Emil Kirkegaard et al. (2019) have just released Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans:
A newly released multivariate polygenic score for educational attainment, cognitive ability, and self-rated mathematical ability in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study was examined as a mediator of the group difference between Jews (n = 53) and 2 Christian denominations, Catholics (n = 2,603) and Lutherans (n = 2,027), with respect to educational attainment, IQ, and performance on a similarities measure. It was found that the Jewish performance advantage over both Catholics and Lutherans with respect to all 3 measures was partially and significantly mediated by group differences in the polygenic score. This result is consistent with the prediction that the high average cognitive ability of Jews may have been shaped, in part, by polygenic selection acting on this population over the course of several millennia.
One rejoinder to claims of significant race differences in IQ is that, despite the overwhelming abundance of circumstantial evidence, there has to date been no real “hard” genetic evidence for it.
(Well, there was Davide Piffer’s work, but it did not meet with wide acceptance).
Well, that’s about to change now. It has now been rigorously shown that Jews have more alleles associated with higher IQs than Caucasoid Gentiles. In other words, Jews have higher IQs at least partially (~50%) on account of genetic factors, not because they train for IQ tests, because society “privileges” them, or because of the Jewish culture of learning and hard work.
Many more such studies are on their way.
Racial blank slatism is going to become untenable within the next few years. Incidentally, due respect to Charles Murray, Razib Khan, and possibly some others I forget, who gave a window of 3-5 years back in 2016. They were exactly on the mark.
The only thing that remains to be seen is whether these landmark developments will spark the next scientific revolution, or whether the latter-day Lysenkoists ramp up enforcement of today’s politically correct orthodoxies.
and furthermore, it’s easier to change the capability of small populations, due to them being small. so it’s much less difficult, over generations of social selection, to make a small group smarter, than it would be to make a general population smarter.
so the process that made jews smarter is really hard to replicate for big general populations. 100 years ago in the anglosphere, there was the social movement towards such a policy of via eugenic practices. it would have worked slower, and had less effect, but it would have been productive, if continued for generations.
today though, most general populations appear to clearly be in natural, mother nature directed dysgenic practices.
thus even in the best case scenario, it would be nearly impossible to make most general populations of third worlders a good amount smarter by social practices, since you’d need to have a smarter group continuously supervising them for 100 years or more. so, no real hope of changing the kinds of things that most social scientists are concerned with, by existing means. only super science can intervene.
One has to ask how the Jews (and the Lutherans, and the Catholics) were picked.
If the sample was drawn, say, from synagogue membership rolls, then one could simply be demonstrating that Judaism draws more intelligent adherents than the other sects. There might be rafts of idiots who were genetically Jewish — but didn’t attend synagogue.
Jews are forever leaving — and returning — to the fold. I’m perfectly open to the idea that Jews have a higher average IQ. At the same time, one has to be suspicious of any result that relies to any extent on the respondents self-selecting themselves as ‘Jewish.’ All kinds of less mentally gifted people of Jewish stock could have drifted out of the tribe. In a generation or two, they wouldn’t even be aware that they were genetically Jewish. At the same time, the sample left would be skewed towards the more intelligent.
Laughable pseudoscience by guys with bachelor’s degrees in social science or linguistics.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_Kirkegaard
AK: Imagine posting an article written by this nutjob at a far left SJW site and expecting to be taken seriously.
https://images.encyclopediadramatica.rs/8/83/OliverSmith03.jpg
The paper is another IQist agitprop piece by the usual crew of jokers including the fabulous Woodley of Meeny, Miny, Moe (minus the huckster Davide Piffer). They try to push and reinforce two memes: (1) Jews are smarter and (2) Genes are responsible for IQ.
(1)The sample of Jews is very small (circa +50) and consists of educated Jews. Their education level is 1.4 SD times higher than that of large sample of Christians. Also look at their data massaging: For a scientific paper the histogram made of a sample of 50 plus looks too smooth, too idealized. Then they do the usual hand waving using various meaningless statical tests (P – values and whatnot – Nassim Taleb would love to take a shot at them).
(2) The polygenic score (PGS) they use explains only 9.61% of IQ variance and 7.84% of Educational Level variance (see Table 1). Yes, there is some concordance between group averages because their Jews have higher PGS by ≈4/3 SD and IQ higher by ≈2/3 SD but because the two numbers are significantly different this exclude a possibility that IQ differences can be attributed to linear dependence on PGS.
There is no science in the paper. It is meme pushing. They managed to get a foot in the door and got published probably because of the first author who seems to have a legit association with some university.
The matter of IQ differences among races per se was not a problem. Who would have cared if studies showed Arabs are smarter than Filipinos or vice versa. After all, no one is bothered by the notion that East Asians have slightly higher IQ than whites.
The IQ controversy revolved around only two groups and for different reasons.
The Anti-‘racist’ West reviles the idea of blacks being less intelligent. Why? Negro-Worship is part of PC, and blacks have come to be seen as fount of genius, creativity, and wisdom. So, the idea that blacks might be less intelligent is absolutely taboo. BUT if, say, James Watson had said blacks are probably smarter but held back only by history or ‘legacy of racism’, he would have been showered with praise. Also, as ‘racism’ is seen as the worst sin and because slavery & discrimination in the past were partly justified on grounds of black inferiority, ANY discussion of blacks being inferior in anything is seen as return of white supremacism.
Another reason why black IQ inferiority is suppressed is it undermines ‘white guilt’, an essential component of White Moral Paralysis that makes whites serve the Holy Other, even though, to be sure, Jews channel ‘white guilt’ mainly to serve Jewish than black interests. After all, the US has been fighting Wars for Israel, not Wars for Congo or Detroit. If it turns out that blacks are less intelligent(and more impulsive), much of the current black problems can be blamed on biology than on history(of white ‘racism’).
So, in a nutshell, the controversy was never about IQ differences AMONG ALL RACES. PC doesn’t care about most races. PC doesn’t care if anyone thinks Turks are smarter than Iranians.
The only real issues were ‘Jews are smarter’ and ‘blacks are dumber’ and their implications to the PC dogma. It was the JAS-BAD Factor.
Has Taleb stopped LARPing as a Greek/Roman/Sumerian and admitted he’s no less of an Arab than his Muslim neighbors in the Levant yet?
Also, tell us how groups can develop in different environments yet have the same intelligence. That’s not even the case for non-humans like dogs. Am I going to hear that humans are too special for that to apply tot them?
Anglos/Amerimutts have a fixation with Kunta Kinte as the noble savage. Liberal degenerates have long held the Negro as a symbol of liberation.
The author’s premise is invalid.
It’s not “smarts” or “IQ” that gives jews an advantage over gentile whites, but is their rabid insistence on cultural and social cohesiveness, insularity and nepotism (but only for themselves) that gives them an “advantage”. This same cultural and social cohesiveness that is prized so highly by jewish interests is denied to gentile whites. Jews, to a man will fight to deny this same cultural and social cohesiveness to gentile whites that they themselves enjoy as it is a major part of the jewish purpose–the destruction of gentile white culture, which IS superior to any jewish cultural or social society. If jews did not possess this power, they would most likely be rag merchants, liquor merchants, or furniture merchants–nothing more.
As I have previously stated, jewish success is based on cultural and social cohesiveness and insularity–NOT “smarts” or “IQ”. Once enough jews get into a position of power in the work world or education systems, they will hire and promote their own, even bypassing more qualified gentile white candidates.
Jews have latched on to cultural cohesiveness and nepotism, as it serves their purpose exceedingly well.
At the same time, jews pushed the concept of racial “equality”, (but only for gentile whites), backing it up with “civil-rights” and “equal accommodation” laws which are enforced by governments–but only against whites. These “civil-rights” laws are used as a “battering ram” against gentile whites to diffuse and fragment any semblance of gentile white solidarity and cohesiveness that may arise.
A great reckoning dealing with the jews is coming. As gentile whites become more marginalized, the accusation of being tagged as “racist” or a “holocaust denier” is rapidly losing its “sting”.
Increasingly, jews are more wary of being “called out” and recognized as “jews”. One can call a jew a shyster, shylock, bankster, criminal or ne-er-do-well, and it will roll off his back like water off a duck, BUT call a jew a “jew”, and he will recoil in horror, having been “found out”.
It is the White gentile male that represents the epitome of human development. PERIOD!
It is us White gentiles who gave so-called “civil-rights” laws a chance, that give EVERY race an equal OPPORTUNITY to excel (at least that was the intent, if not the result). NO OTHER RACE OR CULTURE has ever done anything like that. NOT ONE in the course of human development…NOT ONE…
The greatest advance in human development was the formulation and implementation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.
Throughout human history, NO OTHER DOCUMENTS have ever stated that our “rights” are inherent in our humanity and NOT “given” to us by government.
These founding documents proclaim that there are “limits” to government power, and that the people “allow” the government to exercise “certain enumerated powers”, not unlimited powers.
These founding documents recognize that we are citizens, not “subjects”.
Although the Constitution of the United States has been ignored, disregarded, and even violated, its principles are still as valid today as when the documents were first written.
It is gentile WHITE MEN who espoused such brilliance, that will never be matched by any other racial or cultural group.
Thank you for being on here. This crap needs countering. These bozos see a bunch of charts and graphs, and wazoo! Science! Inarguable Science!
That just shows that Jews are a better lifeform than White Gentiles since they serve their racial interest (doing all they can to terrorize, crush, and subvert their racial competitors) while Whitey won’t (which goes well beyond Jewish infiltration since such degenerate behavior has been in Euro populations since the Romans). And in that case, I’d still call them more wise since they recognize that a man’s kind is his badge.
Whatever you say. Taleb still isn’t a Greek.
JEWS IN ISRAEL HAVE IQ IN THE 90’S.
If it is genetic, then how come Jews in Israel have lower IQ? Avg = 90’s.
And then why Israel is a failed state, trying to beg US for money, instead of becoming rich on its own?
MENA Jews dragging the score down. Same thing happens with White Gentiles when you include the Potatomunchers and South Europeans.
Amerifats can’t even reliably succeed in war across the decades, keep its population White, and keep Pablo from swaming into their country. I’d bet on Israel staying alive and culling the Achmeds before I’d bet on America becoming White again.
It is JEWS that have so corrupted the rest of humanity with their “multiculturalism and diversity for thee, but not for me” mantra utilizing their “holohoax” guilt trip which they have been extremely successful with.
Fortunately, “all (good for the jews-not good for everyone else) things must come to an end”. Pogrom #110 is coming…It won’t be pretty, but, it is on its way…
Regards,
3., 4., 9., and 12. all demonstrate something; man’s incorrigible tendency to deny any fact he finds unpleasant, regardless of the evidence.
Whatever the possible flaws in this study, of course intelligence is determined mostly by genetics. To my mind, to argue otherwise puts one in the same camp as Holocaust deniers, global warming deniers, and flat-earthers. ‘I don’t like it, so it isn’t so.’
Please, grow up. Try to approach life with a minimum of intellectual rigor. Reality isn’t just whatever would please you most. That’s the kind of reasoning a spoiled four-year old practices.
The truth is out there — whatever you would prefer.
‘…Fortunately, “all (good for the jews-not good for everyone else) things must come to an end”. Pogrom #110 is coming…It won’t be pretty, but, it is on its way…’
You may be right, but I regard the fact as unfortunate, not fortunate.
We’re all being dragged down into a place I’d rather not go. Ugly as what we face is, the reaction — and those leading it — won’t be any prettier.
I’m sure part of it is just resentment. Another part of it is some hostility to the idea that some men are born with gifts that grant them the means to leap ahead. Possibly guilt, possibly being insulted at any suggestion that they didn’t suffer enough for their position.
You don’t see this belligerence to saying that facial structure or height are heritable. They do this since they don’t hold beauty or height to the same status as intelligence (though both are important when it comes to attraction).
http://eugenics.net/papers/pson1.html
Read this. It points out that there’s really nothing about asserting intelligence is heritable and differs between groups but requires cultivation that is at odds with European civilizations.
Then are women, gays and blacks not human?
You’re just another christcuck larping as a liberal.
Jews are the most feminine type of man, and subvert a system but never end up ruling it.
Simply, because rule = control of women and they religiously have no desire to.
Any one can bang a Jewish chick and the Kikes will raise the kid a Jew for you||
Or just simply christcuck bs about those who suffer being superior, and meek shall inherit the Earth
Instead of this man is blessed by the Gods, and a righteous man helps his co-bearers who are less fortunte.
O well, all your christcuck weakness is causing mass dissension.
You got lucky with Asia being in a warring states period due to Altaic Nomads, and the Americas succuming to disease.
Otherwise, not even homosexuals spoke about women’s rights in ancient times.
For that, you can thank Mary the Whore
While I don’t really care for Israel, I wouldn’t say that having the most startups per capita is a symptom of a failed state.
Israel’s average is brought down by Arabs and Sephardic Jews; its Ashkenazis are also dumber (and more nationalist) than the ones in the West.
It’s interesting, isn’t it? Israel has the most startups per capita, but even the performance of its top-performing Hebrew-speaking students on the PISA exam is nothing to write home about (the top-performing Hebrew-speaking students in Israel perform slightly worse on PISA than the top-performing students in the OCED as a whole).
I wonder if Israel would have had a stronger top (in terms of IQ) if it wasn’t for mass Ashkenazi-Mizrahi intermarriage. Is assortative (sp?) mating widespread in Israel? What about several decades ago?
I completely agree with your last sentence here. Mizrahis and Arabs bring down the Israeli average IQ, though I really do wonder as to why exactly its Ashkenazis appear to be duller than those in the West. After all, Israel got a huge influx on Soviet Jewish immigrants and even if some of them weren’t fully Jewish by ancestry, one would think that assortative mating in the Soviet Union would have ensured that Jewish-Gentile interrmarriage wouldn’t result in too much of an IQ drop among the children of such couples. Indeed, the dullness of Israeli Ashkenazi Jews really is a mystery to me.
BTW, it would be interesting to see a similar study done for Israeli Jews and especially for Israeli Ashkenazi Jews and Israeli Mizrahi Jews separately.
Will GWAS really convince anyone? The evidence for group differences in IQ is pretty overwhelming now. Perhaps, a small number of intellectuals will change their minds, but GWAS, being more purely statistical, is easier to obfuscate than a lot of other indicators.
Lewontin’s Fallacy is repeated again and again because DNA adds a layer of complexity that befuddles. The original, much older argument that inspired the Marxist Lewontin was based on the range of skull sizes of blacks and whites having overlap. Boy, did it it sound dumb! I bet hardly anyone repeated it, outside of a small circle of communists.
Ironically, though, if one (falsely) rules out IQ as the cause of disproportionate Jewish power, wealth, and influence, then this could make one much more inclined to believe in a Jewish conspiracy. Similarly, if one (falsely) believes that there is no difference in average IQ potential between Gentiles and Jews and yet still sees Jews perform significantly above Gentiles (on average, of course), one could wonder as to what exactly the Jews are doing to keep Gentile IQs down–in other words, to become a believer in a Jewish conspiracy in regards to this.
As for the lower Black average IQ, interestingly enough, genetics actually does sound like a nicer explanation for this than Blacks’ own moral defects. After all, if Blacks’ own moral defects were responsible for this (as colorblind conservatives might like to believe), then this would justify things such as aggressively cutting welfare and the social safety net, et cetera. If, on the other hand, genetics is to blame for this, then colorblind conservatives can no longer blame Black people for their lack of success in life.
Who are the more authentic Jews, the MENA Jews or the European Jews?
Ashkenazi Jews are at least as Jewish as Taleb is Greek. What with how their European ancestry is largely maternal, not paternal.
OT: Robert Lindsey’s blog has been taken down.
a weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil. (The Guardian)
an emblematic figure of the “fake science”, the Danish Emil Kirkegaard, new darling of the extreme right. (Le Temps)
I haven’t been there for years TBH, too much Bigfoot posting, too many weird rants. Though he deFriended me after Trump bombed Syria (he deFriended all pro-Trumpers at that point), I bear him no ill will and I do hope that he made backup copies, since that blog surely accounts for a large chunk of his life’s work.
Incidentally, his blog was always blocked in Russia, for whatever reason.
TBH, I wonder why exactly Syria made him so butthurt.
Jews should be the poster child for motivation and culture being more decisive in determining a groups status than intelligence.
Whites produce significantly more smart people than Jews in absolute numbers, yet have lost substantial ground to Jews in terms of elite influence.
History has given us the clearest example one could wish for in a tidy little package – if you have the wrong motivation-affecting beliefs, the wrong social organization, i.e the wrong culture, a group with substantially fewer smart people than you but better culture will gain substantial ground at your expense.
Yet somehow, HBD people see the rise of Jews as demonstrating genetic determinism. It is astonishing.
I wonder at what point whites will wake up to the fact that HBD is a movement designed to “freeze” a particular moment in history – white decline – as the moment in history that represents the “essence” of the white race, thus cementing white decline, discourage effort and lower motivation among whites, and perpetuate into eternity the current elite set-up, which is composed of a subset of elite whites, Jews, and in a subordinate role, Asians.
