There are three main reasons why the correlation between national IQ and GDP per capita is only around r=0.7, instead of r=0.9.
Oil/resource windfalls: Saudi Arabia would otherwise be about as prosperous as Yemen.
The legacy of Communism: Central planning and especially the lunacy that is Maoism are far less effective than free markets.
The legacy of Malthusianism: This is the most subtle factor, but it used to be very important. Countries like China, Japan, and to a lesser extent India used to be stuck in a high-level equilibrium trap; quite intelligent and productive, but unable to accumulate capital surpluses due to almost everyone being at the limits of subsistence.
This was not the case with relatively land-rich Latin America, where escaping from the Malthusian trap was easier. As a result, the degree of human capital there has long correlated much better with the region’s wealth. (Argentina even had a resource windfall effect around a century ago).
But all these factors will diminish in the coming decades!
Practically everyone outside Sub-Saharan Africa has more or less escaped the Malthusian trap.
Communist regimes have nearly all collapsed, leaving just a few relics like Cuba and Best Korea as monuments to failure. Moreover, over the long term, we can expect institutions everywhere to get better, as different countries adopt established best practices – occasional backsliding as with Venezuela regardless.
The impact of resource windfalls – apart from a few exceptions (e.g. Botswana – diamonds), we’re speaking about oil – will likewise decline. Technology has conquered Hubbert’s peak from the supply side, and soon enough, electric batteries are going to cut in from the demand side.
Even today, it is presumably not an accident that the countries with the most developed automation in manufacturing – Germany, Switzerland, (Northern) Italy, Japan, South Korea, parts of the United States, and increasingly, China – are those where the core populations have 100-105 range average IQs.
The coming automation of more and more sectors of the economy, including services, will impact disproportionately on low IQ jobs, so the impact on economic performance of average IQs – and especially smart fractions – should if anything increase even further.
The one thing that could throw a wrench into this – sort of – is if countries were to begin randomly adopting large-scale intelligence augmentation at highly differential rates (e.g. via CRISPR + genomics of IQ). But it isn’t likely to be random. It will almost certainly be the richest and least superstitious/obscurantist countries that will adopt these technologies first, and both of those factors are already highly correlated with IQ.
The countries you mentioned aren’t necessarily uniform though. In Germany the churches still have a lot of influence in these matters, despite increasing secularization; e.g. their influence is one of the main reasons for fairly restrictive laws on preimplantation genetic diagnosis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimplantation_genetic_diagnosis#Germany ; their reasoning, bizarre and perverse imo, is that this is eugenics and somehow might lead to disabled people in general being devalued and ultimately euthanized like in Nazi Germany). Given that Christian conservatives take this stance even when it’s about the avoidance of serious disability and suffering, I don’t think they’ll be exactly favorable towards intelligence-augmentation (in any case, as they have amply demonstrated in the last few years, they’re also enthusiastically in favour of mass immigration by comparatively low-IQ people).
So I don’t think it’s just about IQ, cultural values also matter. Might be an advantage for the Chinese or Japanese (though who knows where these developments will lead).
I’m very bearish on the prospects of any Asian country forging ahead of the West in a meaningful way. They have proved quite capable of grabbing Western ideas and running with them, and absolutely pathetic when it comes to coming up with their own.
USSR was communist. Also a powerhouse innovator, with lots of firsts. Grew less impressive later on and post-collapse, but that reflects a general trend towards passivity that infects the whole world.
Meaning they were very recently poor. Well, the West was very recently poor when it went and shot ahead of the whole world, powered by incredible innovations. Also, Japan has been very rich for a long time, never Communist, and still never managed to forge ahead.
I think this line of thinking is nonsense. It explains why the Soviets couldn’t put the first person in space because they were cucked by Communism, and why the West couldn’t invent new things in the 1800s because it was cucked by poverty – in other words, it explains why things that happened couldn’t have happened. Not a useful path to walk.
You presume too much. No-one is taking even the most basic steps to halt a rapid dysgenic spiral. There is no reason to assume this will change. It seems like there is a lot of hype in the air. Genetic modification has been around for several decades. It is very unlikely that we will have turnkey designer babies in the next few decades. The long term prospects for modification of humans are great, but they are not fundamentally different from livestock or crops, and will see their benefits reaped on the timescale of human generations, as benefits from new wheat strains are reaped on the timescale of their maturation speed. They will not result, right away, in anything incomparably and spectacularly superior.
