to its present circumstances. (Either by changing society, or changing its genetic composition, or perhaps circumstances will reverse back to earlier conditions, or something I didn’t think of, or a combination of these.) But low TFR is unlikely to persist indefinitely into the future.
I’m not sure such people will have more descendants regardless of circumstances. For example, as the world gets poorer, circumstances will partially revert to earlier, Malthusian circumstances, which might at least partially bring back older social mores. So maybe no more casual sex, maybe parents and older people introducing young people of opposite sex to each other, resulting in a return to older ways – which would result in no more selection for “breeders” and instead for very similar people who exist today.
Another consideration is that truly Malthusian conditions might result in “breeder” genes becoming a disadvantage (remember, we are not “breeders” in the first place because having many children in adversity was literally a disadvantage, leading to less, not more, surviving offspring), so maybe it won’t be “breeders” who will drive the increase in population anyway, instead, it will be people very similar to us, just under very different conditions. (Same as our ancestors maybe ten generations ago were probably similar to us in a lot of ways, yet they had many children and we don’t.)
Nuclear reactors will power increasingly diverse Vertical Farming giving the world vastly increased carrying capacity and major opportunities for Rewilding. Energy apart, the economy will be circular. In this age of superabundance, status seeking will shift towards artistic and scientific performance rather than physical wealth.
TFR will plunge as more cultures reach middle class GDPs/Capita. It will slowly recover as the children of the fertile replace the status seeker’s.
Malthus was wrong before. Malthus will be so again. We are clever monkeys.
Privacy is valued in the abstract but has proven to be valued very little in fact. It is an area is particularly interesting for that exact reason. Cash has become unpopular. The consuming classes have adopted the smart phone as the principal means of identity verification (which include biometrics) as well as economic transactions. It also effectively records your location. And people paid substantial fees for this.
As far as eating insects, the observable trend is obesity. And agriculture is a bad business. I don’t see it ever getting a larger share of GDP.
But AoMI is interesting enough and my own perspective includes no experience with high fertility cultures.
In the West, fertility rates have been declining for decades on end. Italy has been below replacement for nearly fifty years. If not for the 5M+ immigrants in Italy, the country would have no more people today than it had in the late 70s. And those people would, of course, be much older on average.
Indeed, TFR in most Western countries is either stagnant, at around 1.4 ± 0.25, or still dropping, however slowly. The UK, for instance, just this year saw its lowest birthrate on record — TFR 1.7. It’ll probably keep dropping until it hits 1.4, unless they import still more Pakistanis.
And then there’s France. That nation’s dysgenic catastrophe deserves its own book, much more so than fanciful notions of “Malthusian Industrialism.”
Sure, the fertility collapse is a result of an interaction of human biology, society, and modern conditions… but we don’t know what’s driving it, we don’t know how to stop it, and we don’t know how it’ll end.
What indications are there that a low TFR cannot be sustained for a very long period of time?
Truly, “Malthusian Industrialism” seems a byword for a post-industrial society run by the descendants of fast-breeding Africans, and the notion relies upon assumptions that seem obviously spurious.
It likely varies by the government’s ability to collect accurate statistics. There’s no reason to assume it’s always at 1.00.
I think it is quite remarkable that the US had a census in 1790, and yet, even with improved technology, there are still many places where a census seems impossible.
“What indications are there that a low TFR cannot be sustained for a very long period of time?”
A nation or subculture that sustained a low TFR for a very long time would disappear. Conversely, a nation or subculture that had a high fertility will eventually swamp its low-fertility cousins. If secular Western society maintains 1.5 indefinitely the Amish and other high fertility groups would eventually swamp them. Consider Israel’s current population(8.7 million) and growth rate.(1.9%) If it maintained it for 300 years it would be at 2.4 billion.For the world’s population to go to 1 billion everyone has to go along with the low-fertility regime.
Doesn’t sound very exciting.
Carbon-based life (eat-shit-sleep) is not something worth clinging to. Whether God exists or not is not too much interesting; but if homo sapiens sapiens is of any worth, his (its) future is in transcending not only human condition, but most/(all?) materialist, 3+1 dimensions types of existence. So, build (or discover) extra 50-100 dimensions, get rid of shitty small bodies & small, vulnerable brain & leave not only this shitty planet, or solar system, or galaxy,….but the entire “physical” universe & go beyond to godlike life where subject & object are (almost) the same, where time does not exist in the usual sense & where modes of cognition qualitatively supersede cause-effect reasoning, and where you got power to destroy & build galactic clusters, black holes & everything.
Anything short of becoming gods, literally, is not worth the trouble. Whether this is attainable at all- well, that’s quite another question…..
Majority of countries are going to be low fertility in the next decades – just the timing of demographic transition has not been co-ordinated between the developed and undeveloped countries, although to a smaller extent than the discordination in economic development.
Demographic transition does not even require very much economic development. (For example, Bangladesh period total fertility rate is now just below replacement level, even though the country is still very undeveloped.)
And in terms of religion, the countries with the fastest fall in fertility rate in 2018, were mostly Muslim countries. So secularization is also not a necessary condition for demographic transition.
In Africa, there is quite fast decline in fertility rates in the more developed countries. South Africa, for example, is undergoing demographic transition now. The demographic problem will be from the less developed countries in Africa like Somalia, if they are a century behind in demographic transition process.
Lol this sounds like the aim of Mormonism, aside from you propose it as some real science project of the next millennium or two, while in Mormons they have enough creative imagination to believe it is possible now (if you have follow their rituals, wearing holy underwear, etc).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VKT4hrBTuk
This is much older than them. It is ancient gnosis, just couched in old terminology & ignorance of laws of universe & life.
From the beginning you have been immortal, and you are children of eternal life. And you wanted death to be allocated to yourselves so that you might spend it and use it up, and that death might die in you and through you. For when you nullify the world and are not yourselves annihilated, you are lord over creation and all corruption.
Valentinus of Alexandria, 180 AD
Yet, religions propose some great ideas, but are not potent enough to fulfill their promises. Anyway, their, frequently naive & childish images & concepts, are more refreshing that dull & repetitive scientistic projections- all too human (prolongation of life, higher IQ, elimination of most diseases,..).
Because, in all those cases- when someone puts a blade through you, you’ll be dead, whether your IQ is 500 & you could have lived 500 years.
Not enough.
Low TFR can be sustained for generations even in the absence of immigration. With immigration, all bets are off.
The Amish aren’t 1% of the population in Pennsylvania. The vast majority of Americans have never even seen one. Should Amish numbers increase very dramatically, I wouldn’t rule out conflict, mandatory birth control, and other such things.
The Amish are not suited for conflict; even if they’re up against an army led by black DMV ladies, they’re sure to lose every confrontation, every battle. Could you imagine the Amish at war? It would be tragic, pathetic, and funny all at once! Besides, the Amish shun the industrial world. With the Amish, it wouldn’t be “Industrial Malthusianism” — it would be plain agricultural Malthusianism.
You say that “[for] the world’s population to go to 1 billion everyone has to go along with the low-fertility regime.” The remarkable thing is that this seems to be the case! There are very few exceptions in the West: The Amish, the Israelis, Hasidic Jews, and Christian Sects like the Quiverful. The Israelis are an anomaly. The other groups are marginal, and many of them exhibit high birthrates precisely because they shun industrial society.
In the so-called developing world, TFR is on an unmistakable downward trend — in very many places already well below replacement — and immigrants to the West adapt to their new surroundings. The immigrant TFR in England is around 1.9, if I’m not mistaken.
Again, we don’t know what’s causing this, we don’t know how to stop it, and we don’t know how it’ll end. But “Industrial Malthusianism” seems like one of the worst bets you could possibly place. It’s totally obtuse. You could bring the Amish and the Hasids into it, but “luddite malthusianism” doesn’t have the same ring to it — and it’s something of a tautology.
Could you elaborate? France is interesting, because it’s often held up in discourse as an example of a Western nation which has comparatively high birth rates. But of course there’s considerable uncertainty how much of that is due to Arabs and Africans, since the French state doesn’t collect such ethnic data (at least not officially). Are you primarily referring to this ethnic dimension, or is there evidence for dysgenic trends among the native white French as well?
Mormon “reward system” is very anti-spiritual, almost as anti-spiritual as Islam.
It is a Skinner Box for positive conditioning, except that the reward is verbally described (as opposed to seen by the animal) .
Like in Islam (and unlike conventional Skinner Box), the reward in the afterlife is having sex with lots of different women, just adding some justification that it is in order to populate your own planet.
(And in both Islam and Mormonism this is also privilege of tribal leader to do in real life – you can see religious leaders and founders of both religions don’t actually believe its claims of an afterlife, so they follow it in real life instead).
However, in Christianity (real Christianity as described in the New Testament, not adulterated by churches), there is space for real spirituality as it tries to remove people from focus only bodily pleasure.
But this world in which technology might allow us to live 500 years, has probably the ontological status of a simulation.
This not meant in the literal sense that simpleton like Elon Musk claims.
But probably that the consciousness that constitutes us, is “more primary” than physical world in which it is situated.
Addressed here: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/breeders-revenge/
Well, I should also say modern Mormons include mostly civilized people , and they seem to be interpreting these views as not literal.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/becoming-like-god?lang=eng
You are not wrong but you are thinking in decades whereas the AoMI takes place over centuries.
You have a theory — but the theory, as Turok notes, “doesn’t seem to have predicted the past very well,” and is utterly at odds with the present and with all reasonable projections of the near future.
So if your theory is correct, you already have a paradox on your hands. I think it’s at least plausible that the heritability of fertility is a lot weaker than you assume. The literature on this subject is extremely poor — most of the family studies are confounded by shared environmental factors and very short (1-3 generation) observation periods. The paper from Collins and Page is, as Collins himself readily admits, unlikely to reflect reality. The one genetic study I’ve managed to find estimates the heritability of TFR at .1, and even that might be over-stating things.
Demographic science in general, even ex post facto, is a mess. How the birth control pill affected TFR is still a hotly debated question — and far from settled. The most interesting question, “what’s driving the global TFR collapse?” is much more mysterious than that.
I think it’s obvious that the TFR collapse is caused by the environment, because genetic changes couldn’t be so fast. While the specific proximate causes are subject to debate, modernity in general is the obvious reason. While their share is not known with any certainty, a few proximate reasons can easily be identified. One is the economic reality. Before industrialization, having children was economically advantageous. It’s no longer, it’s actually a big cost now. This factor is getting worse constantly, like real estate prices are increasing worldwide, safety requirements are increasing (at least in developed countries), years spent in school is increasing worldwide, etc. Another is culture, and it’s obviously getting constantly worse. People’s mentality also reacts to changing conditions only slowly. Even after these factors started to move in favor of higher fertility, TFR might keep dropping for a while from momentum.
So the fertility collapse is not explained in the sense of not having a detailed model, but it’s hardly a mystery like the Fermi Paradox.
Due to the above mentioned factors, the model is not even expected to explain the past. It’s a model of things to come once the negative factors have stabilized. And they will, because society cannot become much more anti-fertility, nor can the economic incentives get much worse. At least, absent a deliberate effort to exterminate all of humanity.
So what is your problem?
Not mysterious at all. It’s God’s wrath for a post-Christian society.
(I’m oversimplifying, of course, but it is what it is.)
You can extrapolate the shape of the future from that.
“Cash has become unpopular.”
Only with Elites. Average people love cash.
If you treasure liberty at all FIGHT against a cashless society.
Actually, cash is not a very comfortable payment method. The Chinese method of payment by simply looking at a screen is probably way more comfortable. Even a credit card or a debit card (where you don’t have to carry cash on your person) is probably way more convenient than cash, which is why so many people use them. I can hardly think of offline places where I used card payment where paying with cash was impossible. I don’t think these alternative payment methods would gain ground against cash if people were vehemently opposed to it.
One might even go so far as to describe it as pure fantasy.
I would disagree it’s fantasy, more and more since 1800 overall fertility levels are being determined by ideological views towards childbearing and as there are many pro-natalist ideologies, it’s not crazy to think many groups will continue having large number of children no matter what the external conditions might be. The Haredim of Israel crowded into small apartments manage to have as many children as any other group of people in the world. Unless you get outright famine there’s no reason to believe pro natalist groups will cease having large numbers of children.
Though I seem to recall basically the same prediction being made, and falsified, quite a few times already. We haven’t seen the crest yet. So don’t bet too heavily on this. On the other hand, 100 billion seems like a far upper limit.
Indeed, the demographics of this brave new world will be interesting. Will everyone be beige? (best case)
Can we expect Malthdustrialist World to still be a welfare state?
Perhaps MW has mandatory TV nights, hardcore praise of homosexuality, abortificients in the state-provided meals, etc?
I think this, indeed the whole European situation, can be summarized as driven by overpopulated areas diffusing their surplus population into relatively underpopulated areas. A bit of current day malthusianism if you will.
Oh, yes, convenience.
The modern decadence. Well, give up cash, just accept that ALL your transactions will be potentially supervised.
Me, I’d rather take some time off the grid.
I am admittedly skeptical. Not even delving into genetics, I’m not sure that the political will exists for a world of 100 billion, even if it might be technologically possible. I mean, I don’t think regimes would allow it, but would feel threatened by it. Nor would they invest in the global infrastructure necessary, IMO
But I rather like the idea because it makes one think about differential fertility rates and long term trends. Imagine if blackpilled Europeans starting thinking on a timeline to 2300. Really thinking on it. I guess most people don’t think of the distant future in terms like that, but I can imagine a subculture forming with a central idea like that.
I think it would even be relatively easy. Encourage a pride that verges on ancestor worship. Everyone probably has a high fertility ancestor in their tree. Take that as an example to be emulated, for nationalistic reasons.
It’s not that simple.
What you describe is intuitively obvious, but doesn’t explain why fertility has utterly collapsed in countries like Nepal, Yemen , Haiti, El Salvador, and indeed just about every other country, to varying degrees, regardless of how they share in the benefits of modernity. Real estate prices are expensive in England, to be sure, but not in Mongolia, where land is all but free and traditional ways of life are still possible — and yet Mongolia, too, is now hardly above replacement, whereas their TFR was pushing 8 just a few decades ago.