Jews do not consider us “goyim” to be human, but classify us as “livestock with souls-to be used for the advantage of the jews”. It’s all in your “how-to” book–the Talmud. As far as me being liberal, you’ve got it all wrong, pal…simply aware of “the elephant in the room”…
HBD can be seen as a political movement directed at mid-level whites to convince them to accept the current elite set-up by offering them the emotional comfort that in the midst of their decline they are at least better than the darker races.
While Jews and Asians – and elite whites – prize motivation and hard work over innate ability, mid-level whites are taught to believe everything is genetically determined.
While Jews, Asians, and elite whites are careful to create and nurture a set of beliefs that builds motivation and morale, HBD seeks to inculcate in mid-level whites resigned fatalism – all the while holding out the carrot that acceptance of these fatalism inducing beliefs carries with it the emotional reward of being better than the dark races.
Its worth noting that a substantial portion of Asians are rebelling against their subordinate-elite status and returning to Asia. Elite whites and Jews will never truly share power with Asians, and Asians cannot seriously compete against that group, and they are beginning to realize this. How large a group of Asians feels this way is as yet unclear, and it may still be a minority, but there are signs that it is growing.
I don’t want to go there, as well. However, looking back through history, pogroms against the jews seem to be the response to and end result of jewish overreach. If it must happen, let it happen in my time, so that my children and grandchildren don’ t have to live through it. Regards,
There is also the egg and chicken question – is HBD an expression of white decline, i.e a philosophy spontaneously and naturally arising among a people that has become resigned to fatalism, or is HBD designed to cause fatalism, or at least seek to be the cause.
10:1 HRC would have bombed the hell out of Syria, dropping more ordinance than Trump.
I’m not buying this, as is pointed out many times, Israel is not an IQ overachiever so the argument becomes is that it’s only the ashkenazi jews. Many will say that ashkenazi jews are clever because of race mixing with whites, however one can then also argue that all the jewish traits (cheating, dishonesty, scheming, thieving) are part of the ashkenazi. Jews really do cheat on things like IQ tests (because preparing for an IQ test is cheating).
Being against a progrom means you are ok with white genocide (it can be called nothing else, this is really what it is). Why is being a gutmensch towards the jews so important to you?
Since the only movement that bills itself as advocating white interests ends up being at its core a white-declinist movement, it is probably time for me to return to the Jewish fold.
I will probably be retiring my AaronB handle and posting under a new handle advocating HBD and genetic determinism, promoting the idea that the Jewish ascendancy is primarily genetically based, and China’s rise inevitable and unstoppable.
On the plus side, Steve Sailer will finally let me post comments on his blog.
Ultimately one must choose loyalty to a group – but that group must be worthy of loyalty.
Jews are not white, you cannot go back to the jewish fold since you can never leave it in the first place.
And remind me again why exactly we should care about a bunch of camel herders?
Thanks for letting me know that I am a mulatto (quadroon, to be precise–specifically a quarter Jewish).
I guess that I can begin labeling myself a POC!
China has the IQ but perhaps not the creativity necessary to be a true global leader, though.
I don’t know why you have this tongue in cheek attitude, one is coming across an ever increasing number of articles by jews writing that jews are not white. Being a quarter jew is good enough to get automatic entry into Israel, if it is good enough for them then its good enough for me, so yes you are not white.
But the Nazis would have accepted him as full white without limitations, and me as a half they would have accepted but with severe limitations.
So there’s that.
In any case, I leave you to your whiteness with your HBD, IQ obsession, and general materialism to continue your decline into senescence, while I will be joining my natural home, a group whose set of beliefs builds morale and motivation, and which I could teach my children without fear their morale will be damaged for life, the elite-white, Jewish, and Asian ascendancy. Many of their beliefs may be crazy at the moment, but that can be changed from within, at least partially because they do not subscribe to determinism so are mentally flexible, and at their core they are healthier and have a brighter future than the HBD-right.
Keep on dreaming of that pogrom.
excuse me . . . tell me that gene again.
Wrong again. Quarter-Jews were classified as Mischlinge second degree according to the Nuremberg Laws.
Furthermore, the distinction between Western and Eastern Jews also factored into their pragmatism.
Correct, a second degree mischling had more restrictions than I realized. Sorry xyz sounds like you can’t be a full member of the white-HBD cult, and may be forced to believe in the efficacy of culture and upbringing at least as much as purity of blood.
You will never have a Negro Japan.
Found the creationist.
Either you accept man is an animal and thus subject to the same rules as the other animals or you don’t.
Blah, blah, blah, thats so original David French, regurgitating the same stuff that has been shoved down peoples throats since birth is a sign of mental flexibility…
I am however glad you are writing this, to show those whites out there that are still thinking that a jew can be pro white.
I thought that quarter-Jews were discriminated in Nazi Germany to some extent. Am I wrong about this?
Also, FTR, my non-Jewish ancestry is Russian and Belarusian. I don’t know if this would have made a difference in Nazi Germany.
Did the Nazis treat someone who was 1/4 Jewish and 3/4 Slavic differently from someone who was 1/4 Jewish and 3/4 German?
The blogger JayMan is Black and an HBD-believer, though.
They treated part-Jews in Bohemia-Moravia and occupied Western Europe like German part-Jews, but they didn’t bother to make distinctions between Jews and part-Jews/converts in occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union.
I am not sure how a 1/4 Jewish and 3/4 Lusatian person would be treated but I would lean towards being treated like German Mischlinge.
I think it would depend on which territory they lived.
And what is the IQ of Ashkenazi in Israel? The difference between IQ of Ashkenazi in Israel and in the West (if it difference exists) is a serious argument against the genetic conditioning of IQ
I’ve seen this in the U.S. – students from Russia (like Anatoly), China, and India
still worship science and technology (and the high IQ individuals who are skilled
in technical disciplines) because they want their countries to be stronk and
universally feared (who cares about being respected?).
Apparently, they never got the memo that there is a profound disillusionment
with science and technology in the West, the same West that invented much of
the modern world. I won’t say,along with extreme environmentalists, that human
beings are a cancer on the face of the planet, but we are close to it at the current
primitive stage in our evolution. Certainly the Earth would be better off without
us (although reducing the global population back to 2-3 billion would help
mitigate the amount of degradation that the global ecosystems are suffering
because of our presence – this would be the first step in the healing of the
planet).
The disillusionment with science and technology – proving that we left modernity
a long time ago (most would say back in the 1960s) – has taken many forms.
Evolutionary psychology has demonstrated that we’re essentially smart chimps –
we tend to be tribal, aggressive, revengeful, lustful, territorial, and status-seeking.
These traits are baked into our reptilian and paleomammalian brains. The neocortex
and especially the prefrontal cortex are too weak to resist these primitive impulses.
In the hands of perfect beings science and technology would be a great boon to
humanity but we are far from perfect, with the result that science and technology
mostly amplify our evil tendencies, making us far more destructive than the primitive
tribes that we feel so superior to. Metaphorically speaking, it’s Goethe’s Der
Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) being enacted on the stage of our
failing civilization. No wonder there is much revulsion against science and against
the high IQ individuals who gave us modernity. Who is going to play the role of
the old master in Goethe’s tale and save us from ourselves?
Fortunately, there are limits and feedback loops in the system that may prevent our
collapse. No one is making great inventions and great discoveries anymore. The Age
of Genius is over. Many would say that inventions peaked during 1870-1970. For
my grandmother whose life roughly coincided with that period life changed so
drastically I can’t even imagine how she was able to cope. For those of us who
remember the ‘70s, other than airplanes and cars becoming more reliable, life
is still fundamentally the same. Nobel Prizes in Physics are becoming a joke
(Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, with the possible exception of Linus Pauling who
almost single-handedly founded quantum chemistry, were always a joke but
then chemistry is an applied field). By the way, economics is not a science –
all the “Nobel” recipients ought to return their medals. To me the first sign of
rebellion against science was the 1993 cancellation by Congress of the
Supercolliding Super Collider (SSC) which, ironically, was already partly built
outside of Dallas, TX. Unlike the U.S., Europe decided to go ahead and build
its own collider (LHC) in Geneva, which has been a huge disappointment –
it discovered no new particles (the Higgs was already predicted in the ‘60s),
no new symmetries, and no higher dimensions. In the absence of new
experimental data particle physicists are essentially hallucinating (I would
like to know sometimes what they’ve been smoking), and inventing models
that have no relation to reality. Fundamental physics has basically become
a make-work program for the high I.Q. crowd. I suppose governments are
afraid of theoretical physicists rioting in the streets, and stealing pencils and
pocket protectors so to pacify them they continue the funding, at least in
Europe. Sabine Hossenfelder, German physicist and author of “Lost in Math,”
however, will not have it. She’s like the German version of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She proposed recently that 90% of the world’s 40,000 fundamental physicists should
be fired because they contribute nothing to society (applied physicists get to keep
their jobs!). Europe must now decide whether to build an even bigger collider which
would be even more expensive, and would be just as likely to make dubious
discoveries as the LHC. For an informative discussion I recommend, “Should the
Europeans give up?” on Peter Woit’s Columbia University blog, “Not Even Wrong.”
By the way, Peter Woit and Lubos Motl have nothing kind to say about each other.
Lubos is a Czech string theory fanatic, and Peter is a Latvian ancestry critic of
string theories. Who would’ve thunk even 30 years ago that tribal (and gender) wars
would invade physics, probably the most rarefied and philosophical of all
disciplines?
Then the whole IQ metric is a complete fraud. Nations obsessed with IQ test (Japanese, Chinese, Americans) are preparing for tests, Nations indifferent to IQ (for example Russians) are not preparing for them. Accordingly, the comparison of Nations IQ becomes meaningless
The word “polygenic” already makes Kierkegaard et al. look untrustworthy. They chose a vast complexity which allowed cover for whatever
There is a convincing paper out there somewhere, I forget where. It was provocation several months ago by Wizard of Oz, who mentioned the primary author, that led me to it. (I didn’t agree with the Wonderful Wizard’s interpretation of one point in it but dropped the argument.)
That paper convinced me that Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent than the rest of us. AND that Sephardic Jews are not, are as dumb as the rest of us.
It had weaknesses, aspects of no interest to the authors, the assumption that the Ashkenazi Jews of Yiddishland migrated from the west, never substantiated, no records of mass migration, but always assumed by the likes of Leon Uris in Exodus. A play on the name Ashkenaz, ignoring the fact that converts in two European regions could independently have been given that biblical name mentioned in Genesis and Jeremiah, a name meaning Japhethite. (What Uris writes on the topic, undocumented mass eastward migration of the Jews fleeing West European persecution, followed by terrible persecution in Poland once they got there, is particularly silly.) The authors tried to explore how the difference in intelligence arose making various assumptions.
In summary their position, the position of that earlier paper, was that there was a “genetic bottleneck”, meaning that at one point in history the East European Ashkenazi Jews were reduced to, or were, a tiny number. In short, inbreeding by a small number caused them to “evolve” or drift genetically away from the surrounding population. That had negative effects, hereditary diseases the Ashkenazi Jews are subject to, but also that positive side-effect, hereditary higher intelligence.
I haven’t read the paper by Kierkegaard et al. but if they think they have gone “polygenic” yet make no distinctions, just write about “the Jews” … well, the Jews are a multivariate polygenic whole, Sephardim and Ashkenazim and Orientals mixed together, right? If you go multivariate enough we are all the same.
Here we are told of two Christian denominations but not two Jewish denominations when the two Jewish denominations are very highly relevant but the two Christian denominations …
Total nonsense. Yet another rave by the kind who stand with their hand around Adolf Hitler’s shoulder claiming in total agreement with him that the Jews are a distinct race. Such efforts are endless, are enormous, in typical cases highly managed to make certain the desired result is obtained.
And the numbers, 53, 2,603, 2,027 … the 53 could have been selected by the usual gang. Easily.
A little progress has been made in the organized deception. Earlier attempts were discredited by the fact that every geneticist or other researcher was a Jew in a laboratory with a Jewish director, funded by Jewish research grants. Now they have realized that and become a little more cunning. A principal author with a famous Nordic Aryan name.
Many more such studies are on their way. Haw! Haw!
“Black Hebrew Israelites (also called Black Hebrews, African Hebrew Israelites, and Hebrew Israelites) are groups of Black Americans who think that they are descendants of the ancient Israelites.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hebrew_Israelites
‘…Why is being a gutmensch towards the jews so important to you?’
Well, for one thing, I don’t particularly dislike Jews.
I agree that those that prepare for IQ tests adds nothing of use, however there is value in those tests where there no cheating to see what the overall differences in the results are.
First we have to settle on the definition of intelligence. Second one has do decide to what extent the IQ test score is a measure of some intelligence. The IQ test score has heritable component as twin studies show. People seem to agree that its heritability is around 50% based on twin studies. Yet all studies using polygenic scores from tens fo thousands of SNPs could not account for more than 11% of variance so far. This is the missing heritability problem. In the paper we are discussing here the polygenic score explains 9.61% of IQ variance in the sample.
Your phrase mostly by genetics is not warranted. It is your belief and wishful thinking which one may acquire by spending too much time at IQists HBDists sites.
LOL. “Catholics and Lutherans”. Mixed together and combined into “Christians”. I want to see the Lutheran score separated out.
If I did the study I would combine Catholics and Jews into a “non-protestant” category vs Lutherans demononstrate Germans are the smartest.
A Jew could support a white culture worth supporting – but join a culture of despair and resignation, from a culture of optimism and motivation, why would anyone do that…
Jews in the 19th century defected to European culture in droves, because it was superior to what they had. Today, Jews are affirming their distinctiveness from whites, and elite whites are defecting.
A culture of deterministic despair will never attract high quality people. Genetic determinism will scare away motivated people and intelligent people – because it kills motivation, and because its single factor explanation for everything kills thought.
Still though, I suppose there are some Jews who also feel despair and resignation in their bones, who are tired of life, and may well support what you call “whiteness” – presumably the HBD culture of deterministic despair.
That is true – I think one finds a deterministic philosophy attractive insofar as one feels inner pessimism and is tired of life. And such people exist in all races. Jayman is an absolute HBD fanatic.
Also, see Karlins recent highly pessimistic posts about the future – the more pessimistic and life-weary one is, the more deterministic philosophies seem attractive.
Yes, I was mistaken, one quarter Jews did suffer some discrimination, but it was not very extreme.
Ah, well, your Slavic ancestry would have played a role, I’m afraid.
Of course in actuality instead of Lefie Land, if the Redskins and other rightfully culled rats had a lower impact on their environments it was from incapability instead of an aware choice. You see it today with all the pollution coming from non-White countries* and Redskins doing every trick in the book to take advantage of the White Man’s technology regardless of the impact on Da Environment.
*https://twitter.com/heywildrich/status/1026599563480784897
You Jews were never accepted as kin (as you shouldn’t have, belonging among a kinship isn’t a matter of following Magic Paper as in Amerimuttville). And European civilizations were “deterministic” far longer than they accepted the blank slatism/interchangeability/rousseau brand garbage that the Enlightenment Degenerates, Eternal Anglo, and Kikes Like You have been pushing since the 18th century at the earliest. See also:
http://eugenics.net/papers/pson1.html
Considering that the Europe that would proceed to mow over much of the world never actively denied the importance of one’s race, sex, and pedigree…
It’s not like your kind holds itself to the standards it helps push on Whitey (see the Palestinians getting steamrolled and deportations of migrants heading to Israel).
That’s nice of you, Colin.
Israel Shamir writes in Galilee Flowers, where he distinguishes between Jews and the Jews:
Israel Shahak quotes Maimonides, his Code, which I understand or he says in effect is current Jewish law. Jewish History, Jewish Religion, pp. 29-30:
Understand that a Jew who doesn’t hate Colin Wright, a Jew who doesn’t want to kill Colin Wright, thereby commits a sin.
Love your enemies. Do good to them that hate you. Pray for them that dispitefully use you.
But don’t be fooled.
Do you find it strange that in the 19th century Jews defected to European culture en masse, while today it is elite whites who are defecting to a Jewish-led culture?
Part of your problem is that modern white culture in its decline has left you unable to think in anything but extreme binaries.
I am not a blank slatist.
Although blank slatism is a peculiarly European contribution to world thought – developed and introduced entirely by Europeans – of course European culture at its height believed that inherited traits played a significant role. All cultures do, including Jewish.
All great culture, including European, exist in the creative tension generated by balancing opposite extremes – a sense of ones unalterable genetic identity is balanced by a sense of the efficacy of personal effort and a sense of limitless possibility. Grounded in the context of a specific identity, one has the confidence to soar.
Modern white cultures, instead of a fruitful union of opposites, has bifurcated into sterile extremes – blank slatism and generic determinism. Each side captures only a partial truth. This bifurcation is the result of the analytic tendency gaining supremacy over the synthetic tendency in Western culture.
However, determinism leads to despair and resignation, and mental rigidity, while blank slatism leads to unmoored looniness, as we see, but also zest for life, ambition, and optimism. Blank slatism, as crazy it is, carries within itself the possibility of change, because it is not deterministic. Determinism is just a slow death.
“between Jews (n = 53) and 2 Christian denominations, Catholics (n = 2,603) and Lutherans (n = 2,027), with respect to educational attainment, IQ, and performance on a similarities measure.”
