DeepLeftAnalysis🔸 tells us that, if you want economic growth per person, you should want [EDIT: one-off] population decline. He provides a mix of case study and theory to make his case – and yet his analysis fails. I’ll tell you why.
"What DeepLeft overlooks is that this doesn’t give us a model of sustained growth... Clearly, a cut in population isn’t enough to pull off long run growth."
There seems to be no disagreement between us, except that you ascribe beliefs to me that I do not hold.
My original article wasn't saying that reducing the human population to 20 dudes would produce more economic growth than 8 billion people over the next 200 years. My article was showing that over short periods (less than 100 years) you can have economic growth DESPITE a 10% population decline.
I am trying to diffuse hysteria over TEMPORARY population declines, like the ones we see in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. I do not think these will lead to the collapse of civilization, SO LONG AS they can be solved within the next 100 years, which is entirely plausible. It is not a crisis, and calling it a birth rate crisis obscures and distracts from much more important issues.
I am trying to refocus our collective problem-solving capacity away from "more births" toward solving problems of international security via foreign aid. For example, our goal should be to do to Africa what the CCP did in China, in a more humane and peaceful way. That seems to be an easier and quicker problem to solve than trying to get gay zoomers to pump out more babies.
It is my belief that after 2-3 generations of record low birth rates, natalism will win out naturally, without the need for government intervention. I think Ryan Burge's data on religion shows this quite clearly: there are diminishing returns to the secular erosion of religion. What you are left with is a kind of "antibiotic resistant strain" of religion which can survive the ideological pressures of modernity. No need for child tax credits, housing subsidies, or any of the other extremely expensive $200k-per-baby schemes.
With that having been said, I'd like to add on some things which move beyond the scope of your article, and push this conversation into the realm of a more substantive debate which will be more useful to both of us as well as my audience.
Depending on your view of the heritability of IQ and the cultural cost of diversity, immigration has already solved the problem of low fertility. We don't have a declining population at a global scale, and I don't often see models that predict global shrinkage before 2100. So we have 75 years, which is quite long enough for the problem to be solved without the kind of authoritarian theocracy or fiscal irresponsibility (expansion of welfarism) advocated by natalists.
One of the natalist objections to immigration is that they believe immigrants have low economic productivity because they have lower genetic IQ than white natives. Some natalists hint at this view without being honest enough to say it and claim to be anti-racist. Whether or not it is racist, it deserves to be addressed in a rational way.
When we get into IQ, I would make the argument that it is much more important for economic growth within a welfare system to reduce the population of people with an IQ under 70 than to increase the population of people with an IQ of 100. I would argue that poor people are more sensitive to natalist monetary incentives, and therefore, these incentives are inherently suspect from a long-term economic point of view, taking into account the financial burden of low intelligence.
You have claimed that by using extremely complex and targeted policies, you can ameliorate this risk, but I think that government policies can never be this precise and they always degrade toward the lowest-common-denominator. If you want to build a bridge in a year for $100 million, it gets built in 10 years for $1 billion. Similarly, if you want eugenic natalism, you're going to get dysgenic natalism. This isn't an attack on your position specifically, but it is an attack on your faith in the precision of government as a tool for changing human behavior without generating negative externalities.
To conclude: While I appreciate your dedication in trying to refute my views, the views you have refuted are not the ones I hold. If you read my original article and got the impression that I was saying, "we only need 200 dudes for the next 300 years, and we will have more economic growth than a billion dudes over 300 years," that is either a mistake of interpretation on your part, or a lack of clarity on my part. I hope my response here clarifies my view and we can move forward and get into real disagreements, as pertain to pollution, security, immigration, and human intelligence. -DLA
I like the considered reply! I shall reply more fully in a considered manner in a post, but would for now reiterate what I replied in notes that my argument's reasoning targets both the claim that a one-off contraction in population would have a long-lasting boost to economic output and the claim that permanently declining population would be beneficial to growth.
I know you didn't advocate permanent population decline, I would just also reply with the claim that even a one off contraction isn't going to have long lasting benefits to capital concentration per worker in isolation.
I don't disagree that a "one-off contraction in population would have a long-lasting boost to economic output" because there's literally no one-off policy that can induce long-term anything.