Elites are slothful and spectacularly ignorant. Where they look ‘based’ it is almost always just shallow superstition. Even more dismaying, those who are most intelligent and informed seem to have their heads rocketed higher and higher into the clouds, believing general AI, designer babies, and other sci fi shit will spring out into the real world shortly and make our mundane concerns irrelevant. Well, I don’t think so. I think our future is almost certain to be VERY mundane. The East will keep being a dwindling pack of stone faced imitators, the West will gradually Brazilify. If it is shaken up, it will be by war, not by technological developments, and war will startle observers with its resemblance to older conflicts.
IMO, competitive threat makes large scale adoption inevitable.
Can you imagine an ethnically homogeneous, 105 ave. IQ , 1.4 billion pop., completely developed China superpower going loggerheads with a multicultural, affirmative action, fractious, maybe 95 ave. IQ and dropping West? Perhaps. But what if the Chinese had an 180 ave. IQ?
I don’t mean to scream “Yellow Peril”, but I think it is obvious that Asians would be more open to eugenics. I think it is also obvious that the global power dynamic is on track to change quite dramatically, even without considering eugenics, just dysgenics. In the West, the military and even the aerospace industry are developing considerable affirmative-action baggage. When the West faced the USSR, that same baggage was comparatively much smaller.
Good post, Anatoly!
However, I am not quite sure about this part:
“The one thing that could throw a wrench into this – sort of – is if countries were to begin randomly adopting large-scale intelligence augmentation at highly differential rates (e.g. via CRISPR + genomics of IQ). But it isn’t likely to be random. It will almost certainly be the richest and least superstitious/obscruntantist countries that will adopt these technologies first, and both of those factors are already highly correlated with IQ.”
Indeed, you are making it sound like high-IQ countries always have good ideas–which we know isn’t true due to the fact that many high-IQ countries are importing large numbers of low IQ people. Indeed, I wonder how long it will take many high-IQ liberals to slip out of their IQ denialism–after all, some conservatives are still global warming denialists in spite of the overwhelming evidence in favor of global warming and it being man-made.
Plus, this is not to mention pro-lifers’ opposition to things such as IVF. Indeed, I don’t know whether pro-lifers would be comfortable modifying embryos for either intelligence or various other traits.
Also, I don’t think that it’s much of a stretch for many low-IQ people to conclude that their low IQ is holding them back–especially once scientific knowledge and research in this field progresses even further. After all, even a low IQ person would probably be able to figure out that he or she–as well as his or her children–could live a much better life with a much higher IQ.
@ilkarnal: Yeah, East Asians appear to underperform in regards to both economic growth and human achievement (measured in their amount of Nobel Prizes per capita, et cetera)–especially relative to their IQ.
Indeed, I don’t know why this is–a relative lack of curiosity, perhaps?
Enhancing is different from destroying. From a Christian perspective abortion is wrong, even of people who are very disabled. But adding something to enhance may be a more complex situation. Screening certain embryos and destroying them is very different from positive modification. Churches don’t oppose prenatal vitamins, for example.
The will certainly oppose research into this, which involves the destruction of embryos. But if the process of enhancement doesn’t involve that, I’m not so sure.
It might be conformism, and perhaps creativity.
The Soviet space record is impressive in many ways, but a lot of their intellectual and fiscal resources were funnelled into very narrow fields. They also had a lot of failures (as in their lunar program) because they could only manage about a tenth the budget of NASA, and so couldn’t do the very thorough testing of individual nuts and bolts. Meanwhile, the US missed some landmark firsts merely because of political concerns the USSR didn’t have. The idea of using a militarily developed rocket to launch the first US satellite was rejected, so the the USSR won that round.
I wouldn’t say it is true that nobody is taking any steps against dysgenics. China seems to have tightened up their immigration policies considerably. Japan never even had the problem. Of course, that’s not everything – it is not internal differential fertility – but it still is a great deal healthier than much of Europe and America
The USSR looked impressive because of tech transfers from the West:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_C._Sutton
I disagree, for the following reasons:
1 – over the long term, China (and perhaps all of East Asia) have shown as much creativity as another center of human civilization.
