This is the second in a series of posts about the demographics of the coming Age of Malthusian Industrialism.
In the decades and centuries to come, technological progress will slow to a crawl, as dysgenic reproduction patterns deplete the world’s remaining smart fractions (assuming that there are no abrupt discontinuities in humanity’s capacity for collective problem solving, such as genetic IQ augmentation or machine superintelligence). In the meantime, due to fertility preferences being heritable and ultra-competitive in a post-Malthusian world, populations will explode, as the world enters an epochal baby boom not long after 2100. This renewed demographic expansion will last until the world hits the carrying capacity of the late industrial economy, which will usher in the Age of Malthusian Industrialism.
Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4
The above map of French and German total fertility rates displays what is historically a novel state of affairs. France was probably the first country in the world to experience a fertility transition, with birth rates beginning to plummet amongst the French aristocracy in the early 18th century, presaging the libertine spirit of the Age of the Enlightenment and the fantasies of the Marquis de Sade. Meanwhile, the Prussians were introducing a tax on childlessness, and the martial Junkers were in no rush to stop procreating. Consequently, France went from being Europe’s most populated country – a status it has enjoyed since Late Antiquity – during the era of the Sun King, to just 60% of Germany’s level by 1914.
Then the worm turned. German fertility plummeted after World War I, and even the Nazis with their “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” rhetoric were unable to force a recovery to peak Weimar levels. Meanwhile, the French – long derided for “race decay” by the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans – started to make more babies. Ironically, this began during the Vichy period, at the trough of France’s fortunes, and spread to the rest of the country after 1945; the French have been much more fertile than the Germans ever since. Whereas one 1920s League of Nations demographic projection saw the French population falling from 40 million to 29 million by 1970, it instead soared and now stands at 65 million.
But why this turnaround?
I would argue that this historical French dissolution paved the way for present day French virility, and conversely, past German “culture-forced” virility paved the way to present day dissolution. Or to put it in numbers, whereas Germany underwent its fertility 3 generations ago, the France had their about 5 generations ago. Their society has been selecting against those who reproduced less for a while longer, and it is starting to tell.
The Future Belongs to the Fecund
As I pointed out in the previous post in this series, there were huge economic incentives to have large families before the Malthusian transition. Since the economically rational thing to do was to have lots and lots of children, there much have been little, if any, selection for fertility per se. If anything, sooner the converse. Families that had more children than they could support suffered higher death rates for their lack of discipline. Meanwhile, the genetic competitiveness that committed and affluent “breeders” gained was limited by the fact that overall cultural norms were highly pro-natal, which limited their ability to eke out a relative advantage. Moreover, since higher IQ tends to be correlated with both greater economic success and lower desired fertility, these rich genotypic breeders must have been quite rare anyway. Hence, in the pre-industrial Malthusian world, there would have been an equilibrium in which breeders only ever constituted a small share of the population.
When these Malthusian constraints fell away at around the time of the Industrial Revolution, along with the loosening of traditionalist pro-natality mores (have as many children as you can support and no more), the evolutionary underpinnings of the old equilibrium likewise crumbled away. However, since in most populations breeders are not yet a high percentage of the population, at first – i.e. the first century or so – this only had very modest effects, because there were very few breeders at t=0.
Hence, cultural and social influences played much greater roles in determining fertility in First World nations during the 20th century, and at least in Africa, will probably continue to do so for the next century.
But this will not be true after another one or two centuries.
Fertility preferences, like all aspects of personality, are heritable – and thus ultracompetitive in a world where the old Malthusian constraints have been relaxed.
Kolk et al., 2014 developed a rigorous model to demonstrate this:
Correlations in family size across generations could have a major influence on human population size in the future. Empirical studies have shown that the associations between the fertility of parents and the fertility of children are substantial and growing over time. Despite their potential long-term consequences, intergenerational fertility correlations have largely been ignored by researchers… We show that intergenerational fertility correlations will result in an increase in fertility over time.
They model the historical and future prevalence of four distinct reproductive groups:
Relative frequencies of PHH (blue, solid), PLH (green, dashed), PHL (purple, dotted) and PLL (red, dot-dashed) over time, after the manifestation of a new low-fertility lifestyle (model 1). We use the following initial values at t = 0: PHH(0) = 0.09, PLH(0) = 0.01, PHL(0) = 0.81 and PLL(0) = 0.09.
It takes around three generations for the old order (high fertility lifestyles, low fertility preferences – that is, our pre-industrial Malthusian world) to give way to the current order (low fertility lifestyles, low fertility preferences).
However, after five or so generations, the breeders (high fertility lifestyle, high fertility preferences) start expanding as a share of the population, slowly at first, but gaining in rapidity once the laws of exponential growth make themselves felt. On the above chart, the French, the Dutch, and the Anglo-Saxons might be around Generation #5. It is also at this stage that there emerge what we might call “breeder cults”, such as quiverfulls, or that Dutch community with an average TFR of close to 10 [AK: What are they called? I dimly recall reading about them].
Moreover, in a few ethno-religious societies, such as the Amish and the Hasidim, the process is much further advanced, since many of the people less committed to their values – which include high fertility – have been getting “boiled off” into their neighboring societies with every passing generation (Cochran & Harpending 2015).
Sketch of three different scenarios, each with different assumptions on fertility correlations across generations, showing implications for fertility (population size) and fertility correlations.
The authors present three possible scenarios for the future:
Scenario #1, in which fertility preferences are not heritable, is not backed up by the empirical evidence. Fertility correlations between generations are not only real, but they are actually increasing.