If I understand your cockney slang -- I am not suggesting that the main or only benefit of anti-natalism is economic benefit. I would prefer that each human being was intelligent and moral enough to be a net economic contributor in such a way that we could actually grow our population while, at the same time, increasing green spaces, for instance by greening the roofs of our infrastructure, putting transportation underground, increasing the heights of buildings, and so on. But right now each new person born, on average, is a net taker, not a net contributor. We need to slow down the production of new human beings until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
I'm claiming that each new person is in expectation a contributor - since optimal population growth for innovation (which underscores steady state rate of growth) is empirically in the 0.2-1% range, as per the paper I linked
I just want to point out how stupid it is to think economic growth is more regulated by the population share of low-IQ vs the raw number of high-IQ. Endogenous growth theory son! Larger absolute numbers of high IQ people generate more nonrivalrous productivity enhancements (ideas, technologies, etc), so it really is the case that the pure number of smart people with innovative cultural values causes economic growth for everybody. OTOH you can have a wide variance in population share with low IQ and still have growth: there’s been huge economic growth around the world even with relatively little measurable change in IQ! This clearly shows us that the bottom end of the IQ distribution doesn’t matter that much. And indeed since innovations require markets and scale, I would argue that low IQ people probably have strong economic complementarities with high IQ people.
The financial burden stuff is goofy too— financial burdens on any scale can be easily handled if growth is high enough. Debt limits only exist for countries that aren’t growthmaxxing.
India for instance has millions of high iq individuals. And yet it’s got a gdp per capita of $2,500 and people shit in the street. Those millions of smart people are just absolutely swamped by low iq parasites that get in the way.
You could say the same about Africa as a whole or specific countries I. Africa. South Africa even had a white elite and English government legacy and it didn’t matter because the blacks took over and started murdering and looting and they couldn’t keep the power plants running.
One of the biggest challenges of the next century is going to be to find ways to keep the low iq hordes out of the productive countries. Combine immigration with low birth rates amongst the smarts and you will get the mass third worldling of the oecd and civilizational collapse.
That’s why immigration/natalism/genetic enhancement are the only things that really matter in the long run. Any other problem you could think up will probably happen anyway if the demographics get messed up.
I get it. You don’t like the vibes of seeing the global poor as dangerous parasites we need to keep out. But it’s an inability to be honest about the situation that is leading to out of control immigration that is just going to snowball and the math doesn’t work out. To whatever extent you can achieve the necessary result while double talking about how awesome everyone in the world is fine, but you gotta get the results no matter what.
The good news is that In the first world dysgenics is a solved problem on the lower end. The poor really aren’t having too many kids. All we need to do is get smart people to have more and keep the immigrants out and everything will be fine.
This is as simple as taxing childless smarts to give tax breaks to smart breeders. It’s just a hard sell because childless smarts are greedy fucks that want to free ride on the future and not do their fair share.
Bit reductive to boil down the outcomes of a country to merely its people, no? If we looked at Europe 400 years ago, then we'd conclude that the Dutch are unique genius's amongst a continent of brutes by that metric.
The Dutch are a high IQ people. NW Europe has some of the highest IQs in the world, and even compared favorably to other Europeans. Its no surprise the Industrial Revolution got going there.
The pre-industrial world limits the usefulness of IQ because martial prowess is so much more important and there aren't as many benefits to complex abstract reasoning, but once the Industrial Revolution gets here IQ becomes the dominant trait (we could expand beyond IQ, but we would just be talking about various genetic traits).
"Bit reductive to boil down the outcomes of a country to merely its people, no?"
Unless you go communist, it's the primary variable by far.
I mean I'm not huge on national IQs myself, but I can still take them as read and it reinforces my point. My point was that the Dutch are not supreme ahead of all Europeans, but that if you looked at Europe 400 years ago and used prosperity as your proxy for national IQ, then you would have to declare the Dutch insanely intelligent. Yet even if national IQs were valid, we'd see the Dutch similar to the Germans.
And martial prowess wasn't the source of Dutch prosperity.
Take the point re potential that IQ-prosperity relationship varies pre to post industrialisation.