2 – Creativity is overrated somewhat. It’s impressive coming up with ideas, but to implement it in terms of economic well-being and geopolitical power, all you need is to take the idea and implement well or on a big enough scale (hopeful both!).
New Yorker vs Mike Enoch.
http://archive.is/5ddog#selection-1409.0-1412.0
East Asian countries have a big, big fertility problem. The fertility-driven dysgenics has no floor to it, while the race mixing won’t result in arbitrarily low IQ people, even though the decline it drives is faster.
A bit healthier, maybe. Still extremely extremely ill. As in, if we follow their example we are doomed. They are god-fucking-awful. Let’s get that clear. Take away ‘white guilt,’ take away leftism, there is no indication that you aren’t still utterly doomed if you do anything short of ban birth control for high IQ women.
Throw in as many caveats as you like, they were still pushing the boundaries in a big way. They aren’t anymore. They weren’t, before they were Communist.
Both sides had a lot of failures.
Not at all. The modern West is unparalleled. Nothing comes even remotely close.
Also, over the long term, populations change. Maybe some capacity for creativity has been driven out, while in the West clearly that capacity skyrocketed.
Creativity is your word. I don’t give a fuck what it is, it’s what underlies being able to make genuine technological advancements. All of that. Box it. The West has more. The East is comparatively pathetic. They can only copy, only follow. For whatever reason. Could be just low ‘creativity’ – I doubt it. But I don’t care what it is, I care that it is and that it has been stable at this point across a wide timespan and a wide range of conditions.
Nonsense. You can’t explain away Soviet technical achievements that ADVANCED the state of the art. Everyone copied and bought, if they could, better technology from Western countries, including other Western countries. The West gets tech transfers from other parts of the West. Somehow the Soviets put their asses into gear and did shit, made genuine advances. Were the best in the world in a whole range of stuff. They were real scary rivals. Nothing like that happened with Japan, ever. Nothing like that is happening with China or any other southeast or east Asian country.
Damn fool ignorance, that’s the problem. You get a sense a lot of people might as well have been born yesterday.
If Sutton is right, then obviously you can explain away Soviet achievements.
Even today, Russia depends on Western technology for energy extraction, one of its primary industries:
http://www.futuresmag.com/2014/07/30/us-denies-russia-fracking-technology
This predates the Soviet era. Tsarist Russia would import Western technicians and technology wholesale to establish industry in Russia.
You’re assuming that there’s something magical about “creativity” and it is something that can’t be isolated, studied and re-developed for, either in education methodology or the logic fed into digital systems to serve as proxies. In fact, there are some institutions in China that already focus on that.
The paper below shows one example.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49722340_Effects_of_a_Learn_to_Think_intervention_program_on_primary_school_students
This is so patently ridiculous by anyone who has spent time in East Asia as to not worth much response. Just a simple duckduckgo search brings this up:
https://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/12/07/7-technologies-where-china-has-us-beat
There are also examples in Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review, and Forbes off the top of my head.
But at any rate, you can only develop advances if you’re working on something; if, for example, the US doesn’t have manufacturing plants and investment for manufacturing, the US isn’t likely to find the next advance for manufacturing. Its the reason why Friedrich List supported native industrial development even at a comparative disadvantage, because of the body of knowledge and experience that can be gained(or be vacant).
At any rate, I think you’ll see the results in a generation or two. And the conditions have very much changed, and continue to change.
By ‘long term’ I mean on the millennium-sized scale. So while I agree that Europe after approx. 1500 has made enormous technological strides that outstripped anything outside of the continent, it does not mean that the other parts of the world aren’t able to make any technological advances whatsoever. China has produced a variety of inventions in the past, such as printing, gunpowder, etc. as well as the present inventions like the e-cigarette, Non-invasive prenatal diagnostic testing for Down’s Syndrome and the passenger drone (I got these from the Wikipedia page).
While biological factors is not insignificant in the inventiveness of a region (you need smart people get the ideas, after), you also require social and economic institutions that allows for these ideas to be produces in a timely manner (although this also depends biological factors as well). What I am suggesting is that these are just as important to a society’s inventiveness as much the base ‘creativity’ of its people.
Throwing a wrench into your future is the idocracy meme.
So many Americans and people in the West hardly value intelligence. While iq will increasingly become more important, the majority of people will be perfectly happy living like proles getting drunk and getting knocked up by random people.