Scenario #2 has static cultural values, with a gradual return to the fertility patterns of the pre-industrial Malthusian age by the time breeder genes become dominant. Incidentally, I would even further speculate that the ultimate TFR may be even higher, due to technological advances and greater per capita resources (at least before the world overshoots the carrying capacity of the modern industrial economy).
Scenario #3 also has breeders eventually reaching demographic saturation, but the difference from #2 consists in the “continuous introduction of novel cultural traits [that allow] for the possibility of sustained low fertility,” on the assumption that “the cultural changes associated with the fertility transition are not singular historical events, but rather the beginning of a rapid and ongoing increase in cultural diversity.”
So, basically, more and more of this. Every single generation.
I am pretty skeptical about #3.
First, it is far from obvious that future ideological or technological trends will necessarily be loaded against natality; to the contrary, as Randall Parker has argued, things such as life extension, gene selection for better babies, and further automation of domestic chores could expand people’s capacity and willingness to have more children.
Second, as I argued in my article on The Age of Malthusian Industrialism, if there is no major breakthrough that increases intellectual capacity during the 21st century – for instance, IQ augmentation via genetic editing, or machine superintelligence – then they may become impossible in principle due to dysgenics, as the world descends into a long dark age of idiocracy. In an extended period of technological stagnation, it seems reasonable to assume that cultural innovation will also stagnate. At any rate, there isn’t any good reason to believe that most of the cultural shifts that do happen will be in the direction of further fertility restriction.
In a related discussion on the original Age of Malthusian Industrialism post, commenter AP suggested that breeder behavior would be constrained by lack of ample housing:
These high-fertility groups in the West tend to live in relatively sparsely populated areas (Utah, rural areas, Siberia), where having lots of kids doesn’t change one’s lifestyle and environment too much. There is still plenty of room for more people in those places. The idea of eventual massive overpopulation rests on the assumption that high-breeding Westerners such as Mormons, traditional Christians, etc. would tolerate cramped surroundings resembling rural India or Bangladesh in their packed humanity. I strongly suspect this would not be the case.
The flippant retort would be to just say that those breeders who can’t breed in Bangladeshi-like conditions would also be selected against (actually, is this even wrong?). But we don’t have to.
As commenter Cicerone points out: “Haredi Jews have 7 children per woman even though they live in densely populated Israel and the dense BosWash corridor.”
And here is the city of Modi’in Illit in Israel, a concrete ghetto. As Russian blogger Ivan Vladimirov put it, “Vykhino with less snow” [Vykhino is a dreary Moscow suburb]. But then he reveals some demographic facts about Desert!Vykhino: It was founded in 1996, and only gained city status in 2008; in 2009, it had 46,000 people, of whom 80% were under the age of 30; in 2006, the median age was just over 10 years. No surprise, then, that by 2016, the city had 66,000 people. So what’s their trick? Desert!Vykhino also happened to be the largest settlement of Haredi Jews in the Occupied Territories.
So far as fertility is concerned, housing quality is very much a tertiary issue.
Population in the 21st Century
About a year ago, I made the counterintuitive prediction that fertility rates in the dark continent may well dip below those of Europe and White America by the year 2100.
Since I posted that, behavioral economists Jason Collins and Lionel Page have written a paper in which they replaced the standard UN demographic models with one that accounts for heritable fertility preferences.
In their model, European TFR overtake’s Africa’s in the late 20th century, with Europe finishing up at around 2.5 children per woman and Africa at 2.2 children per woman by 2100.
Though in the meantime, the projection that there will be more than 4 billion Africans – the “world’s most important graph“, as popularized by Steve Sailer – will also come true.
The world population – driven mainly by trends in Asia and Africa, which were late to experience and have yet to complete their demographic transitions, respectively – will largely track standard forecasts before beginning to increasingly diverge by the end of the century.
This happens to be exactly in sync with what I argued in my original post on the Age of Malthusian Industrialism.
Population in the 22nd Century
Their model does not be beyond 2100, but it is not difficult to sketch out what will be happening as we enter the 22nd century.
- Africa will have completed its demographic transition, and will take a breather at 4 billion, only eking out modest increases in the next 100 years.
- Asia will be approximately where France is today, gradually resuming steady population growth. China may again become the world’s most populous nation in the 22nd century, after falling behind India in the 2020s.
- Europe and White America will be converging with the state of Israel today, with TFRs approaching 3 children per woman and looking to triple-quadruple their populations in the coming century, reaching the demographic scale of Asia today by 2200.
- The US may end that century as majority White again, having lost that status around the 2040s.
- The precise details of what will happen in Europe will depend on unknowables, such as the extent to which it becomes Africanized during the 21st century, and the interplay of shifting ethnic proportions with Islamic conversion. However, one minimal thing we can say is that after reaching a minimum sometime in the second half of the 21st century, the share of the indigenous European population will begin to increase again in the 22nd century. They will be concentrated in the small towns and rural areas, and will begin to demographically push back into the Afro-Islamic big cities.
- At the extreme end, Israel will by now basically be a nation-sized breeder cult. With a population of at least 30 million by 2100, it will start soaring into the hundreds of millions in the century after that. At this point, it will likely have to territorially expand or to start emitting emigrants.
Of course by that time the classical nation-state may have gone the way of the dodo, so it’s unclear to what extent geopolitics as we know it today will still be a valid prism through which to analyze things.
Part III will briefly cover the Geopolitics of the Age of Malthusian Industrialism (though I will be saving most of this for the book).