OK. There always was selective migration to the USA. The Lutherians of the USA (Germans and Scandinavians) moved to the Wild West at the time the USA did not need intelligent people, it needed farmers. These farmers usually were surplus people in their home countries and enterprising enough to start a new life. The successful ones had a good life in Europe and were not so willing to move.
The Catholics include Irish. Irland was and still is a low IQ country in Europe, and though the ones who moved to the USA when they had the famine and all had a higher average than the ones who stayed, they were still not average Northern Europeans. From Poland, another Catholic country, most of the immigrants to the USA were from the mountains where they had surplus population, not the brightest Poles also.
While in Russia were imposed new laws that removed the privileges of the Jews. They were the city people, much better educated than the country-side native people. Jews lost the monopole on alcohol production and selling. They lost the guaranteed jobs in the governmental section. Therefore intelligent Jews moved away, unlike for most nations, the less fortunate but rather clever move to find a new life. Richard Lynn proposed that this selective migration is the explanation why the Ashkenazi Jews in the USA have the average IQ of 110 (though he measured that the verbal IQ of American Jews is 107.5 and the total IQ is lower, like 104, which is also what you get from the 2008 study by Helmuth Nyberg based on a subset of the 1997 national study: all white Americans have the average 106, Jews have 110. Normalizing it in the international way, whites have IQ 100, thus American Jews in 1997 had the IQ 104.)
About these IQ GWAS studies, I am not yet convinced of them. I tried to calculate how IQ increasing and decreasing alleles would be inherited and give the measured and estimated genetic heritability of IQ. The result was that if did not seem to work. It looked to me that it is not mainly genes in the additive polygenic manner, but fortunate and unfortunate combinations of genes, nonadditive. I was sure some pro-Jew-high-IQ people will in a short time publish a paper supporting their view, but such a study must be taken with as much salt as the papers of Piffer. It is simply not so simple.
It is clear that the determinists lack the imagination and mental subtlety needed to introduce an element of blank slatism into their world view – an appreciation for the tremendous role of personal effort and motivation, the way culture and history affect these things, etc.
They are just too stupid and middle brow.
The blank slatists are unhinged, but by definition demonstrate mental flexibility – the task is to introduce a dollop of stabilizing determinism into their world view.
(Cont’d)
As I already mentioned, in the West disillusionment with science and technology,
even with modernity in general, is now, before our very eyes, being extended to
encompass disillusionment with scientists, and high IQ individuals in general.
It may even be responsible for part of the anti-white animus in the U.S., at least
against the whites of Western European (incl. German) ancestry who were responsible
for much of colonialism and slavery (in North America). A hundred
years ago someone who could mentally multiply two three-digit numbers would have
been an object of admiration. Today any 5-year-old with a calculator can do it
better and faster. Thus exceptional mental abilities are losing status. 60-70 years
ago people like Linus Pauling or Richard Feynman who could do lightning speed
arithmetic in their heads would as a result intimidate others. Today we’re developing A.I.
systems which will effectively have the equivalent of infinite I.Q. What human being
can compete with that? By comparison everyone will look dumb.
If people felt that high IQ individuals were making a real contribution to society,
the situation would change. But, as mentioned, physicists are becoming an object
of ridicule – women won’t date nerds. Too many scientists and engineers are
employed as “whores selling their services to the military-industrial complex,”
to use the phrase which originated at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, and hence are
automatically morally suspect. Medical researchers are spending billions of
dollars testing new drugs and treatments, and yet life expectancy in the U.S.
continues to drop. Disillusionment and revulsion all around.
This sense of disillusionment will naturally apply to Jews, particularly because
of their aggressive promotion of modernity. But now people are realizing that
Israel, where the Jews can be observed as they really are in their pure element,
is a low IQ country which is basically a welfare case, unable to support itself
without billions of dollars flowing continuously from abroad. That makes it,
ironically, very similar to New York City which continuously needs billions
of dollars to maintain its infrastructure. In the 1970s the Federal govt basically
said “Fck you” to New Yorkers when they needed money, and New York never
forgot it. Today, NYC needs trillions of dollars to upgrade its Third World
transportation system (incl. a rail tunnel under the Hudson river), and there
is no money for it. NYC, like Israel, is completely dependent on public
assistance for its survival, and Trump seems to be saying “Fck you” to Chucky
Schumer, just like in the ‘70s. Moreover, as documented by Unz, there has
been a collapse in Jewish achievement in recent decades. This makes people even
more suspicious – perhaps the Jews are not as smart as they claim to be.
Jews – the quintessential neurotic urban nerds – were a novelty after WW I
during the mass migration from the farms to the cities. Today, esp.
because of their rejection of athleticism, people wonder what else Jews
cannot do. The fact the Jews failed to create a great country, let alone a great
civilization, is highly suspect. 2500 years of history, and all they have to show
for it is a country 1/15 the size of Germany. That’s not to say that the Jews
are history’s losers, but clearly it’s nothing to write home about. The fact that
new uncomplimentary facts are coming out every year about the Jewish trinity
– Marx, Freud (or Dr. Fraud as he is known today), and Einstein (e.g., his
racism and his treatment of women), contribute to the general
disillusionment. Jews are increasingly seen more as objects of pity,
than admiration (e.g., being aware that they are 2-3 times more
prone to mental illness (due to inbreeding?) than the general
population). I ‘ve had many dumb Jews in my classes (but they would
still use their Middle-Eastern ways with me, haggling to get a higher
grade lol), often children of small merchants, so I never fell for the
IQ worship which befalls so many commenters on Unz. Of course,
these days it’s even worse due to the population explosion among the
Ultraorthodox in New York who at 18 barely speak English, barely know
what a molecule is, and are completely dependent on public welfare.
Fred Reed’s latest column on the United States as the custodial state to the
American blacks is relevant here.
When the Jews were expelled from Western Europe (incl. the German states),
they largely escaped to Poland which in 1569, due to the personal union with
Lithuania, became the largest country in Europe assuming the name Polish-
Lithuanian Republic (Rzeczpospolita), expressly patterned after the Roman
Republic. By 1550 80% of the world’s Jews (i.e., probably 90% of the
Ashkenazis) lived in Poland, which for a couple of hundred years became
known as Paradisus Iudaeorum (Jewish Paradise). The Jews basically said to
the Polish nobles, “Take care of us! Please, pretty please, feed us and defend us
for we cannot till the soil and cannot bear arms” Of course, they could till the soil
but they refused. As to the defense, the Polish nobility (szlachta) originally started
out as the warrior caste so until the late 18th century it was indeed their
responsibility to defend the population of the country, incl. the Jews. The
Rzeczpospolita (literally Res Publica) was huge: it encompassed in today’s terms
central and eastern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and western Ukraine but it
was dominated by the Polish language and culture. Thus Poland, which was the
center of Jewish life in Europe until the 1930s, became a custodial state to its
Jews, feeding them and defending them. The Jews were typically employed
as innkeepers, tax collectors, minor traders, etc. The vast majority of the U.S.
Jews are ultimately descended from the Jews in the Rzeczpospolita which
after the Partitions became roughly equivalent to the Pale of Settlement
imposed by the Russian (i.e., 90% German) tsars. Did the Jews ever express
gratitude for being taken care of by the Polish nobility? Of course they did –
after WW I the Jewish leaders argued vehemently at Versailles AGAINST
Poland regaining independence.
It’s funny how it works out: the Jews got so used to living in the Polish
custodial state, that in the U.S. they again live in a custodial state – they neither
till the soil, nor bear arms ( they enlist at extremely low rates – the U.S.
military would collapse if they had to rely on volunteers from places like New
York City). Israel similarly is largely a ward of the United States which fights
the wars that Israel refuses to fight. Isn’t it wonderful to be Jewish? People
will feed you, and defend you, and fight your wars for you.
And who are, pray, the determinists you are referring to?!
Not really. BTW, the currently most agreed upon IQ range for Poles is between 95-101, so no need to bring the selective immigration as the explanation for low(ish) IQ of catholics in US.
The Poles who still admit to Polish heritage in US BTW have rather higher than average IQ (though Audacius epigone disagrees, giving 99.7 IQ, above German 98.+)
AaronB—a group with substantially fewer smart people than you but better culture will gain substantial ground at your expense
This list of Jewish expulsions shows that the gain is always short-lived. It seems odd to describe a culture which makes itself universally unwelcome as ‘better’.
You say pogrom is coming. Why is the solution to the Jewish Question pogroms? And are you up to date with reports that the deaths in historic pogroms like Chmielnitski were about a tenth of the numbers that had always been claimed? Shamir writes that the pogroms of 19th-century Tsarist Russia amounted in total to about three months of the pogroms being continuously carried out in Palestine today.
By talking pogroms (and excluding state-driven pogroms as in Nazi Germany and present-day Israel) you are talking the rabble, the proles, reacting against the Jews.
Today options might be for the government to prohibit genital mutilation, to prohibit any Jew who has met or listened to a rabbi in the past six months from voting, to declare the Jewish “community” just a gang, which is what it is, and imprison anyone who calls it a “community”, to imprison the more notorious gangsters, to prohibit Jews from air travel, from land ownership, from owning corporate stocks, from operating banks, many other possibilities. Apartheid Israel with the restrictions it places on Gentiles could form a model.
That would ensure that there were no pogroms.
The list of white people who died in Europe’s interminable wars is infinitely higher – all the Jews who died in pogroms or who got expelled – casualties of a clandestine war between Jews and non-Jews – is a fraction of the gentile deaths suffered in the inter-ethnic skirmishes, battles, and wars that characterize European history.
In war – loss of territory (expulsions) is an expected and recurring event. The Jews did not suffer this more than any other people. Let us make a list of the endless ebb and flow of territorial gains and losses of European princes.
But anyways my point isn’t that Jewish culture is better – simply that it is better than white culture post WW2, which is characterized by determinism and materialism, pessimism and despair.
And elite whites acknowledge this by defecting to Jewish led culture, while previously Jews acknowledged the superiority of European culture by defecting an masse.
You, for instance.
Dude, is it worth the cop out? Just own your position.
Unfortunately, utu doesn’t always write this rationally.
HBD is strictly an Internet phenomenon. And even on the Internet, it occupies a dark and dank little corner. HBD has zero viability beyond a relatively small number of keyboard jockeys.
HBD falls flat on its face on the actual science, causing its proponents to spin, lie, deny, obfuscate and regurgitate canned nonsense. It’s probably true that HBD adherents don’t really believe what they profess, since no one can be that dumb. Rather it’s a last-gasp effort to forestall change — change that is both inevitable and inexorable.
Your New York parochialism is showing again.
Even if you have Israel, it won’t help if American Jews swallow their own poison.
Determinism leads to Detachment. Detachment leads to God.
There is no free will. It is all God’s Will.
This is true. Its almost impossible to document the many contradictions and historical lacunae that pepper their writings.
So that’s the interesting thing. HBD adversely affects most the people who actually believe in it – it demotivates. It’s a morale killer. It undermines hard work and personal effort. Current day high success groups like Jews and Asians (and elite whites) have a belief system that prioritizes personal effort over innate ability. Instead of “scientific” determinism, they have a sense of almost supernatural agency – it errs a bit on the other side in irrationality, tbh, but its clearly healthier and more realistic, judging by results.
Mid level and low brow whites, who are going through something of a decline, are the last group who need a philosophy like this.
So ok, I guess the emotional reward is they get to feel superior to the darker races, and in that sense its an attempt to keep the darker races down and forestall change.
The funny thing they are too dumb to realize it is a Trojan horse. That’s why I wonder if it is an expression of an underlying pathology – clinical exhaustion or deleterious gene mutations (irony alert lol) – rather than an attempt to persuade.
From your pov, you should be delighted that people like Karlin believe this stuff and seek to spread his brand of morale sapping despair among susceptible people, and guard your own group from falling prey to it.
From my pov, I just feel sorry for any human who allows himself to be infected by this.
This is also very much true. In the real world it isn’t a thing. Plenty of groups are racist or have a strong tribal consciousness – Jews, Asians, whatnot – but it isn’t HBD.
Human beings have a natural urge to accomplish things and have a demonstrable ability to do so. Fighting this urge is not detachment, but a form of caring. Detachment is acceptance of things just as they are. Of human nature just as it is.
We already know about this phenomenon. It’s called ‘ethnic nepotism’.
AaronB—all the Jews who died in pogroms or who got expelled…is a fraction of the gentile deaths…in the…wars that characterize European history
We are told that getting on for half of the world’s Jewish population perished during the Second World War. Over the past thousand years, have nearly half of all Europeans died in war? I don’t have the figures to hand but it seems unlikely.
In war – loss of territory (expulsions) is an expected and recurring event
I imagine most of the expulsions in the list I gave occurred not as the result of war but as the inevitable result of different peoples living on the same patch of land. Multiculturalism will always fail.
my point isn’t that Jewish culture is better – simply that it is better than white culture post WW2
Not much of a boast. White culture, where is still exists, hardly dares speak its name. The Culture of Critique, the third book of Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy, explains why.
Well, it’s all part of the same thing, as Steve says, “Invade the world, invite the world.” My view is let them bomb each other and save us the expense.
Well, in the 30 Years War alone, something like 30% of the population of Germany was decimated.
My point is simply that Jews living in gentile lands were basically in a state of war with gentiles, and that viewed in that contexts, the expulsions and pogroms are no more a failure of Jewish culture than the countless wars and massacres were a failure of European culture. They should be viewed as naturally occurring events in war, and incessant warfare characterized Europe since ancient times. Jews were simply a part of this.
I am not boasting about Jewish culture – I merely pointing out that the kind of genetic determinism and scientific materialism you whites have adopted as your mainstream culture puts you at a severe disadvantage, it saps your morale and leads to the defection of your best people, who find endless ruminations on the countless ways everything is finally explained by genes of the kind Anatoly dishes up to be a sterile pursuit.
The alternative cultural-complex set up by Jews and increasingly siphoning away elite whites after WW2, while batshit crazy, is far more appealing and motivating to high quality people, and even in the final analysts more susceptible to reform in a more realistic direction as it isn’t a rigid fatalism.
Anatoly, and most HBD people, believe the recent Jewish ascendancy is largely explained through superior Jewish IQ, which is primarily genetic.
Ethnic nepotism or other factors are secondary in their view.
This position makes zero sense factually or logically, but they stick to it with the blind bulldog tenacity of someone who has found a spiritually consoling world view and will not facts separate him from it.
At that point, you gave to ask what consolation it offers – then you realize to the pessimistic, fatalism is soothing and attractive.
Then you realize the HBD movement is a sub-branch of the decline of the West, and not at all a departure from dominant cultural trends.
Then you realize the game is up for the time being and there is no optimistic Western philosophy forthcoming, but only flavors of despair, and then you decide to join the rival Jewish-elite white-Asian cultural complex as at least offering optimism and probably being more susceptible to healthy reform.
I do not think it is mainstream yet but the Unzian stable of Stakhanovites like Sailer, Karlin, Thompson, Durocher, Epigon keep spreading the poison daily.
Excellent points–all of them!
Pogroms do not have to be episodes of killing–in fact most of them were not. They were expulsions–nothing more
You are correct about pogroms being quite less hazardous to jews than they claim. The pogrom’s primary purpose was to “encourage” jews to leave voluntarily–to be expelled, nothing more. Just as the holohoax “6 million” was a fabrication, so were the numbers claimed in the pogroms.
Your idea on outlawing “male genital mutilation” (circumcision) is an excellent idea. This barbaric practice should have been outlawed a long time ago.
The outlawing of “dual citizenship” and “dual nationality” could go a long way in reigning in jewish power. Prohibiting ANY employment for those who wish to exercise “dual citizenship” and “dual nationality” would be a good “first step”. What is especially needed is a prohibition of anyone who claims “dual citizenship” or “dual nationality” from serving or being employed by any unit of government. This would automatically remove about 40 members of congress and thousands of “policy wonks” infecting our State department.
Serving in a foreign military should be grounds for automatic loss of American citizenship and mandatory permanent deportation. Split loyalties never work.
When most of people lived on farms, people understood breeding. I don’t know if you’d call that HBD. Sometimes, it led people to make foolish claims, like the French were all cowards. But, whatever one thinks of it, people were about at their spiritual peak at the time – the French would not have accepted the insult.
We need a return to the idea of breeding to combat universalism, which is the real center of despair in the West. That a Frenchman= a Somali = an Algerian. And the ones not in France, are pre-approved Frenchmen. With more right to France than the French, as much right to vote, more right to hurl insults, or be parasites.
No – universalism is what is wrong with the West. Not HBD, which is honestly a fringe movement.
This universalism and particularism are false dichotomies – you need to balance them. We need to stop thinking in dichotomies.
Going to the extreme of particularism, in reaction to universalism, becomes a form of genetic determinism – and leads to retarded things like saying since for a few decades French lost their military spirit, their essence is to be cowards. Because Jews are ascendant for a few decades, this is an eternal arrangement that is genetically determined.
Universalism of course has its own in built insanity – but there is no law that says we must only think in extreme binaries. The ancient Greeks had a wonderful notion called the Golden Mean.
I have a sense that this kind of thinking had gradually become mainstream among whites by WW2 or earlier (I would have to do some refresher reading to back this up), and that the alternative cultural complex set up by Jews became so popular because it at least offered hope even though it was so dysfunctional in other ways. Now, the alternative culture set up by Jews can be said to be more maintream among elite whites.