The smart people will be forced to pay for all of this through living wages and higher taxes.
Agree 100%. The IQ-enchancing technologies and knowledge have been around thousands of years. There is nothing magical about CRISPR than cannot be (at the population level) achieved by applying basic selection to human breeding. But if anything, we have recently seen the opposition to eugenics growing stronger – and specifically in high-IQ West.
The main question is to what extent the average IQ of a population is hereditary and what extent – the result of certain cultural models. “Confucian” countries of the far East show great similarity (in IQ and other options), despite the fact that the origin of the peoples of the region are quite different. This is a serious argument in favor of a major influence of the cultural factor.
Anatoly Karlin’s obsession with IQ, even to the extent of splitting hairs between Spanish and German provinces, is beyond bizarre.
For example, for all of Mr. Karlin’s ‘analysis’, he cannot account for economic growth.
If a country had an economy that grew 5% over the previous year in Real GDP, then did that country’s IQ rise 5% in a year?
Well? Why did the economy grow, when IQ is the same? Well?
This questions is completely a ‘whoosh’ over Karlin’s head. He just does not grasp it, because it destroys his models.
Since 2010, China’s GDP grew 87% and India’s grew 78%. Did the IQ of each country rise substantially? Over the same period, the US grew only 22% and the EU only 8%.
Similarly, China was poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa until 1979. China’s political goals, and even its system, changed. But did the IQ of the country change? No, it did not.
This is even before getting into the fact that while men and women have the same average IQs, men are vastly more productive than women, and account for about 100% of all inventions. This invalidates the notion that IQ correlates to economic productivity. But I will let that slide, since the GDP growth topic alone is something Karlin will just never be able to grasp.
My friend, you will never educate these wiggers.
Always remember that white variance is extremely high. There is never a reason to talk about ‘median’ whites due to their high variance.
The top 80% of whites really are the best people in the world.
The bottom 20% are the worst. They are even lower than blacks. It is really two races that have nothing in common other than white skin. The women become fat, tattooed feminists, and the men become white trashionalists.
If these white trashionalists and feminists were given land and told the create their own country, it would be worse than Rwanda.
What a nonsense comment. Everyone pays taxes. And the rich would never have gotten rich if it weren’t for public services which is built by and paid for by everyone. Your rant is pure ignorance and complete idiocy.
Another Jew spotted. The recent Lieberman thread over at iSteve is crawling with them. Hasbara central is getting desperate.
Disagree on the attacks on East Asians. Innovation of China alone is enough to refute the claim that East Asians are “not creative”. It’s bogus. Furthermore, if you look at the cutting edge innovation today, it’s hard to say that, say, Germany is a more innovative country than South Korea.
The chart looks like bullshit. GDP (PPP) per capita in Russia is reported as ~ $26K, in China ~$15K and in the US ~ $57K.
Of course, central planning is pretty much everywhere these days, that’s the nature of modern (neoliberal) capitalism. If it wasn’t, the West would’ve collapsed long time ago. “Free markets” is a fantasy.
As for Maoism, some ‘lunacy’ it was: transferring one of the poorest and most backwards countries in the world into the strongest. Just ask any (high IQ!) Chinese person.
Mao did things like having farmers stop farming and instead produce mini steel furnaces because he thought that was the fastest way to become a superpower, this is also not the only crazy thing he believed in. I am not pro democracy and not pro the neoliberal/cuckservative world order, however one does not have to be that to see that Mao was not the sanest.
China produced things like literature, philosophers, technical inventions, Sub Saharan Africa produced none of these things. There is a clear difference in what the two can do, and you obviously did not read the article. Nobody is surprised if North Korea produces Hydrogen bombs and missiles regardless how bad their government is, the same cannot be said about even a big state like Nigeria, their low average IQ simply means they will be an inferior state not capable of producing anything of note.
Similar ‘crazy things’ happened in every industrial country at some point. In the US, for example, it took a super-bloody war to stop people from farming cotton and send them to manufacture steel and other industrial stuff.
“legacy of Malthusianism”
Do you simply mean below average arable land per capita?
“coming automation of more and more sectors of the economy”
Since average US increases in productivity have declined every decade since good tabulation starting in the 1950’s, is automation really going to start accelerating and replacing jobs at a faster pace than in the past or will replacement of existing jobs by automation actually slow down?