Part IV will be the biggest individual section, and will attempt to calculate the carrying capacity (max sustainable population) of the Age of Malthusian Industrialism.
I’m nit-picking, but that wasn’t a Nazi slogan (especially the Kirche part).
How many of those 65 million are European-French though? Sure, native French fertility has been higher than feared in the 1920s, but the 65 million figure seems to overstate the change.
Sounds absolutely horrible, there are far too many people already. Unless space colonization happens (which seems unlikely), this will be a nightmare.
If that’s the future, I’m glad I’ll be long dead by then. I’m not sure though if there’s much sense in making predictions for a time as distant as the 22nd century, in all probability none of those commenting here will be able to see if your predictions turn out to be correct.
You keep coming up with these bizarre theories as you try to convince yourself that the West is NOT doomed as a society. This one doesn’t make any more sense to me than your “generation Zyklon” theory.
Even if we assume that the above statement is correct, it will take dozens, possibly hundreds of generations for the forces of natural selection to produce this new European “Breeder” breed. This new breed of European people will then represent a small minority within the white population, which itself will become a minority in the US as early as 2040…
We’re talking about a timeline of millennia here, far too late to save the West as we know it.
It’s interesting discussion in these posts.
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Israel is probably the strangest in demography of industrialized countries.
Jews of Israel, particularly secular Jews of Israel, are not following “standard advice” recommended for avoiding low fertility rates.
If I can remember what I read about this last year.
Also average age of marriage in Israel is much older than Russia. If only secular Jews of Israel were included, average age of marriage would be higher than most of Western Europe (despite rising fertility rate with this secular group).
Jews of Israel become mature older, and only start their career when they are many years older, compared to almost all countries.
After “high school”, secular Jews go to army. This is for 3 years for men and 2 years for women. National Religious Jewish women are conscripted for “national service” for the same time (National Religious Jews are not having children in their late teens and early 20s).
After the army, they often travel for a year, and begin undergraduate at university from age 22 or sometimes later.
Median age for attaining an undergraduate university degree is 27 years old in Israel (they are the oldest university students in the world).
There may be “internship work” and temporary work before, but their career and ability to begin a family is probably the oldest in the world.
This should be suppressing fertility.
People live in modest, cheaply made, apartments and not suitable conditions for any large family.
Golikova is talking about how she will raise fertility (target is a fertility rate of 1,7 children per woman by 2024 if I remember?) by solving alleged difficulties of housing for young couples, but while this may be a contributing factor, obviously it is not a necessary condition of the replacement fertility mystery (there are countries with replacement fertility, where housing and apartment affordability is far worse than in Russia).
“At this point, it will likely have to territorially expand or to start emitting emigrants.” You are not funny. A near-shithole like Kishinev is infested with Israeli Jews, silly hat and all that. Bucharest is infested, although they are at least decent enough to hide their cult paraphernalia when in public.
How do you think the Jews got to Medieval Spain or to nascent US? Where did “Saint” Paul live? Jews have “emitted” since forever, especially from stagnant places to areas of uncontrolled growth, where profiteering is easy.
Even now, when their homeland is presumably a haven of democracy, science and startups, they are sending 6 thousand a year to US. In the list of source countries, they are cuddly nested between 42. Bosnia, 43. Lebanon, 44. Jordan, 45. Israel, 46. Somalia – all countries of similar 10-millionish size.
Also, why do we care about 2200? Do you think you grandgrandparents, or Duke Wellington gave a F about us? How could they even do anything about us? In human history, change is gradual, despite a tendency to teach history as a series of revolutions. And inferring from our last 3000 years, it’s clear life expectancy can only get longer, physical work can only get lighter, breeding can only get rarer, save for the occasional decade-long dip. Clowns like Samaritans and Circassians will disappear, followed by Romanians, Greeks and Italians. But a somewhat changed Latin identity will persist on the Northern shores of the Mediterranean. Rome had 50 inhabitants at a few times during the Middle Age, so counts will vary, but they will not replace us.
I think you don’t have children of your own, so don’t fret it. Last but not least, it’s only some ((futurologists))) that can make predictions a rent-paying job.
There is sense in doing these projections, because the mechanism is there, and more importantly, because few others make these projections. If you want to have projections that stop at 2100, the UN website is full of them. 😉
Gernerally, well written and deeply interesting stuff, as always. So I am really sorry to nitpuck on this one:
Taking the year at which TFR dipped well below 4 children per woman (say, below 3.8 to set a number) is not the perfect, but a good way of telling since when this process started. Why that number? 4 or a bit less than that was the lowest TFRs typically shown in Hajnal-Europe well below the demographic transition, so it is the lowest number attainable in a pre-industrial setting without having the population dying out.
France dipped below that number in the late 1830s, Switzerland in the mid 1880s and all the rest of core Europe (Germany, UK, Netherlands, the Nordics etc.) and their offshoots (US, Canada, Australia, NZ) between 1890 and the onset of WWI. France is two generations ahead of everyone else in that game, playing in its own category.
This is an “overflow town” from Bnei Brak (the poorest city of Israel).
Bnei Brak is one of the main core areas of the Haredi Jews of Israel.
Haredi Jews were 2% of Israel’s population originally, but they don’t use contraception or family planning, and grow to around 10% of the population today.
In its building and housing quality, Bnei Brak is like Somalia. However, because of the population increase in this favela, a cheap small, decaying apartment there is valued $500,000 (despite being the poorest city).
As a result, the young Haredi Jews are forced to emigrate to these towns of Elad and Modi’in Illit.