Oh absolutely, Hitler wasn't stupid, neither was Stalin, and neither were the German people. But I don't think the problem of security is merely about interstate conflict -- you have crime, gangs, non-state actors, and terrorists. Then you have the question of what happens when IQ decline is combined with heterogeneous cultural shift. Does that make a state more secure, or less? My argument isn't that intelligence prevents war, but that a rapid decline in intelligence, especially when combined with cultural heterogeneity, is a risk to security on a number of levels, not just interstate. I would suggest that when we think about natalism at the global scale we should take into account how changing birth rates and financial incentives affect both 3rd world populations, 1st world populations, native populations, and immigrant populations. I think you may have stated your position as "nationalist natalism," meaning that you want higher birth rates for America, but not for the rest of the world. I would argue that it is better from a security perspective to focus on a global birth reduction than a local (national) birth boost, and from a political perspective, I believe that it is very difficult to couple those two policies together. You can complain that people misuse the term eugenics, or that they have a misunderstanding of what constitutes racism, but this does not change the ideological playing field as it exists in the realm of what is practical, likely, and possible.
I don't think that's a correct retelling of Lyman's position. Liberal pronatalism is where it's at - supporting people in the decisions they want. That brings some externalities, sure, but the externalities can't be the only motivator.
Look it would be very easy for "liberal pro naturism" to turn into "another free cash giveaway to poor single moms".
Take Minnesota, which has a $1,750 child tax credit that is fully refundable. It starts to phase out at $36,880 in household income for a married couple ($31,090 for a single mom). This is basically juts a giveaway for poor single women that nobody else qualifies for.
At the national level there was a strong push to eliminate the child tax credit expansion above an income of $X, with the left always pushing a lower $X.
And of course the very concept of a fixed $Y benefit is inherently progressive/dysgenic. It should scale with income.
And of course we could go on and on (does the benefit penalize marriage, does it penalize SAHM, etc).
It's very tempting to turn "pro natalism" into just another welfare program because the votes of poor single mums are cheap and they've got a sob story for cover. It also costs less money (in the near term) than what it would cost to get the middle and UMC to have more kids (though in the long run they pay for themselves). This is standard public choice problems.
JD Vance has thankfully pushed back against income phase outs for child tax credits. He gets it. A dollar spent on poor single moms is another dollar wasted that could be better spent on getting net positive contributors to have more kids.
There will always have to be some degree of universality to any child tax benefit to make it politically viable. But we should waste as little money as we can on the poor. They didn't earn it, and neither will their kids.
1. A rapid global decline in intelligence, combined with increasing cultural heterogeneity, is a global security threat, not just in terms of conventional war, but also in terms of internal conflict.
2. I am skeptical of any sort of natalism which is culturally neutral (which you may be referring to as "liberal natalism"), because I believe it will exacerbate existing demographic issues. I also do not believe that targeted natalist policies can be effective because of political polarization. Instead, it would be better to pursue global anti-natalist policies, because that's an effective strategy which works.
In Europe and America, general natalist policies would disproportionately benefit non-whites. It sounds like you are advocating for race-neutral natalism. I would issue as a cautionary tale what occurred in South Africa after 1920, where the black population quadrupled while the white population only slightly increased. Race-blind natalism is a security threat, because countries which undergo rapid demographic turnover experience higher levels of political extremism.
The Civil Rights era was a direct result of the mass immigration policies of the 1860s, for example. Catholics and Jews were much easier to integrate (fiscally and culturally) than today's immigrants, especially in the case of Europe. There is no economy if there is not political security.
There is no reason to believe that fertility is going to bounce back anyplace it’s fallen, nor that dysgenic trends are going to reverse. You’ve got no empirical data to back this up. It hasn’t happened anywhere.
South Korea is going to go from 20% 65+ today to 60% by 2082. The burden of the old on the young will get worse and worse, and the young will respond by having fewer kids. Yes, it’s a crisis.
What’s worse, low birth rates in the first world are actually causing pressure to import low iq hordes from abroad. Because every single institution in our societies needs “number go up” to function and so they start grasping at the straws of immigration.
Designing child incentives that are eugenic isn’t that hard. You just make it a scalar tax break. It’s really just about the fact that you don’t want to pay your fair share to support smart people that are making babies because you’re a greedy and selfish person. The entire reason you’re not having kids is so you have more disposable income. The rest is all rationalization.
These comments are fairly disconnected from reality. India is experiencing rapid economic growth and is far wealthier than it was under colonial administration. South Africa proves my point— South Africa today doesn’t have some massively higher share of low-functioning people than it had decades ago! Rather, it had highly selective exit by elites! The loss of a demographically small number of highly productive elites has sunk the country, NOT the growth of lower functioning masses. Where go the elites, so goes the country.