But scientific determinism must be the most despair inducing philosophy invented by man – it is no wonder anyone with any spirit flees from it, even into craziness.
It is a shame that the only alternative to craziness is despair – which simply means our culture has not yet overcome its despair, and is just reissuing it in different colored bottles.
“Not really. BTW, the currently most agreed upon IQ range for Poles is between 95-101,”
The average IQ is 99 in Poland, the same as in Northern Europeans. In the USA, with better possibilities, the average could be higher, but as it is, you say it is 99.7 (US norms? meaning 97.7 international norms). Notice that the effect of selective immigration decreases for several generations, not as J-man said, for one generation only. And besides, selective migration effect not so much the average but the distribution.
That’s true, but today there is no balance, public debate in Western countries is totally skewed towards ever more extreme universalism. National identities of Europeans are regarded as illegitimate and something to be erased, and by present trends many Western European nationalities will become minorities in their own homelands within the lifetime of people commenting here. HBD isn’t responsible for that, it is indeed merely a fringe subculture, and essentially an attempt to restore balance (maybe one overshooting the mark, but that shouldn’t be surprising).
But HBD will never become a real challenge to universalism because its morale sapping effect and intellectually unchallenging nature will never attract highly motivated, intelligent men.
Universalism in its extreme form is a problem, but HBD is repugnant and not the solution. Its another flavor of the pessimism that was rearing its head already in the 19th century.
You have no clue what you’re talking about. No variant of HBD has ever been mainstream. Not in Western culture or any other culture.
In the last couple of decades of the 19th century, after Darwinism became an accepted part of the scientific canon, many intellectuals in the West began espousing something that resembles what is today called HBD, but they were never part of the mainstream and it’s doubtful their views were ever widely accepted even among most intellectuals. Novelists, poets, musicians, and most philosophers and scientists, including most social scientists, went about their business as if Darwinism had never existed.
In America, a few prominent politicians and nonscientific thinkers at the time might echo some HBD thought that was being bandied about, and a few laws were put in place that represented this minority sentiment, but the prevailing ethos among the masses and their representatives was still Christian and democratic. Immigration laws were put in place in the nineteen-twenties not because of IQ studies (no matter what some scholars say about their inclusion in a Congressional report at the time), but because most Americans quite rightly didn’t like the newcomers. They were seen as bringing poverty, crime, terrorism, and bad ideas like socialism and anarchism. They were not assimilating.
After the nineteen-twenties, even this small HBD front began to recede for various reasons until it had all but disappeared by the nineteen-fifties. Darwinism was shunted off without ceremony from most of the social sciences. Psychometrics ducked its head and kept a lower profile. And, today, despite your affinity for trolling HBD websites like they are the mainstream, they are so small a part of American culture that they aren’t worth mentioning. Idiots on both the right and left who think HBDers finally got the president they want in Trump will have to make peace with the likelihood that Trump has no idea what HBD even means.
I don’t think you have any clue what has attracted highly motivated and intelligent men.
This is not my sense at all – social Darwinism was huge in the 19th century, and all sorts of prominent poets and artists supported eugenics. One of my favourite writers, Jack London, wrote tons about the superiority of the white man.
Herbert Spencer was perhaps the most popular intellectual of the 19th century, and HBD is basically recycled Herbert Spencer.
The extensive literature on colonialism was replete with talk of the lesser races and the white mans burden and the like.
HBD saturated the elite culture.
One of my intellectual failings is that I like the grand sweeping view of things and hate getting bogged down in details, but I would really like one of these days to make a survey of 1) all the pessimistic European writers, showing cultural decline well antedated Jews and was a product of scientific determinism 2) The way HBD ideas grew in influence till WW2
The Earth in any meaningful sense is us.
” Certainly the Earth would be better off without us ” because of pollution is like saying a person who doesn’t treat their body correctly would be better off without a brain.
Theoretical physics and other scientific revolutions were as nothing to the ongoing computer engineering one.
If one rules out IQ then the least superstitious answer is the convenant with God. At least for me, who knows there’s no conspiracy there, there.
Both are equally Jewish. Judaism is defined spiritually and therefore both groups have equally Jewish souls. There is no more Jewish solution to the question you posed.
Just FIY, as far as i’m aware, there’s no confirmation whether does genes are actually causal. Jews are genetically distinct from other populations, and have higher education, and therefore ANY single gene that is distinct between the jews/christians is going to get hit.
The best example of this is if someone ran a GWAS for chop stick use. There would be tons of hits, all associating with asian ancestry. But how much of those genes are directly responsible for using chop sticks? Very hard to say. In such a case the GWAS would identify genes that for example, are responsible for asian facial structure, hair, eyes etc as ‘associated with chop stick use’. Tells nothing about whether those genes actually cause chop stick use or not.
Regarding HBD and ‘race science’, there’s always been a huge difference between the ‘liberal’ HBD’ers and the nationalist types. They tend to follow and befriend each other on twitter, but this is most likely because they dont understand each other. The liberal HBD’ers are basically IQ nationalists, they want eugenics/embryo selection/transhumanism. Their concept of race is purely materialistic – it’s the 23andme gene autism of whether you’re 99.7% european/jewish african etc.
Meanwhile the racial nationalists usually have a concept of race that isn’t even really scientific, more like metaphysical/philosophical, something like Oswald Spengler, Evola etc. They usually dont tend to like transhumanism/gene engineering etc. Again, these two intermingle on twitter and the internet, but probably because they dont really understand each other. Few know this, but nazis themselves opposed intelligence testing, seeing IQ tests as an extention of the burgher-capitalist worldview and what not (the warrior class is obviously supposed to rule, not the burghers).
The reality is that HBD/IQ stuff is perfectly compatible with liberal-globohomoist worldview. Infact, it’s almost perfect. Obesity is 90% heritable (more than IQ), so i should stop exercising, i’m fat because of my genes. Transgenderism is also very heritable. If parenting doesn’t matter like jayman and other HBD’ers say, then the institution of marriage and family is pretty useless, so why stop it from dissapearing? Just do massive embryo selection for IQ and make everyone grow up parentless via artificial wombs (much better capability to select for IQ that way). Oh those muslims and russians? Well they are ‘clannish’ conservatives because of centuries of inbreeding. So that’s no good.
How exactly this is something any conservative/traditionalist would want is beyond me. Ihmo traditionalists/conservatives who embrace HBD should think twice before jumping on this bandwagon.
One wonders why a nation with so many Nobels is stuck in a startup situation, while the Dutch can make CPU-manufacturing machines.
Israelis are very good at startups, because all you need for a startup is a grant from someone else. Only in Boston, paid for by the city and the state of Massachusetts, we have New England – Israel Business Council, Massachusetts Israel Inovation Partnership, Jewish Endowment Foundation of Western Mass. Those do-nothing Israeli startups are a form of gibs disguised in “work”, similar to the TSA jobs for the locals – all paid by the Americans. Israeli startups are best evidence that trickle down works, at least from the Largest Plundered to the Little Satan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_eclipse_of_Darwinism
Not at all Lamarckian – evolution theory was dominant among eugenicists as late as the 1930s. At the begining of the century it was Max Nordau vs Oscar Wilde. Nordau thought that habit became hereditary. The most influential race and eugenics scientist by the mid 30’s was Ernest Hooton, who wanted sterilisation or isolation of undesirables; he was a thoroughgoing Lamarckian. Crucially, Hooton said a long established race (such as the American type of white he claimed had evolved) could not be altered by immigration, because the American environment would alter the immigrants’ genetic qualities toward American norms even if they married within their own immigrant community. The genes of every new influx would be modified to the inveterate type formed by the American environment and mode of life.
Hence the American type population would subsume any amount of immigrants, because the similar environment would alter the immigrants’ genes with or without intermarriage. Genetic mixture of the (white) American type population with new immigrants would be overborne by modification of the immigrant genes acquiring the characteristic of American genes. This was not any kind of Darwinism.
The scientists who provided the rationale for eugenics laws being passed were in the mainstream, but were in a great many cases not Darwinians. Moreover, they were actually targeting problematic white individuals and populations, such as the Appalachians who had failed to alter for the better despite living in the US for hundreds of years, thereby showing themselves to be a pathological element not susceptible to Lamarckian environmental genetic modification. Hoooton and his allies thought the Negro genes could be altered environmentally too if they were allowed to live among whites. Much of the intelligentsia’s thinking on race and immigration is still predicated on Lamarckian assumptions. Ron Unz’s writings on the descendants of Irish immigrants to the US is an example.
Such talk about the lesser races was “replete” before Darwin. That’s not HBD, where in even the crudest expressions there is at least some patina of scientific justification tacked on to them.
While many in the post-Darwin era used what we call HBD ideas to justify colonial adventures and racist projects, those ideas were in no sense needed for the enterprises to thrive. The U.S., for example, went into the Philippines with McKinley wanting to Christianize the Filipinos (apparently he felt Spanish Catholicism was inadequate for that purpose), and the Filipinos were later ruled by Taft, who expressed a desire to democratize his “brown brothers.” TR’s more scientific ideas on eugenics and race-ordering, which were fashionable among a sliver of the intellectual elite at the time, played little part in it.
Similarly, many people we would call progressives today, including Darwin, accepted the proposition that the races might be unequal and yet their politics on race still followed a very liberal line. Many intellectuals who were not scientists also accepted the ideas of eugenics, but their politics were quite progressive. Socialists like George Bernard Shaw advocated race-mixing for eugenic reasons, and W. E. B. DuBois wanted to use eugenics to develop a more talented class of black leaders.
But most intellectuals thought little to nothing about HBD. F Scott Fitzgerald might mention in a letter something about race degeneration, but there’s no evidence he gave the idea much thought beyond dropping a flourish like this in a letter or two.
Note how Fitzgerald, like many at the time, used these HBD ideas to directly attack, not blacks and Asians, but other whites. This was common. Even among scientists, White South African eugenicists before WW2, for example, focused their efforts on improving white breeding. They didn’t give a shit how the lesser races bred and gave little thought to it. They cared intently how whites were breeding.
The reason for this was simple, but easily forgotten today. Whites were so widely considered superior to blacks that needing a scientific justification for it would’ve been seen as silly and unnecessary.
But even Fitzgerald’s private thoughts were not usually shared among his class of writers. I can think of many famous novelists of the early 20th-century – Willa Cather, Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, etc. – and not one jumps out for having even crudely scientific ideas on race. That’s not to say they didn’t share the common prejudices of their time, but they clearly didn’t need science to guide them in the matter.
While I am certainly willing to accept the increased genetic intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews, I can’t help but think that gross Jewish over-representation and success in academia (Nobel, Fields prizes etc.) is due to their ethnic nepotism allowing them to shape scholarship (i.e., appointments, grant funding, etc.) after their own proclivities, which feeds back on itself and increasingly makes knowledge accumulation occur in the, as some have pointed out, “Talmudic” manner, which positions Jews to excel all the more.
Everything after WW2 was jew dominated: finance, education, politicians, media and entertainment. There was no more white culture after WW2.
Aaron B speaks of what elite Jews, Asians and gentile whites believe in (e.g., hard work, spiritual development, etc.) and contrasts it to what mainstream whites believe in (HBD materialism).
Of course this is silly, and I wouldn’t even comment on it if I thought Aaron was trolling. But he actually seems to believe in it at some level.
At no time in American history has HBD ever been mainstream. But a prototype of HBD was once far more popular than is the modern variant today.
From around 1880 to the end of the 1920s, many prominent American figures considered themselves eugenicists or held other proto-HBD views. And during this era, some laws were changed to reflect those new viewpoints and some policies were implemented to achieve eugenic goals.
But contrary to Aaron’s view, these changes were both small and driven by the elites. They were not pushed by the mainstream. As are most scientific ideas, eugenics was an elite preoccupation and given little consideration by most Americans, most of whom were able to continue holding racist views without using science to justify them.
This explains why you can read McKinley’s thoughts on holding the Philippines or Coolidge’s thoughts on restricting immigration and not read a single scientific justification in them. A couple of senators might refer to the science of the times in a speech to justify their votes on the legislation, but they were a minority. The presidents had to appeal to broader audiences.
If you read Calvin Coolidge’s thoughts on immigration restriction, for example, what ought to strike the fair-minded reader is how he appeals to commonsense and the broad interests of American people rather than to any scientific justifications.
Here, for example, is how Coolidge argued for restriction in 1924:
And again here:
And here:
Those opinions hold up very well considering that many people today consider immigration restriction to have been pushed in the nineteen-twenties for pseudo-scientific reasons.
That’s complete nonsense.
Stop giving the Jews so much credit. The mainline Protestants are more to blame for this state of affairs than are the Jews.
You know of any law anywhere that makes it illegal to say bad things about mainline protestants? Or how about all those mainline protestants that run Hollywood or big banks or the mass media. Or how about all those laws that pushed anything Christian out of the public sphere. The clearly have zero power and zero influence on anything meaningful, that being the case how can the take the blame for anything?
Who cares? You want to assign blame, then assign it where it belongs.
Most European nations have almost no Jews, yet they still struggle with the same problems we struggle with. Do you think policy in Sweden or Germany is driven by Hollywood movies? Or nonexistent Jews?
Because mainline Protestants have secularized. They’ve gotten rid of the need for church by pushing their religious impulses into the public sphere. You think Episcopalians welcome female and gay ministers into their church because of Jews? Or Hollywood?
Yes and yes. Sweden and Germany are both puppet regimes of the USA, just look how quickly they comply to US demands regarding Venezuela as a good example. Both German and Swedish pop culture and its media is very much driven by US influences, just because there are no jews there (which is not true since both have jews living in their lands) the international jew still dominates their land and ultimately decides all their mainstream culture and politics.
The push for homosexuality was very much a Hollywood/mass media push, the Episcopalians have to accept female and gay ministers because if they don’t they will in the end be banished from polite society, they were never the initiators of this.
Good point.
If you believe Hollywood Jews are driving German and Swedish immigration policy, then you’re a moronic goofball.
Read some American history. The radical Republicans of the post-Civil War period spoke just like multicult types do today, and there was no Jewish Hollywood or press to help them think in that manner.
IIRC Lynn gave it as 110 and 103, respectively.
Erm… Why? There’s plenty of possible causes. For instance, it would have been the more nationalist and religious (duller) Jews to would have felt sufficiently strongly committed to go to Israel in the first place. Lots of brain drain to the US. Etc.
One of my favorite quotes from that period was by a governor who vetoed a sterilization bill for felons:
Lynn also mentions in his book that a large number of Russian gentiles fled the USSR for Israel by using spurious claims of Jewish ancestry. He estimates their numbers and cites one source, but how can one trust such a figure without using DNA?
That’s absolutely true. Most of them leverage HBD theory to mask their inadequacies and personal failings. That is to say, to mask those inadequacies and failings primarily from themselves such that there’s no self-reflection, self-improvement or self-actualization. It’s really just the latest iteration of scapegoatism.
It’s probably the case that HBDers represent the very embodiment of the ruinous gene expressions they commonly attribute to other races. Indeed, it is ironic.
People like Karlin are valuable if unwitting allies. This very blog serves as an important antidote to the values it is trying to promote. White supremacism has always been an unsuspecting partner in the pursuit of social justice. Every landmark and epochal achievement in that regard was instigated by the deeds and misdeeds of white supremacists.
So 3% of Germans died?
I hate when people use word “decimate” incorrectly.
Decimate is never used in its original sense because a person could not use the word at all if he were so limited. How many events after ancient Rome, where the death of one in ten soldiers was sometimes imposed, do you know of where a population was truly decimated? Any?
PSA on Okuspearchucker
Except I’m not. Dude, you are absolutely confused. My position is taht genes push us into certain directions but do not determine our future, and that genes interact with environment. This is customarily called “hereditarian position” and is standard position espoused by all hereditarians I know.
I wonder why anyone would bother defending blank slatism, provided there’s enough evidence to show it’s wrong.
If many studies come to show stuff like IQ is heritable, and Ashkenazis have higher IQs, on average, due to genetics (SNPs and all that), and ”not because they train for IQ tests, because society ‘privileges’ them, or because of the Jewish culture of learning and hard work”… and, on the other hand, that Sub-Saharan Africans have lower IQs, on average, due to genetics and not because they were/are discriminated against, are malnourished, had to deal with colonialism, lynching, blackface minstrel shows, and a plethora of microaggressions… then, what’s the big deal?
What are the reasons for, I dunno, this ”genetic exceptionalism”?
Once more, to be clear: why is it appalling, disgusting, racist to propose the black-white/black-asian/black-Ashkenazi/white-Ashkenazi gap is the work of genes, yet it’s all right to say that Zhang’s and Benjamin’s parents read to ’em a lot when they were young, subjected them to Baby Mozart, and sent ’em to good schools, and that’s why they do better at IQ tests, while Abdul’s family was broken and he had to grow up eating fried chicken bones and being called ”little black sambo” and was nearly lynched once (though he got better), and that’s why he does poorly at IQ tests?
What difference does it make?
That Benjamin and Zhang were born with genes for higher IQ was not their doing. It was luck, there’s no merit in it. And it wasn’t Abdul’s fault that he was born with fewer such genes. At all. It’s not a moral failing.