Our “biorealistic” future:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.01149.pdf
I agree there’s be differences in responses.
China will embrace it, the government won’t even have to prod to get people to adopt it (according to opinion polls). The US probably won’t ban it outright, but majority of people are opposed to intelligence augmentation according to opinion polls. Germany will be hampered by Christian SJWs. Russia will probably ban it because it because of the growing influence of state-sponsored obscurantism. Possibly the most welcoming climate for this in Europe will be in Denmark (liberal but less shiblib than the other Scandis) and Czechia (highly atheist, individualist).
Good point. Could even be language. That their form of language necessitates that the early development of the brain forms a certain way. Wonder if there have been studies on this.
Peace.
Noticed this and speculated about it myself.
James Thompson had a post describing an article by Kenya Kura, Jan te Nijenhuis, Edward Dutton which found that East Asians are indeed less curious: http://www.unz.com/jthompson/asians-bright-but-not-curious/
Sounds plausible. What are you referring to with “growing influence of state-sponsored obscurantism” in Russia? The nexus between the Russian state and the Orthodox church (and other religions) or some more general trends?
TRIZ, too.
Confucianism only core to China and Korea (long part of Chinese Empire), in Japan it was merely one of many borrowings from China.
It is good to argue with oneself. Carry on.
Seems to be true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Fortunately, this is one of those rare cases in history where have a near perfect control group:
Fun anecdote: You had fewer chances of getting fired in Maoist China than dying on your job. Even the USSR never reached near that level of insanity.
No mass repressions? You have gotta be kidding: 40 years under the martial law.
Also, how is this a “near perfect control group”? A small nation of 20 million people, and a recipient, in the context of the cold war, of significant financial and military American aid — vs. China?
I suppose India would be the most obvious country to draw a comparison with…
Interesting, its the first time I’ve heard of it and it definitely seemed like it actually demonstrated practical application. Thanks for the reference.
I’ve wondered if East Asian IQ might cluster around the mean more than European IQ, so that per capita there are both fewer idiots and fewer geniuses. Is there any data supporting this?
The people’s republic got massive Soviet aid until the early 1960s though (iirc one of the biggest aid programmes in all of history). Also significant American support once China and the US had concluded a quasi-alliance against the Soviet Union. That would have to figure in any comparison as well.
Good theory, but no.
* http://infoproc.blogspot.ru/2008/06/asian-white-iq-variance-from-pisa.html
* http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft2.htm
Sure. Apart from one brutal crushing of a rebellion in 1947, I am not aware of any mass repressions in Taiwan. Police state? Sure. Though that’s what China had since Mao anyway.
Twenty million is by no means small.
No, because India has an average IQ in the low 80s. (Although their socialist Licence Raj didn’t help much either).
Or clannishness:
Clannishness – the Series: Zigzag Lightning in the Brain
That article you linked is emblematic. Scaling up is not making anything revolutionary. The West invents automobiles – maybe Japan builds them fastest and best for a while. Do you understand how fundamentally pathetic it is to point to the latter ‘achievement’ as anything comparing to the former?
The East Asians are a shrinking bunch of stone-faced imitators. Not much of a yellow peril. They have proved unable to go anywhere they are not led.
As for them coming up with some magical fix – lol. They aren’t even coming up with a fix for the very very very basic fertility problem, unhandicaped by Westerners’ anti-racism and liberalism. They are clueless, Western thinkers project savvy on to them.
None of this is to say they are not smart. You see a lot of bright, clear intellects from that background. But what is indicated by the IQ avg is that you should have a larger proportion of earth-shattering geniuses coming from there, and while that prediction comes true for Jews it does not in this population. I don’t claim to know why.
But I also reject absolutely the idea that this is terribly surprising. IQ is great but has shown big cracks, like intertemporal invalidity and this East Asian overprediction and only moderate if any g-loading improvement over other measures. And then it wouldn’t even be that surprising if some populations just overperformed or underperformed in test-like environments generally.
You can compare this to IQ denialist bullshit if you want, but remember – the East Asian-White difference is quite small compared to the Black-White difference, and factors like this have a much easier time closing a smaller gap. Also Blacks do nicely align with the predictions associated with their lower IQ, just like Jews nicely align with predictions associated with their higher IQ. When the predictions match results, trying to undermine the test is motivated reasoning. When they diverge sharply, it is only good sense.