I’m not averse to saying unpopular or uncomfortable things. I do it all the time. But edgelordy “oooo look at me saying taboo racisms” isn’t a position actually based on the evidence. It’s beta cope.
India has gone from 1% of our GDP per capita to 3% of our GDP per capita. Are you in a rush to move there? lol. Astounding how when you start at nothing there is nowhere to go but up. They've got an average IQ of 76 and will probably top out at less than $10,000.
"highly selective exit by elites"
Why did those elites exit? Could it be because the low IQ black hordes took over and wrecked everything! That's what low IQ people do. That's why having too many of them around is dangerous.
I'm as in favor of low IQ societies becoming apartheid states that try to limit the damage their trash can do as the next guy, but it's an inherently unstable and limiting system. Apartheid didn't last, and it's not like SA was that wealthy under apartheid either. It's some people in gated compounds trying to hold the rickety structure together and hoping the mob doesn't storm the compound one day. I wouldn't want to live in such a society, and I don't want mine becoming one.
High average IQ democracies are way better than that. Let's keep them.
One might have a model in which a low level (Malthusian) equilibrium trap is broken by an exogenous population decline and some of the increase real income per person goes toward creating innovation (or just any kind of by-hypothesis non-depreciating capital?).
Long run growth needs more geniuses with more time to spend playing with ideas and gadgets. If population IQ is declining, or university is extended to people with lower IQs, then we will be worse off.
My plan for boosting world well-being is: enforce a strict minimum of 145 on the WAIS for university matriculation. Leave the geniuses alone to figure out new things. Don't distract them with having to explain stuff to simpletons.
Also, we don't want indiscriminate babymaking, we want high-investment parents.
I agree that growth needs innovation which needs intelligence. I haven't replied directly on intelligence claims here, but I would point out that intelligence positively predicts fertility in various populations, eg Swedish men, so it's not clear that we are in (as it were) genetic-IQ decline. It seems like in some populations it negatively predicts fertility (through education and careerism) and in others it positively predicts fertility (through income and, more speculatively, ability to maintain relationship quality).
As it comes to enforcing a minimum of 145 IQ for university matriculation - why 145? Seems kinda arbitrary. Then I think of who does innovation, and then it seems nonsensical! The Feynman example is often used, but it's still true - he most likely would not have scored 145+ on the WAIS. Countless entrepreneurs and inventors have IQs anywhere from 105 to 145.
Yes, even within academia IQ predicts impact, but it is exactly that: predicting impact. It is not some iron cut off.
Imposing an arbitrary cut off top-down would be far more inefficient than letting things play out.
By the by, on the high-investment parents point. Whilst Caplan needs to update his case with the evidence, I do like the core point in Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids - raising productive people does not require high investment by the standards of today.
You are right, three sigma is arbitrary. Perhaps it should be four. Any higher than that, though, and the population of university researchers would likely to be too small to pass on their knowledge sustainably.
And yes, IQ is highly imperfect, but it's the best tool to hand.
My point is to avoid having highly productive people waste their lives in pointless departmental meetings, and homework grading sessions being bored by ... lesser intellects, shall we say.
BTW the IQ cutoff should apply to administrators as much as academics.
also it's incredibly common for people at the tails to have high variance in their scores across components, ie not have a reliable aggregate iq score, making it less reliable at the tails
Sure, but then a) why use a measure that won't be very accurate at assessing ability at the level you want to assess, and b) my other point was that this ignores that plenty of people become very productive who are not of elite IQ scoring (ie many of the 'lower mass' may be more productive than you think)
I'm not sure you're engaging with my suggestion - why not see what pans out? Given that plenty of people innovate and do cool stuff with an IQ below 145
I think space is an issue, but not as much as many would like you to think! We can build but we regulate!
As it comes to climate change, the trends in per person carbon emissions are so good that having children has a miniscule on the margin effect once you throw out the carbage Wynes & Nicholas 2017 paper that used already obsolete data. I wrote on this in The Critic: https://thecritic.co.uk/having-kids-wont-hurt-the-planet/
"What DeepLeft overlooks is that this doesn’t give us a model of sustained growth... Clearly, a cut in population isn’t enough to pull off long run growth."
There seems to be no disagreement between us, except that you ascribe beliefs to me that I do not hold.