I think maybe (vague estimate) 15% of the population are very dark brown (including some with a burnt black colour of Indians). Perhaps 15% or more are blonde like they would be a Swedish stereotype if differently dressed. And then probably 70% of them are some various shades between the brown and white.
Whether they are mixing the different races there I was not sure. But I don’t think there would be a genetic explanation for this demographic – as this demographic appear to my eyes as including different races within the same city and religious order.
Their high birth rate is more probably just that they are not allowed to use contraception.
Another contradiction is that the women have very high employment rates while the men do not work (usually high female employment rates are linked to low fertility rates).
“Also, why do we care about 2200? Do you think you grandgrandparents, or Duke Wellington gave a F about us? How could they even do anything about us?”
By that logic, why do we care about 1800? If futurology is useless, why isn’t history also useless?
What happens when “artificial womb” technology arrives – which could likely be later this century.
If it’s legally only allowed to couples, it would raise the fertility rate by some points due to its convenience (and therefore governments would probably subsidise it).
On the other hand, if governments and corporations allowed access to producing children in “factories”, then there is no limit to what numbers they would produce. (With potential implications of technologies like this, 22nd and 23rd centuries likely will be a lot weirder and more unpredictable than we are writing in our speculations today).
The most fertile part of Germany seems to be Lower Saxony (Neddersassen). Perhaps the fertility map can be combined with intelligence maps to predict the future cognitive profile of Germany and other countries: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/valley-of-the-clever/
Also another thing which should be suppressing fertility:
Female employment rate is usually said by “experts” to reduce fertility rates.
However, in Israel has one of the highest female employment rate countries (excluding Muslims).
So maybe female employment is not relevant.
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with these points – it could be that it is a freak for demographic advice. Israel/Palestine is a war zone with religious conflict, not only between Jews and Muslims, but also /different groups of Jews. This could have some psychological effect.
Or alternatively, that normal expert advice about how to modify fertility is marginal.
It is all in genes:
Even less that resembles an argument than I was expecting, and I wasn’t expecting much.
Thank you Karlin, will refollow on Feedly.
In regards to your rural vs urban scenario how does urbanization affect this?
In many places native rural Tfr is higher but within cities muslims have almost a 2:1 advantage.
How does genocide/conversion play into this?
Anatoly, what do you expect the nation-state to be replaced by? I can’t imagine that it would be replaced by a world government due to the different average IQs and political systems in various countries. Thus, what else is there?
Also, as you said, I certainly can’t imagine small countries such as Israel to be able to sustain their high fertility indefinitely unless they will continuously acquire more and more Lebensraum. Countries such as the US, Canada, and Russia are better off in regards to this due to their much larger amount of territory, but even then these countries will eventually run into their limits.
In addition to this, if the entire world will eventually look like Singapore, then I can’t imagine it being very good for either quality of life or combating things such as global warming. After all, a massive increase in the population of developed countries is going to result in much more carbon dioxide emissions, no?
On the bright side, though, having the entire world look like Singapore could create the conditions for extremely eugenic fertility since only the prosperous are actually going to be able to afford to live well and have lots of children. Let’s just hope that we don’t experience a massive dysgenic trend beforehand, though.
Also, you already hinted at this in your previous post, but there could very well be the risk of additional warfare in the world by countries which need more Lebensraum. While nukes are likely to prevent conflict between countries such as Russia and China, it would be much easier to pick on countries which don’t have nukes and which can’t easily develop nukes due to their low average IQ.
It’s the late 21st century, not the late 20th century. The 21st century is from 2001 to 2100 while the 20th century is from 1901 to 2000.
It used to be commonly said of the French that their bravest men died in battle in WWI leaving only the cowards to sire. I think that is silly and oversimplistic, but the idea is nevertheless striking, since it demonstrates how people used to speak so readily about heritability, though they no longer do so.
My previous comment was about the Napoleonic wars. As far as WWI on the Western front I do not think there was much you could do once you were in the trenches and your bravery/cowardice factor did make much difference. The French executed by orders of magnitude more of their own soldiers than Germans did. But it seems that the French have learned something from it and decided not to get sucked up into another senseless resistance threatening the biological substance of the nation in the WW II and they were fortunate to have Maréchal Pétain who saved them and absolved them from their dishonor by taking the balem and guilt on himself while General De Gaulle was there only to save the honor of the French and France, otherwise he was inconsequential but he did not know it, and in his stupidity and overzealousness he executed way too many Frenchmen after the war.
Unless I missed it, there is no breakdown on how many those numbers are white people and non white. I have come across a lot of “healthy” demographics writing before from neocon/neoliberal outlets, and it mostly turns out to be non whites.
A return to the multi-ethnic states of the past ruled by elites with little national consciousness.
Futurists are always, always wrong.
You mean as a result of mass immigration?
Also, won’t countries such as Poland, Japan, Israel, and South Korea remain racially homogeneous (or relatively so, in the case of Israel)?
I broadly agree with the theory that fertility preferences are heritable and the natural result of this in a world with no Malthusian pressures will be rising fertility, France however isn’t really a good data point to use I would argue as European France has a TFR of around 1.84 which means an ethnic French TFR of 1.75, that is the same as nations which entered demographic transition much later, like Denmark where women of Danish origin had a TFR of 1.78 in 2017. For France to confirm this theory, French fertility should be much higher then countries whose fertility rates fell a century or more after France’s did, the Danish fertility rate in 1900 was what France’s was in the Napoleonic period, yet both countries have identical fertility rates today. French fertility is also only around 0.1 higher then British fertility despite Britain entering the transition much later.