Land is cheap and plentiful in Iowa, and raising children is easy enough — but TFR is still below replacement, even there.
What you describe also doesn’t quite explain why measures taken to increase fertility in countries like South Korea and Japan have met with absolutely no success. The South Korean government has spent $130B between 2006 and 2018, according to figures from its national assembly, on measures designed to encourage more births. Those efforts included free childcare until the age of five, cash payouts to pregnant women, and supporting youth clubs. On top of all that, they’ve now started offering a cash payout to parents on a per-child basis, with no conditions, and no questions asked. These heroic efforts have failed utterly; South Korean TFR has been among the world’s very lowest for a few years now. Simply put, economic measures don’t seem to work.
Countries like Italy, Germany, and Austria have been sub-replacement since the early 70s, and show no indications of a rebound — and that notwithstanding the numbers of immigrants they’ve accepted from ostensibly high-fertility countries. At this rate, they’ll probably look to take in more immigrants to prop-up their welfare states, who will breed faster than the native population, but not fast enough to stave away a collapse… and this cycle will likely repeat more than once. The “breeders” you’re talking about — if they exist at all, which is extremely dubious — are probably not going to be natives.
From the fathers’ perspective. Mothers had greater chance to just die in child birth.
A big part of the environment that you didn’t mention is this: humans. There’re many and many more people around now. Our gene’s eyes never have saw so many copies of themselves.
If the genes can be selfish, they’re probably shell shocked by their success by now.
I know very little about Mongolia, but I would be surprised if real estate was for free. Unlike in nomad times, children are probably not an economic asset, rather a liability.
Here’s Nepal:
https://knoema.com/atlas/Nepal/topics/Education/Literacy/Adult-literacy-rate
Children used to just grow and work. Now they go to school. Even in Nepal. Even in the Arab world. Even in Africa. That’s the trend.
The culture keeps getting worse, and its penetration rate into formerly isolated countries is probably very high now. I’m pretty sure that more people watch American movies or porn or listen to hip hop than did twenty or thirty years ago, even in Mongolia or Nepal.
It’s not inconceivable that there is a biological mechanism which puts the breaks on reproduction when there are many other humans around. It hardly made a lot of sense to just pump out lots of babies into an already overcrowded place, where famine must’ve been way more likely than at lower population densities.
Hi Anatoly,
Good analysis but it ignores the effect of religion, no?
The white groups experiencing demographic expansion are religious ones, yes? Like the Amish or Ultra-Orthodox Jews, no?
These are also the groups which prefer avoiding aspects of modernity such as the extensive reliance on technology or long periods of secular education, no?
And with time, the dying out irreligious mainstream will automate most critical aspects of industrial society for greater capital efficiency, which their religious successors lacking extensive technological sophistication, won’t be able to replace after the inevitable natural or man-made disasters like earthquakes or wars, no?
So a proliferation of such religious people lacking support for modernity will inevitably cause a decline of industrial society back to pre-industrial levels, like the Galactic Empire in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, no?
A pre-industrial technology level that cannot possibly support 100 billion people!
Thus the “Age of Malthusian Industrialism” will inevitably be very short and fall apart into a widespread global collapse until population reduces to Earth’s natural carrying limit of ~10 billion, no?
The economic baseline is the childless case. Most people want to live like their neighbors. In a childless world, it’s only possible if you’re richer than them (or if the government takes up all costs of childcare, including hidden costs), otherwise you will get poorer. And here’s the catch: you are never truly richer than your neighbors, because if you are, you will move into a better neighborhood.
Another point is that people often copy their neighbors: if no one is having a lot of kids, you will find it the normal behavior, and won’t have kids even if it’d already be advantageous. As I wrote, it probably has a lot of momentum, and takes a long time to change direction, even if circumstances change.
Another point is that it’s easier to transition from lots of kids to few kids than the other way around. If you have large families, you will find it easier to find some relatives looking after your kids while you have something to do. But if you don’t have a large family, you will find it very difficult to raise many kids. Also, having fewer kids means that you immediately save the costs of raising them, effectively living off the future. But if you have had a low TFR for a long time, you will have lots of elderly to look after, and then you will add the extra number of kids. Basically it’s the obvious thing that moving to degeneracy is always easier than the other way around. It’s pretty asymmetrical.
There are a number of other possible factors. In the past, if someone wanted just one offspring to survive him, he needed to have many children, because even then he couldn’t be sure that they wouldn’t all die. Now with vaccines and antibiotics and overall low infant mortality rates even an only child has an almost 100% chance of reaching adulthood. I guess it took a couple of generations to sink in, but now it’s the expectation.
I don’t think it’s a very big mystery, we just don’t know the weight of these factors.
Seems to me that women who are very vocal in their support for abortion probably represent a phenotype that was very open to infanticide in ancient times, since under the right conditions, it increases survivorship of the mother, and perhaps of the family.
I’ve wondered if these people who speak of humanity as a disease – often radical environmentalists, or very atomized – might represent a second phenotype somewhat analogous to this first group. In past times, perhaps something to due with mass human sacrifice or war, as a means of population control.
If so, it might be an obstacle to AoIM. Or perhaps not, if they have low fertility.
Thankfully Putler is already working to prevent the age of Maltusian Industrialism and is currently engineering gene-edited super Russians, at least according to Bloomberg.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-29/future-of-genetically-modified-babies-may-lie-in-putin-s-hands
Couple of points:
1)
https://www.lukiegames.com/assets/images/N64/n64_turok_dinosaur_hunter_p_v0x57h.jpg
2)
Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem, but even in the hypothetical event that all bacterial pathogens evolve resistance that does not mean a return to prewar medical conditions.
For starters standards of sanitation are far superior, which reduces the number of pathogen vectors. Improved medical care also increases the odds of recovering from infection and reduces the risk of secondary infection.
Antibiotics also suffer from commercial hurdles. Namely, there’s not a lot of money in them: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3673487/
If, or rather when, antibiotic resistance becomes an order of magnitude greater than it is today the development model will be changed.
But most promising is the fact that antibiotics are not the only way to kill bacteria in an animal. Bacteria themselves are preyed upon by viral pathogens known as bacteriophages. Prior to the development of antibiotics, this was an emerging area of medical research. The Soviet Union successfully used phage therapy on wounded soldiers during the Great Patriotic War, and research continued longer in the USSR than in the West owing to later mass deployment of antibiotics.
Phage therapy development is presently not commercially viable, but as with novel antibiotics that is likely to change.
3)
I don’t think animal worship as a contributing factor can be ruled out, though climate hysteria has turbocharged the process.
An ignored factor is commercial pressures. Meat production is expensive, time-consuming, and does not produce (appetizing) homogeneous shelf-stable products. “Plant-based” alternatives use low-cost, fungible inputs. They require extensive processing, and every stage of processing adds more value to the producer. Unlike meat, “plant-based” products also are distinctive and thus have brand value. This provides a very powerful incentive for major corporations to produce, brand, and market these products. It further provides them with powerful incentives to use their resources to shape regulation and public perceptions to provide further commercial advantage.
IF the AoMI comes to pass and diets are shaped by objective economic and environmental forces rather than ideology and commercial pressures, then strictly vegetarian diets will not be adopted.
This is for the very simple reason that not all land is suitable for agricultural crops. Pastureland is only suitable for ruminant grazing. Pastureland will thus continue to support cattle, goats, and sheep. However, in an era of Malthusian limits the rearing of livestock for meat will be largely phased out. Female ruminants will be exploited for dairy production and turned into low-grade meat at the time of natural death (as well as processed for other products like leather, gelatin, etc.). Male animals will either be slaughtered at birth (or eliminated entirely by relying on in vitro fertilization with female embryos) or slaughtered as soon as they are marketable (e.g. veal, lamb). Beef from young steers will exclusively be consumed by the nobility and overall production figures will be very low.
As in the past, commoners who do not live in cities may keep chickens and pigs as well. The sale of eggs to urban consumers will be a major source of income for them.
If you single out, say, Chinese, you can see that there never was so many Chineses.
On the main islands of Japan, there are more Japaneses than ever before.
What about the English speaking people (as Churchill called them)? Same. Not long ago, you can only find English speaking people in the small tiny British isles. Now they fill continents.
People get worried about TFR only when other peoples (Germans, Africans, etc.) are brought into consideration. Now you have a competition. There seems to be a race to occupy lands. TFR suddenly becomes salient.
To some degree, the following two implicits reflect similar human anxiety:
But why? And what exactly can you do about it? The introduction of potatos did more to Chinese population level than what the polity ever managed. I doubt people are that easily fooled by Hollywood movies in one of the more important aspects of our lives.
You greatly overestimate humans.
I guess your first point is that video games (and other newly available forms of electronic entertainment) are a big contributing factor. I can only agree.
Right.
Well, the economic case you mentioned previously is one facet of the problem, but it doesn’t seem to be the main one, or even an especially important one. Others include:
Expanded opportunity for secondary education, particularly, again, where women are concerned.
The fact that people in most industrialized nations are not in a position to start families until their mid-to-late twenties, significantly later than the historical norm. (And thus that the age of first childbirth is steadily rising worldwide.)
Women’s rights in the workplace, and the career-woman mode of life.
Expanded legal rights for women.
Expanded access to contraception and to pregnancy-terminating measures.
The decline of agriculture as a way of life.
The decline of religious ways of life, with a sort of degraded, animal hedonism filling the gaps in most ultra-low TFR countries.
The almost complete cultural dominance of low-fertility nations, e.g. the USA in the West, and Japan and S.Korea in Asia.
Expanded access to leisure activities, including television and video games.
Occult factors: Declining spermcounts in men worldwide. Globo-MegaAgriculture endocrine-disruptors in the food supply. Viral load. Other such things.
Although some of these things are similar, and some are associated with or follow others, they’re all subtly different. Education may help to explain Iran’s catastrophically low TFR, compared to, say, Egypt’s fairly healthy one. In any case, what you noted earlier is entirely correct: What weight each factor should be assigned is unknown. We know what the different factors are — most of them, in any case — but we don’t know which are important, or how things can be turned around.
The Koreans bought the economic argument, went all-in on it, made raising children just about as economically painless as they could, and poured $130B down the drain with nothing to show for it.
You’re also right that people copy their neighbors — but they also copy and learn from their parents, and may attempt to recreate for their children the environment that they associate with their own childhoods. This, combined with shared economic/environmental factors and very short observation periods, can make it seem as though fertility characteristics are heritable — but I think that this is utterly untrue at .3 and very likely untrue at .1. It may well be that fertility characteristics are not heritable at all, to any extent.
30 years ago France and Sweden had the lowest borth rates. They both took financial and social steps (maßsive subsidized childcare in Sweden) to incetivize childbirth. Swedish women actually ceded their position for promiscuity to the Brits.
But it wasn’t painless at all. The best they could do was take up a small fraction of childrearing costs (maybe most of it until age 5, which means that the parents will still hold the bag for the much more expensive later phases, which includes an unknown number of years spent in higher education), and then they expected a rapid turnaround. As I wrote, it probably has a very strong momentum.
In Hungary the economic package in the 1970s and 1980s was hugely successful (the first time that the final fertility of a cohort was higher than the previous cohort), but then after the collapse of communism lots of benefits were abolished or allowed to be destroyed by inflation. This led to a rapid collapse in fertility, especially the 1995 austerity package can be seen in the data. Then they reintroduced most measures and some more, but fertility didn’t increase back. Why? Well, people are not stupid. They know that such measures can easily be abolished. Maybe the Korean public doesn’t believe that the measures will stay.
I know a few families who chose to have a third child after Orbán introduced the tax breaks (he had already introduced it in the late 1990s, but they were later abolished by the leftists who governed 2002-10). I often have a feeling that in my milieu (upper middle class, middle class) Hungarians have more children than in Western Europe, and especially than in other former communist countries. But I haven’t seen data.
So I think you are too quick to dismiss the economic factors.
But I agree that economic factors are not the only explanation, and perhaps not even the most important.
All this futurist enterprise suffers from one big flaw (and many minor others) – it doesn’t know or seriously analyze human condition.
Take two issues, women & human collectives.
Women, although they’re more or less the same, differ between cultures. If we take only modern, highly technological civilization, we see: (normal) women want children & family, and they want some kind of freedom, education & fuller life than in old societies. In Africa, we need not comment; nor in Indios countries in South America. In Islam, they’re pillars of Islamic idiocy. They don’t want any kind of “freedom”- even if they could organize themselves. I guess in Chechnya they’re perfectly satisfied. In India- they protest only when rapes & violence cross all sustainable limits.
So, we better forget about them. There is no universal female (nor male, for that matter) behavior that matters re burning issues.
In developed countries, from Canada via Europe, Russia to Japan, there are similarities & differences.
Women:
but, they want also fun, education & some kind of financial independence. No way to going back to old style life with kitchen & children. It is perfectly normal they will not have many children- atavistic breeding is for primitive coloreds.
demographically, what is lost in numbers can be replaced with higher efficiency of modern life. Colored breeders can be just isolated until they die off or something else. This brings us to a very unpleasant stumbling point most normal, humanistic oriented people will disagree with: universal human rights idea has to go. Peoples (and races/cultures) are not equal; “others” can be tolerated until they become a threat to the advanced civilizations by pure breeding & demographic inundation. You can try to help them, if this is possible at all. If not- isolate them & exclude them completely.
now, many (most?) women in affluent societies will protest because of many reasons (too many to dissect). They basically vacillate between their desire for security, good life …& do-gooding impulses stemming from their nature & further nourished by media and civilizational trends.
As I see it – except married women – most “liberal” single, especially young females will not accept any reasoning or arguments what is the best for their future. They will happily bow to masculine power, and want to do this. This power is, of course, from their sort of men. They, as a group, don’t want savages like Africans & Muslims (see most female Boer community in South Africa). True, some loony pervs (masochistic freaks, druggies, fugly feminists,..) will go full mudshark & kebab. But- they’re in the minority.
So, at this stage of civilization- what is to be done?
Affluent societies need to grow balls if they mean to survive. Otherwise, they’re doomed.