My original article wasn't saying that reducing the human population to 20 dudes would produce more economic growth than 8 billion people over the next 200 years. My article was showing that over short periods (less than 100 years) you can have economic growth DESPITE a 10% population decline.
I am trying to diffuse hysteria over TEMPORARY population declines, like the ones we see in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. I do not think these will lead to the collapse of civilization, SO LONG AS they can be solved within the next 100 years, which is entirely plausible. It is not a crisis, and calling it a birth rate crisis obscures and distracts from much more important issues.
I am trying to refocus our collective problem-solving capacity away from "more births" toward solving problems of international security via foreign aid. For example, our goal should be to do to Africa what the CCP did in China, in a more humane and peaceful way. That seems to be an easier and quicker problem to solve than trying to get gay zoomers to pump out more babies.
It is my belief that after 2-3 generations of record low birth rates, natalism will win out naturally, without the need for government intervention. I think Ryan Burge's data on religion shows this quite clearly: there are diminishing returns to the secular erosion of religion. What you are left with is a kind of "antibiotic resistant strain" of religion which can survive the ideological pressures of modernity. No need for child tax credits, housing subsidies, or any of the other extremely expensive $200k-per-baby schemes.
With that having been said, I'd like to add on some things which move beyond the scope of your article, and push this conversation into the realm of a more substantive debate which will be more useful to both of us as well as my audience.
Depending on your view of the heritability of IQ and the cultural cost of diversity, immigration has already solved the problem of low fertility. We don't have a declining population at a global scale, and I don't often see models that predict global shrinkage before 2100. So we have 75 years, which is quite long enough for the problem to be solved without the kind of authoritarian theocracy or fiscal irresponsibility (expansion of welfarism) advocated by natalists.
One of the natalist objections to immigration is that they believe immigrants have low economic productivity because they have lower genetic IQ than white natives. Some natalists hint at this view without being honest enough to say it and claim to be anti-racist. Whether or not it is racist, it deserves to be addressed in a rational way.
When we get into IQ, I would make the argument that it is much more important for economic growth within a welfare system to reduce the population of people with an IQ under 70 than to increase the population of people with an IQ of 100. I would argue that poor people are more sensitive to natalist monetary incentives, and therefore, these incentives are inherently suspect from a long-term economic point of view, taking into account the financial burden of low intelligence.
You have claimed that by using extremely complex and targeted policies, you can ameliorate this risk, but I think that government policies can never be this precise and they always degrade toward the lowest-common-denominator. If you want to build a bridge in a year for $100 million, it gets built in 10 years for $1 billion. Similarly, if you want eugenic natalism, you're going to get dysgenic natalism. This isn't an attack on your position specifically, but it is an attack on your faith in the precision of government as a tool for changing human behavior without generating negative externalities.
To conclude: While I appreciate your dedication in trying to refute my views, the views you have refuted are not the ones I hold. If you read my original article and got the impression that I was saying, "we only need 200 dudes for the next 300 years, and we will have more economic growth than a billion dudes over 300 years," that is either a mistake of interpretation on your part, or a lack of clarity on my part. I hope my response here clarifies my view and we can move forward and get into real disagreements, as pertain to pollution, security, immigration, and human intelligence. -DLA
I like the considered reply! I shall reply more fully in a considered manner in a post, but would for now reiterate what I replied in notes that my argument's reasoning targets both the claim that a one-off contraction in population would have a long-lasting boost to economic output and the claim that permanently declining population would be beneficial to growth.
I know you didn't advocate permanent population decline, I would just also reply with the claim that even a one off contraction isn't going to have long lasting benefits to capital concentration per worker in isolation.
I don't disagree that a "one-off contraction in population would have a long-lasting boost to economic output" because there's literally no one-off policy that can induce long-term anything.
Sure, but then why lush for it on the basis of econ benefits? If the boost wears out reasonably quickly
Seems in that case the driver for it is left to the matter of pollution
If I understand your cockney slang -- I am not suggesting that the main or only benefit of anti-natalism is economic benefit. I would prefer that each human being was intelligent and moral enough to be a net economic contributor in such a way that we could actually grow our population while, at the same time, increasing green spaces, for instance by greening the roofs of our infrastructure, putting transportation underground, increasing the heights of buildings, and so on. But right now each new person born, on average, is a net taker, not a net contributor. We need to slow down the production of new human beings until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
I'm claiming that each new person is in expectation a contributor - since optimal population growth for innovation (which underscores steady state rate of growth) is empirically in the 0.2-1% range, as per the paper I linked
I agree that historically 1% was good for growth, but I think due to catastrophic security risks and pollution risks that is no longer the case.