This is pure nonsense. We do not need to reach carrying capacity before systems collapse. This is typical economist bullshit. Africa has a high probability of collapsing due to disease and other problems. We have increased the population of Africa by slowing disease and giving aid. We have actually made the problem worse and it will haunt us. This assumes a steady state for civilization and the planet. If blacks and Hispanics take over the US which is what they want to do you could basically have another Africa.
These people don’t believe in law or science. IQ may collapse totally. S. Africa right now is dismantling their university system to placate the black mob who can’t meet any legitimate standard of education. In America the university is done. Graduating people who couldn’t get through high school. When colonial powers left Africa the infrastructure collapsed. The next generation can’t do anything. The smart people will be attacked like maniacs and murdered by the Twitter Mobs. Morons like Cortez will dominate the political insanity. We are at the most dangerous time because the Dems and their friends the Jews want white genocide and demand it every day. They will not quit. We don’t need Malthus to become real before we collapse we have thousands of Black Swans waiting to happen.
For previously homogeneous countries, yes. Of course, there exist states that are and have been multi-ethnic for ages.
Israel may remain religiously homogeneous, but they are not ethnically homogeneous.
Poland has begun the first steps towards importing workers from Asia.
Japan has started to follow South Korea in importing workers from South-East Asia.
Ethnic clashes leading to a national-revolutionary regime is a possibility, but so is the continuation of the current trajectory.
The plot of Niven and Pournelles’ excellent SciFi novel “The Mote in God’s Eye” revolves around a human encounter with what can be characterized as an old Malthusian industrial breeder race. Has there been any other SciFi with themes of Malthusian industrialism?
It absolutely is. People raised in large families go on to form large families themselves. If you don’t believe the statistics, you can fall back on anecdotal evidence that this is true.
‘Heritable’ doesn’t mean ‘genetic’. No natural selection is needed; people who don’t have kids won’t inherit the earth. Those who do will. This is a logical tautology.
Note that it doesn’t matter what the mechanism of this heredity is. Whether it’s genetic, social, cultural or chemical or whatever makes no difference.
It is if Anatoly’s theory is correct. If he’s right, then you don’t need to solve a mystery or change somebody’s mind. All you need is to give economic encouragement to those who were going to have kids anyways. An easy problem to solve.
Seems like the Russian government’s view of the future broadly matches Anatoly’s.
In a controlled experiment, i.e., a stable society I can imagine conducting studies correlating number of offsprings through several generations and to some extent controlling for all external factors and with a lot of luck arriving at heritability estimates. But societies are never stable and the number of offsprings will depend on many external factors (including cultural ones) that keep changing and are not uniformly affecting whole society. And I believe that all these external factors can overwhelm whatever signal there is, if it really exists, due to genetics. Occupying yourself with genetic factor in fertility is a fanciful nonsense.
You’re (again) confusing heritability and genetics.
Cultural factors are obviously heritable, and obviously not genetic.
In this case it doesn’t matter what causes heritable fertility, genetics or culture or something else.
Indeed. But heritability is a different issue.
So tell us what you think it is.
I just told you. Are you daft?
Simple example: Islam is extremely heritable, but there isn’t any “Islam gene”.
It doesn’t matter what causes heritable fertility — Islam, genes, chemicals in the water, something else — what matters here is the end effect.
Not much within this paradigm that includes the ravaging effects of sickness on the general trend of population growth? How about military conflict and war? How many millions of people succumbed to both types of calamities in the 20th century, where are the correlations and predictions of this for the 21st and 22nd centuries?
You seem to have a problem with English dictionary. You can find the usage of ‘heritable’. Google ‘Islam is heritable’.
You occasionally make original utterances. This does not imply original thinking however. Anyway, do not bother to continue this conversation because it is finished.
Thanks, very good critique.
It forced me to think deeper about this: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/breeding-breeders/
Actually, your confusion about the meaning of the word heritable has however brought up an important point.
Your point that its impossible to tease out if its heritability or a process of cultural transmission – which led to your misunderstanding of the word heritable – is an important point that undercuts much HBD thinking.
While you were trying to affirm HBD, it actually illuminates its shortcomings.
Anatoly here is, as usual, discounting cultural or environmental factors and focusing purely on heritability, when as utu pointed out upthread and as you intuitively grasp, that’s impossible. Now, cultural and environmental factors are complex and difficult to describe, and focusing on heritability requires a fraction of the brainpower and education, so its understandable why such an approach is gaining ground in our age of intellectual decline.
But I still want to applaud you for intuitive grasp of the limitations of HBD.
This is all speculation, but more the topic of the third part of this series, anyway, so won’t comment for now.
CO2 emissions may fall due to falling per capita incomes as the Age of Malthusian Industrialism draws near. I expect EV’s to replace almost all internal combustion engine cars before the idiocracy makes further technological progress impossible; I mean, it is sort of already imminent, with some analysts predicting that production of the latter has already peaked in 2018. Also, there’s a good chance that truly catastrophic (for most of the world) global warming will be averted through geoengineering.
The Imperium of Man (Warhammer 40k) is basically the Age of Malthusian Industrialism in space.
I expect violence will continue to decrease during the 21st century, but at some point, if we do run into the limits to growth, there’ll need to be some sort of Malthusian check (one way or another).
My guess is that it will involve general dearth and antibiotic resistance. Possibly also pro-male sex-selective abortions.