Or is it not all right to notice the IQ gap at all, and the consensus is that IQ tests just measure how subservient you are (and how unlikely you are to deadlift regularly)? That could be the case, I guess.
But if one does acknowledge the gap exists, and that IQ measures intelligence to some degree, and yet, when the hypothesis that one’s IQ is in good part due to genetics is brought up, they vigorously deny that this could the case, it seems like they’re admitting, subtly, that genes are what make you, well, you — and therefore, to say that it’s your genes that make your IQ higher/lower, and you smarter/dumber is inadmissible. It would be attacking the very essence of what someone is: their genes.
Yes, this was verbose. I apologize. I hope it at least made some sense.
The later discovery of this fact left me crestfallen, having loved The Call of the Wild as a kid.
Interestingly, Jack London was one of the writers who helped set the stage for the murderous riots following the Johnson-Jeffries fight. Also of note is how much society has evolved. I mean, London’s articles in major newspapers read like KKK pamphlets of the time.
That’s also been one of my points all along. Not only is HBD not Real Science!™, it’s also not traditional at all and is in fact an extreme hothouse flower bred by late, urban conditions. HBD finds its natural (and only) home among a class that does not exist outside of the modern West, the suburban entourage of neo-liberal pseudo-bourgeoisie. I call them neo-liberal not because they consciously hold and profess neo-liberal beliefs or even understand the definition of the word (that would require a bit more sobriety and intellectual horsepower than they typically possess), but because it was neo-liberal policies that created this class and sustains them in existence. I’m talking about the mediocre middle of educated but ignorant, affluent beyond their desserts, White dorks that I have earlier characterized as the Clark Griswold contingent. They are all thoroughgoing liberals and one-worlders as long as their comforts aren’t imperiled; HBD is their squeal of pain once their “market value” (economic, intellectual, sexual) begins to revert from its artificially high plateau.
It is only then that they attempt to find religion on matters of race and sex, and go running to Sailer and Heartiste for consolation amidst their troubles. But they never get off the intellectual short bus they started out on. They do not think about the philosophical contradictions present in HBD and Game because they are unable really to think about anything. They are obsessed with pop culture, with sports and entertainment, with fame and money, and the only sort of truth they understand is social validation. HBD gives them a means to this validation in the form of a preexisting community, vocabulary, and stock of ideas wherewith to reinterpret the social landscape as the foreordained outcome of genetic scripts. They even have a name for this little religious conversion of theirs: They call it “taking the red pill.”
So much suffices to explain the followers, but what about the pied pipers, what about Sailer himself? I believe his own curious psychology is the result of his adoption; his infatuation with the Real Science!™ of genetics a predictable result of his quest to find some intrinsic identity of his own that could never be dissolved away by the vagaries of fate or the fickleness of human affection. He therefore invented HBD, which he originally intended in all innocence to be nothing more than a private religion, but which by many turns and disappointments eventually gained the attention of the Griswold contingent, who embraced it with both hands as a holy revelation. One casts about in vain for evidence of their sycophantic claims that “Sailer is the bravest, awesomest, shiniest intellectual in the whole wide world,” but once you understand the underlying motivations of the cult, it all makes sense.
Darwinism and all its cognate and derivative thought systems (such as utilitarianism, scientism, irreverence toward religion, HBD, Game) is incompatible with Tradition and does not belong by nature to any kind of Right wing, “Alt-” or otherwise. The fact that the soi-disant saviors of Western Civilization have latched onto these fantasies shows that the problem has not been comprehended in the least. I mean no disrespect to Sailer as a person and I actually wish him well, but I think it is important for any casual readers—the lurkers, the visitors, the curious, the recently “converted”—to understand exactly what has been going on at this bizarre website and to take appropriate measures to protect themselves. Read Spengler before you read Sailer, Dante before Darwin, understand Traditional Christianity before embracing heterodox neo-liberal materialism. Then you will see all things better and can act appropriately. But HBD is a complete nonstarter and it is precisely ideas like it that will stifle all nascent reactionary movements in the seed.
Although most of AK’s bullet points do accurately reflect my thoughts, a couple are
mischaracterizations or outright lies. Anyone who is truly interested should search his blog for my comments.
On the statements he highlighted which I know to be true, I didn’t just say these things, I also defended them very well. He knows that and I know that. But he’s trying to mislead people who don’t know that.
Very insightful. I did not know he was adopted. Do you have a take on Ron Unz and his complicated relationship with his father?
What’s it like being the Sisyphus of the commentariat?
Give it up; the meaning of a word can change.
I hope that by now, you are all aware that something being genetic, does not mean it is inherited in a Mendelian fashion, deterministic, or not subject to trans-generational environmental input.
You seem to be suggesting as much Karlin, which suggests to me, that your knowledge of DNA, like that of the HBD community in general, is stuck in the 90s.
Has anyone done a study of HBD – to determine if any notable fraction of its population has any academic, university, or professional relationship to biology.
I can see the authorities just banning these types of studies. They validate too many stereotypes.
Let’s give him the benefit of doubt. He was misinformed. Were he alive today he would know that race is not real and is just something that we made up.
you are all aware that something being genetic, does not mean it is inherited in a Mendelian fashion
No they don’t; most of ’em anyway.
The main aspect of test-taking is thinking. Thinking is an action which results in a thought. If the main aspect of test-taking is thinking and thinking is an action which results in a thought then thinking is irreducible to anything physical (physiology, brain states/structure, genes).
Claims from hereditarians such as “IQ scores have a genetic basis” can be re-written as “thinking has a genetic basis.” So the claim is that individual differences in thinking are caused/influenced by genes. The fact that thinking is an action which results in a thought proves that thinking is irreducible and so genes don’t explain thinking so genes don’t explain variation in IQ scores (thinking).
Well, he was a communist after all. I’m sure if he were alive today he would championing Nigerian takeover of the world.
The absolute worst of the lot is that ludicrous impostor “Lance Welton,” whose understanding of genetics is literally stuck, not in the ’90s, but in Saturday morning cartoons, and even his crap is greedily lapped up by the HBDers. It is his inclusion among the columnists here, more than anything, that has caused me to suspect that HBD is at least partially a disinfo campaign that has already grown cynical and careless in its operations. Nobody formed in the delicate discipline of scientific reasoning could possibly read Lance Welton without his veins popping.
I actually know nothing about Ron Unz’ personal life, but now that you’ve mentioned it I will give it some thought.
This is not necessarily so, since the smaller a population is, the less genetic diversity, and the more drift can predominate relative to a larger population.
This seems to be an increasingly popular theme. Of course Asians are smarter than white people but white people have more creativity so they’re still superior. There’s no actual evidence that creativity is a real thing but believing in it is comforting for people who have to believe in HBD (because HBD says whites are better than blacks) but are upset that HBD says Asians are better than whites.
It smacks of desperation. Asians have the IQ but we white people have a special magic. It can’t be detected or measured but it must be there. It must!
That would certainly be a good start! Are we anywhere near to doing that? I didn’t think so.
HBD-ers don’t seem to realise this because they don’t seem to realise that the internet is not reality. They really seem to think that HBD is suddenly going to go mainstream. Political ideologies don’t work that way. And HBD is a political ideology, dressed up with cool graphs and charts and lots of numbers. Thinking that you can persuade people to accept HBD with scientific (or pseudoscientific) arguments is like thinking you can persuade people that communism is inevitable because Marx scientifically proved that it was inevitable. People believed in communism, or disbelieved in it, for emotional reasons. That’s how political ideologies work.
The amusing thing is that the HBD-ers who believe that HBD is about to become universally accepted because Science! all assume they’re members of the high IQ elite.
Their problem is that they don’t get out enough. They need to walk away from the keyboard and go spend some time in the real world.
Yes, I’ve talked about this before. There is a Dunning-Kruger effect of the second order wherein those in the 110-120 IQ range are so used to being smarter than the average person that they award their own thoughts a ridiculously inflated value and do not realize how ill prepared they are to grapple with deep realities that can only be approached by genius.
Having lived in both Israel and the American Jewish community, the challenges faced by both communities require cultivating different intellectual abilities and personality traits.
People respond to their environment Anatoly. Diaspora Jews neglect the physical dimension and focus on developing a set of intellectual skills and psychological traits from a very early age that is appropriate to their peculiar and unstable position as a merchant minority.
Israelis are faced with a completely different reality.
When I was in Israel as a kid I engaged in constant physical adventure, exploring ancient ruins, getting into scrapes with Arabs and other Israeli kids, playing a ton of sports, running around in the hot sun all day. I don’t think I read a single book and was completely unintellectual. I cared about sports mostly. I was a completely lackluster student.
Then lo and behold I move into the very alien American Jewish community and a completely different cultural environment. Suddenly I started reading intensively, becoming introverted, excelling academically.
I remember shortly after moving to America a group of us got into a fight with a bunch of Italians. My natural instinct was to fight back, I thought it would be good fun, just another schoolyard scrap – every other member of my group fled the scene and I was severely reprimanded by the principal for trying to defend myself physically. I was told to never fight back.
I was being inculcated with a new set of values – all my aggression, ambition, and instinct for self defense must only be expressed intellectually and psychologically, and I must meekly submit to every physical insult and assault. Study intensively and achieve – that’s your self defense, and its communal.
I also had occasion to observe the reverse process when American Jewish friends moved to Israel – after a few years, they are simpler people, with less nervous energy, less superficially clever and bright, more physical, more relaxed, less ambitious.
So I have firsthand observed the HBD lie that personality and ability are innate and express themselves invariably regardless of environment – environment is absolutely transformative.
Later for business reasons I lived in Asia – and again, a new personality emerged, a new suite of traits and abilities in response to my environment that shocked everyone who knew me.
Obviously man is not infinitely elastic and there is a biological substrtatum – but the effect of culture and environment, the effect of the specific place and position you are in with its rich concrete detail, has specific effects that cannot be captured by abstract generalities.
Yes, that’s the problem.
There are a lot of people (Sailer is probably one of them) who grew up in a rather nice world. They know that it was a much nicer much better world than the world of today. They’re upset about that, and rightly so. They start looking for reasons for the decline.
The trouble is that there were many reasons and the reasons were often complex. The introduction of the contraceptive pill, the decline of Christianity and the rise of militant secularism, the drug culture, the destruction of the manufacturing sector, mass media, excessive and inappropriate education, disillusionment with foreign policy adventurism, disillusionment with science and technology, the increasing globalisation of capitalism, feminism, the mainstreaming of homosexuality, the tidal wave of pornography, the increasing cynicism and corruption of democratic institutions and yes, too much immigration. It’s all very confusing and fixing those things would be a lot of hard work.
The temptation is to look for one simple explanation. It’s immigrants. Or it’s the Jews. Or it’s the blacks. Those explanations are so simple and so clear-cut. So much better than having to grapple with the idea that our own civilisation has started to self-destruct. It’s always best to find an explanation that makes it somebody else’s fault.
The further temptation is to look for magical solutions. HBD is a magical solution. If only everyone accepted HBD all social problems would disappear! IQ fetishism is a magical solution.
My contention simply is that scientific determinism – and Darwinism and what you call proto-HBD views -had become extremely widespread among the thinking classes perhaps by the late 19th century, and led to widspread pessimism and decline in optimism and ambition throughout Europe and the West in general. It also bred ever more extreme and ruinous attempts to “recapture a lost vitality” through movements like Fascism and National Socialism, without understanding the source of the problem.
Obviously there were opposed cultural trends which formed the nucleus for today’s alternative cultural-complex (created by whites but later including Jews in a leading role), starting with figures like Emerson and Thoroux – but what is significant is that already the alternative culture had to derive inspiration from non-Western sources (Indian thought, etc), and had to define itself as in some sense an alternative to mainstream Western culture.
Because the “commanding heights” of European culture had been captured by scientific determinism and it’s inevitable derivative, proto-HBD thought – since this had come to define Western culture, even though one could easily construct an alternative culture using purely Western sources, the alternative felt itself compelled to define itself as not specifically Western, and to become increasingly estranged from Western culture and develop into the bizarre and regrettable elite culture we see today.
Now, of course these movement originated amongst the elites and were primarily an elite preoccupation – but cultures trickles downward, and a fatalistic mood among the elite has an impact on the uneducated classes even if they are not affected to the same degree by these cultural trends.
As for quotations, I would like to trawl the net and produce quotations that would substantiate my position, but anything less than a book length survey would leave one open to the charge that one is selectively quoting, plus I am unfortunately a lazy man. Instead I count on the general education of people here – I do not see how anyone who has extensively engaged with European culture can not see at least that my position is compelling and plausible. How many pessimistic European writers of the turn of the last century were crying out again scientific determinism!
Anyways I offer my hypothesis – any educated person can measure it against his reading and knowledge.
If I understand you correctly, you’re basically arguing against the idea that physical things can be causes for mental things – each order of reality is autonomous and self-contained, and there is no observed mechanism or lever that can mediate between the two in order for one to be the cause of another. A physical thing can impact another physical thing, like can impact like, but what “substance” connects two unlike things? Where do they “touch”? How can you “touch” a mental phenomena in order to impact it?
In other words how can a physical thing “touch” a non physical thing, what is the lever, the mechanism, by which these two aspects of reality connect.
Isn’t this the famous problem Descartes had (iirc) I’m trying to find a connection between mind and body, which led to Cartesian dualism (and the famous split in the West between body and mind)?
I’m just trying to understand what you are saying – you come on here with these mystifying statements and I’m so seeing if I finally understand you.
And if that is what you are saying, then physical and mental events can be seen as “appearing together” as a package rather than being in a causal relationship – and if you can summon one element of the package, it can only appear with the other.
The notion of causality might need to be discarded.
‘PSA on Okuspearchucker…’
Good read. Thanks.
Well, Jack London was the foremost victim of his philosophy – he committed suicide despite achieving fame and success.
If you read his tragic novel Martin Eden, where the protagonist also commits suicide after achieving success by one night slipping out of a window into the open sea on an ocean voyage, overcome by the emptiness of his existence after having lived his life according to a philosophy of social Darwinism, proto-HBD, and scientific materialism, you see clearly where this world view leads. To death.
Is it really worth playing this game? Where are your comments lovingly exploring the vast effects of the environment on outcomes? Or is it that despite you totally recognizing the importance of the environment you are just somehow only interested in genetic effects and discuss only those?
You are a functional genetic determinist who qualifies his position in a purely rhetorical manner to deflect criticism, in light of your focus on genetic factors.
But what’s the point? Fine, I won’t accuse you of being a genetic determinist and allow you a more “reasonable” position.
To answer your question, we can refer back to my post on another of Karlin’s articles which he was kind enough to quote on this thread:
My wife has a PhD in the biological sciences, emphasizing human genetics. I have traveled with her to various scientific conferences around the world. I have met Nobel Prize winners and potential Nobel Prize winners. And this HBD junk is never in evidence in their world.
There’s your answer.
I’m sure you’re right. And to be fair, he wasn’t a vitriolic, fire-breathing racist. At least not by the standard set by some commentators on Unz, including Karlin himself. It was rather a genteel racism.
Would I stop reading London because of his racism? Of course not. Even his racist writings are exceptionally well-written and a pleasure to read.
No it isn’t. You are totally wrong and more like a lizard because you cannot think.
While you are correct that alterable cultural factors play an important role, culture (particularly when it involves hundreds of thousands or millions) is ‘sticky’ in large quantities.
It is not enough to simply read a dubious New Age book written by some Indian about ‘how to change your destiny’.
Really scintillating argumentation. But you forget the most important make-work job they developed to keep unemployed physicists from rioting–nuclear power. The world’s most expensive method of finding earthquake faults.
Nuclear power is the absolute zenith of the horrors of “science,” “technology,” and “modernity,” and perhaps the number 1 non-war reason for people’s disillusionment with science worship.
The interesting thing is, any idiot can understand why nuclear power plants are the dumbest idea under the sun. Just take the fact that they can’t run on their own power (the mind boggles–how is this possible? this one fact is so insane average people have trouble processing it, such faith have they in their lovely “scientists.”) Such reasons against it are so legion, so obvious, so inarguable, so simple and easy-to-understand–and yet ask a nuclear physicist: he will tell you you are too ignorant to understand why we must have nuclear power, only geniuses like him can understand it.
Whenever they tell me I can’t understand something because it is too complicated, then I know they are lying. And this deliberate-obfuscation-to-hide-incompetence syndrome may be another aspect of that utter bankruptcy of the whole “Science” experiment which anybody (except for those aged, basement-dwelling, still quoting their 50s “Science”-boosting “Science” textbooks mooks–like Karlin–found frequently lurking on here) knows full well without even trying.
You have a bizarre way of stating this thesis.
You first claimed that the white hoi polloi are currently the primary proponents of HBD, and that elite whites (as well as Jews and East Asians) look down upon such materialistic ideas, preferring instead to educate their children with more ethical precepts (e.g., work hard and you will succeed). You then argued that this HBD advocacy has been ruinous for white proles by making them materialistic in a world that their superiors among gentile whites, Jews and East Asians are better prepared for.
Now, following my lead, you claim that proto-HBD ideas were both introduced and propagated in the West by elite high-IQ whites – scientists, writers, politicians, etc. – and that their introduction was ruinous to the West.