But, considering that:
a) there is no going back to old ways (kitchen & old style religion)
b) moral relativism & promiscuity, especially female, have corroded much of the developed world
c) media, now more powerful than ever, promote unattainable goals & females seem to be more susceptible to brainwashing than men (although men are also rather dumb): https://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/devlin_shalit.htm
Else, later…
Overcrowded rats stop reproducing even in the presence of enough food. Cities usually have lower fertility than rural areas despite younger (immigration,) populations.
In nature food abundance under overcrowded conditions never lasted very long.
I don’t know, I recall some map of Europe with number of average sexual partners for women, and the value for Sweden was absurdly high (unfortunately I can’t find that thing now).
France is more interesting to me though, because it’s so difficult to get a good sense of what’s actually going on there and whether they really have had some success with pro-natalist policies.
I don’t know where you live, but in places like Russia people don’t give a flying shit about their neighbors, much less try to emulate them.
Aside from contraception, fall in fertility rates is because people have “less degeneracy” and have lower time preference today than in the past.
People (in civilized countries) have mostly 1 or 2 children now in conditions where contraception is available, because they view children as a responsibility, of care, attention, time, and resources.
Whereas our ancestors had so many children because they were peasants, with of course lack of contraception, but also often lower responsibility, higher time preference, and perspective of viewing children as labour, rather than ends in themselves.
Today, in countries with higher civilization or morality, there is demographic transition. Whereas the high fertility countries are usually more uncivilized, where the culture has less developed morality – Angola, Mali, Niger, etc. Likewise the high fertility nationalities within Europe, are the nationalities like gypsies, which have high time preference and a culture that encourages people to be more irresponsible in relation to the commons.
Fertility rates by country.
https://i.imgur.com/OIqKkxo.png
While there are low fertility countries which are high in murder rates – there is no high fertility country in map above, which is low in homicide rates in map below.
https://i.imgur.com/crzwUkQ.jpg
^ Obviously, from international welfare perspective, there now immediately should be some priority to introducing free contraception programs to Africa and Middle East.
Shouldn’t the opposite be true? If engineers and other higher IQ people in such a society are not able to make more money than the lesser IQ workers, how are they supposed to raise more kids on average to get the Clark-Unz effect going again?
Excellent comment!
Because I don’t expect them to be successful – most certainly not everywhere. I expect the socialisms of the AoMI era to resemble Venezuela’s, not Maoist China’s (the only major country I can think of where wages by skill level truly were leveled; even the Soviet Union had distinct wage tiers for skilled/unskilled workers, with overall Gini index of 25).
No-one ever will. It’s just too abstract. 280 years ago high-tech was sailing ships, flintlock muskets, horse-drawn carriages and candles. It’s just not possible to think in term of such time scales.
280 years ago the United States, Italy and Germany did not exist as nations. Russia was not yet a great power. No-one knew anything about China. India was ruled by the Moghuls. No-one knew Australia existed. The ancien regime was still alive and well.
No-one knew that disease was caused by micro-organisms. Electricity was still pretty much a mystery. People still believed in the ether. No-one had the faintest notion of the age of the Earth. No-one was even seriously speculating about evolution.
It was an unimaginably different world. The world 280 years from now may be just as unimaginably different. The nations we know today may no longer exist.
Yep.
I just thought about it, cannot porn be the most important factor? It’s getting widely available even in places like Pakistan, which should depress birth rates.
The idea is that technology, which was accelerating back then, may be slowing down. This would lead to a more predictable future. Life expectancies are way higher, even for adults, and women give birth later (though the prediction is that this would change), so forwards 280 years might equal to just 220 years backwards. Still very different, but the US would already exist (and some people did already sense the potential). You are exaggerating about China. People were vaguely aware of it and actually overestimated it (based on the fact that whenever some sporadic piece of information came through, it seemed to show a highly developed country), which had the strange effect that predicting China as a major superpower was easier in the 18th century than in the 19th or early 20th centuries. Germany did exist, just not as a nation state, it even had an emperor both 280 and 220 years ago. Italy – yes, it was just a geographic area, but in the grand scheme of things it didn’t matter.
Of course, you cannot make accurate predictions, but it’s interesting to occasionally think about the longer term possibilities.
The AoMI scenario presupposes a long period of technological stagnation.
Predicting a future in which ems, technological singularity, and/or biosingularity happens is indeed extremely difficult, and analogous to your example.
AoMI is actually a great deal easier. It is not a phase transition from agricultural society to industrial society. It’s the same industrial society but with many more people.
That hbd discourse is good because it generally doesn’t pander to the unwashed masses that want to believe it anyway, unlike two comparably fringe (although much more false) right-wing-coded scientific theories.
In 1739 the Eastern Seaboard of North America was dotted with self-governing colonies whose population was fast approaching one million. It’s not a stretch to suggest someone realized this area would in the future become important.
Germany at that time was a nation nearly a thousand years old, and at least theoretically had a state as well (in practice it hadn’t for centuries of course).
Italy was indeed a geographical expression, but Italian writers had been lamenting their weakness before the French and other outsiders for centuries by then. The Tuscan dialect of Italian had emerged as a standard vernacular between elites, at least in the north.
Australia had been discovered more than a century earlier.
Even in technology heat engines were known, and the word electricity itself was almost a century old at that point.
Forgot to add that the idea no one knew anything about China in 1739 is positively silly.
Eurasia has been integrated since the Axial Age. By Roman times both Rome and China knew of each other’s existence as great empires. The Chinese made failed efforts to send emissaries to Rome (thwarted by the Parthians), and the Romans actually succeeded in sending diplomatic missions.
Knowledge of China did not disappear with the fall of the Western empire either. Justinian famously had silk worms smuggled out of China to break the Chinese monopoly on silk production, and a full-fledged embassy was sent later.
By the high middle ages Europeans were routinely visiting China, culminating in the famous voyage of Marco Polo. That was nearly five centuries before 1739. By the time of the Renaissance European ships were visiting Chinese ports directly, and most of the silver the Spanish mined in America ended up in China.
First results from a quick literature search:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2017105.pdf?origin=ppub
And
http://www.midus.wisc.edu/findings/pdfs/1565.pdf
Heritability of completed fertility was found to be high (h2 estimates of 0.28 for US and 0.47 for UK) but mediated entirely through other genetic traits, especially “starting early.”
Highlights:
Important to note (for the dysgenic hypothesis) that they found cognitive ability to be barely correlated with completed fertility at the genetic level, though they found a strong dysgenic effect on conscientiousness. This accords with several other data points on US / UK fertility (eugenic male fertility offsetting dysgenic female fertility pretty closely).
Sounds really gay no warrior heaven
Jews are not white, but yes those Orthodox jews are breeding like cockroaches and this is a big problem.
Then why were bishops and other crying about over population in the middle ages? Go play your harp when your cock doesn’t work in heaven bitch boi LOL.
Rape in India is lower than the USA and protests are organized by feminist ngos.
Sounded like it was making fun of it.
Technology is not slowing down. We are currently like a man, who has walked to base of the Himalayas, and might vaguely see some of the lower heights.
Currently, our achievement is that we know such mountains exist to be climbed, not that we have climbed a few metres of some of them.
For example, one of the most beneficial and exciting technology applications since late 20th century, is genetically modified crops.
It has now already caused many great benefits for man, that can directly genetically modify (rather than indirectly through selective breeding) some existing crops to be more resistant to disease, and this has reduced worldwide pesticides, herbicides,* famine, etc.
But this is just the most primitive stage, and incredibly far from what the mature technology will be. E.g. As we can conceive when there is more fundamental understanding – we should able create new fruits, vegetables (animals, etc) to match specifications on a computer simulation.
–
*
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443613/
Sperm counts are down by half and most people are overweight and many outright obese but LOOK we use 8% less herbicides look how great our food supply is!
Aren’t those a bit of a false dichotomy? An emulated brain or technological stagnation? A singularity or everything goes to hell?
Regardless of what one thinks of “the singularity,” even with just Moore’s law continuing there will be massive increases in computational power that can automate huge swaths of the economy such that its hard to say we’re going backwards from the information age to the industrial age, much less going to not hit or shift into the automation age. (It won’t take that much brainpower to make this happen; most new neural network developments aren’t exactly rocket science, just slightly clever stacks of neurons hooked into vastly better parallel processors than ever existed before.)
Further to that, genetic selection for IQ (and more importantly to popular uptake, looks and health) might be fairly trivial from here. Larger datasets with better measures of g are all it will take to allow fairly meaningful IQ-based embryo selection.
Turning stem cells into oocytes, or taking out and maturing oocytes from a slice of ovary also can’t be that hard to enable massive embryo selection. (Leaving aside options like figuring out sperm selection that could add another layer of selection to move well more than 1 SD per generation AND allow selection without using IVF.)
The amount of brainpower focused on these problems is such a tiny fraction of worldwide mental capacity that it would take some pretty brutal dysgenics (or societal disintegration) to stop them from occuring.
It’s not sure colonies in 18th century America, or the explorers finding Australia, is so relevant to his argument.
He is accurate to say there has already been some significant discontinuity in our life (more than had happened in thousands of years previously), from 280 years ago, primarily because of technological development that has occurred.
But technological development is extremely recent in human history (beginning in the 17th century with the Scientific revolution), and is just starting to accelerate now. Moreover, the interesting or fundamental changes to our life are only just beginning.
I would disagree with him that prediction – at least of specific future changes – is impossible though. For example, some of the implications of artificial wombs – it is already in Plato’s Republic, although without the technological basis.
Through all human history, famine (too little food) has been either main killer, or one of the main killers, of man.
And in 21st century America, people complain that they are obese and have too much food.
This is one of the most comical revolutions in man’s relation to the world – or perhaps just an illustration of eternal human ability to complain about everything, and fuck their life when given even the greatest improvements.
Base reality:
(1) Problems tend to get harder, not easier – all else equal, tech progress becomes more difficult.
(2) Dysgenic reproduction, esp. in smart fraction countries.
==> Technological stagnation very likely in the absence of developments that reverse at least one of these two trends.
(Historic example: Greece after the classical period – it took until the Renaissance to resume vigorous scientific progress).
(1) Assuming that it does continue.
(2) Self-driving cars and robot baristas will be nice but there’s plenty of jobs that are not going to be automated anytime soon in all but the most technooptismistic futures. E.g., air conditioner installation.
Of course the problems get harder, but data and computational power grow a lot faster than problem complexity (or dysgenic fertility). Four orders of magnitude more computational power is worth more than a small per-generation hit to the smart fraction size.
And air conditioner installation will be just one sub-facet of pre-printed 3D structures, already well past proof of concept.
—
That may all be irrelevant because ultimately we are going to hit some real physical limits and by definition hit “Malthusian Industrialism” (and a massive war for resources) and long before that see Western societies rip themselves apart through diversity plus democracy, but even then it’s very hard to imagine scenarios in which it’s not trivial for China to figure out the human intelligence problem. Dysgenics just moves sooo slowly compared to scientific progress, which despite “slowing down” is still more exponential and faster moving than dysgenics.
Whether there is government or popular will to begin doing large-scale massive embryo selection (especially in the West) is an entirely different question, but hitting that milestone of 1-2 SD jumps per generation being possible is almost a foregone conclusion.
My guess is most of the really interesting questions center around future wars for resources (and how preemptively they begin) and what happens when one group begins to massively outrun the others in IQ. My guess is not too many high-IQ people care much about what happens to Africa (besides Gates et al and their efforts toward population control); one would think a genetically engineered Han super-race isn’t going to feel much affinity for a swarthy Europe or a declining mixed-race America.
Have you considered putting together an expert survey on future progress in genetic intelligence augmentation?
Thinking something like this: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/10/futuristic-physicists/
Though perhaps split by crspr scientists, biologists working on fundamental research around stem cells and oocytes, and experts on embryo selection rather than level of experience. It probably wouldn’t take much to get a reasonable sample of people willing to fill it out and suggest other participants.
Or similar to this survey of experts on AI (who congregate together a bit more than those involved in the various approaches to genetic intelligence augmentation). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf
Moore’s law has been dead for a decade. It’s not a law of nature, just a short-term observation of the market conditions a particular slice of a particular industry.
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
The graph you linked to levels off after about 2008. They carefully massaged the data to make it look like there’s a rising graph, but it’s lies and fake news.
Moreover, they misquotes Moore’s law. It actually goes like this:
That is, Moore’s law is about prices of integrated circuits, not technological progress.
It’s an observation of market forces and economics. Like any economics ‘law’ it is valid, but only up to the next disruption or boom/bust cycle.
You can read about it from people who have infinitely more clue on the subject than you: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=moore%27s%20law%20is%20dead
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-francis-st-peters-square-statue-historic-migration-indifference-refugees-a9125896.html
Please do not encourage the use of enemy search engines.
Right, but think about those papers for a moment. As you allude to, the list of things that could have confounded those junk-science papers is a mile long. The main problems are the shared environment and the short observation period — but as you also note, correctly, the traits they “associate with fertility” are the same traits and genes that are negatively associated with conscientiousness and, very likely, are positively associated with gambling, violence, and many other evils.
Wouldn’t it be easier to say that impulsivity (or time preference) is heritable, and that, all things being equal, in a shared environment, given similar economic conditions, and given contemporary industrial society’s incentives and disincentives, impulsive people will have more children?
From there to the true .3 heritability of fertility is one hell of a stretch. You just can’t separate what those papers call the “heritability of fertility” from the very complex environment we live in, with its dozens of factors which shift over time. The factors themselves are not always obvious, and they can shift in ways that are very subtle.
And speaking of the breeder’s equation, it has been known for a long time that reproductive performance per se in animals — wild, captive, agricultural, and even insects — doesn’t respond significantly to selection. In wild animals, it’s mostly governed by environmental factors.
I disagree with Turok when he says “a poorer society cannot afford 1984-style surveillance”. Electronics, cameras, etc. are getting cheaper and cheaper. Red China already has “1984-style surveillance”. It turns out that the “killer app” of AI is as a force multiplier for goons monitoring video cameras, emails, etc.
There are factors that might make recovery slower. Easy-to-exploit mineral resources have been depleted a lot. Look how deep people have to dig to get gold in South Africa. Lots of gold was near the surface in Cecil Rhodes’s day. Also, water resources have been degraded, and much topsoil has been eroded.