I just want to point out how stupid it is to think economic growth is more regulated by the population share of low-IQ vs the raw number of high-IQ. Endogenous growth theory son! Larger absolute numbers of high IQ people generate more nonrivalrous productivity enhancements (ideas, technologies, etc), so it really is the case that the pure number of smart people with innovative cultural values causes economic growth for everybody. OTOH you can have a wide variance in population share with low IQ and still have growth: there’s been huge economic growth around the world even with relatively little measurable change in IQ! This clearly shows us that the bottom end of the IQ distribution doesn’t matter that much. And indeed since innovations require markets and scale, I would argue that low IQ people probably have strong economic complementarities with high IQ people.
The financial burden stuff is goofy too— financial burdens on any scale can be easily handled if growth is high enough. Debt limits only exist for countries that aren’t growthmaxxing.
This is clearly false Lyman.
India for instance has millions of high iq individuals. And yet it’s got a gdp per capita of $2,500 and people shit in the street. Those millions of smart people are just absolutely swamped by low iq parasites that get in the way.
You could say the same about Africa as a whole or specific countries I. Africa. South Africa even had a white elite and English government legacy and it didn’t matter because the blacks took over and started murdering and looting and they couldn’t keep the power plants running.
One of the biggest challenges of the next century is going to be to find ways to keep the low iq hordes out of the productive countries. Combine immigration with low birth rates amongst the smarts and you will get the mass third worldling of the oecd and civilizational collapse.
That’s why immigration/natalism/genetic enhancement are the only things that really matter in the long run. Any other problem you could think up will probably happen anyway if the demographics get messed up.
I get it. You don’t like the vibes of seeing the global poor as dangerous parasites we need to keep out. But it’s an inability to be honest about the situation that is leading to out of control immigration that is just going to snowball and the math doesn’t work out. To whatever extent you can achieve the necessary result while double talking about how awesome everyone in the world is fine, but you gotta get the results no matter what.
The good news is that In the first world dysgenics is a solved problem on the lower end. The poor really aren’t having too many kids. All we need to do is get smart people to have more and keep the immigrants out and everything will be fine.
This is as simple as taxing childless smarts to give tax breaks to smart breeders. It’s just a hard sell because childless smarts are greedy fucks that want to free ride on the future and not do their fair share.
Bit reductive to boil down the outcomes of a country to merely its people, no? If we looked at Europe 400 years ago, then we'd conclude that the Dutch are unique genius's amongst a continent of brutes by that metric.
The Dutch are a high IQ people. NW Europe has some of the highest IQs in the world, and even compared favorably to other Europeans. Its no surprise the Industrial Revolution got going there.
The pre-industrial world limits the usefulness of IQ because martial prowess is so much more important and there aren't as many benefits to complex abstract reasoning, but once the Industrial Revolution gets here IQ becomes the dominant trait (we could expand beyond IQ, but we would just be talking about various genetic traits).
"Bit reductive to boil down the outcomes of a country to merely its people, no?"
Unless you go communist, it's the primary variable by far.
I mean I'm not huge on national IQs myself, but I can still take them as read and it reinforces my point. My point was that the Dutch are not supreme ahead of all Europeans, but that if you looked at Europe 400 years ago and used prosperity as your proxy for national IQ, then you would have to declare the Dutch insanely intelligent. Yet even if national IQs were valid, we'd see the Dutch similar to the Germans.
And martial prowess wasn't the source of Dutch prosperity.
Take the point re potential that IQ-prosperity relationship varies pre to post industrialisation.
Stupid and goofy as I might be, I think that security is the crucial foundation of economic growth, and intelligence has a huge impact on security.
I think the history of warfare in Europe and asia reveals that high IQs are no defense against interstate warfare.