Let’s look past the apparent contradiction in your argument for now. This is a bold thesis. Certainly, it can be – and has been – argued that materialism has been ruinous to the West, but since when has that materialism ever been reduced to any variant of HBD? And when has any type of racial theorizing been widely consumed by the masses?
The answer is never. I would argue that not even in Nazi Germany was racial theorizing something the masses spent much if any time doing. It has always been an elite preoccupation. The average German in 1932 might hate Jews, but he didn’t need any racial theories to justify that belief, even if the Nazi leadership abundantly provided him with them. Nor did the East Europeans need them before launching pograms.
The U.S. was a slave power for nearly a century before Herbert Spencer popularized what was later called Social Darwinism and the science of races began to be disseminated widely beyond a couple of skull-measuring scientists who very few white proles had heard of. But a lack of racial theorizing by the American masses doesn’t seem to have hampered the institution.
I’m sure you know this. You don’t seem like a stupid person. You seem well-informed. But that isn’t preventing you from arguing like a stupid person in this thread.
Here’s my counter argument:
1) At no time in American history have white proles gone in for scientific racial theories. That doesn’t mean they were racially enlightened. Proles have just never needed elaborate theories to confirm their beliefs. They didn’t need the introduction of IQ tests, for example, to know that whites were smarter than blacks. They just knew it.
2) Contrary to your belief about the spread of materialism in the West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most white proles – at least in the United States – were going through a major religious revival at the time their “betters” were making scientific arguments about the races and introducing eugenic legislation.
3) Even today the vast majority of whites, both among the elite and among the proles, are highly uncomfortable with racial theories of any kind that claim to measure talents. They don’t publicly subscribe to them; they don’t support people who make them; and they don’t consume the literature which supports those theories. So to the degree that America and Europe have become materialistic, let’s blame it on something other than HBD.
I don’t follow this argument.
It’s trickling very slowly. Wake me après le déluge. Meanwhile, you might want to address the racism among East Asians (I lived there for ten years) and among Israelis towards Arabs before lecturing European proles about how their HBD materialism is affecting their future by bankrupting them spiritually.
Furthermore, while you praise ‘Jewish-led culture’ and contrast it against ‘determinism and materialism, pessimism and despair’, a significant section of them believe in ideas such as Africans will never improve because of increasingly mythical ‘racism’ (determinism), the world will end in 12 years because of the environment (millenarian despair) and the earth is nothing more than an arbitrary division of economic zones (atheistic materialism).
Why should I write those long comments? The commonly held convinction is that genes held no role. Therefore, to criticize that position I concentrate on its weak points, not on the storng points.
In fact you would find me criticising genetic determinism in posts, for example, about why Poland was overrun by communists. Or in the long discussion about “g” in the past.
The thing is that NO hereditarian I know beleives in genetical determinism. The “Genetical determinism” is a strawman which was long used by blank slatists to smear hereditarian position and which is now used by former blank slatist to avoid admitting, that they completely lost the fight and that people they smeared in the past (Jensen, Watson) were 100% right, while people they admire (Gould etc) were charlatans and ideologically-driven frauds.
BTW do not confuse my belief that there is no free will with belief that genes determine everything.
1) I see it as a historical process with multiple stages. By early last century, the reigning philosophy among Western elites was scientific determinism and all its derivatives, leading to growing pessimism. Regular people were indirectly affected through the trickle down effect, but remained somewhat immune. Western culture as a whole was characterized by growing pessimism.
2) Sometime after WW2, Jews took a leading role in developing and expanding the cultural alternative to scientific determinism, which originated as a dissident fringe movement among white intellectuals. However, this alternative tradition has a long history – it emerged shortly after scientific determinism became influential, as a counter movement, and has been called many names, including the Romantic Movement in its early stages.
3) Highly motivated and intelligent whites began to defect to this cultural alternative en masse after WW2, as it was more inspiring and optimistic than scientific determinism and provided greater scope for their ambitions and talents. However, since the most prestigious and characteristic Western cultural production was scientific determinism, this alternative tradition began more and more to define itself as anti-Western.
4) As elite whites defected to this alternative tradition, normal whites remained identified with the tradition of scientific determinism that they had received as a trickle down effect from the elites even while never fully assimilating into it.
5) Today, with Western countries declining, a movement has emerged among non-elite whites to defend and promote the last characteristically Western cultural moment – which happens to be scientific determinism, social Darwinism, and all its derivatives. That is why today HBD and Game and scientific determinism in general has paradoxically come to be seen as Tradition, which as has been pointed out above on this thread is absurd.
6) However, scientific determinism, far from representing the healthy Tradition of the West, was the final stage of its decline – so the Rights attempt to return to the final stage of Western decline, because they see it as the last characteristically Western cultural moment, is a stupidity of the first order, and can only happen because most elite whites, the natural leadership class, has defected, and we are left with retards like Vox Day (145 IQ!).
Even today, after decades of Americanisation, continental philosophy retains widespread influence and did much more so before 1945.
And determinism need not be a sign of defeat.
In fact many ideological groups such as communists, Hegelian nationalists/imperialists and liberal democrats believe or believed in their historically determined victory over their enemies.
‘had to’ – excluding the fact that many threw themselves into romantic and idealist beliefs without the need for foreign doctrine, as condescending Orientalist scholars, most of it is based on European visions of the self, memorably the Persian Letters of Montesquieu and The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Your main objection seems to center around whether the masses thought of HBD in terms of scientific terminology. While just as today average people spout scientific verbiage without understanding it and I’m sure they did so then, I am not so concerned with the idiom in which ideas are expressed.
Today’s HBD proponents wrap it in a scientific patina because it is the language of prestige – but the science is absurd, its just for rhetoric.
The religious revival was very real, and a reaction to the growing scientific determinism.
My contention is that proto-HBD and scientific determinist ideas did shape the world view of the masses as a trickle down effect of the elites even if different classes discussed these ideas using a different idiom – and that today, from among the non-elite white classes has emerged a movement that identifies Western greatness with the last stage of its decline, and seeks to revive that stage.
To believe that your side is historically fated to win is quite a different thing. The premise is that using your personal agency you have identified the movement of history and willingly chosen to identify with the good side.
This is an inspiring vision. The idea that you are entirely detained by your genes and have no personal agency is a vision of personal limitation – its despair.
As Potato pointed out above:
While ultranationalists and reactionaries interact with psychometricists that doesn’t mean they have the same philosophical beliefs.
And the Manosphere bear even less relation to tradition (none, in fact, beyond their symbolic insistence on female chastity).
It isn’t enough. But you’d be shocked how having a healthy belief system can affect motivation and performance on the world. It’s literally transformative.
Science is knowledge but philosophy is love of wisdom, this is a crucial distinction.
Science is a social activity, subject to all the human vices.
The problem is that some people go out their way to make sure its never the jews. All the things I have highlighted are very much directly tied to jewish led actions. To say jews have nothing to do with these things is equivalent to how liberals argue that blacks moving into neighbourhood has nothing to do with the increase of crime. This hiding behind “its complicated issue, you don’t understand” is a simple tactic that is used often, and most of the times the people making these arguments are just trying to avoid talking about the real issues.
he wasn’t a vitriolic, fire-breathing racist … including Karlin himself.
This makes me think that you have had very limited experiences with actual fire-breathing racists.
The median IQ to get a Ph.D. in physics at a U.S. research university is about
135, in elementary particle physics (particularly theory) – 140. And so we are
presented with the spectacle of 40,000 (worldwide) super-smart particle
physicists, among them thousands of Jews, who are incapable of making
new discoveries. To paraphrase Paul Dirac who said that in the 1920s
even second-rate minds made first-rate discoveries, today even first-rate
minds make second-rate discoveries (if at all – my favorite example is the
Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, a trivial discovery, which somehow merited
the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics). So much for the usefulness of having
a very high IQ! By the way, Jews are much more attracted to fundamental
physics than applied physics. Murray Gell-Mann, particle physicist, famously
said that to him, “Solid-state physics was the physics of dirt,” not a subject
of interest to Jews. So when Sabine Hossenfelder recently suggested that
90% of particle physicists should be fired, she implied that the thousands
of Jews among them are useless to the society and should be let go.
Computer and software engineering doesn’t require very high levels of
intelligence – IQs in the 120-5 range are more than enough. However,
computer engineering with its potential for creating surveillance
capitalism, porn- and game-addicted populations, sex bots (with the
resultant fertility collapse), and robots creating mass unemployment
are some of the reasons why the Silicon Valley, for example, is increasingly
viewed with horror rather than the admiration it garnered only 10-15
years ago. Besides, all the advances in computer engineering have contributed
surprisingly little to productivity. Few people are really excited about
virtual or augmented reality. Apple has no new revolutionary products
on the horizon. As Tyler Cowen asserted in 2011, stagnation is the new
reality, in physics and many other areas. In the U.S. the economic vitality
is largely gone – fewer and fewer people are starting new companies, for example,
which is really bad news for the young generation.
However, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I remain an optimist. Christianity 1.0
is dying but its new and improved, non-dual, version, Christianity 2.0 has been
born in the last 40-50 years, and is gaining growing numbers of adherents.
Outdated religions like Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc still seem to be doing
reasonably well, but they too will be replaced by something better in the coming
centuries IMHO. We may be smart chimps at this stage of our evolution but I
believe we have infinite potential. Once you begin to perceive ecstatic energy fields
around people’s bodies and this becomes part of your daily empirical reality,
it doesn’t take much to convince you that the reality around us is really a lucid
dream, that we are really divine beings exploring what it’s like to have a human
experience with all its joys and sorrows. Being divine, we are all equal, and the
concept of IQ, or any kind of superiority or inferiority, from that point of view
loses all meaning.
You’re like AaronB, if all the massive dishonest parts were removed. You are much more tolerable, even pleasurable to read, even despite your anti-German sentiment (but that’s to be expected from Poles).
From the 17th-start of the 20th century Jewish accomplishments in classical music, literature, science and engineering were minimal. Part of that was down to opportunity…but only a very small part of it.
A lot of great slavic painists in the last 130 years were sidelined whereas equal or garbage level jewish pianists like Horowitz and Rubinstein were ridiculously overpromoted and praised. That is not to say that there aren’t many excelently talented jewish pianists…but the numbers of them are misleading..at the expense of many slavic pianists, particularly slavic female pianists.
As such I reject assertion of the article. If geneology had something to do with it….then where are the jews achievements from 1650 – the end of the Pogroms in the Russian empire?
Never. Decimate forever!
You certainly didn’t defend this one, did you? – “Africa has more middle class people than China”. Is there a source?
You might ponder how much of this is you projecting a variant of your own position.
Really not worth engaging with you when you are so quick to pigeonhole people into false dichotomies to suit your unnuanced view of the world.
Do you consider yourself an environmental determinist? (aka blank slatist)
This is one of those points where Karlin deviously reimagines what I actually said. My assertion was that Africa has a larger percentage of middle class than China, not that Africa has a larger middle class than China numerically. As I recall, I cited African Development Bank data to support that statement. But even The World Bank, that Karlin is so enamored with concerning PPP exchange rates, assesses the percentage of African middle class at 34%.
Africa’s middle class is expected to grow from 355 million (34 percent of Africa’s population) to 1.1 billion (42 percent of the population) in 2060.
http://blogs.worldbank.org/futuredevelopment/making-middle-class-africa
So the question becomes, does China’s middle class constitute more than 34% of its population? I think not:
In 2002, China’s middle class was only four percent of its population. A decade later, this number had climbed to 31 percent, constituting over 420 million people.
https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/
Hopefully, Karlin can now drop this matter.
OK, I’ll make it simple. If you make it about the Jews you’ll lose. You’ll lose because nobody (outside of dissident right echo chambers like this) will listen to you. They’ll assume you’re a Nazi and they won’t listen.
And everyone trying to put across a dissident point of view will be tarred with the same brush. So you’ll ensure that no dissident views get listened to. You’ll have done a great job for the globalists and the SJWs. Can’t you see that they want you to fall into that trap?
To be fair, though, a lot of Ashkenazi Jews ended up in Israel because they had nowhere else to go. For instance, my own parents immigrated to Israel in 1991 because the U.S. wouldn’t accept them back then (we successfully moved to the U.S. almost ten years later) and my parents are pretty smart. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a lot of smart Ashkenazi Jews who were in my parents’ position and who moved to Israel because the U.S. wouldn’t accept them (and with them not being as lucky as my parents were in being able to leave Israel and move to the U.S. later on).
Thus, I am skeptical of claims that Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants to Israel were heavily selected against intelligence. While it’s possible that this was true to some extent for the pre-WWII waves of Ashkenazi Jewish immigration to Palestine, I am much less certain about it being the case for the post-WWII waves of Ashkenazi Jewish immigration to Palestine/Israel.
As for brain drain, I’d like to see some data for this. I seem to recall reading that around 90% of the ex-USSR Jews who immigrated to Israel ended up staying there. Thus, even if all of the smartest ones left (which is extremely unlikely, IMHO), it wouldn’t have had much of an impact on average IQ. While brain drains are very capable of significantly reducing the amount of smart fractions in one’s country, they are unlikely to have a significant effect on average IQ even if, say, the smartest 10% of the population emigrates.
My own theory is unproven but here goes: Israeli Ashkenazi Jews are relatively dull because of massive intermarriage with Mizrahi Jews–and possibly without that much assortative mating. I think that something like 50% of Israeli Jewish couples are Ashkenazi-Mizrahi intermarriages. If so, this could mean that a lot of Israelis who self-identify as Ashkenazi have some Mizrahi ancestry–which likely brings down their IQs since, on average, Mizrahis are much duller than Ashkenazis (even in Israel).
I disagree with several of your six points, but I want to focus on #5, since it is the reason we began this discussion.
HBD is such a marginal subfield of scientific inquiry, and the people devoted to it so marginal to the political and scientific debates in the U.S. and Europe, that I find it hard to believe anyone could seriously maintain it was responsible for any political and/or social trend.
Greg Cochran is one of the finest public intellectuals in the country right now, but I think even he would admit he has no influence. I admire Steve Sailer as a journalist and writer for focusing on important issues other journalists won’t touch, but he’s been reduced to begging for money on the internet. Razib Khan is a sharp scientist with a wide knowledge of history and religion, but he was given the swift public guillotine by the MSM the moment some of his HBD associations and comments came to light.
The rest of the HBDers seem to be mostly a ragtag bunch of anonymous internet scribes (hbd chick, Jayman, Audacious Epigone, etc.) and Europeans who couldn’t fill a small arena of 2,000 to listen to their comments if their lives depended on it. I think some in this group are better than others as thinkers and writers, but I wouldn’t say that a single one of them was influential.
It’s sometimes said by people trying to discredit the HBDers that social media has given them a platform they would otherwise lack, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the number of their twitter followers or the traffic on their blogs. Steve Sailer, for example, has 21.6 thousand twitter followers. David Frum, by comparison, has 730K. David Brooks has 177K . Jonah Goldberg has 319K. David French has 162K. A complete cipher like Guy Benson has 180K. That’s quite a disparity, even if their numbers are puffed up.
Even an anonymous GOP moderate milquetoast like Allahpundit (of HotAir) has 94K followers. The only person from the HBD world I could find who comes close to that figure is Charles Murray with 73K, perhaps because he’s such an affable fellow and has befriended several Neocons who have passed on a few of their many followers to him.
So I think that describing HBD as a movement of consequence is a nonstarter, and I say that as a person who is sympathetic to their arguments.
Well, if you’re going to argue that HBD is about scientific determinism creating fatalism around the U.S. and Europe, then you should be responsible for showing that “regular Joes” really believe in it at some level.
People in the HBD world talk about IQ tests and genes and population groups and the evolution of hominids.
When you go out in the real world, how many people do you know talk about stuff like that, even circumspectly?
I bet the answer is close to fucking zero. I know it is for me.
Thanks for the links. The reason I asked source for this particular figure is because it failed the smell test. Off the top of my head I remember that in 2018 China’s nominal per capita income was ~$9500. Sub Saharan Africa is ~$1500-$2000. If North Africa is taken together then the average will be around ~$3000-$4000. Even if we take inequality into consideration, there is no way Africa could have proportionally more middle class people than China. So I was curious.
The problem with the sources you have given is that they are not using the same standards to define ‘middle class’.
The WB article considers those earning between $2 and $20 a day as middle class.
The CSIS article considers those spending between $10 and $50 a day as middle class.
Obviously these two are widely different standards. If we apply the same WB standard of $2/day to China, 99% of Chinese will be considered middle class (see the first chart in the CSIS article).
Admit it, you got this one wrong. Unless you can point to some other study.
Thanks for digging into that. It makes me wonder whether Okechukwu was just being oblivious or was actively dishonest. One other way people can lie with class statistics is to ignore the other categories (here the higher classes). For example, at the CSIS link we see Japan with far fewer people spending $10-20/day than China because most people are spending more.
P.S. Is the text in the CSIS article first paragraph “31 percent” actually correct? Looking at the graphic we see China with 29.06% at $10-20 and 9.65% at $20-50 (plus 0.78% at >$50) which would give 39% using their definition of “The middle-class is defined by persons spending between $10 and $50 per day.”