Punctuated equilibrium is a good analogy for technical progress. There is some fundamental breakthrough like the wheel or the steam engine or the light bulb that drags a huge amount of other stuff with it. In this stage firm’s with Central Research Labs do well as there is a whole range of interdependent technologies. Much advance has been due to artisans and engineers solving problems not scientist making discoveries. Steam, aviation, jet engines. Chemistry and biotech being somewhat different. We still have a way to go. What matters is framing the problems. Our greatest prosperity is in front of us.
That was a ramble, too many late nights.
A similar, actually faster learning curve applies to disk drives.
There will be plumbers when the universe ends.
We don’t even do what should be easy without technology. Like encouraging smart people (especially smart women) to have more kids. Simply just saying so on TV would cost nothing. Instead, we spend way more money on LGBT parades and banning some pro-natalist thoughts as hate speech.
It’s not crystal clear that even the required tiny fraction of the brainpower will go where it should.
Besides, the problem of genetically engineering humans might be more complicated than it seems.
I don’t have time (or the connections) to organize a poll like that myself. I did suggest to Aubrey de Grey that perhaps he could carry out an expert survey on radical life extension.
Look, I said in the past that I don’t think the AoMI is the likeliest scenario. I think a biosingularity is the likeliest scenario.
I would put the AoMI’s chances at well above 1% but below 25%.
Moreover, it is essentially an exploration of “business as usual” scenarios – just with HBD.
Useful scientific progress for technology, is only emerging since around the 16th-17th century – so very recent in human history, and I’m not sure there has been any previous precedent of stagnation in its relation to technology.
As for technological development, it is surely accelerating at the moment. Although I’m not sure how we would measure this, and what might happen in different industries is people confusing maturity of particular technologies, with stagnation.
For example, passenger jet planes are just mature – so you could view it as stagnation that we have little progress in them for 50 years.
If Jews aren’t “white,” I’m curious what your criteria are for determining who does and does not qualify.
280 years ago the United States, Italy and Germany did not exist as nations. Russia was not yet a great power. No-one knew anything about China. India was ruled by the Moghuls. No-one knew Australia existed. The ancien regime was still alive and well.
280 years ago was 1739.
Russia had been a great power for some decades by then.
India was not really ruled by the Moghuls in 1739, they’d been falling apart for several decades. In fact, this was the year Nadir Shah of Persia invaded India and sacked Delhi.
China was mysterious to a large extent, but the Qing were very near the height of their power.
The ancien regime was alive, but I think it would be stretching a point to call it well.
Why do you consider it trolling to ask what criteria are used to determine who is and is not white?
Seems to me that would be just about the most important question any person interested in preserving the white race could have.
Thanks for linking to the blog. To address some of your points:
“I am not sure about the former due to antibiotics resistance. At the end of the day, the births/deaths equations do need to be balanced somehow, especially during the crisis at the beginning of the AoMI.”
The antibiotic apocalypse people have been predicting for decades hasn’t gone through the formality of actually happening. I’ve heard it’s because the mutations to survive antibiotics are maladaptive outside the pool of antibiotics.(I know little about biology but it makes intuitive sense.)
“I am not so sure about this. In the AoMI, there will appear a class of ultra-rich oligarchs (a natural consequence of Ricardo’s Law of Rents, which will be very applicable to a world that returns to neo-Malthusian conditions). And like the industrial oligarchs of old, and moneyed noblemen before them, they will still seek to convert their wealth into status. (Indeed, due to technological stagnation, I posit that there will be confluence between the two, with industrial dynasties playing a very large economic role). Funding the arts is a reliable path towards that.”
Sure, what I meant by this is OBSESSION of the kind that leads to Bobby-Fischer-like behavior. Basically, they will still be interested in art, but not so much that they adopt the penniless artist/otaku lifestyle.
“This is a very interesting idea that I have not considered. I am not sure why it would be more likely than other forms of redistributionism (e.g. subsidized bread and games as in Roman times). For a start, rationing is very hard to impose in non-emergencies, politically. The AoMI will be the new “normal”, not an emergency.”
Rationing continued after WWI, lasting until 1954 in Britain, and through the 1950s in Israel. I think it will be imposed in the “emergency” conditions in the begging and will be maintained as the working classes see it as a kind of safety net, fearing that higher classes will claw away too much without it.
Jews are not a single colour. It is group which became multi-racial or multi-colour as a result of historical dispersion.
If you divide roughly into white and brown. I guess Jews are maybe 80% brown and 20% white. (but that is just my personal guess)
–
In Israel, it’s difficult to estimate total racial composition of Jews, because wide variation according to city, class, or religious group.
If you compare racial compositions by Jewish schools.
In the secular school in Galilee it looks – about 80% brown/black and 20% white?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEFJvQwCajs
Nationalist Religious Jews look a similar mix – maybe 30% brown and 70% white?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLLryTW5j34
But a working class part of Israel, Jewish schools can look 100% brown/black race
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBbmHRhRWaM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjhbkE-_qQI
As for Haredim. Even in the Haredi school – it maybe about 30% white and 70% brown? Even such closed and insular cult groups have a quite a lot of racial variation of brown and white (but somehow despite racial mix all Haredim look similar and wear glasses).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_hGps3s1zQ
Oops I mean to write that they 70% brown and 30% white. But that is my subjective impression. (I haven’t travelled across their towns and counted them).
My point was that in any given period as long as 280 years there are going to be social, cultural, political, economic, scientific and technological changes so significant that they are effectively game-changing. And those changes mostly were not, and probably could not have been, predicted.
The invention of printing. The Reformation. The discovery and colonisation of North America. The Industrial Revolution. The French Revolution. The rise of Marxism. The rise of mass media. The invention of radio. The overthrowing of Newtonian physics. The discovery of the vast age of the Earth. The theory of evolution by natural selection. The Russian Revolution. The invention of computers. The introduction of the contraceptive pill. The collapse of Christianity. Every one of these things had cataclysmic consequences, for good or ill.
I don’t think any of these events, or their consequences, could have been predicted. And every one of these events would have made nonsense of any attempts to predict the future of society. Imagine someone in 1400 trying to predict the future of society 280 years ahead without being aware that printing and the Reformation were about to change the rules of the game.
The criteria is any people that originated from Europe over 10 000 years ago. Jews are middle eastern, nobody considers Arabs white, why should jews be? Those jews that race mixed with whites are not white just like children of blacks race mixing with whites are not.
nobody considers Arabs white
The US government does. Under Obama they attempted to separate out yet another group, Middle Eastern / North African (MENA) for identity politics reasons, much as they did with the at least equally diverse “Hispanics.”
But the attempt failed. Of course, if they win the next election it will go through.
Arab Christians were considered “ethnic whites” prior to the Flight From White in America and still are in Brazil.
Arabs are easier to categorize by race, as their historical distribution was limited to Middle East and North Africa.
So although Arabs include racial variety, it is least limited to similar latitudes, so has more uniform colour.
While Jews – although a Middle Eastern origin nationality and still majority brown – became dispersed too widely, and now it’s more like a “religious club” which encompasses different races which you can see all over Israel.
So if you ask if Jews are white or brown – the only way your question makes sense is if you answer something like “80% are brown and 20% are white” (but with variation depending on the location in Israel).
–
If you look at a secular school in Israel (this video of school apparently for youth with psychological issues) – then you can see how difficult your question is to answer, as the modern population which you see today, is a mix of different colours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1mJl8SoW4Q
If you look at Arab Christians in Israel, are still a brown race, but I think include people with a lighter colour of brown which is historic for the region.
Here is the Arab Christians in Haifa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Qom66X1SE
While Muslim Arab population in Israel is perhaps darker brown (more of Muslim Arab Israelis ancestors had immigrated more recently from more Southern latitudes in Arabian peninsula?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NmoZ-BeFeQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcCOHIVhFt0
Just this, “breeder under industrial conditions”, who says that those breeders under current conditions won’t become more sterile under unkown future conditions? Or that these segments of society aren’t so small that it will take 300 years before they even START to dominate the much larger non-breeders? Or that breeders even currently exist? Just to state that groups like the Amish have high fertility isn’t really convincingly proving that they’re breeders, they’ve started to converge with the rest of the population and might easily catch up in a few decades.
This theory relies on the breeder genotype already being extant in the population, and since we’re unsure of the precise cause of the fertility collapse we therefore can’t be sure that there are any groups which have actually resisted the cause, or if they’ve only thus far been insulated from it.
Arabs are mainly within different shades of brown, but it’s only an accident of history, because Arabs conquered in longitude instead of latitude.
If they conquered North or South, they would have become a very multicoloured, as their policy also integrated and intermarried with the local pagan populations.
As it was, I wonder how genetically close Moroccans are to people thousands of kilometers away in Oman.
It’s expected that anyone posting comments on the Unz Review, at least on the right-wing articles, is familiar with the fact that most of the hard right does not consider the Jews to be white.
Whites are simply people of European, Christian descent. Potentially also some of the other Christians of the Mediterranean Basin (Copts, Maronites, etc.).
There should be a law that as a discussion on Unz grows longer, the probability that it will segway into “are X white” approaches 1.
“This may eventually bring the world population into line with the carrying capacity of the modern industrial economy (which I estimate at ~100 billion).”
An amazing statement which totally ignores the rapidly diminishing levels of topsoil, nutrients in that topsoil, and fresh water required to feed the world…Only a small number of countries can currently feed themselves (none in Africa, and probably none of any size in Asia)…Malnutrition followed by starvation will kick in long before world population doubles from the current 7.5 billion.
You are saying colour is cultural, which is a position of postmodernism. But colour is normally viewed as genetically, colour of skin and hair, which is what you notice in real life.
For example, Jihadist Bosnians which went to prison because they planned to bomb the Israeli football team in Kosovo. In photo below you can see 2-3 of them are white (definitely the two on the left of picture), even if religion is Islam and originated in the Arabian pennisula.
https://i.imgur.com/LDvAAvA.jpg
Muslim nationalities like Tatars, can also include a white colours mixed into their nationality (these are simply multi-racial nationalities).
https://www.tatary-urala.ru/images/ad3726a05376223fabdd38448a784c7f.jpg.jpg
Racially these groups will be usually brown, with exceptions. Copts more dark brown and Maronites more semi-brown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SUN74pLZZE
–
Culturally, both Copts and Maronites follow a Middle Eastern religion, close to its geographical origin. However, Maronites obviously receive a lot of cultural diffusion from Europe, via their church, and also many of them can speak French due to position in French colonial governance.
Still I find it strange to say cultural transmission from Europe has relation to colour of the people, and that colour is not is just a simple genetic factor with no cultural determination, but rather the latitude your ancestors lived.
And where does the finite supply of oil fit into all these predictions? The only reason industrial society is possible is because of it and we only have so much. None of the alternatives listed seem viable and any alleged viability they might have is hard to gauge due to the hidden subsidy of having the entirety of the supply chain fueled by oil.
The song in the national religious video is beautiful. Apparently they are singing on the holiday that renews the agricultural year.
“We will live (physically) on what there is and desire and ask for nothing more. But we all want to be good, and we can be even better. More love, more peace, more faith between man and man….”
A nation that has its youth sing such songs will have a will to live.
I wonder what they sing in American schools.
I don’t disagree.
But at the same time, human nature does not change so much, and possible consequences of some technologies we can already extrapolate about.
For example, artificial wombs will require very heavy legal regulation, if they don’t have revolutionary consequence (potentially they could imply factory production of children by government or private businesses, without a need for families anymore).
Jihadist Bosnians which went to prison because they planned to bomb the Israeli football team in Kosovo. In photo below you can see 2-3 of them are white (definitely the two on the left of picture)
More of Varg’s brothers.
It seems to be a popular song for the national religious sector – they have some hippies mixed in them, singing songs about peace and love.
If “white” has any real meaning, it must be genetic, not cultural.
So asking where the line is to be drawn between white and not-white seems a perfectly logical thing to do.
Would also like to note that “most of the hard right does not consider Jews to be white” is actually not an argument at all. It is the logical fallacy of “appeal to popularity.” It begs the question of why we should agree that most of the hard right is correct to hold this opinion.
Moroccans (and Algerians, etc.) are likely not very “Arab” by blood. Mostly Berber, the original inhabitants. The Arab conquerors were never very numerous. Heck, the Arab peninsula was never very populous, for obvious reasons.
North African nations are “Arab” culturally and linguistically, not ethnically.
But low TFR is unlikely to persist indefinitely into the future.
Quite right, since at some point a population breeding at less than replacement rate will disappear. Sort of by definition.
Hippiness and songs about love and peace are a big part of Israeli life.
It started as an idealistic back to the land communistic movement, after all.
Yeah, we’d hit peak phosphorus long before we hit 100B people. Phosphorus is the weak link in Earth’s carrying capacity.
And once phosphorus reserves on Earth are depleted, agricultural projects in space, or on phosphorus-rich Mars, would be easier than on Earth. See:
Wamelink GW, Frissel JY, Krijnen WH, Verwoert MR, Goedhart PW. Can plants grow on Mars and the moon: a growth experiment on Mars and moon soil simulants. PLoS ONE. 2014;9(8):e103138.
And also: https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/phosphorus.html
But I maintain that this whole issue is moot, as these so-called “breeders” simply do not exist in the general population. They’re an artefact of slipshod analysis and hopelessly confounded study design.
Strange, for such a hippy song, which is existing only in the national religious sector.
It’s because of the words “yoter elohim” I guess it becomes acceptable for them. Also they don’t want the same song as the secular hippies – like shir le’shalom, which is associated with Rabin Day.
This is another funny thing about national religious sector in Israel – women only concert stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZNpjpn0tTw
I agree with that comment.
But your question is not possible to answer, simply, for multiracial category like Jews.
If you fill a pot with a mix of black and white marbles. Is it a jar of white marbles or a jar of black marbles?
The majority of Jews are brown, but there is a minority which is white – to oversimplify.
Particular ratio of brown/white/black people in Israel varies, even from one part of the city, to another.
Here is the colour mix of a Orthodox Jewish school in Southern Israel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srdKt0wNQoI
Right, so the religious types will add the word ellohim and that makes it good – but all these hippy ideas about peace and love are really found in the Prophets, so its all kosher.
I suggest that when Americans refer to “Jews,” they’re not referring to the population of Israel, many of whom are from the Middle East or Africa.