Since we’re analyzing everything on the ‘per capita’ basis here, how ‘massive’ could that Soviet aid be? Especially in the immediate post war years? In the early 60s, even in Moscow they were still rationing wheat flour, as I remember.
Is that a fact? What kind of support?
If East Asians and white gentiles are compared what is the disparity in creativity/curiosity/entrepreneurship? Among the Forbes 40 under 40 richest entrepreneurs, if the athletes and pop starts are removed, about half of the list are Jewish. How many Nobel prize winners in the US are non-foreigner and gentile? It seems in the US at least white gentiles are stagnant in creative-ish traits given large numbers and lack of out output.
Sweet – so once the West has solved their own fertility problem – East Asia will be right behind them! And possibly improve on the numbers like they did with automobiles!
Peace.
That’s pretty funny because that’s exactly what China managed in 2016 and increased the number of births. What the government wants, they get. At any rate, population density being as high as it is, rapidly increasing the population isn’t really at the top list of priorities.
Context changes, as does better understanding of process and methodology. The idea that innovation is something mystical that cannot be put into method or process seems to be a tall order, given that increasing datasets has allowed us to procedurize almost everything else. Indeed, I’ll argue that understanding that would be a necessary condition for improving outcomes from artificial intelligence.
But I do wish you good luck in your beliefs. Ignorance is bliss, I hear.
1) I am not Jewish.
2) Jews are white.
Any more brilliant insights?
WNs have Negro IQs.
Primarily technology transfer and US financial investment I’d suppose (which had a political dimension because the US wanted China as a counter-weight to the Soviet Union). I’ll admit though that I’m not that knowledgeable about the details, maybe someone else can provide them.
That’s interesting, thanks.
The Japanese are also “core” Confucians. In particular, Confucianism was the official ideology of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Cultural characteristics of Japanese people (work ethic, the cult of learning, hierarchy) is typically Confucian. Perhaps in addition to Confucianism played the role of the intensive rice-growing, but the representatives of the four rice-Confucian cultures (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam) show a striking cultural similarities.
Even Koreans in Russia (100 years living in isolation from Korea, whose native language is Russian, and the native religion – Christianity), has culture is still Confucian.
Welcome , CRISPR !
The generation whose parents do not take advantage of CRISPR for fitness and cognition will compete with those whose parents did. “Why didn’t you help us when you could?’ will be the question they ask.
From 1951-1965 the USA gave 1.4 billion dollars worth of aid to Taiwan.
http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNAAK054.pdf
That’s $10.8 billion in 2017 dollars, or an average of $770 million per year.* Or, based on Taiwan’s 1965 population, about $60 per resident, per year. According to wiki, US economic aid ceased in 1965.
In 1980 Taiwan had a per capita GDP of $2,367. In China the per capita GDP was more than ten times less: $195.
There was also a Maoist state in Europe: Albania. It did much worse than any of its non-Maoist neighbors.
*In context, that’s 1/4 as much as Israel (which has about 36% of Taiwan’s population) gets per year.
Here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2642405?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
The US aid to Taiwan amounted to 43% of all investment (during just the 1950s) and 90% of all foreign investment; and that’s not counting the military aid. Planned economic development, launched in 1953, consisted of three four-year plans. So much for free markets.
Anyway, I don’t think there is any doubt that Taiwan was a US protectorate for several decades, which, together with the huge difference of scale, makes any comparison with China completely unsuitable.
I find it surprising that stating that the post-war China is, overall, a great success story could somehow be controversial.
It’s been a success story for the last 40 years, after three decades of catastrophes and wasted potential.
Well. they were probably educated in the PRC, which has a vested interest in promoting the good side of Maoism.
My impression is about Maoism, at best, it provided the background (e.g. a mostly unified state) for creating a powerful ‘developmentalist’ state in the Japanese/South Korean/Taiwanese mold (with Chinese characteristics!) once Mao was gone. Before that, Maoism mostly meandered from crazy scheme to crazy scheme with little to show for it.
That’s not what my Chinese friends tell me, including, incidentally, those educated in the US. Maoism brought China from total misery into a strong consolidated state and a world power. You can’t really separate the last 40 years from the previous 30: all the reforms, the 5-year plans, industrialization. Obviously, the cultural revolution was an unfortunate setback, but hey, what did you expect. This has been, and still is, a journey across the uncharted territory.