Oh absolutely, Hitler wasn't stupid, neither was Stalin, and neither were the German people. But I don't think the problem of security is merely about interstate conflict -- you have crime, gangs, non-state actors, and terrorists. Then you have the question of what happens when IQ decline is combined with heterogeneous cultural shift. Does that make a state more secure, or less? My argument isn't that intelligence prevents war, but that a rapid decline in intelligence, especially when combined with cultural heterogeneity, is a risk to security on a number of levels, not just interstate. I would suggest that when we think about natalism at the global scale we should take into account how changing birth rates and financial incentives affect both 3rd world populations, 1st world populations, native populations, and immigrant populations. I think you may have stated your position as "nationalist natalism," meaning that you want higher birth rates for America, but not for the rest of the world. I would argue that it is better from a security perspective to focus on a global birth reduction than a local (national) birth boost, and from a political perspective, I believe that it is very difficult to couple those two policies together. You can complain that people misuse the term eugenics, or that they have a misunderstanding of what constitutes racism, but this does not change the ideological playing field as it exists in the realm of what is practical, likely, and possible.
I don't think that's a correct retelling of Lyman's position. Liberal pronatalism is where it's at - supporting people in the decisions they want. That brings some externalities, sure, but the externalities can't be the only motivator.
Supporting who? How much?
Look it would be very easy for "liberal pro naturism" to turn into "another free cash giveaway to poor single moms".
Take Minnesota, which has a $1,750 child tax credit that is fully refundable. It starts to phase out at $36,880 in household income for a married couple ($31,090 for a single mom). This is basically juts a giveaway for poor single women that nobody else qualifies for.
At the national level there was a strong push to eliminate the child tax credit expansion above an income of $X, with the left always pushing a lower $X.
And of course the very concept of a fixed $Y benefit is inherently progressive/dysgenic. It should scale with income.
And of course we could go on and on (does the benefit penalize marriage, does it penalize SAHM, etc).
It's very tempting to turn "pro natalism" into just another welfare program because the votes of poor single mums are cheap and they've got a sob story for cover. It also costs less money (in the near term) than what it would cost to get the middle and UMC to have more kids (though in the long run they pay for themselves). This is standard public choice problems.
JD Vance has thankfully pushed back against income phase outs for child tax credits. He gets it. A dollar spent on poor single moms is another dollar wasted that could be better spent on getting net positive contributors to have more kids.
There will always have to be some degree of universality to any child tax benefit to make it politically viable. But we should waste as little money as we can on the poor. They didn't earn it, and neither will their kids.
Let me reorganize my points:
1. A rapid global decline in intelligence, combined with increasing cultural heterogeneity, is a global security threat, not just in terms of conventional war, but also in terms of internal conflict.
2. I am skeptical of any sort of natalism which is culturally neutral (which you may be referring to as "liberal natalism"), because I believe it will exacerbate existing demographic issues. I also do not believe that targeted natalist policies can be effective because of political polarization. Instead, it would be better to pursue global anti-natalist policies, because that's an effective strategy which works.
In Europe and America, general natalist policies would disproportionately benefit non-whites. It sounds like you are advocating for race-neutral natalism. I would issue as a cautionary tale what occurred in South Africa after 1920, where the black population quadrupled while the white population only slightly increased. Race-blind natalism is a security threat, because countries which undergo rapid demographic turnover experience higher levels of political extremism.
The Civil Rights era was a direct result of the mass immigration policies of the 1860s, for example. Catholics and Jews were much easier to integrate (fiscally and culturally) than today's immigrants, especially in the case of Europe. There is no economy if there is not political security.
Diffuse, or defuse? Spread widely, or make inert?
There is no reason to believe that fertility is going to bounce back anyplace it’s fallen, nor that dysgenic trends are going to reverse. You’ve got no empirical data to back this up. It hasn’t happened anywhere.
South Korea is going to go from 20% 65+ today to 60% by 2082. The burden of the old on the young will get worse and worse, and the young will respond by having fewer kids. Yes, it’s a crisis.
What’s worse, low birth rates in the first world are actually causing pressure to import low iq hordes from abroad. Because every single institution in our societies needs “number go up” to function and so they start grasping at the straws of immigration.
Designing child incentives that are eugenic isn’t that hard. You just make it a scalar tax break. It’s really just about the fact that you don’t want to pay your fair share to support smart people that are making babies because you’re a greedy and selfish person. The entire reason you’re not having kids is so you have more disposable income. The rest is all rationalization.
These comments are fairly disconnected from reality. India is experiencing rapid economic growth and is far wealthier than it was under colonial administration. South Africa proves my point— South Africa today doesn’t have some massively higher share of low-functioning people than it had decades ago! Rather, it had highly selective exit by elites! The loss of a demographically small number of highly productive elites has sunk the country, NOT the growth of lower functioning masses. Where go the elites, so goes the country.