They’re referring to the type of people they meet who are Jews. American Jews, almost all of whom are Ashkenazim.
These are the people the Hard Right is claiming are “not white,” and what I’m asking is what is the rationale for that. Surely it’s not necessary for me to hunt up a dozen pictures of famous American Jews and ask what is non-white about their appearance.
BTW, I think it’s hilarious that it’s more and more common for American Jews to agree with the Hard Right that they aren’t really “white.”
It depends on what you mean by human nature. If you mean those aspects of human behaviour that are largely driven by genetic predispositions then you’re correct. But human behaviour is also driven by cultural factors.
And human behaviour can change very radically very quickly. Just take a look at western society in the post-WW2 period. Gay Pride Marches, slut culture and a total immersion in pornography were not normal parts of human behaviour prior to WW2.
How much of human behaviour is genetically determined and how much is cultural? We have no idea. But the history of the West since 1945 suggests that cultural factors are incredibly powerful.
Up till now our track record on predicting consequences has been incredibly poor. How many people predicted that railways would play a major rôle in destroying long-established communities? How many people predicted that the motor car would finish the job of destroying those communities? How many people predicted any of the consequences of the rise of mass media? How many people predicted that the internet would lead to a large chunk of several generations devoting their lives to downloading porn? How many people predicted that the rise of capitalism would deal a death blow to Christianity? How many people predicted that European colonialism would lead to the destruction of European society through mass immigration?
Do you know where dogs came from?
People have been saying exactly that, almost word-for-word, since the world population was under 1 billion.
Not a very good track record for prediction.
P.S. Most people vastly underestimate how huge the Earth’s surface is compared to the tiny part of it inhabited by humans.
I think they still look a bit of mix of colours, although the ratio of dark Jews might be different in America.
It’s still asking about a jar of marbles with different colours.
–
For example, when I look at video of the Jewish school of Australia.
One proportion of the Australian Jewish children look darker, like Middle Eastern children, but then another proportion of them are almost as light as an anglosaxon,
So it is not a binary answer. But a question of different coloured people in the same population.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNudmRg5fUg
–
If a population is 50% white and 50% brown – what colour is it?
This difficulty of classification is not unique for Jews either (although they might be the most extreme example). There are quite a lot of nationalities which have this mixed colour issue.
For example, Armenians are almost all at least somewhat brown (although including both light brown and dark brown people), so they are easy to categorize.
But what about Georgians? The majority of Georgians are brown, but there is also a minority of Georgians which are white people from any definition.
They’re no browner than Italians in this reality.
The cheap and easy ways of producing rock phosphate fertilizer are on their way to exhaustion. It’s possible to recycle the stuff — and it’s possible to refine low-purity material, which is abundant worldwide — but it’s a technological challenge. The costs involved, and the energy inputs required, are going to be significant. I don’t see it happening in a world dominated by people of African descent. They may not even be capable of sustaining Haber-Bosch fertilizer plants.
If the global population so much as doubles, agriculture in impoverished areas is going to be constrained by phosphorus availability. As Asimov said: “Life can multiply until all the phosphorus is gone, and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent […] We may be able to substitute nuclear power for coal, and plastics for wood, and yeast for meat, and friendliness for isolation — but for phosphorus there is neither substitute nor replacement.”
Ultimately, if our technological capacity is degraded — which is an almost inevitable consequence of the AOMI prophecy, when you think about the demographics involved — the carrying capacity of Earth isn’t going to be anywhere near 100B. It’s going to be far less than that. And it’ll end up in plain-vanilla Malthusianism — with industrialism decreasing in importance over time.
Your whole theory is ridiculous. The reason for low fertility is the lack of patriarchy. Any people where teenage brides are arranged married and men actually own their wives and kids has high fertility.
There is an ocean full of minerals and energy to be extracted.
@Anatoly Karlin
” Another would be social adaptations, such as mass female infanticide, e.g. as in late Qing era China.”
Late marriage is also another possible adaptation. Or else Male infanticide in the manner of Spartans or a replication of the Tundra which resulted in an excess of women compared to men limiting fertility:
https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-puzzle-of-european-hair-eye-and.html
This plus the enforced monogamy from the Tundra Environment except among the most skilled hunters will also limit fertility.
Frost, P. (2008). Sexual selection and human geographic variation, Special Issue: Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 2(4), pp. 169-191.
http://www.jsecjournal.com/articles/volume2/issue4/NEEPSfrost.pdf
Frost, P. (2006). European hair and eye color – A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection? Evolution and Human Behavior, 27, 85-103.
Georgians include brown people and white people in the same nationality. Ethnogenesis of Georgians (people Georgian by nationality) is a fusion of different tribes.
If you look at a school there (I can’t say how representative it is – but of the few Georgian people I have met, they all looked different to the other ones)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vtx0Mafx2c
Asimov might not be the best authority on AoIM.
Been a while since I read Caves of Steel, but, IIRC, he had squirrels in a zoo at about 8 or 9 billion.
Asimov was a major contributor to nerd culture’s thankfully dimming belief in imminent overpopulation. It’s one of those things that you have to have a baseline IQ to believe in, requiring some understanding of non-intuitive ideas like exponential growth. The ideas make sense in theory and allow you to look down on the rubes who don’t get them, so you end up ignoring the fact that the world doesn’t much look like your theory predicts it should.
Saudi Arabia is currently at 2.53 and heading toward 2.0, if they aren’t patriarchal I don’t know who is. Kuwait is already below 2.
The whole planet isn’t going to be African. Even if Africans maintain higher fertility rates than the rest of the world indefinitely, it’s not a problem for nations with functioning border control.
There were predictions of loosening of sexual mores, as well as globalization destroying ethnic and racial identities. Stoddard predicted that European colonialism in Asia and the Middle East was doomed. Not many people predicted these things, but not many people tried either.
“Only a small number of countries can currently feed themselves (none in Africa, and probably none of any size in Asia)”
That isn’t true, many countries in Africa are net exporters, as is India:
https://www.indexmundi.com/blog/index.php/2013/02/19/food-exports-and-imports-worldwide/
And of those that aren’t it doesn’t mean they hit their Malthusian limit, it just means the law of comparative advantage says food can be more cheaply grown elsewhere and imported.
While I am not overly sanguine about Africa’s economic prospects, I’m inclined to think that food production there hasn’t yet peaked, and will substantially increase under the right structure of incentives.
Either the natives will manage it, by adopting best practices, or it will be foreign leases, or even invasions.
The question of how much military conflict is possible I think really influences what the longterm upper limits on global food production might be. Really massive infrastructure investment, such as attempting to put the Sahara into productive use, may require invasion by global powers.
What is your source for that?
Iirc, the data I came across when I looked into the eastern bloc (not just USSR) had at least some countries around 18.
Exactly. Any idiot back then could have foreseen the world of 2019.
Actually, I have been at this site since its inception, and this is one of the very few times I have seen this question raised.
I’d agree that raising that question is “trolling” behavior, even if it was asked innocently. The result is invariably interminable, acrimonious disputation.
Only a government with the power to enforce its opinion can really ever “settle” the question in any way that matters. The implication of this is that those on the margins of whiteness must therefore carefully consider their participation in anything “pro-white,” because they may end up with a government that doesn’t intend to include them.
The corollary of that is that those countries without functioning border control – ie us – have a lot to worry about.
Ben Franklin in 1755 was able to extrapolate from the exponential growth in population of British North America that it would eventually have a higher population than Great Britain.
I saw no brown people in that video.
Despite an obviously “off” appearance (the Georgians are not Indo-European, like the way pureblood Finns aren’t) they are still clearly “white”.
That said, Armenians speak an Indo-European language and are very often “brown”.
Majority of Georgians have a colouration of 40° latitude or below. For normal definitions, this is brown (for example, Turks are viewed as a brown, not a white race). That’s not saying they are Indians and Saudis.
A few parts of Europe – Sicily, half of Spain, Greece- are at lower latitudes. Most Ancient Romans and Ancient Athenians probably had this colouration, so it is not any indication of civilization.
They vary from as white as Northern Europe, to as brown as Iraqi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJHX0DKARGo
Sexual mores were already loosening in the 1920s.
Did he predict that the end result of European colonialism would be mass immigration from the former colonies into Europe?
You can judge for yourself, but from the Wikipedia page it seems that he was a crazy white supremacist who believed in a number of nonsensical theories like the one that mass immigration was harmful to western countries (he clearly hasn’t heard of the Economy) or that differential fertilities mattered a great deal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_Tide_of_Color_Against_White_World-Supremacy?wprov=sfti1
@songbird
The question isn’t if there is the political will for a world of 100 billion people but if there is enough political will/competence to stop it (if it is the natural equilibrium).
I think Karlin has said population is power. If this is true why would regimes feel threatened by an increase in population? If it is not true, why not?
What’s your best guess?
I think lack of patriarchy contributes.
Also think the proliferation Information Technology and exocomunity institutions has advantaged memes/ cultures that are spread viraly as apposed to from parent to child.
Maybe also as wealth increase life-path optionality family formation becomes relatively less appealing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGXpsJYNILg
Time: 00:07:17
“We’re late, really. There’s been plenty of time.”
At any time, there are very many fingers pointing in all directions, a few of them got to be true. Like a dead clock.
On a different note, UNZ now has a pic of equations on the first page! Must count as sth! 🙂
Nailed it (although median consumption per capita is a better measure than GDP, because GDP includes government spending which is basically transfers to people already well above the median).
Malthus was a dilettante fuckwit – precisely the type who has always trotted out “The End is Nigh” horse-shit.
Malthus was the Paul Erlich of his day, and vice versa: nowadays the same type of scare-the-proles shit is the stock in trade of the Climate Cult (most of whom have no idea that the end-game is to apply indirect taxes to consumer-level energy use, demand for which is highly inelastic: the political class think this will enable their their grift’s budget constraint slightly).
If he had done a literature review before writing his drivel, he would never have picked up a pen: the British Agricultural Revolution began almost a century before Malthus started writing, and agricultural output had been growing faster than human population for more than 3 generations by the time he wrote “An Essay on the Principle of Population“.
A better title for Malthus’s steaming pile of horse-shit would be “Drivel I Pulled Out Of My Arse That Was Known To Be Wrong At The Time“.
That people still use the term “Malthusian” non-ironically is atrocious: it ought to have connotations of being a complete fucking retard.
why do otherwise brilliant minds like Anatoly go berserk? let tomorrow take care of itself…
“In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate [i.e., reject] specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.2
Strange Views
These were strange, almost diabolical, views for a member of the Christian clergy to hold. Did Malthus really mourn over baptisms, while celebrating funeral rites with a particular zest?
https://www.pop.org/the-malthusian-delusion-and-the-origins-of-population-control-2/
Real populations of individual species vary widely and in practice erratically from year to year through interactions that are too complex to measure with current equipment.
It is unclear that humans should be exempt from this general rule over the long term.
Even fairly simple industrial situations must be understood through systematic Monte Carlo simulation, and then only to get a feel for the problem. I do not believe that continuous mathematics apply to the case being discussed, and am not at all sure that applicable mathematics will be developed within the next 20 years.
Counterinsurgency
“Clutch size problem” in ecology. Too few eggs and the bird is out competed. Too many and the nestlings die (maybe all of them) from parental care spread out over too many nestlings.
Analogies to “oversized clutch” can make lasting changes to population behavior. The Irish TFR never did recover from the Potato Famine, and still remains low today. Apparently no one theory on why is generally accepted, but the effect is apparent.
Counterinsurgency
Agreed. The pendulum may as well swing the other way.
Globalism becomes Anti-Globalism. Local, green, environmentalist, closed frontiers, ethnically defined, genuinely democratic, Christian (?) high ethics based closed societies with advanced local manufacturing.
Or maybe not. It’s just speculation.
This may eventually bring the world population into line with the carrying capacity of the modern industrial economy (which I estimate at ~100 billion).
This laughable estimate could only have been carried out by a non-scientist / non-engineer.
The reality is that our present 7bn population is entirely dependent on oil for its current fecundity. Take away cheap oil and the population will eventually stabilize at around 1bn.
Our Energy and Debt Predicament in 2019
Our current low/negative interest rates are a desperate attempt to steal from the future. That can only continue for so long. The oil price needed to find and produce more oil is higher than the price that society can afford.
Excuse me barging in without getting far into your article but I wonder whether you have an answer to a practical question about high IQs that I have brought up and tossed around for many years. I ask here in the context of your mention of transhumanism or practical eugenics.
What can the very very high IQ person do without improving the interface? Can an IQ of 300 ensure that one can read, comprehend and remember a cutting edge physics text at 1500 words per minute or the NYT at 4000 words per minute? And what about the delivery of the product of 300 IQ cerebration?
Ah right, I forgot, the Age of Cheap Oil began c.1800 when the world population passed the 1 billion mark.
Do you doomers ever tire of being wrong?
Have you ever worked at the construction of a nuclear reactor? Well, I have. And that was 45 years ago in the UK.
It takes literally decades to bring one reactor into operation in Europe.
Here is the news for the USA. These 2 new reactors will not replace the ones being shut down.
Following a 30-year period in which few new reactors were built, it is expected that two more new units will come online soon after 2020, these resulting from 16 licence applications made since mid-2007 to build 24 new nuclear reactors
Nuclear Power in the USA
The only people who know how to build economically a nuclear reactor these days are the Russians and Chinese. In the West, those had the knowledge are dying off.
You guys think you are smart because you can do a little HTML or read articles by people who have never built anything in their lives. Grow up mate!
The reality is that we are living off investments (i.e. sacrifices) that were made by our parents and grandparents. We are not replacing these huge investments, we are running them down.
It’s the same thing about people, organizations, and issues/subjects. The more in charge/weighty they are, the less they are mentioned.
Commercial interests have found that if they can create trends, and situations where the mass human can feel they are above the mass by, in fact, doing the commercial interests’ bidding, that’s maybe the only, certainly the best way to obtain compliance.
Just hack their largely unconscious social status seeking software, there’s very little they won’t do, or won’t (believe that they) believe.
African fertility is a huge problem. The entire world will turn into a giant zoo if nothing is done about this problem.
Limits to Growth adequately recognized in the 1960’s an 70’s.