Maoism broke Confucianism and was necessary for China to forge ahead; however, its hard to say that all of the stupidity that was also involved was necessary. Hindsight is 20/20, I’m sure that it could have been done better, but history is what it is.
Didn’t the Guomindang do that successfully anyway?
And why was Confucianism so bad anyway? I am leery of overly cultural explanations, but lots of people were praising it as enabling the fast growth of the East Asian tigers in the 1990s (whereas before they had blamed Confucianism for their historical backwardness… hence my leeriness).
It probably wasn’t as great as Protestantism (primarily for fostering literacy) but better than Catholicism or Orthodoxy.
“I find it surprising that stating that the post-war China is, overall, a great success story could somehow be controversial.”
Post war China consist of two periods, Maoist China and post Mao China. Post Mao China is a success story because Deng scrapped many of the Mao’s insanities that wrecked the country for decades.
Well, Chiang Kai-shek still had people calling him Lord Chiang for one thousand year reign, so perhaps he wasn’t quite as dedicated to blow up everything as Mao Zedong was, for better or worse. Its really hard to say; the thing is, China really was a mess of ritual and stagnation and the Cultural Revolution certainly its part to permanently disrupt things such as building dragon holes, crying out to scare forth demons, and the like. KMT would have kept things relatively less brutal and if you really need to alter the true nature of a population, perhaps you really do need to put them through a brutal sieve of starvation and baby-eating. I bet that it’ll select for better survivors and more practicality…in one way to put it.
But you can’t have a nutcase running things forever for obvious reasons, even if some of his insanities proved ultimately helpful.
I think that Confucianism in certain extents was helpful – the basic notions of education, harmony, and hard work all being useful. What wasn’t useful was the added load from Neoconfucianism, with its detailed caste system bashing on soldiers and praising rice eating and all that associated nonsense. Much as Christianity would disrupt Europe which was at one point holding onto Roman notions of dignity,etc, so I think the massive disruption that Mao brought seems ultimately necessary to bring us a modern China that has a genuine chance of being different, as opposed to say, a larger Japan or Korea.
Do you have any investment ideas based on this chart and/or other factors?
Didn’t the Novgorod Republic have a high level of literacy for its time?
Literacy in pre-Modern China was quite low outside of the Mandarins.
IIRC, Confucianism was a backwards looking ideology. Confucius’ big goal was to find the ancient rites to revive the ‘golden age’ of his own fallen age – this being more than two thousand years ago. It’s not right philosophy for a civilization dealing with foreigners who are light years ahead of them, as was the case with China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
An interesting note to keep in mind is that the Cultural Revolution was a “success” in the sense that it achieved its main purpose of Mao taking back power. I think the Machiavellian power grabbing part of the Cultural Revolution was much more important than whatever the purported ideological reason was. Needless to say, what was good for Mao personally might not be very good for the Party and the country.
History is not about individuals; it doesn’t matter whose portrait is hanging on the wall. From the dialectical materialism angle, I think it’s pretty clear that it was a setback, an attempt to slow down, prevent vital reforms. But of course I could be wrong.
From my understanding, the thing with the Guomindang is that they were like a loose alliance of rival clans. I think the reason why the Communists were necessary was the fact that they were able to wipe clean all the tangled up alliances and corrupt power structures that made the Guomindang such a giant ungovernable mess. Of course, the problem with the Communists is that if they decided to use their rather effective command structure to do stupid shit they end up with the Great Leap Forward. But on the other hand it is completely possible the Guomindang would have made a mess out of governance as well even though they would probably have killed less people. I think it is possible to argue that if the Communists never took over then Deng would never have eventually gotten the chance to implement successful policies (or, to put it another way, there would never have been a Guomindang Deng who would have the same amount of success).
ilkarnal: I think this (legacy of Malthusianism) line of thinking is nonsense
Yeah, if you really think about it, it does not make a lot of sense.
Was South Korea, or Taiwan, say, really disadvantaged relative to Latin America due to differences in marginal low productivity for farmers? (On the other side of the ledger, there are Smithian productivity advantages from access to high amounts of human capital).
In reality, we’re talking about the fact that Latin populations tended to adopt Enlightenment Era Western European innovations in technology, science, and education earlier than those two populations I mentioned, which were far more culturally conservative to pre-industrial norms in the 19th and early 20th century.