Military conflict/war – depends on geopolitical trends. If a world of many weak states and/or One World Government, probably not. If a world of nation-states as today, possibly yes.
So basically Pagang?
I think there are predictions that the UK will be the most populated state of the West
Notice the conspicuous lack of mention of ‘genes’ or ‘genetic’.
There’s no confusion on my part, you silly fool. The confusion lies squarely on those who confuse “heritable” (general property) with “genetic” (a special case of heritability).
Cultural and environmental factors are highly heritable. Case in point, which I already mentioned: Islam.
Sounds to me like you’re shooting yourself in the foot here with this response. Aren’t you the one that’s a ‘Russian nationalist’ (not even a Russian imperialist?)? Don’t nationalists abhor the idea of a One World Government and all of its diluting effects as far as nation states are concerned? Please don’t come back with some sophisticated idea that tries to reconcile these two ideas, because they’re really not compatible. Any ‘One World Government’ would have to be at its core inimical to nationalism of any sort (other than some extremely watered down version that allows sports teams to ‘proudly’ represent some region or ‘country’).
You agree with this idea, yet you seem quite interested in history and even more so with futurology? Bang, bang, you’ve just shot yourself in the foot again. You have no more feet to stand upon. 🙂
That was a rather illogical comment, you seem to have misinterpreted AK’s statements (where did he write he was in favour of a world government? How is being interested in both history and futurology supposed to be intellectually incoherent?).
What does EV’s stand for?
electric vehicles
Electrical Vehicle
Is it possible that Lagos could have a pop between 61-100 million in 2100? It’s hard for me to believe that it’s possible, but that’s what’s projected.
I could believe it of the Japanese, if they had the fertility. But Nigerians? What kind of interventions would it take to make it possible? And would any group be willing to commit to that level of monstrous cuckoldry?
I keep thinking of those pictures of mother birds feeding monstrous baby birds of another species, that laid its eggs in the nest. Some seem to have an instinct to fill a gaping maw, even if the bird killed the mother’s offspring.
Another thing: I wonder how much the West moved that trendline for Africa, by intervening for HIV. Maybe, that was Africa’s divine fertility transition.
How is being interested in both history and futurology supposed to be intellectually incoherent?
Quite.
I would like to point out that futurology is constrained and limited while history has no earthly limits.
OT: Will there be fewer homosexuals (or at least, fewer people with genes encouraging homosexuality) in future, now that homosexuals who before might have married women are now free to engage totally in their sterile activities?
Is it even clear that genetics plays the predominant role in homosexuality?
iirc Cochran claims it might be due to germs.
History is inherently limited by what you can deduce from the sources.
Otherwise you’re just making things up.
Exactly
Thanks!
Thanks!
The heritability of homosexuality is relatively low for both men and women–albeit height for women (0.33) than for men (0.22).
A pathogen might be involved in this somewhere in the process–at least, this would explain how humans failed to evolve immunity to this considering that pathogens can also evolve. Still, I wonder if the process is a bit different from Cochran’s speculation–specifically, what if a pathogen triggers an immune reaction by a pregnant woman’s body which can result in this woman’s fetus becoming gay or bisexual?
I know that the odds of a baby boy being gay increases for each older brother that he has. Thus, we need a theory to take this into account (it’s called the fraternal birth order effect).
I don’t think that Lagos is going to have that high of a population in 2100 due to my belief that a lot of these extra Nigerians are going to end up in the West (especially in Western Europe, which is right next door to Africa).
Homosexuality actually has relatively low heritability for both men and women.
Well, silly me. I guess that I did infer a meaning to Anatoly’s comment, where a world without war would be a good world, something worth striving towards. Apparently not. If a world with nation-states is still to exist, then I guess we’ll continue having wars – oh goody!
After rereading comment #7, I do see where in fact Anatoly is poo-pooing the idea that either history or futurology is useless. Sorry, for the confusion.
The problem is that you seem to have major problems with elementary logic.
For instance, the idea that statements of preference (e.g. my desire for a Russian Space Empire) are distinct from statements of projection (e.g. my theory of the Age of Malthusian Industrialism, which isn’t likely to be particularly nice and may well involve the dissolution of all currently existing nations).
I think a question that might arise is whether one’s projections are influenced by one’s preferences. Of course they are, but we need to have some sort of standard or reference when we read what you (or anyone else) has to say. Do you cheat consciously or unconsciously?
Golikova’s policy relating to housing (like preferential mortages) with the idea to motivate women to have more children.
So her view is not like Karlin, who proposes fertility rates are insensitive to housing conditions.
I was listening online to some of their discussion at Gaidar forum last week. Governor of Perm territory even said material pro-natalist policies operate more to reduce poverty than stimulate fertility (where the effect is limited), and supports it for that reason.
Around 1:08:30
No isn’t clear, and male homosexuality could be due to skewed effect generalist genes that make extra sexy/fertile women but effeminate men. It is well known in animal breeding (dairy cows for example if I remember my CH Waddington) that there is a problem with desired qualities in females interfering with the reproductive quality of males. Steve had a great post on ugly people, hypermasculine John Huston, and his not very feminine daughter, and the Rum deer study https://www.unz.com/isteve/why-doesnt-evolution-get-rid-of-ugly/
One may think that as men with homosexual-male/mothers of many children genes in a permissive society cease to be forced to marry, reproduce, and pass on those genes, it will also follow that women who have a lot of babies will also become less common. Natural systems seem to work so as to prevent runaway snowballing results and while it is interesting to look at the theory and useful to be able to recognize such situations, in practice they are very rare.