Garrett Hardin/ see ‘ Naked Emperors’,Kenneth E. Boulding/ see ‘ The Economics Of The Coming Spaceship Earth’ et al.
It’s been a Race For What’s Left, a feast of predicted process and consequences.
Please don’t use “malthdustrials” in your book, man.
Orban to the rescue, he will stop Malthusian whatever.
Supposedly the Orban government in Hungary is going to offer women who have or plan to have 4 children a lifetime of no income taxes. This is interesting as it targets smarter women who I will assume have higher incomes due to their higher IQs and other superior personal behaviors.
Women with Four Children to Be Income-tax Exempt from 2020
https://hungarytoday.hu/women-four-children-long-families-hungary-income-tax-exempt-free/
And you thought Chinese was the language of the future. Go Magyar Go!!!!
At the upper limits, it would require a sort of competency too, and active planning.
More people seem to be saying this now, and future history could conceivably change thinking further.
But I am thinking of what seems to be the dominant Leftist instinct, as evidenced by one or two-child policies in China and Vietnam. Or forced sterilizations in India in the 1970s. Or the dramatic writings of the white Left.
Another political dimension is the global total. How far can Africans manage by themselves? And if not far, will they be aided or invaded? That seems to be a big part of the question. If aggressive, the nuclear powers might check each other, or agree to divide up the place.
Does he have a plan to stop immigrants and non-Hungarians from using this?
How much would you like to bet that the ethnic Hungarian TFR doesn’t rise past 1.6 over the next ten years?
Economic measures simply don’t work — even when they consist of sizable cash handouts and free childcare services, instead of mere tax credits.
…If you buy the economic argument, then it should seem that, on the whole, these measures are not viewed as adequate compensation for the costs and pains of raising children. The effort still outweighs the reward.
(And nevermind the fact that having four children is something completely alien to the contemporary European way of life. Powerful enough incentives have not yet been conceived, and are surely not at all viable!)
Long ago, I read a study that thought that it had proved that the optimum IQ for a travelling salesman was 110. More than that and his ability to relate to ordinary people breaks down. The salesman also becomes aware of the deficiencies of his own case.
They were all men in those days.
On a somewhat related note, anyone have any thoughts on the woman who addressed AOC?
I was almost fooled. She actually sounded a lot like someone who addressed Obama at a invite-only meeting once, but I thought it overly dramatic when she took off her sweater, while speaking, like she was getting hot from being so angry.
Funny how AOC didn’t really react negatively. LaRouchePAC is claiming credit. Weird how the media always identifies them as conservatives, when they are obviously very internationalist, and alt-left. I think you would need some of these crazy LaRouche people to win and build their super-giant infrastructure projects in Africa to get to 100 Billion pop.
I designed the insulation for the gas circulator motors for the Hartlepool AGR. My design was used on Heysham as well.
AGRs were particularly safe as even without power the gas circulation would still keep the reactor temperature in safe limits.
I was factory based for the AGR’s (GEC Large Machines where I did my apprenticeship. ). My installation site experience was with Aberthaw B, one of the largest coal fired stations.
The AGRs had a larger content of civil works than the PWRs. The UK construction industry took advantage which made them hideously expensive. This was a huge pity. In principle, the AGRs were the safest reactors which were cheap enough give or take the construction process. Maggie cancelled them which was a terrible decision. She made similar decisions that destroyed the supply chains in rail, telecoms, electricity, gas, water and other businesses crashing a huge part of our industry for the lack of three to five years continuity of orders.
We need nukes driving turbines if only to provide frequency stabilisation for the grid. Renewables failed to that quite recently and took out large chunks of the grid with them.
We now need to invest in Molten Salt Reactors on a huge scale. I’ve been looking at the fuel cycle for a client. They burn waste. The Russian designs are antique. We start even with them.
Okay, you’re doubtful it’ll work. But are you opposed to the very attempt itself?
I don’t think I came across that plausible idea but remember something about a 25 point difference between leaders and led in the army (or maybe armed forces) was the max if proper connection was to be maintained. Confirming something like that I have observed people with IQs about 135 noticing how smart someone with an IQ of 145+ is whereas the earnest and quite successful person with a Masters degree and IQ of about 120 can’t see the nuances.
No doubt training could ameliorate such situations – probably best invested in the jogher IQ people just as a probablistic generalisation.
A somewhat related thought…. A still historically prosperous white world can probably get away with all those 1Q 100 to 115 tertiary teachers of soft subjects addling the brains of the 90 to 105s being diverted into near adult child care because there are still millions of smart Asians studying STEM subjects and we will be glad that patents expire after 20 years.
Did the nerdy fact oriented Darwin see through Malthus as you have over 200 years on? And what do you make of the great J.M.Keynes having been Vice President of the Malthusian Society till news from the Continent (presumably)caused his resignation in 1943?
Thank you for pointing out what was available to Malthus but missed by him. However, is it not overdue that we try and get Popes and Imams to help bring uneducated African and subcontinental breeding patterns into line with those in European welfare states – prompted by a basic “Malthusian” insight?
Not saying I am at 110, but this is why I always sucked at sales. Blacks and Latinos are often rock stars at it, or just make so many blunt-affect calls they get lucky.
There’s a good study in inter-ethnic competition as it relates to conscience.
“the ethnic Hungarian TFR doesn’t rise past 1.6 over the next ten years?”
What is interesting about the proposal is it seems to target high IQ Hungarian women, not all Hungarian women. I am using income as an imperfect proxy for IQ.
An interesting topic might be how to improve the fertility of the far right hand side of the IQ distribution and even the extreme right hand side.
If you want to make the fertility rate high, make government welfare contingent on it and increase the amount of $ and housing for each kid. That worked until the Clinton Administration stopped it.
It’s not. Immigration is a problem, not Africans.
The continent of Africa is around half the size of Eurasia, without any cold areas. Meanwhile African population is only about a quarter of Eurasia.
Meaning, even with third-world conditions the Africans easily have the space to double in size.
Just don’t let them into your own countries.
Of course they do, don’t be an idiot.
Unlike yourself, this isn’t a theoretical question for me. “Cash handouts” and “free childcare” is the least of your problems when you have lots of kids.
The big problem is real estate, or rather the crux of needing enough space for kids and sex and earning enough to support them at the same time. (The human animal doesn’t breed in captivity.)
The problem could be easily solved by government measures, but doing so will inevitably crash the real estate markets.
For your current leadership real estate bucks are more important than the future progeny of your nation, sorry.
That’s totally unproven. Hungary had the lowest TFR in the Soviet block since the late 1950s. This is no longer the case. (Though the numbers are hardly comparable anyway. Many emigrants are not counted as such, while their children born abroad are not counted, which artificially depresses birthrates and TFR. While Poles left Poland in the noughties, Hungarian mass emigration only started around 2011, so when comparing Orbán’s regime with the previous one, you have to take into account that there’s this headwind of lots of young people 20-40 suddenly leaving the country, and they count into the denominator but not into the numerator.) As you must be aware, the trend is towards lower TFR everywhere. Merely halting the decline is an achievement. Halting and reverting it while facing the big headwind of emigration is more remarkable still. And as you no doubt also know, raising children is very expensive. So the most rational people with the lowest time preference will have the smallest number of children. Which is why Orbán’s measures aimed at the upper middle class will produce the least measurable improvements.
When you say that economic incentives “don’t work” (a common leftist talking point), you basically say that people with low time preference don’t, in fact, have a low time preference. This sounds suspicious.
I’m usually suspicious of these claims. There’s way fewer 140 IQ people than 110 IQ people, so for any job where the intellectual floor is 105, you will obviously find way more competent 110 IQ people than 140 IQ people. But it doesn’t mean that 110 IQ people are, on average, better at the job. (Also, what kind of 140 IQ person would choose a career in a field where the intellectual floor is 105? Sometimes if it has a very high prestige, like military officer in Germany prior to 1945 – and then we can see that, given the right incentive structure, the 130+ IQ people will thrive.)
Without Malthus there’d be no Darwin.
They possibly work a little bit, but not much.
It’s a cultural problem, not an economic problem.
Globalists and Woke Capital have achieved their objectives by changing the culture. The damage can only be undone by cultural change. The Right doesn’t care about culture so it is never going to solve this problem.
The issue is that lower IQ fertility improved since 2010, not higher IQ. People with higher education didn’t improve. Though their slide downwards stopped.
There’s the issue, on the other hand, that emigration increased since 2010, and it probably involved people with a higher education to a greater extent than people without a high school diploma. So the issue with them being counted in the denominator while their foreign born children not being counted in the numerator is obviously there.
https://g7.hu/elet/20181118/az-altalanost-vegzettek-es-a-tizenevesek-koreben-beindult-a-baby-boom-magyarorszagon/
Well, I don’t want cool animals like lions and zebras and giraffes and elephants and hippos etc. be exterminated just to have more Africans.
All we have to do is to convince Africans that they should destroy their societies the way we’ve destroyed ours. I’m sure they’ll be very grateful.
Why exactly would you want to do that? You’ll just end up with more surplus intellectuals busily at work destroying society.
It’s clearly both. Economic and cultural problem. In a society where having many children is not costly and might even be economically beneficial it’s difficult to spread the culture of having few or no children, whereas in a society where having children is costly convincing people to have many children is an uphill struggle.
hehe, I bet putler think you are better than that swedish girl.
Studies have found that men and women in the United States, if asked what the ideal number of kids is, respond with almost the exact same answer. I think it’s primarily economics, you don’t need lots of kids to support you when you’re old. Plus child-rearing hasn’t gotten all that funner or easier, whereas other forms of leisure are much better.
This isn’t fair, Malthus was not oblivious to agricultural improvements. He just doubted they could keep up with population growth. His theory was solid when applied to most of human history.
It takes only a small amount of current oil consumption to fuel modern agriculture. If production goes to half its present value there will still be more than enough. And if it eventually runs out completely you can get oil from coal. And after that, you could convert those combines to run on electric power from nuclear and hydroelectric. All this would be harder and would take energy away from other things, making us poorer, but not sending the population back to 1800.
It has been found that the more intelligent read more quickly. I’ve thought about this in the context of speedtalks, where very intelligent people may be able to process the spoken word faster:
https://posthumanitybook.wordpress.com/2018/07/21/chapter-18-extreme-projects/
It has been found that the more intelligent read more quickly. I’ve thought about this in the context of speedtalks, where very intelligent people may be able to process the spoken word faster:
“If you think of the human brain as the “hardware,” our languages are “software.” Might some software be “better?” It appears not. There is no remnant of the simpler proto-language our ancestors must have spoken. While the extant languages differ in many ways, none of these variations have been shown to be “better” in that they lead to more intelligent thought.
Among these variations in human language is information density. If you take a text in a high-density language and translate it into a low-density language, the text in the low-density language will have more syllables. You may think that the test in the low-density language will take longer to read. Yet, in an experiment where native speakers of different languages read the same text out loud, translated into their own language, they all took similar amounts of time.[xiv] If you were to argue that the more information-dense languages were “superior,” then it would appear that there is some limitation in our neural hardware that prevents us from enjoying the gain. People think at a constant rate, and will speed up or slow down their speech to be consistent with this rate. This matches intuition, when one language is dubbed into another in movies, it doesn’t need to be slowed down or sped up depending on the information density of the languages. But will this always be true?
Intelligence correlates with reaction time. Give a person a seemingly ‘non-intellectual’ task, such as to push one button or another when a color is displayed on a screen, and the more intelligent people are, the better they will perform. This implies that their brains do in some sense “run faster” than those of the less intelligent, it’s not merely that the intelligent are better at certain intellectual puzzles. A study which scanned the brains of 92 subjects was able to detect the speed at which signals move in the brain, and found a positive correlation with intelligence.[xv] This suggests a speculative possibility, people with posthuman intelligence could think at a faster rate, and communicate a faster rate if a language of very high information density was provided. In Robert Heinlein’s 1949 novella Gulf, this was called a speedtalk.
Do the more intelligent talk faster? Sometimes, dumb people are stereotyped as talking “slow,” but there is a competing stereotype that they talk very fast but don’t say anything interesting. The answer to this question is not obvious, which would imply that a speedtalk would not work. You could argue that more intelligent people are constrained by a need to conform to the speaking rate of everyone else. However, cognitive sorting leads to common conversational groups of differing intelligence, and one would expect weak differences in speaking rate to emerge. If they do so, the difference is very slight and non-obvious. However, children, who are less intelligent than adults, do speak at a slower rate, and it has been hypothesized that this is caused by both cognitive and motor factors.[xvi] The difference in intelligence among conversational groups seen today, around 15 points or so, may be dwarfed by the differences in intelligence seen between 100 IQ moderns and 250 IQ posthumans. I will not make a prediction as to whether or not a speedtalk will work, only that someone will try to create it for this reason. There is a modern conlang, Ithkuil, which functions as a speedtalk, though this was not its main purpose.”
https://posthumanitybook.wordpress.com/2018/07/21/chapter-18-extreme-projects/
Where they’ve been tried, most notably in S. Korea and Japan, economic measures have had zero measurable success. In South Korea, things keep getting worse every year despite heroic efforts — and, in Japan, TFR has oscillated around 1.4 for the past 30 years.
The Japanese mode is the European mode. Since the mid 90s, TFR in all of the following countries has dropped to around 1.45 (±0.15) and has stayed there: Hungary, Czechia, Croatia, Malta, Serbia, Slovenia, Poland, Estonia, Cyprus, Romania. Scotland is also much the same way, to whatever extent it qualifies as a nation.
Many other countries have been in the same place for far longer: Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands. Some of these nations have been stuck around 1.45 since the mid 70s.
This is an obvious pattern. A decline, however slowly or rapidly, until a setpoint is reached. This setpoint is 1.45 in most of Europe and in Japan.
“Halting the decline” is a meaningless notion. This is more like homeostasis:Once a country is at that setpoint, there is often no measurable further decline, just simple oscillation around that point. (Though in some cases the national-ethnic TFR may keep dropping, but the TFR on paper remains steady, as it is buttressed by immigration from high-fertility ethnic groups. This would certainly seem to be the case in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany. This is, assuredly, the case in the UK and France.)
You seem to be saying that economic measures must work — perhaps because this is intuitively the case, or because you support them in principle. But try to observe, rather than judge, and you’ll see that there has never been an economic measure that has moved the needle. What has Seoul bought with its $130B?