(And education is particularly important – the Iberian colonies obviously had a better time of gaining a stock of Western style education in the late 19th and very early 20th than any Asian economies bar Japan, which absolutely went for broke on Westernisation).
They did so because they were colonies of Europe, with most of their ancestral stock from Iberia.
Less cultural distance = easier to adopt innovations; productivity rises earlier. (Not “free land”.)
To pick further on the term of “High level equilibrium” as well, it’s also a bit of a nonsense term because it suggests technical production within most advanced regions of India and China in say, 1500 AD, was more advanced than European counterparts. But technologically this is obviously not the case if you really dig into the lit of innovations and production and make objective comparisons.
A higher level of importing from India / China to the West is sometimes held to be the result of technological advantage. However, again if you really look at it, any importing from India/China to Europe tended to be driven by the silver excess, and better coin and ship technology, in the West, and by agricultural advantages in warm climate crops in the East (e.g. Indians can grow cotton, which you can’t in Europe, so they lead production, but there’s no advantage in tech sophistication). Technological sophistication in advanced cultural products did not lag, post Middle Ages.
…
Anatoly: The legacy of Communism
Communism is not so unique. There are all kinds of productivity lowering errors across the world in government and economic systems (corruption, for one).
Unselected Anglos or Japanese or Ashkenazis, for example, obviously wouldn’t nearly be as productive in most countries, say Brazil or Mexico, if they were dumped there and forced to abide the government structures that exist.
In the same way, Mexicans, or Germans, or Japanese, are hugely more productive in the US than they are in Mexico, or Germany, or Japan. (“Super Economy”).
Communism is not the only government system mediated exception to country economic productivities as average of citizen ability.
(Meaning it’s not the case that, so long as you’re not Communist, you can do what you like with economic and political policy and you will turn out rich.)
Where Communism is interesting is that it’s an error in government that smart people seem to fall for. Most other errors in government and economic systems tend to happen in less smart populations, so don’t break the IQ->GDP correlation.
Communism unusual here. It’s an error in government which doesn’t drop in probability as your population becomes smarter and better educated (if anything becomes more probable, looking at Western campuses).
…
On a general note Anatoly, you’re a pretty smart guy, but you’d be way smarter on these topics if you went to the twitter for Garett Jones (https://twitter.com/GarettJones) and PseudoErasmus (https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus) and systematically read through everything they’ve posted for about the last 2 years. You’d be a lot more informed about economic history and have a much better position to make these posts grounded in that.
Read mainstream economic history+a healthy dose of “Deep Roots” economic literature => understand real reasons for divergences. It works!
Lots of famous and intelligent people – Zwicky and Polya come to mind – have attempted to find an automatic way for anyone to replicate their creativity. None has ever succeeded, and none ever will.
It is a myth. About the level of literacy in medieval Novgorod, there is no reliable data (there are finds of medieval letters, but the percentage of literacy is impossible to calculate). Based on indirect data (overall low level of material culture) is the percentage of literacy had to be very low.
dunno, it’s too early to tell.
I think creativity is 99% of it just knowing one’s stuff (esp. the associated math) and thinking about the problem a lot.
It’d be interesting to know how people generally come up with things, for example, one of the most momentous (by Shannon, I think), the idea to make electric circuits perform Boolean algebra.
I genuinely hope so.
Dr. B. Oakley explored a variation of this too, and found that learning appears to be accomplished in mappings of the brain very similar to what you suggested: it appears that separate nodes in the brain each hold chunks of information, and there’s a “tentacle” effect in which the brain does, usually while semi-conscious, asleep, etc, in which these disparate ideas are connected to try to solve the problem.
A lot of the ideas generated are completely useless, akin to the dream-logic we have while sleeping, but some actually produce something coherent and meaningful. Anyone who’s been “struck by a muse” can probably relate to this.
Translation : Anatoly Karlin has no argument. This is what I predicted in my comment above.
Karlin just has no grasp of the concept of GDP growth, and if a country with a 100 IQ had the GDP per capita 20 years ago that a country with an 85 IQ has today, then the latter country is just 20 years behind, which undermines the hare-brained premise of most of Karlin’s articles.
Hence, Karlin is far below the level of knowledge where he can discuss this subject. He proved it.