I’m not averse to saying unpopular or uncomfortable things. I do it all the time. But edgelordy “oooo look at me saying taboo racisms” isn’t a position actually based on the evidence. It’s beta cope.
India has gone from 1% of our GDP per capita to 3% of our GDP per capita. Are you in a rush to move there? lol. Astounding how when you start at nothing there is nowhere to go but up. They've got an average IQ of 76 and will probably top out at less than $10,000.
"highly selective exit by elites"
Why did those elites exit? Could it be because the low IQ black hordes took over and wrecked everything! That's what low IQ people do. That's why having too many of them around is dangerous.
I'm as in favor of low IQ societies becoming apartheid states that try to limit the damage their trash can do as the next guy, but it's an inherently unstable and limiting system. Apartheid didn't last, and it's not like SA was that wealthy under apartheid either. It's some people in gated compounds trying to hold the rickety structure together and hoping the mob doesn't storm the compound one day. I wouldn't want to live in such a society, and I don't want mine becoming one.
High average IQ democracies are way better than that. Let's keep them.
One might have a model in which a low level (Malthusian) equilibrium trap is broken by an exogenous population decline and some of the increase real income per person goes toward creating innovation (or just any kind of by-hypothesis non-depreciating capital?).
Long run growth needs more geniuses with more time to spend playing with ideas and gadgets. If population IQ is declining, or university is extended to people with lower IQs, then we will be worse off.
My plan for boosting world well-being is: enforce a strict minimum of 145 on the WAIS for university matriculation. Leave the geniuses alone to figure out new things. Don't distract them with having to explain stuff to simpletons.
Also, we don't want indiscriminate babymaking, we want high-investment parents.
I agree that growth needs innovation which needs intelligence. I haven't replied directly on intelligence claims here, but I would point out that intelligence positively predicts fertility in various populations, eg Swedish men, so it's not clear that we are in (as it were) genetic-IQ decline. It seems like in some populations it negatively predicts fertility (through education and careerism) and in others it positively predicts fertility (through income and, more speculatively, ability to maintain relationship quality).
As it comes to enforcing a minimum of 145 IQ for university matriculation - why 145? Seems kinda arbitrary. Then I think of who does innovation, and then it seems nonsensical! The Feynman example is often used, but it's still true - he most likely would not have scored 145+ on the WAIS. Countless entrepreneurs and inventors have IQs anywhere from 105 to 145.
Yes, even within academia IQ predicts impact, but it is exactly that: predicting impact. It is not some iron cut off.
Imposing an arbitrary cut off top-down would be far more inefficient than letting things play out.
By the by, on the high-investment parents point. Whilst Caplan needs to update his case with the evidence, I do like the core point in Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids - raising productive people does not require high investment by the standards of today.
You are right, three sigma is arbitrary. Perhaps it should be four. Any higher than that, though, and the population of university researchers would likely to be too small to pass on their knowledge sustainably.
And yes, IQ is highly imperfect, but it's the best tool to hand.
My point is to avoid having highly productive people waste their lives in pointless departmental meetings, and homework grading sessions being bored by ... lesser intellects, shall we say.
BTW the IQ cutoff should apply to administrators as much as academics.
also it's incredibly common for people at the tails to have high variance in their scores across components, ie not have a reliable aggregate iq score, making it less reliable at the tails
also the WAIS literally isn't meant to be good at assessing the tails, so using it for 145+ seems to miss the point
The point is to exclude the lower mass.
Sure, but then a) why use a measure that won't be very accurate at assessing ability at the level you want to assess, and b) my other point was that this ignores that plenty of people become very productive who are not of elite IQ scoring (ie many of the 'lower mass' may be more productive than you think)
I'm not sure you're engaging with my suggestion - why not see what pans out? Given that plenty of people innovate and do cool stuff with an IQ below 145
I think space is an issue, but not as much as many would like you to think! We can build but we regulate!
As it comes to climate change, the trends in per person carbon emissions are so good that having children has a miniscule on the margin effect once you throw out the carbage Wynes & Nicholas 2017 paper that used already obsolete data. I wrote on this in The Critic: https://thecritic.co.uk/having-kids-wont-hurt-the-planet/
The best and latest paper on the effect of having children on carbon emissions is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4535022
On more general pollution, I'll write a post engaging more comprehensively soon!