It could be that we need to remove all costs, and all pains, associated with parenthood: With cheap subsidized real estate, free childcare, generous cash benefits, permanent tax breaks, medals like the Mutterehrenkreuz — all at once! But not only is this not at all viable or implementable, it still may not work. There are no guarantees — the cultural undertow we’re caught in is very strong — and having four children is something completely alien to the contemporary European psyche.
As Spandrell said a few years ago, we need a new religion. Doesn’t it seem that all “breeder” populations are religious populations — I mean with the Jews, the Amish, the Quiverfull, devout Muslims, and our devout Christian forebears? Certainly it seems that the cultural problem is worse than the economic problem.
Children are not less intelligent than adults. This should be obvious to anybody with two brain cells to rub together.
I cannot say anything about Japan or South Korea, countries I know very little about, but in Hungary the measures in the late 1960s and the 1970s seem to have worked, and then the worsening economic situation in the 1980s put us back on the secular trend. But fertility only fell off a cliff after a serious cut in the child support measures (which, by the way, saved very little), and it seems that it’s always easier to cut fertility by making families’ economic situation very difficult, then to raise fertility. Anyway, Orbán managed to increase fertility somewhat. (The graph ends in 2010, the year Orbán came to power.)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Hungary_TFR.png
It seems untrue in Hungary. And in 1995 the fertility drop was very sharp in response to an austerity package. I also know people who decided to have a third child after the introduction of the tax breaks. I also know upper middle class Hungarian families with three and four children.
And why would that be a “setpoint?” In East Germany in the 1990s it was below 1.0, and apparently in South Korea it’s not higher either. In Hong Kong and Taiwan it might be 1.1-1.2. Also among core populations, like ethnically Germans in Germany, it might already be below 1.2. I’m pretty sure that the number could easily fall below 1.0 later.
Overall I think there’s no reason to accept your assertion that economic factors play no role at all. Because they probably do. But I agree with you that economic measures alone cannot turn around the situation. But it’s not an argument to do nothing until the new religion (or the old one) is found.
How does it feel to be WRONG?
Kids are retarded.
I played an eight year old boy in chess a few weeks ago. Despite the fact that he’s been playing regularly for three years now and I hardly ever do, I rapidly trounced him. It was embarrassing.
Next we played checkers and the result was even more humiliating for him.
Also, why is it that communist countries had somewhat higher fertility rates than Western Europe? And why did it drop everywhere after the fall of communism? I would argue that economic factors played a huge role. People certainly weren’t more religious under communism. The lifelong employment (coupled with the right of employees to change jobs if they could find a better one) and lots of family friendly measures (free daycare, kindergarten, etc.) meant enormous financial stability for families. People could choose to have children with the knowledge that economic conditions would stay the same until the child would reach adulthood. Capitalism is inherently incapable of providing that kind of stability, though perhaps some kind of mixed economy with a welfare state could come close.
Chad. Also based and redpilled.
The fact that it sounds so extremely ridiculous to brag about beating a child in chess (or anything) shows that their mental abilities are naturally considered much lower than that of adults.
Studies have found that men and women in the United States, if asked what the ideal number of kids is, respond with almost the exact same answer.
The fact the answer doesn’t match up with the birthrates shows they should have been looking at revealed preference. More importantly, question was under our current system. To a lot of men a child is just a support payment these days. If men had more rights over their wives – and children – they would chose to have more children (all else equal).
I think it’s primarily economics, you don’t need lots of kids to support you when you’re old.
I agree this plays a role. Still, most Amish have enough money to retire comfortably – still have loads of kids. Many other examples.
Students qualify for SET (Study of Exceptional Talent) by obtaining an SAT score of only 700 on Math or Verbal by age 13. That’s not ultra-high if you are 16 or 17 (though still good), but apparently it is very high if you are only 13.
Darwin was a bright man, but he wasn’t an economist (or a student of the relevant specialisation in “moral philosophy”, at the time). Even in a time when very smart people ranged across disciplines, it’s not reasonable to expect a biologist to keep abreast of things in a field that far removed.
Smith and Ricardo bookend Malthus, and Ricardo wiped the floor with Malthus (in unrelated arguments). But Smith’s two masterworks show that truly, genuinely smart people within the domain, knew what time it was, well before Malthus wrote his millennarian fantasy.
People like Brad deLong have tried to claim that Smith had Malthusian tendencies, and since people don’t read whole books or check citations, he has gotten away with it to an extent.
deLong excerpts a paragraph, fills it with ellipses, and because it contains ‘the declining state‘, then asserts that Smith’s view was that the long run is characterised by decline… which he then claims (equally falsely) must mean that Smith envisaged developmental limits as being a stylised fact.
However Smith very very specifically wrote that population growth was good for productivity, because it permitted greater specialisation and division of labour, and that:
What Smith’s on about here, is that labour must be permitted a share of the spoils so that their children didn’t die in infancy, which was common at the bottom on the income distribution (and remained so until the middle of the 20th century).
Smith did think it would be harder to get productivity improvements from specialisation and the division of labour in agriculture, than it is in manufacturing (and he was right – as he was in most things)… but he also knew – being an evidence-driven chappie – that agriculture was labour intensive and that it was a relatively large proportion of the economy. So a larger population had a bigger ‘bang for the buck’ than an increase in specialisation in early-industrial manufacturing.
He was writing ~25 years before Malthus, with less evidence of the bounty generated by the BAR; nevertheless, there is an appendix that discusses the trajectory of the price of food expressed in terms of how much time a common labourer had to work to pay for them. The price of food in working-class labour-hours had declined over the period for which he could get data. The excerpt below is not from that appendix – it is just from within the text itself – but it hits the main points.
That – by itself – shows two related things:
① the labouring classes were becoming better off in real terms, and
② food prices were falling in relative terms – becoming a smaller share of the household budget.
It’s natural for necessities to become a smaller share of budgets as incomes rise, but if food production was not more-than keeping pace with population, the whole ‘Malthus’ pile of shit might make sense.
The population was growing at a reasonable clip (~0.4% a year), and yet there was no pressure on food prices.
This is why I say Malthus was the Paul Erlich of his time: when Erlich rose to prominence with his fuckwitted Jeremiad, Julian Simon knew full well that relative prices of key industrial minerals were falling despite rapid growth in output – which is why he knew that Erlich would lose a bet regarding any basket of metals. Erlich, being a fuckwit, took the bet. And lost. Twice.
.
It is not hindsight that enables anyone who has read Smith to dismiss Malthus: it is recognising that one single fact drove Malthus to fame – a couple of years after he wrote is drivel, there was a series of bad harvests in UK agriculture.
As a result, his shit ‘went viral’ because it enabled the blame to be put on the poor for over-breeding. Plus, he understood the real moral of “Chicken Little” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”: people want frisson in their lives.
As for Keynes (the Travelling Pederast, aka Lord Poofter): I despise that self-promoting hack, as do all well-trained economists. His ‘General Theory‘ was specifically aimed at giving the State a reason to further intervene in the economy. So it should come as no surprise that he studied Economics for precisely one undergraduate term.
As for Africans (or anyone else who’s breeding too fast for your liking): if you want fewer of them, encourage the World Bank/IMF economic hit-men and NGO charity-vampires to leave them alone, and let them get richer.
Birth rates plummet when the bottom quintile gets above absolute poverty (i.e., genuine, ongoing daily risk of starving to death).
(funnily enough, Smith was right about that, too… wealthy women weren’t having kiddies then, either…
Africa’s not there yet: the West only took its boot off their throats a generation or two ago.
The nearest thing to a genuinely Malthusian quotation from the Master – and o course there’s a “BUT“:
Where are our Smiths? Our Humes? Our Benthams? We have an absolute surfeit of Malthus-clones and Erlichs – squawking for all they’re worth. Time passes, eppure il cielo non cade, to riff off another great who was right at the time.
The poor breed more.
It’s multifactor, but it’s got overwhelming empirical support. And I like that it’s unpopular with everyday folks – the flak you get when taking positions such as mine, are a good indicator you’re roughly on target.
I’m not one to say “the science is settled” – that’s a theological statement – but given some readily-observable things about offspring (they’re far less rewarding than is commonly assumed; they’re costly), it isn’t a huge surprise that high-IQ and no-kids-having is a thing, too.
They got richer – which is amazing since a whole lot of national wealth got purloined by a bunch of Red Sea Pedestrians who tried to re-enact the ‘steal-y’ bits of Exodus (i.e., stealing anything that wasn’t bolted down, as they were leaving).
It just goes to show how powerful private sector activity is: if you allow more of it from a low base, you can have people steal your major infrastructure, and still have an increase in average prosperity.
The economic and cultural factors are quite interconnected. If you have a society that measures success by how much money you make and how much you consume you’re not going to have many children.
It’s possible that capitalism will always lead to a collapse in birth rates.
Urbanisation is another factor. A really nice apartment in Manhattan can be great for a childless couple but not so great for a couple with three kids. And city life offers so many other opportunities for consumption. Combining urbanisation with high birth rates is a tricky problem. Singapore is a fine example of the deadly effects of urbanisation. Probably a great place to live but it’s doomed.
Any attempt to solve the problem by economic means is likely to have very limited success. You might raise your TFR from 1.3 to 1.4 but that’s not going to save you. It’s not that attacking the problem by economic means is a bad idea but it will never be anywhere near enough. A radical reconstruction of the whole society and the whole culture is required.
The really big problem is that most people just don’t care. People find it incredibly difficult to understand long-term social consequences. You’d need a government prepared to tackle the problem even though most of the citizenry are either unaware of the problem or don’t care. Maybe the Chinese could do it. They still seem to believe that long-term planning is a good idea.
They were less pozzed?
It’s possible that economic incentives to have more children will still work in a country like Hungary because it’s not yet as pozzed as western Europe. As the poz takes over eastern Europe (and that process will be complete within a generation) those economic incentives will work less well.
Agreed.
And the less educated breed more. We need to consider the possibility that our societies are ludicrously over-educated. Seriously. Most people have more education that they need. Higher education for example is good for a tiny proportion of the population. For the rest it’s mostly a bad thing. It makes people less happy. It leads to social instability. Education is a good thing, in moderation, for some people. We’re doing it to excess.
It is also a possibility that we suffer from too much prosperity. We have surplus prosperity. Most consumption is not only frivolous but destructive. The evidence that unlimited material prosperity is the key to human happiness is less than convincing. Material prosperity, like education, is a good thing in moderation.
Lol your “methodology” is looking at bar on the chart and trying to correlate that to stories in your mind about what you think is the cause.
A problem is you are looking at total fertility rate, which is mostly noise.
It would be better to find data for eventual fertility rates, or at least estimates of what they will be – then it would be easier to see if there is any such correlation to the story.
For example, if total fertility rate increased after Orban has come to power, this is quite likely a simply statistical noise reaction to the fact it was lower before.
If total fertility rate falls for a few years, then it will have usually go higher in following years to correct the earlier decline. This is just artifact of the inaccurate/noisy way total fertility rate tracks (or tries to track) the ongoing information (we expect total fertility rate should move up and down in a multi-year wave exaggeratedly like seismograph because the way the measurement is designed).
–
As for whether government policy affects eventual fertility rates or not – this is an issue sometimes studied by demographers and you can see some published literature. I only looked at very little so cannot say what they found – just the part of a (1 paper) paper I read says there is not evidence of an effect. But it might be interesting to look for those papers.
Here’s some data on final fertility for different age groups of women. You should download the Excel file at the bottom of the page, because the graph is not easy to read.
http://demografia.hu/hu/tudastar/fogalomtar/6-kohorsztermekenyseg
Here are the final fertility numbers for birth groups
1950 1.94
1955 1.912
1960 1.97727821
1965 1.94567004
1970 1.81608827
As you can see, the secular decline was halted and partially reversed for the birth cohorts who came of age after the full effect of the pro-natalist policies 1965-75. (After 1975, no new measures were rolled out.) Meanwhile in Western Europe the fertility rate kept dropping.
It’s pretty obvious that people didn’t get more religious, their opportunities for entertainment increased a lot (TV penetration exploded, car ownership exploded, tourism exploded, even if mostly just inland tourism, etc.), so it’s a huge achievement that the fertility rate, which should have been dropping under extreme headwinds, increased instead. And the most plausible explanation is the introduction of pro-natalist policies.
Bangladesh and Iran have below replacement period fertility (total fertility rate). Even Saudi Arabia’s going to fall below period (total fertility rate) replacement fertility quite soon, despite things like “women’s rights”, or “tolerance to sexual minorities”, having less in Saudi Arabia, than in Medieval Europe. Whether actual completed fertility will fall quite so low is another question.
However, the explanation is quite simple and like the cause of many social changes – technology.
Governments in Iran or Bangladesh have encouraged use of condoms and oral contraceptives, but when the condoms and oral contraceptives are widely available or affordable, then fertility falls in a way that does not recover, even if government incentives will try to reverse its decline.
As for how it was in the USSR, contraception – oral contraceptives IUDs – difficult to access, and women used abortion a lot. Condoms were sold widely but not encouraged in the way of today.
It’s interesting how Hungary was at least a bit higher than Russia for these cohorts.
This is Russia by comparison.
https://i.imgur.com/KlHarzp.jpg
–
Hungary has a rising trend of fertility for cohorts born from 1940 to mid-1960s.
https://i.imgur.com/3ShLAn5.jpg
Intelligence is the ability to learn new skills and create new ideas.
Chess, SATs, IQ tests and such are the product of intelligence, not the cause.
Since kids usually grow up to be smart adults, and smart adults grow up to be stupid old people, it should be obvious that kids are more intelligent than adults.
Your childhood intelligence is the deposit you’re spending for the rest of your life.
(Why the hell am I even explaining this to you? Do you have a room-temperature IQ? (Don’t answer the rhetorical question, by the way.))
Am I wrong to value Malthus’s contribution to understanding what follows from natural unfettered breeding habits and commend him for not saying that all children are to be welcomed as gifts from God?
As for Keynes, did not Hayek describe him as the one great man he had ever known? (Would you say that Hayek wasn’t sincere ar all because he was writing to Keynes’s widow?)