In the body of the article they actually say: “China’s middle-class share of 39 percent of its population is similar to that of Switzerland (42 percent)”
P.P.S. This example was one which Okechukwu considered a clear victory for himself based on those links. That says a great deal.
That’s the magic of the PPP Karlin loves so much. That Africa’s middle class constitutes 34% of the population is the considered judgment of Karlin’s beloved World Bank, whose virtues he has been extolling for months. It’s the same methodology that raises India to the third largest economy in the world, meaning that they have a substantial middle class at greatly reduced monetary values.
I have no doubt that people earning that little can indeed be middle class when adjusted for how much further a dollar goes in their societies compared to, say, New York City. That’s purchasing power in isolation. There is even purchasing power variability within the United States in areas such as housing, for example.
Still doubling down on this?! Here is another point from your World Bank link that is worth emphasizing:
I think it’s safe to bet the $4-$20 range looks like the rapidly declining tail of a Gaussian. In other words, there are probably precious few Africans in the $10-$20 range. That’s a nice way of misleading with statistics. Use a broad range which is dominated by people at one end.
Also note that the WB article uses income and the CSIS article uses spending.
You might try comparing apples and apples sometime.
And any thoughts about my point that your CSIS link actually indicates the Chinese middle class is 39% in text body and the graphic?
And to conclude by asking a simple question, do you find it even slightly plausible that countries with a 2.8x difference in PPP GDP per capita (per 2017 World Bank, China $16,807, Nigeria $5,861) have a similarly sized middle class? And Nigeria is one of the best performing African countries by this metric! It’s good to have oil.
Numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
P.S. I’m slowly realizing that you aren’t even as smart as I used to think you were.
It’s not my research. I was merely quoting The World Bank, which Karlin considers unassailable.
If you’re going to compare China and Japan dollar for dollar then it sort of defeats the argument you’re trying to make. Because then China would have virtually no middle class.
That’s probably due to a lag in the data. China’s 31% is based on 2012 numbers, whereas Africa’s 34% was as of 2010.
In 2010, 34% (313 million) of Africa’s population was considered to be middle class. This figure is projected to triple to about 1 billion people by 2060.
https://www.afdb.org/en/blogs/afdb-championing-inclusive-growth-across-africa/post/the-african-consumer-market-8901/
But remember, Africa also experienced positive economic growth during the interim period between 2010 and today.
The links do indeed vindicate what I said, which Karlin has attempted to harangue me over. Who are you? Are you an economist? That Africa has a larger percentage of middle class than China is either true or, at worst, unsettled and the subject of controversy.
If high Ashkenazi IQ in the US is due to high PGS, and considering that Ashkenazi IQ is lower in Israel, shouldn’t Ashlenazi PGS be lower in Israel (if the theory is true)?
Also, if the theory is true, shouldn’t we expect PGS and IQ to be correlated within groups, not just between groups?
All the paper shows is a small R squared of PGS and IQ between two groups (or 3, if Catholics and Lutherans are considered separately). That proves nothing.
The results are particularly unimpressive given the small N of the Ashkenazi group, and the small R squared.
Irrelevant. This is about median income.
That’s strictly for country by country comparisons. China’s middle class is defined by income level.
That tracks with the degree of urbanization. You can live like an American millionaire in the non-urbanized areas of Nigeria for a fraction of the cost of a similar lifestyle in the United States. But in Lagos or Abuja, you’d have to be an actual millionaire in order to live like one.
Idiotic statement. Nigeria’s growth is in spite of oil and not because of it. Besides which, oil money, even if it weren’t being pilfered, wouldn’t go very far in a country of 200 million that produces 2 million barrels on a good day, and only gets to keep 60% of that production per their JV agreements with international producers.
The question wasn’t about the merits and demerits of the PPP metric. The question was – Does Africa have proportionally a greater number of people in middle class than China or not? This is what you asserted. Whether that is measured in PPP or real term is irrelevant as long as the standards are same for both.
The sources you provided are using different standards (both sources are using PPP but the range is different). So they are useless.
I can tell you won’t find any source anywhere that supports your claim. Not that it’s a big deal. People occasionally get things wrong on the internet. No biggie.
Nominal GDP would leave China, Russia and a host of other countries without a single middle-class person on average, given that nominal measurements apply the same standard to every country. It has to be PPP, and PPP valuations vary by country subject to the unique cost of living circumstances in each country.
No, they’re not useless. It’s a function of Africa as a whole being less developed than China. Cost of living expenditures are always going to weigh in favor of less developed areas. This is the dichotomy inherent to PPP that I’ve pointed out before as to why it’s a flawed metric. While PPP tends to be correct in strict numbers terms, often it’s measuring situational indigence more than wealth. Because in order for products and services to be cheap enough to cause higher PPP conversion rates, the population must necessarily be poorer.
You’re babbling. You have no clue what you’re talking about.
If you’re estimating the size of the middle class in a developing country, then you shouldn’t care about the “average.” You can look at the top quintile stats or the decile stats for nominal PPP or GDP by currency and get a good idea of what people have to spend at each level in any country. China’s relative rank among countries is approximately the same whether you use nominal GDP per capita or PPP per capita – between 70th and 80th, according to the World Bank and the other major organizations who do economic metrics. But that won’t help anyone understand the size of its middle class.
Use the same standards or you’re cherry-picking. And any idiot can cherry-pick statistics to tell the story he wants to tell.
Martin Eden? Wow. I have never before met an American who read this novel. I am impressed.
You are giving the impression that as if you brought up China and Africa’s relative middle class size to demonstrate the flaw in PPP measurement.
Now if that’s what you were trying to say then I can at least see where you are coming from. But that’s not what I got from your initial assertion.
Anyone who thinks that the middle classes of China and sub-Saharan Africa are of similar size has a screw loose or is trying to sell you something. The idea should be prima facie absurd. It’s as stupid as pretending that Africans still live in huts.
Oh and I forgot mention. Those things are already taken into consideration before arriving at the PPP figure. In other words $2 PPP in Africa is not the same as $2 PPP in China. It’s less. On top of that you are selecting different ranges. So yeah, the comparison is wrong.
I think it sails over your pointy head.
You can’t use the same standard. Take our host’s country Russia. Does it or doesn’t it have a substantial (albeit lately shrinking) middle class? It does, doesn’t it? Well, how can that be in light of its meager GDP per capita which falls below the US poverty line? Russia’s own poverty line is a mere 10,000 rubles (a whopping $151). Yet The World Bank officially classifies Russia as a high income country. Not even middle income, mind you, but high income.
According to the World Bank’s latest annual classification of the world’s economies, based on gross national income (GNI) per capita for 2012, Russia, Chile, Uruguay and Lithuania all qualify for the highest category, where the average person in each country earns more than $12,616.
https://www.thebalance.com/gross-national-income-4020738
Now, ask yourself why this is.
PPP is a junk metric. But that’s not why I brought it up the very first time. It was simply a statement of fact when looking at the numbers in isolation, absent all the other accouterments of healthy and pleasant living.
Geographic variation in cost of living is real. That’s the justification for the World Bank’s classification as middle income half the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. They forecast further that all the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa will be middle income by 2040. But there are steep costs associated with low cost of living, which in turn should depress their purchasing power numbers.
The cost of living in China can vary substantially from region to region, city to city. And Africa is a massive place with some countries doing better than China in terms of per capita GDP and some doing worse. You’d have to narrow it down quite a bit for a useful comparison. However, it is a given that wealthier countries have lower purchasing power than poorer ones. As a matter of fact, for the wealthiest countries, GDP and PPP values are at or near equilibrium and even sometimes inverted.
Yes and the statement was still factually wrong. $2 PPP cutoff will place 99% of Chinese in the middle class category vs may be ~40% of Africans today. The numbers are from the article you provided.
Obviously 99% of Chinese or 40% of Africans aren’t really middle class by US standards. But whatever standard you use, there aren’t proportionally more middle class people in Africa than China. If US standards are applied then the number would come down to ~2% for China and ~1% for Africa. Either way, China is ahead.
The PPP numbers are calculated after taking local differences in cost of living into consideration. That’s exactly what PPP is all about.
Worth noting that much of Okechukwu’s middle class is in Egypt:
https://www.theatlas.com/i/[email protected]
That graphic comes from this article: https://qz.com/africa/1486764/how-big-is-africas-middle-class/
and is based on this AfDB report: The Middle of the Pyramid report
The report underlying the World Bank article: The making of the middle class in Africa
is different, but the abstract notes:
The AfDB report gives the same 34% figure and is consumption based so is more comparable with the CSIS data. Therefore I will focus on it. Here is how they define the middle class:
As Hanoodtroll noted above, this is VERY different from the CSIC definition: “The middle-class is defined by persons spending between $10 and $50 per day.” This alone completely refutes Okechukwu’s assertion. His failure to address obvious issues like this and others which I pointed out is why I am responding to him with LOLs.
But since I have the AfDB report open, let’s continue with it.
Table 1 breaks down the size of the middle class by groups (as defined above). There we see that excluding the $2-$4 group reduces the “middle class” from 34.3% to 13.4%. And of that 13.4% almost two thirds is in the $4-$10 group!
Chart 1 gives the 2010 “Rich class” (>$20) as 4.84% so we are looking at about 10% of Africans at $10 a day or above (a superset of the CSIS middle class category which includes 39% of Chinese per the CSIS paper data). Also note that an additional 60% (almost all) Chinese fall into the $2-$10 category. Using the AfDB definitions, 89% of Chinese are “middle class” with an additional 10% above that.
Chart 2 gives population proportions subdividing the poor class into <$1.25 and $1.25-$2.
Chart 3 gives similar data for 2010 incomes making clear how different that is from consumption.
Chart 4 gives a country breakdown for middle class size with and without the $2-$4 group. Unsurprisingly, North Africa (Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and Algeria) dominates, but Gabon is an interesting outlier. For a specific country comparison, Nigeria has 22.8% from $2-$20 and 9.9% from $4-$20. Compare that to China!
Chart 18 gives a country breakdown for the relative sizes of the middle class subgroups. Here Nigeria is 56/27/17% in the $2-4, $4-10, and $10-20 groups.
Table 2 gives a table breaking down Africa into Sub-Saharan and North Africa and comparing those to Developing Asia, Developing Europe, Latin America, and the OECD. It is illuminating, but the country in/exclusions are odd so be sure to look at the notes.
There is much more in the AfDB report. For anyone interested in this topic I recommend checking it out.
It is very important to read any article about Africa carefully and attempt to find the original data sources to truly understand them. The path from report to brief article to internet commentary introduces a great deal of distortion along the way.
P.S. And this is the example that Okechukwu chose to focus on and then keep doubling down. Truly deserving of LOLs!
Using the 2017 World Bank data at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
I see these countries:
Equatorial Guinea 24,817 (oil, from wiki: “however, the wealth is distributed extremely unevenly, and few people have benefited from the oil riches”)
Gabon 18,183 (oil, from wiki: “because of inequality in income distribution, a significant proportion of the population remains poor”)
Botswana 17,354 (this looks like the success story to me, a balanced economy with relatively well distributed benefits)
Compared to: China 16,807
Looking at Charts 18 and 4 in the AfDB report I linked above we see that Botswana and Gabon are the success stories by the middle class metric, but their numbers don’t compare to China using similar $ ranges.
P.S. It’s fun to watch your attempts to handwave the facts away here.
The cost of Chinese housing alone, as an aggregate average, exceeds the PPP adjusted incomes of several African countries. Even if we low-ball Chinese housing costs to $200-$300 a month.
However, Chinese use slave labor to manufacture their products. And I’ve seen Chinese packed into single room homes like sardines. Africans don’t live that way, which is why it’s difficult to make an accurate determination.
Therein lies the major flaw in PPP evaluations. It measures how cheaply people can live, not how productive they are. With a drastic alteration to my lifestyle, I could dramatically increase my own personal PPP quotient. But I’d prefer not to live that way.
Which article states that the threshold for Chinese middle income status is $2?
The only way for $2 to go further in China than in most Sub-Saharan countries is if products are manufactured in China and shipped to that African country. The costs of transportation, logistics and paperwork should, theoretically, make those particular products more expensive.
Take your complaint to the World Bank. It’s not my data.
According to the World Bank, 50% of the Sub-Saharan African countries are middle income. They expect that figure to reach 100% by 2040.
Africa today is home to 22 MICs (23 if South Sudan is included)!
http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/africas-mics
LOL. So you edit ADB data to suit your agenda and then claim you’re right. Nevermind all their Harvard and Oxford-trained economists on staff who have actually traveled to these countries and done research, while you probably have never left the United States and have no inkling of economics or finance.
Haha. You gotta love the chutzpah of Internet trolls.
You are the one who brought up two articles that uses PPP. Are you complaining to yourself?
The same article that set the middle class threshold for Africans at $2 PPP.
Not sure what that has to do with the China comparison. Which is the point at issue here. Once all the Sub-Saharan African countries are classed as middle income I wonder what and where will be low income.
Show me where I misrepresented anything. Read the whole 24 page AfDB (their term, not ADB, see http://www.afdb.com) report yourself.
0 for 2, but that’s par for the course for you. Seeing how badly you misread me increases the confidence I have in my assessment of your incompetence.
Indeed. That and your (sorry, their) tendency towards projection.
He’s flailing. Deep in a hole, but still digging furiously.
Who is claiming further? You are the one attempting to claim an already PPP adjusted range of $2-$20 in Africa is equivalent to $10-$50 in China.
You really aren’t very good at debate. Do the pathetic arguing techniques you demonstrate here actually work in real life? If so you must deal with idiots frequently.
I just posted data from the World Bank. This is getting repetitive.
I don’t see any mention of China in the article. Can you point it out?
That’s how you get an equal or larger percentage of African middle income relative to Chinese. Although many of them are classified as low-middle income. Remember, China has 400-500 million more people than Africa, many of them wretchedly poor. The math doesn’t exactly work in their favor.
This stuff isn’t rocket science.
I haven’t claimed anything. The World Bank and the African Development bank have. They have world-class experts, which definitely you are not.
What I did say is that it’s difficult to determine who has a PPP advantage when it’s a race to the bottom. For example, Chinese will eat anything that moves, Africans won’t. So I guess that may give the Chinese an advantage in the price of food.
You’re not even a serious interlocutor. I pegged you a long time ago as the guy with the phony graphs, a deceitful, willfully dumb and blind IQist moron and connoisseur of the most outrageous strains of racist pseudoscience.
You made that claim implicitly when you compared the % middle class numbers from two different sources. One of which used a PPP adjusted range of $2-$20 for Africa while the other used a $10-$50 range for China. The World Bank and AfDB did not make that particular comparison–you did.
You are good (well, not really, but since it’s what you’re best at I can at least try to look on the positive side) at insults, but can you back any of them up? Which of my graphs are phony and why? Point to something I have said which is deceitful, willfully dumb, blind, etc.
It is worth emphasizing that you have failed to point out any problems with the data, graphs, etc. I have presented in this thread. All you have done is disparage them. That clearly shows you have nothing to offer but insults.
Projection is a terrible thing. I think anyone reading this thread with an IQ of over 100 can tell who is and who is not serious.
Except presenting what you did about Africa says little towards that without including similar information about China.
This is true. Which makes what the Chinese have done over the last few decades all the more impressive. Not that they don’t still have a way to go though. If only Africa could show as much sustained progress over a period of decades.
Indeed. Which is why it is sad that you are so bad at it. Trying to equate $2-$20 and $10-$50. Things are pretty bad for you when you have to resort to such transparent chicanery.
Res,
Listen to the experts at ADB. They’re not just making stuff up. You are beyond ignorant on this matter. As far as I can tell, your only areas of expertise are racialism and pseudo-genetics, which is akin to being an expert on bigfoot or extraterrestrial visitors.
I have attempted to give you an education on this thread but you resist due to an ideological fixation on African failure. I am aware that that is a major part of your shtick. However, when ADB says that an African can live a middle class lifestyle (by developing world standards) on as little as $2 a day, they mean it. You see, Africans own land which they never paid for. There isn’t any mortgage or rent on these lands. There isn’t any property tax. It’s just land that they’ve always been on and that is passed down from generation to generation. With no estate tax, by the way. That’s worth at least $1000 a month. These are all the data points that organizations like ADB factor into their equations — things that an obtuse know-it-all like you could never conceive.
I tried to make a distinction between urban living and non-urban living to make this point clearer to you. I told that you could live like a wealthy person in the non-urbanized parts of Africa, even if your income was $10,000 a year, or below the US poverty level.
As Africa becomes more successful and more urbanized, the threshold for entering the middle class will have to be adjusted upward. Urban centers are never cheap anywhere. Also, with increased urbanization comes increased government intrusion in terms of taxation, fees and levies. And, of course, property isn’t free in the cities. So even $20 a day won’t cut it.
The problem is that the particular WB and ADB articles you cited didn’t comment on China. You are using two disparate sources. This what everyone is complaining about.
So if we use the same source, according to ADB the size of China’s middle class was 62.68% back in early 2010s.
See page 8 – https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/27726/special-chapter-02.pdf
Are you an idiot? I went through the 24 page AfDB report and posted detailed notes here. What exactly do you want me to listen to them about? They don’t make your comparison of Africa and China (they make their own, see below, perhaps you should listen to that, too bad it refutes your original point).