You are doing good work spreading this message.
On another thread, I argued that the medium-high heritability of IQ may actually just be measuring culturally transmitted practices of study and problem-solving and not heritability at all.
(Btw, heritable traits are those you are born with – if you picked them up sometime after birth, they are not heritable traits. Traits acquired through environment or culture are by definition not heritable. It’s a technical term with a specific meaning used especially to distinguish culture and environment from traits one is born with)
But even though you are confused about the language, your ideas are correct and sound, and maybe your language has a better chance to penetrate the HBD mind, which isn’t very bright.
Perhaps, it isn’t any problem of mine with elementary logic, but rather your own inability to express your ideas in a clear and forthright manner? Distinctions between ‘preference’ and ‘projection’ of yours might become clearer if you enunciate them, rather than obfuscate them in a menagerie of code words that only you seem to be able to understand?
I see that Iffen right above is expressing a very similar sentiment about your writing style as I am, so that I see that I’m not the only one who feels this way.
Don’t promote ideas you don’t believe yourself, it makes you appear mendacious.
No, I wasn’t singling out AK (although it would be nice if he completed his glossary). It is a generalization that applies to all. Who says something is as important as what is said because what is said cannot be separated from who said it.
Don’t promote ideas you don’t believe yourself, it makes you appear mendacious.
Big Daddy: Mendacity. What do you know about mendacity? I could write a book on it…Mendacity. Look at all the lies that I got to put up with. Pretenses. Hypocrisy. Pretendin’ like I care for Big Mama, I haven’t been able to stand that woman in forty years. Church! It bores me. But I go. And all those swindlin’ lodges and social clubs and money-grabbin’ auxiliaries. It’s-it’s got me on the number one sucker list. Boy, I’ve lived with mendacity. Now why can’t you live with it? You’ve got to live with it. There’s nothin’ to live with but mendacity. Is there?
Tennessee Williams – Cat on Hot Tin Roof (film)
Karlin was specifically included in your criticism for being nothing less that clear in his writing style while he was trying to admonish me about my supposed inability to use elementary logic. His criticism of me centered around my supposed inability to distinguish ideas of his that were indicative of ‘preference’ with those of his that were intended to reflect ‘projections’. I countered and suggested that if I were actually remiss in doing so, it was more a matter of his own inability to express his thoughts in a clearer writing style. You seemed to support this conclusion by suggesting that he (among others) could help his readers understand him better by him including some sort of ‘reference’ material to accompany his pieces:
Your criticism of his writing style seems more scathing than my own, as you seem to indicate that his motives for writing so loosely is motivated by his mendacious desire to cheat? I wouldn’t go that far! 🙂
I see what AK was getting at with the elementary part. Let’s try this again.
I see that Iffen right above is expressing a very similar sentiment about your writing style
No, as in no, I was not expressing a very similar sentiment.
I usually get the gist of his posts and have a basic understanding of “where he’s coming from.”
What his Russian nationalism holds on the JQ and the exact mechanics of his dealing with the non-Russians in his country is a little fuzzy to me (show me a nationalism that is not, at least at some points in its genesis and evolution). Just like it’s a little fuzzy as to how he expects to be able to make the Ukrainians (whoever they are) say Uncle Ivan. But his perspective is reasonably clear to me and I am able to discern as to whether he is hoping and praying or doing his best to give an objective opinion of the facts as he sees them.
could help his readers understand him better by him including some sort of ‘reference’ material to accompany his pieces:
No, as in no.
The reader forms his own reference. If you took the writer’s reference, how would you know if he was being normative or descriptive in giving you his reference?
Your criticism of his writing style seems more scathing than my own,
No, as in no.
Do you cheat consciously or unconsciously?
Not AK specifically, the universal you, everybody, you, me, everybody.
I have to decide when someone is being partisan in their writing and when they are not. Whether they know it or not is a different question.
A reference that I use when I read your comments is that you have some sort of major hard-on for AK, the cause and origin of which I am unaware.
Akarlin,
I think I know where you’re getting the 100 billion figure for the Earth’s carrying capacity. Its from Brian Wang’s blog, based on his calculations for agriculture as well as the use of advanced nuclear power.
When you level a criticism at somebody within a reply and clearly references that individual as in ‘you,’ you clearly don’t leave much room for later excluding that person from your criticism, now do you?:
Another example of the exact same thing:
I’m not sure about what you mean about having a ‘major hard-on’ for AK? In a good way or a bad way? I’m certainly not gay and don’t feel that I’m extremely critical or appreciative of him, either way. When I was younger, a ‘hard-on’ for somebody or something was construed as having an attraction (in a good way) towards it. 🙂
‘
All I can say about France is whenever I tune into some sports or entertainment event, the representatives from France are always without fail African. Even in larger groups eg sports teams at junior European championships or whatever tend to be minimum 2/3 African (mostly mixed ‘au lait’ by now though admittedly). The difference compared even to other European countries that are furthest down this path (Netherlands, UK) is really, really striking. So that’s a pretty big caveat for me about France’s fertility data; though, if this trend does go back to Vichy, then maybe that’s not applicable… (though I’d guess France was also the first European country to import Africans en masse too – when exactly mass immigration to France start?)
I didn’t get it from Wang’s blog, I did the calculations myself and I didn’t even know Bryan Wang had come to similar figures. (Though it’s good that he did!).
I follow NBF but with dozens of posts a day I obviously don’t catch all of them. Could you give a link please?