A once quite well known private sector economist proffered the view to me that Keynesian economics was designed for a more or less self suficient economy like America’s. The truth in that inclines me to the view that one of FDR’s greatest failures was not to take Keynes’s advice. ?????
Are you retarded?
Rhetorical.
What you’re trying to say is that it is obvious that some children are smarter than some adults. Specifically, smart children are smarter than dumb adults.
Even so, maximum intelligence is not reached in childhood. So barring brain trauma, a smart child will grow into a smarter adult.
The thing about religions is that they reconcile you to life and the world – the “world denying” aspect of all religions is just a first step in a dialectic that results in having a fundamentally positive attitude towards the world, even as one regards it as ephemeral.
Secular life is pessimistic and world denying as a final, total step. So no kids, and general depression.
Correction: they got poorer. Many communist bloc countries didn't recover to 1989 per capita GDP until 2005ish (some recovered much sooner though). Fertility rates collapsed almost immediately after the fall of communism. (Eg Russia 1989: 2.01; 1993: 1.39 Romania 1989: 2.22; 1993: 1.43)
So your position is that we’d be better off with a higher proportion of morons?
My guess would be that your ability to relate to other human beings was deficient.
As someone who was fairly good at sales, I think this is far more important than “making a good case.” If your customer likes you, he’s vastly more likely to buy, regardless of how good your case is. If your customer is more informed than you are, merely having a “good case” can work against you. This is most obvious with nerdy-techie types, who often really resent it if you pretend to know as much as them but clearly don’t. With these types, I found it best to simply confess that “you know a lot more about this than I do.” And the easiest way to get them to like you was to get them to show off their knowledge, as in [looking concerned] “there’s something I’ve been wondering about, and maybe you can clear it up for me…”, and then pretend to be impressed by and grateful for their explanation.
GDP per capita is a poor metric, considering that it includes ‘G’ (government spending) which is – always and everywhere – redistributive upwards.
A collapse in ‘G’ can drive per-capita GDP down sharply, but redistribute income in ways that improve life for everyone below the median (in fact, for everyone outside the top quintile).
When central planning fails, the distribution of output should be expected to improve a priori (the system moves back towards a Pareto optimum), but statistical measures will show very large declines, mostly due to step-changes in statistics-collection.
Disaggregated data for the former Soviet bloc is terrible, and it’s been two decades since I was a close observer of the region, but I’m pretty sure the historical data agrees with me even if its been revised since I looked at it closely.
On Soviet-Russia specifically, as an undergrad I had data up to and including 1992 (it was quite fresh, being 1994 at the time).
I wrote my main assignment for ‘Comparative Economic Systems‘ (CES) on the Soviet bloc mid-collapse (key point: the collapse was mostly a statistical artefact because too few people starved to death).
My key contention was (and is) that once the central planners lose power, a great deal of output leaves the statistics but is still produced – a collapse looks terrible on paper, but it greatly benefits the rural poor.
This contention was a corollary to – in fact the flip-side of – the massive statistical expansion of Chinese ag output after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms that legalised private trade in “above-quota” output: that trade had always been happening, but had been ‘off the books’ and so did not appear in the statistics. (There was a genuine ‘bump’ to production from those stats though – since a ‘disincentive to effort’ was removed).
This was clearly the case in the former Soviet bloc mid-collapse: private trade (particularly in the poorest regions) will have gone ‘off the books’; there was also a collapse in statistics-collection, particularly outside of cities.
The ‘Dog That Did Not Bark‘ in this case is that mortality numbers for the period are not big enough given the alleged collapse in output.
Without TOOTing too much: for a 3rd year undergrad that was a fucking outstanding piece of work – I taught 3rd years for 3 years later that decade, and never saw anything that came close. (I got the university’s award for outstanding undergraduate that year, and a Reserve Bank research cadetship – one of 4 in the country – which I turned down because I hate bureaucracy… TOOT TOOT!!).
It was noticing that fact that spurred my (since then ongoing) interest in demography, and also in spatial analysis of economic phenomena.
The likely demographic and spatial redistrbution of income after a State collapse was also something I looked at that same year. (It was a banner year).
In semester II of the same year, my main assignment for ‘Capitalism: Contrasting Views‘ (taught by the same guy who taught CES) was on the effective redistribution caused by State intervention in the economy. Looking back, the conclusions sound obvious – as do all good conclusions.
States redistribute income towards cities, and upwards.
‘Towards cities‘ is already upwards: ‘towards cities and upwards‘ means that it redistributes output within cities, upwards, as well.
Key result 1: bureaucrats on average are paid 20% more for the same skillset, the world over;
Key result 2: government procurement favours size;
Key result 3: wages at firms who rely on government contracts are even higher than bureaucrat’s salaries;
Key result 4: profits at firms who rely on government contracts are higher and less volatile that pure-private firms;
Key result 5: government-enforced monopoly (trademarks, patents, licencing, restraints of trade) are greatest in sectors that already have the wherewithal to lobby for policy in their favour. These are also high-wage, urban-centre operations.
What this implies, is that a collapse in government spending will a priori be positive for the distribution of income.
One thing I didn’t cover at the time was fertility – the data was just not good enough – but the data as now recorded, ties in with the broader economic data and the praxeological underpinnings.
The late Hans Rosling’s research (at GapMinder) shows that the link from income to fertility postulated praxeologically (i.e., a strong, negative correlation) is borne out by data, cross sectionally.
This brilliant video is queued to the starting point for a time-lapse of output per capita (using GDP which understates improvements at the bottom) to TFR… in case your player begins at the start, move forward to about 74 seconds in (1:14)
https://youtu.be/-90zRbRCQtA?t=114
Even so, that doesn’t rule out the possibility of total output being drastically lower…
…particularly if what collapsed was mostly industry rather than agriculture.
So if people were still fed and had access to medical care, it’s not clear why mortality rates should have been expected to increase substantially.
This implies that state collapse should result in greater equality. But the communist collapse resulted in those countries’ Gini’s rising from the very low 20s to, in most cases, the low 30s (in Russia’s case, to the mid-40s).
And in any case, a rise in unemployment from essentially zero to, in most cases, 10-15% by 1995 (and beyond) is surely indicative of a rise in poverty. This is especially pertinent to the economic insecurity hypothesis of fertility rates.
That’s a charitable view of his work – although the main point is that he is wrong about “natural unfettered breeding habits” in human beings, which has very different characteristics to what he described.
His view was that humans will keep breeding like a virus – until the total load hits an environmental constraint and there has to be a die-off (while individual virii continue to attempt to reproduce as fast as possible).
The reality is very different: humans are amazingly good at finding ways around constraints – it’s probably the sole positive trait for which we can validly claim to be the best in the animal kingdom.
Human reproductive strategies are very varied, and wide-scale ‘die-offs’ in humans generally happen as a result of unforeseen environmental stressors (drought, in particular). That is, famines are caused by big changes in environmental conditions that are not usually themselves the result of human population expansion.
Once a famine is actually happening, people change their reproductive habits until they expect that the problem is past.
The Irish Famine in the late 1840s is a good example: about a million died, another million emigrated, and birth rates remained low (and outward-migration rates stayed high) for the rest of the 1800s. Between 1850 and 1900 as many Irish left, as died (the people leaving will have been mostly adults; the people dying mostly infants) and population halved. TFR remained low partly because people understood that the economic precarity would continue due to the English occupation.
When an additional infant is expected to have life-threatening adverse consequences, humans ‘behave’ their way around the problem. In some societies women – who often have no socially-recognised right to control whether they have conjugal sex or fall pregnant – control their own fertility by deliberately inducing miscarriage (e.g., by taking natural abortifacients and emmenagogues: ‘a bottle of gin and a hot bath‘).
When an unwanted kiddie slips through the cracks (lol), in genuinely-marginal societies there will be wilful infanticide (e.g., the Australian aboriginals of the Simpson Desert and Arnhem Land, there excess babies are left out in the open to die of exposure). Horrible as that may be to Western sensibilities, it is also a very cogent example of the fact that human groups form expectations regarding the carrying capacity of their environment, and their reproductive strategies adapt.
Had Malthus read Smith, this would not have escaped him.
Hayek had a foot in both camps a lot of the time – I don’t begrudge him wanting to maintain his status, and being a dick to a dead man’s beard would certainly have seen him cast to the outer darkness.
Hayek had a very cogent example of what happens if you aren’t sufficiently obsequious to the power clique in academia: Ludwig von Mises.
Mises was a better economist than Hayek (by a fair distance); he was also less inclined to hedge his statements in order to appease. As a very direct result, Mises therefore could not get a paid academic position and relied on a philanthropic benefactor to keep body and soul together.
Besides: Keynes was a ‘great man’, in the sense that he was able to get policy to adapt to his infatuations. The same is true of Churchill being referred to as ‘great’. Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Robespierre, Atilla the Hun, Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were likewise ‘great men’.
It helped that Keynes was giving the political class what they wanted: a supposed economic justification to intervene in the economy. Nobody in their right mind would think that once given that fig-leaf, they would confine themselves to counter-cyclical fiscal policy.
Keynes’ economics is (almost) explicitly designed around an economy in autarky (with a fixed rate of exchange, which amounts to the same thing).
That’s why when Hicks and Hansen tried to formalise it mathematically (the IS-LM model for the short run, and AD/AS for the long run), there was no explicit external sector.
When Mundell and Fleming added a BP curve (which models the balance of payments), the ability of Keynesian demand management to shift total output, vanishes.
It also has to be said that Keynes was far too sanguine about the dynamic ramifications of extending government control over the economy, because he had no objection to it despite it being absolutely clear from the work of Mises and others, that each increase in government spending is a step on the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire. Keynes’ view of how governments operate was as naive as Malthus’ view of how human reproduction operates.
Also: the US economy is not remotely ‘self-sufficient’, and wasn’t in the leadup to FDR’s administration; a significant contributor to the prolongation of the Great Depression was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, which drove international trade off a cliff.
Nowadays the US economy requires the rest of the world to acquire $621 billion dollars’ worth of US capital every year (the flip side of the trade deficit). If the US dollar was not the global clearing currency for most trade in commodities, the rest of the world would hold far smaller USD balances, and would remove a prop from under the US dollar; balance would be restored at an output level 3-5% lower than the current level; a move to autarky (including no foreign capital) would be even more worser.
Keynes’ 1933 letter to FDR was so fawning and waffly that it can be all things to all people. The single concrete proposal was not within FDR’s remit (cutting the Fed Fund rate to 2.5%), facilitated by the Fed doing a ‘twist’ by buying long-dated Treasuries: we now know that doesn’t work, because it’s been tried in similar economic conditions.
Keynes’ position as a government lickspittle is quite clear in the last sentence (regarding a ‘successful outcome’, which he predicted, Greenspan-like, with ‘great confidence’):
And of course NIRA “failed” – just like TARP and QE “failed”. (Failed is in scare-quotes because it compares the policy outcome to the publicly-stated aim, which is the wrong basis for comparison, given that the actual underlying the aim of all policy is to enrich a clique of cronies).
Very interesting and as I have never been a professional economist I can be quite relaxed about possibly having been wrong but it always struck me that Keynes was a hell of a lot smarter than my friends who sounded off about him in a cranky way. But I admit that I never thoight he would have been a Keynesian when politicians were claiming support from him for spending in the 60s and 70s designed to buy votes and I was confident that he would have ranked control of inflation very high (I wonder what he would have said about an inflatiin target as high as 2-3 per cent – doubling/halving value in less than 24 years: “theft” by the standards of those growing up before 1914).
Would he not have supported the
simple quite egalitarian point that, when those who have money don’t spend governments should be able to increase total welfare by investing money borrowed at historically low rates? I know it is said that Japan did it very unproductively after 1989 but why does it have to be so?
I claim one well expressed Keynsian – or just logical classic – insight. Partly taking off from the point about autarky I got stuck into the Cain governtment’s Treasurer’s absurd attempt to run a “Keynesian”policy ib a provincial economy with no control over currency , tariffs or interest rates. Add their naive attempts at picking winners and its no wonder Jeff Kennett lioked goid for quite a while.
Let me add an example of fertility control that seems to support your view of Malthus’s inadequacy. From 1600 to 1650 or so the English population was, from memory, virtually static. and illegitimacy rates were no more than 3 or 4 per cent. I can only speculate on the combination of factors which prevailed in that case.
You are talking past each other.
He is claiming that intelligence is the pace of new knowledge and skills assimilation.
He claims it is derivation value in a point on knowledge-time graph.
You are claiming it is the graph/curve value in a point on that graph.
Children and teenagers undoubtedly have the ability to learn more per unit of time than adults do.
This ability “accumulates” their (mental) capabilities and allows them to reach their peak in early adulthood.
Chess is a skill, not intelligence. Intelligent people play chess better for a host of reasons, but a stupid+experienced player will wipe the floor with a novice galaxy brain because chess is ultimately a rather arbitrary game which bears no relation to reality.
Be that as it may, the “breeder” groups I mentioned have one more thing in common, if nothing else: They’re all, to whatever extent, sheltered from technological civilization.
The Utah Mormons — fairly devout but in tune with our social and technolgical epoch — are nearing a replacement-level TFR. The Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who resemble an 18th century society, have an 18th century TFR, at nearly 7.0.
So is it faith itself, or the fact that their faiths proscribe their participation in our modern, technological society?
I’ll grant that, on the margins, economic measures may have some non-zero effect. Perhaps Orban can lift his nation from 1.45 to 1.65. Should he be wildly successful, perhaps even to 1.75.
Doubtful. And, anyway, the thought that a few tax breaks might have any hope of turning modern Hungarians into “Breeders” at TFR >2.1 is truly laughable.
Even if economic measures work — which they seemingly do not — they would not be sufficient. Different tools are required. There’s something out there — some proscription, some social technology, or some measure that can be taken — that can achieve much, much more than a measly 15% tax break… but we don’t know what it is, very few people are looking for it, and it may well be unthinkable and alien to modern sensibilities.
I think we’d be better off with a lower proportion of over-educated misfits. A lot of what we fetishise as education is not really education. A Mickey Mouse degree in gender studies or film studies or some pseudo-science like anthropology hardly qualifies as education. If we reduced the number of college students by three-quarters we’d have a healthier saner society.