Do you also teach your grandmother to suck eggs? That is basic. Both China and Africa have rural and urban areas.
FWIW $10,000 per year is $27 per day so well above the AfDB middle class figure. And 6-12x that of the $2-$4 range composing the bulk of the AfDB middle class population. Just don’t try to buy internationally traded goods with that $10k though. It won’t last long. Probably good for hiring laborers and servants though.
Spare me. That is the most LOL-worthy thing you have said in this thread.
But is it the same middle class lifestyle as one can live in China on $10 (5x!) a day (using PPP)? Since you consider the AfDB a reliable source take a look at Table 2 on page 21 of their report where they compare Africa (33%) and Developing Asia (56%, includes China!) using the same $2-$20 metric. The AfDB seems to think it makes sense to use the same metric to compare those regions. Why don’t you follow their example? BTW, the AfDB leaves Nigeria out of their sub-Saharan category (see notes). How do they justify that?
Now those are marks of a well functioning country. How exactly does that work when a population is reproducing at well above replacement rate?
As Hanoodtroll says, the key point here is your use of disparate sources with inconsistent measurements. We have been clear about that. It seems apparent you are just willfully ignoring that point.
P.S. FWIW in 2017 Africa’s rural population was 60.46% and China’s 42.04%: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS
Different, but enough to justify a 5x difference in spending threshold?
You dance around the subject because you have no clue what you’re talking about.
Find a single World Bank Economist who claims that sub-Saharan Africa and China’s middle classes are of similar size. You won’t find one. You know why? Because no World Bank economist would dare say such a silly thing.
Think about that for a moment before you go back to reiterating your stupid claim.
Russia is an incredibly poor country with an incredibly wealthy capital. The country does NOT have a substantial middle class compared to its population because the hinterlands are still very poor and most Russians live in the hinterlands. It does have a substantial middle class in absolute numbers, however, because Russia is a large country with a lot of people.
The World Bank classifies countries using GNI per capital and the Atlas method. The WB is aware of the limitations of how GNI is calculated, but uses it for its own administration purposes.
So? Grouping Russia in a classification with Uruguay, Chile, and Lithuania doesn’t seem that audacious to me. The World Bank understands the limitations of its methodology. It’s still not stupid enough to claim that SSA’s middle class is as large as China’s.
You have to ask?
He keeps believing that apples weigh as much as watermelons because if you count one using the metric system and one using the imperial system, then it’s almost true.
And it’s just racism on your part that you don’t see this.
My comment about ADB vs. AfDB is actually important.
ADB is Asian Development Bank: https://www.adb.org/
AfDB is African Development Bank: https://www.afdb.org/en/
But your ADB source does use the exact same definitions as the AfDB report for both middle class and the subgroups. Thanks!
Also, Table 2.1 in the ADB report appears almost identical to Table 2 in the AfDB report so it looks like they coordinate at some level. (the latter does add an overall category for Africa)
Another thing which is notable about those tables is how much more than Africa Developing Asia improved between 1990 and 2008 using the $2-$20 middle class metric. Figure 2.1 shows that even more clearly.
That ADB report is a great source. Thanks again! Some more notes.
Table 2.3 has the country breakdowns (China is PRC).
Table 2.5 has urban/rural income (uses different data source) breakdowns for PRC. The proportions are surprisingly close for those. IMO this argues against the importance of Okechukwu’s urban/rural point. One data point, in 2007 87.4% of rural Chinese had incomes in the $2-$20 range.
Table 2.6 does the same for expenditures. In 2004-2005 the national/urban/rural proportions in the $2-$20 range were 38.1%/50.6%/33.1%
Too bad the AfDB report does not go into this level of detail.
Figures 2.3 and 2.4 are nice bar charts showing the changes in both rural and urban middle class proportions from 1995 to 2007 (China) or 1993 to 2004 (India). Makes clear just how amazingly well China has done by this metric over this time frame. Later figures cover Indonesia and The Philippines.
This is the part which baffles me the most. Does he actually believe this? Or is it just something he tells himself to preserve his self esteem while he is being destroyed in discussions like this.
Yeah I realized just after posting that one is AfDB and the other is ADB. But it’s obvious that they coordinate with each other and WB.
Okechukwu is clearly pretending to not understand. So it won’t matter.
Are you suggesting that the Chinese middle class percentage I’ve alleged is at variance with the facts? What then in your estimation is the proportion of Chinese middle class?
Bear in mind, China itself freely admits that 40% of its population lives on less than a PPP adjusted $5.50 a day. And if that is something they admit to, it most assuredly is much worse than that. At the same time, hundreds of millions of Chinese are attempting to domicile in places like Beijing and Shanghai, where $5.50 a day definitely won’t cut it. In fact, $5.50 a day wouldn’t cut it in Luanda or Kinshasa either. Thus these rural transplants are nowhere near middle class. As a matter of fact, Chinese authorities are presently clearing out their unsightly shanty towns, euphemistically known as “illegal structures.”
Your data was compiled in 2008. Since then China has more than tripled its GDP and several hundred million persons have transplanted from rural areas to vastly more expensive urban centers. China’s official poverty line is $1.90 a day. So it definitely doesn’t see $2 a day as middle class.
Do you not read simple English, you witless nincompoop?
He said you’re using two standards for judging two different middle classes. What’s worse, you can find no reputable economist who agrees with your judgment that SSA’s middle class is as sizable as China’s, which eviscerates your economic reasoning for using a double standard.
Got it now? Or do you need to have it drilled into your noggin even more? Because we have several capable drillers here who seem to have infinite patience when dealing with idiots.
This is all blather. No one here is claiming that most people in China are in the middle class. So who cares what “40%” of the population in China lives on?
Okechukwu throws out useless statistics like a squid releases ink. They are tossed out to throw off anyone hot on the trail of any argument he was originally trying to make.
You have to use a different standard, you nitwit. Do you want to use a USA standard to judge China, with around half the population living on less than $5.50 a day? You even have to use different standards within China itself given the wide regional disparities in income and cost of living.
Right now there are more “middle class” in China than the entire US population. Does anyone give a fuck that it’s the Chinese standard that is used to make that determination?
While over the same period African GDP has increased about 70%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/240665/gdp-of-africa/
Do you think that difference has increased or decreased the Chinese advantage in middle class proportions seen in 2008?
The ADB seemed to think it reasonable to apply the same standards in their report. Aren’t we supposed to listen to them?
If I was comparing China’s middle class to the middle class in the United States, then, yes, I would use the same standard.
Like I said, dunderhead, you want to show that apples are almost the same size as watermelons by using the metric system to weigh apples and the Imperial system to weigh watermelons. And, yes, kilograms to stones, apples do weigh almost as much as watermelons if you’re just looking at the numbers.
Fantastic! Now you can argue in your melon-headed way, that sub-Saharan Africa’s middle class is bigger than America’s middle class. Good luck with that!
I don’t see why Okechukwu doesn’t just argue that all of sub-Saharan Africa is potentially middle class. Not in the next few decades. But today.
If $2 a day makes for the middle class in SSA, then a small subsidy of $730 a year will turn a poverty-stricken African into the equivalent of a striving middle class Chinese or a fat and sleek American consumer.
At that rate $73 billion a year would turn 100 hundred million impoverished sub-Saharan Africans into part of the middle class. That’s about the same annual income Delaware generates, and only about one-third of the interest Americans will pay on their federal debt this year.
At the same rate we could lift 500 million sub-Saharan Africans into the middle class with $365 billion a year in subsidies. That’s only about 60 percent of the U.S. military budget. Very doable.
Who besides Okechukwu knew that lifting all of sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty could be so cheap and easy! Someone needs to alert the World Bank.
Everyone is always talking about ending poverty in SSA, but finally Okechukwu has found an answer that won’t cost much: We simply define it away.
I think you may have just identified a new discipline. Perhaps we should call it “Okenomics.”
I think others have tried. How else to explain Nigeria not appearing in the sub-Saharan Africa numbers in the AfDB and ADB reports? I mean it is only the biggest country in Africa (by > 2x). And just happens to have a middle class 10% smaller (23% vs. 33%) than the value they quote for both Africa and SSA.
But real economists aren’t shameless enough to do it as thoroughly as Okechukwu does.
P.S. Don’t they also leave out the second largest SSA country (Democratic Republic of Congo) with it’s 12.4% middle class?
It’s like arguing with a 9/11 Truther. He’s not interested in the details unless they strengthen his impossibly weak case. So you have to shame him rather than debate him, since he’s not interested in debating, anyway.
Alas, the math is elegant in its simplicity and it simply doesn’t work to produce a greater proportion of middle class in China than in Africa.
China already states officially that 40% of its citizens live on less than $5.50 a day. Mind you, that’s not an average of $5.50 a day, but rather up to $5.50 a day. Meaning that this population is in an income spectrum of between $0.01 to $5.50 a day. Averaging that out, we get a value of $2.75. Given the Communist Party of China’s propensity to understate its weaknesses while overstating its strengths, I think it’s safe to assume that the actual numbers of Chinese living on this $2.75 a day constitute more than 50% of the population. But let’s stay with 50% for the sake of this exercise. That means that half of all Chinese, a figure nearly equivalent to the entire population of Sub-Saharan Africa, are living on $2.75 a day.
Of the remaining half of the Chinese population that are above the $5.50 threshold, about 15% will be upper income. This means that the Chinese middle class would have to come out of the remaining 35%. But certainly not the entire 35% will be middle class. There’s still a band of people above $5.50 but below $20, or even below $6. I have no idea how narrow or wide this band is. What is certain is that the Chinese middle class constitutes less than 35% of the population.
Regarding this African middle class range of between $2 to $20 proffered by the World Bank and AFD, keep in mind that the mean of that range is $11. What that means is that this population of Africans alone are, on average, 400% wealthier than half the population of China.
Jesus, man, do I have to spoonfeed you this stuff? In the SSA context, Nigeria has the same problem China has in that its massive population depresses its numbers.
Which is reason to leave it out?! Perhaps they should just leave out the lowest performing Chinese provinces as well.
It really is amazing that despite this issue China with its huge numbers still manages to outperform both Nigeria and all of Africa. How do you think the Chinese do it?
I think what it comes down to for you is that larger numbers in one country makes it more difficult to play games with cherry picking countries to include. Botswana and Gabon (~2 million people each) do relatively well, but are dominated in any honest pan-African average by Nigeria (~170 million).
Here is the list of SSA countries used in Table 2 of the AfDB report.
Putting that together with Chart 4 and this table of African country populations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_countries_by_population
It seems clear that Table 2 is not an honest reckoning of the African population weighted middle class proportions. Of the three largest SSA countries (with a total population about 3/4 that of the total for SSA given in Table 2) we have the following $2-$20 middle class proportions:
Nigeria (173 million, not included): 22.8%
Ethiopia (99 million, included): 21.5%
Democratic Republic of the Congo (86 million, not included): 12.4%
I don’t see how that allows for the overall quoted average of 33%! At least if it is population weighted, which is the correct way to calculate it for comparison to China.
And here are the next four largest SSA countries:
South Africa (55 million, included): 43.2%
Tanzania (51 million, included): 12.1%
Kenya (46 million, included): 44.9%
Sudan (40 million, not included): Data not available, I can only imagine what that means.
So we can see how South Africa and Kenya pull up the average, but in an honest accounting Nigeria, Ethiopia, DRotC, Tanzania, and Sudan would overwhelm them.
Why is it that every time I look closely at statistics quoted touting African success there seems to be chicanery afoot?
I do have to give you credit for persistence. If I had posted half of the decisively refuted BS you have in this thread I would have run away in embarrassment long ago.
No, we rely on the data given which is even more elegant in its simplicity. It’s funny how the only use you seem to have for math is to produce obfuscatory squid ink.
This one is epic:
See my comment 191 where I explain why that is misleading (outright wrong in this case). It is fun when I anticipate your BS like that. How did you ever succeed at chess when it is so easy to think a move ahead of you?
I think I will keep that assertion of yours around as a prime example of Okenomics in action.
And just so it doesn’t look like I am hand waving, let’s lay out the data showing how wrong that assertion is. Chart 2 of the AfDB report gives the African population distribution by expenditure based subclasses. In 2010 we had the following categories and population proportions.
Rich class (>$20): 4.84%
Upper middle ($10-$20): 4.70%
Lower middle ($4-$10): 8.74%
Floating class ($2-$4): 20.88%
2nd poverty line ($1.25-$2): 16.70%
1st poverty line (<$1.25): 44.15%
So we can see how that "average" you give of $11 for the $2-$20 group is spurious. 5/6 of that group is below $10 in reality.
Math really isn't your strong suit.
P.S. And is it really so hard to use the proper abbreviation of AfDB? First you use ADB, now AFD, why?
Nigeria isn’t left out of anything. If it were there would be an even higher proportion of African middle class vis-a-vis China.
The issue at hand is the relative sizes of China’s and Africa’s middle classes, not performance. Countries out-perform other countries for a variety of reasons. Extrapolated to Chinese population numbers, the USA’s GDP would be around $100 trillion dollars.
You just made that up. It’s literally meaningless.
What it really comes down to is that for some countries, China among them, larger numbers of people provide diminishing returns. That, after all, is why they instituted the one-child policy. It’s why they’ve probably aborted a couple of billion fetuses since enacting that policy.
Every report I’ve seen includes those countries. Ethiopia is the fastest growing economy in the world. Why would it be left out?
And, by the way, ADB’s data encompasses all of Africa as a single unit. It isn’t based on the average of the averages of individual countries.
You don’t have to guess or speculate with regard to China. I’ve already demonstrated that at least 50% of Chinese live on less than $2.75 a day. And don’t think that there aren’t any floaters among that unstable and vulnerable group either.
So even if the 33% African middle class is disproportionately distributed toward the left tail of the bell curve, they’re still much wealthier than 50% of Chinese.
Math indeed. LOL.
See the footnotes to Table 2 (which I quoted) of the AfDB report. It is left out of their SSA aggregate (also in the ADB report).
You don’t even understand population weighted averages? Pathetic.
The individual country data is in the reports, but as the Table 2 footnotes show Nigeria and DRotC are left out of the SSA aggregate.
I sure hope so. I just don’t see how that is possible given the numbers I discussed in detail. Encompassing Africa as a single unit is the same as doing a population weighted average by country. That’s why population weighting the average is important.
That comment was weak sauce. Are you getting tired?
P.S. Here is some remedial work for you: https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/198549-what-methods-are-used-to-calculate-aggregates-for
The denominator of the middle class proportions is the total population. This is why it is important to population weight the averages.
You really don’t get it?! I think this comment adds to the lore of Okenomics. My earlier comment stands. You did not address my points and your “averaging” technique is ridiculous.
It is a bad sign when you have to resort to chicanery like this rather than straightforward apples to apples comparisons. How about we compare the Chinese middle class to all of Africa?
That comment was also weak sauce.
Nigeria is most definitely not left out of ADB reports. It’s either a typo or you’re seeing what you want to see. Why not expand your research beyond this one report you keep parroting? Of course, you’re not a serious writer, your aim being to “win” through deception and cherrypicking. Skills, undoubtedly, you acquired as an enthusiastic mouthpiece for racist pseudoscience.
I understand a hell of a lot more than you, on a multitude of topics. As far I can tell, your “knowledge” is confined to racist pseudoscience, which has about as much validity as flat-earthism.
Big hint: I’m kicking your sorry ass in this debate. Hundreds of millions of Africans are wealthier than hundreds of millions of Chinese. The entirety of China, on average, lives on about $8 a day. You made a big deal about the African middle class being under $10? Well the entire Chinese population is under $10 on average.
Given that Africa has about 60% of the population of China, it is not inconceivable that Africa has a proportionally larger middle class. At least it’s not as farfetched as clowns like you and Karlin assert. It’s arguable. It’s debatable. But it’s not impossible.
Sure thing. Just as soon as we compare the African middle class to all of China.
And with that, I’m done with this debate.
Table 2 says it is not included in the SSA totals. Read it there for yourself. I included an exact quote of the explanatory footnote.
This is classic. You introduced that report to this thread and indicated you thought it was reliable. That is why I have been focusing on it. And now that you realize it may say something you don’t like you are disavowing it. Hilarious.
Plus, I have been relying on both the AfDB (African Development Bank, your ADB) and the ADB (Asian Development Bank) reports since they seem to be working from the same data.
Oh the projection. How blatant can it get? Do you seriously not realize that is what you are doing and how obvious it is to any thoughtful reader?
Perhaps so. Apparently just not about anything we are talking about here. And most definitely not about basic mathematics given your laughable attempt at averaging the max and min of the $2-$20 range. If you understand so much, how about actually demonstrating it?
You are living in Fantasy Land.
The AfDB and ADB data indicate otherwise. What is more, they are based on older data (e.g. 2008, 2010). Given the relative rate of PPP GDP growth in Africa and China since then it is likely that the difference in middle class proportions in China’s favor is even larger now.
There is a big difference between being those things and being true. That you are retreating to that position makes clear that even you don’t think it is true.
Do you not realize my mocking retort was a response to you doing just that?
Run away, run away!
https://youtu.be/92gP2J0CUjc?t=92