Ask and you shall receive:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2014/02/we-could-use-technology-that-is-over.html
Nextbigfuture has a search function near the top of the website. Try searching with terms “population”, “capacity”, and “agriculture” as separate terms (don’t group them together in quotes) and you will get all of his postings relating to the maximum population capacity.
You might also want to look at something Brian calls the “mundane singularity”. This is a “singularity” based on mostly manufacturing related technologies such as robotics, 3-D printing, and advanced nuclear power (Thorium, MSR, some of the fusion start-ups) as well as biotech stuff. All of the technologies that comprise the “mundane singularity (which really is not much of a singularity) is stuff that is easily developable in the next 2-3 decades. These are technologies that 1) can be developed even in a dysgenic society and, 2) could have the perverse effect of increasing rather than decreasing the birthrate.
I look forward to seeing your calculations when your book comes out.
In any case, I had read several times over the past 3 decades or so that the ultimate carrying capacity of Earth was around 40 billion, and that the limiting factor is waste heat. This is not the CO2 climate change thing. Instead its the actual amount of heat produced by industrial and commercial processes as well as living itself gets to the point where it directly heats the Earth up high enough to make living untenable.
Perhaps this is not the case, or that better manufacturing processes will reduce the amount of waste heat generated for any given amount of “product” made.
Thanks.
Actually that post will come out a lot sooner, on Monday or Tuesday. They’re basic crop yield/arable land/caloric needs calculations, for the most part, but they all tend to converge to ~100 billion.
The actually interesting calculations are to do with whether mankind can directly convert energy it generates into food with any efficiency, which will allow it to go way beyond 100 billion. While I didn’t expect it to be very feasible, its sheer inefficiency surprised even me – – so much so that I almost suspect I made have made an error in my calculations.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1017509567306043399
If true, that would seem to rule out non-cryogenic generation ships. But we’ll have plenty of space to discuss that come next week.
That seems unlikely.
There are amusing calculations (Fremlin 1964, “How Many People Can the World Support?”) showing that you’d need to get up to 10^16-10^18 people before heat dissipation due to human bodies becomes a problem. I don’t remember the exact figures, and I can’t be bothered looking them up right now, but the energy available to modern man is around 100x that of his caloric intake. This suggests that Earth could easily support even a quadrillion people before waste heat in general becomes any sort of problem.
Eric Kaufmann: Why the Religious Will Inherit the Earth
Thanks for the mention of some points I made about natalist behavior and technology some years back. I do think that tech will greatly reduce the burden of child-raising. Computers and robots will track movement of kids for parents, cook for them, clean up after them. Interactive computers will end up teaching many topics as well parents. Home schooling will become easier. Autonomous vehicles with auto-locked doors will fetch kids from school and move them around between houses of different parents so the kids can play. Tech will automate the ability of parents to be overprotective.
The ability to reduce bad genetic variants in offspring and boost good genetic variants (good and bad as defined by parents) will reduce the perceived risk and boost the perceived benefit of having children. Certainly a lot of upper middle class parents would leap at the chance of totally avoiding regression to the mean. Instead have kids who have great prospects, who learn fast, have drive, high innate self control, long time orientation in pursuit of goals. Kids who make wise decisions and have very high probabilities of career success, scientific success, social and mate-seeking success.
Another argument I’ve made: parents could even use gene editing to boost the pro-natalist genes of their children. They’d do this in order to assure grandchildren. This would have an explosive effect on future TFR.
We are going to need some parents to genetically engineer their offspring for 150+ IQ kids in order to handle melting polar ice caps, acidified oceans, run-away population sizes, wrecked ecosystems.
Valid and important point.
Gene editing will not avert a population explosion; if anything, it might accelerate it. But combined with IQ augmentation, it may avert the Age of Malthusian Industrialism (since tech growth can continue to expand carrying capacity).
It’s not body heat I was referring to. But, rather, the heat generated by all of our industrial processes – cities, factories, air conditioning, generating plants, etc. All of these thing generate heat (based on Carnot efficiency). What I’ve heard over the years was that this is the limiting factor.
Add biotech food factories into the mix, as well as a method to move the planet, we could end up living like Pierson’s Puppeteers. Of course the Puppeteers are smart and we’re mostly not.
Guys, we’re going to need space colonization for that pro-natal stuff.
Space colonization is absolutely not a practical way to bleed off excess population. It is not even a practical way to grow a large human population somewhere else, at least not in this solar system. Earth is such a better planet for humans than any other planet in the solar system that human populations anywhere else would have to be smaller.
We’d need really cheap and fast interstellar travel to make large scale migration practical. That might never happen.
If TFR goes back above 2.1 and stays there then at best tech will delay the day of reckoning. It might delay it a long time. But we end up with war and collapse at some point.
Randall, I’m not talking about settling Mars or some such thing. I’m talking about the O’neill high frontier concept, which offers far greater potential than planetary surface colonies.
I’m genuinely curious – how do you know? There are flights to Tel Aviv, but “infested”?
I resent that! Maybe Orthodox (and nominally Orthodox) Romanians, but Pentecostals and other high fertility Romanian groups will keep chugging along. There was an article in one of the main national newspapers a week ago about a Pentecostal woman dying of cancer at 49 and leaving behind 18 children. Definitely Romanian and not dirt poor, though obviously not comfortable. And there are plenty of breeders among the Orthodox, not least of which we have the priests themselves, since not only are they not celibate, but they cannot get a parish without being married. Minimum number of children 2 and I’ve met some with 5. Priestly fertility is hardly dysgenic, whetever one may say about the Church.