Wednesday, June 29, 2016

High Plateau Drifter on the Death of the Welfare State.

My son-in-law is a Danish citizen and is very proud of his socialism which he wears as a badge of honor and as an emblem of his Danish nationalism. Yet even he acknowledges that Denmark is paying low IQ unemployed Danish girls to have babies just as we in the U.S. are paying low IQ unemployed girls and women to have babies, even as the economic necessity of having married women work depresses birth rates among women of average and higher intelligence. He also agrees that the average IQ and educational attainment ranking of Denmark is falling, just as it is here in the U.S.

Think about the process. Men with jobs and incomes, and who are thus subject to child support requirements, are not about to impregnate a welfare mother. Thus, overwhelmingly, the children of these low IQ women will be the product of unions with the least intelligent and most shiftless males. And we now know that the transmission belt for IQ is genetic to a correlation of .6 to .8. You cannot sustain a modern civilization on the backs of a population with and average IQ of 80. Indeed the reason I bring up Denmark is that with relatively little immigration the problem is largely due to low IQ White girls. The welfare state can undo thousands of years of darwinian natural selection for high IQ in the Northern wastes in just a few generations.

For a long time, the support obligation for this rapidly expanding class of unemployable citizens was offset in the minds of our elites by the easy control of their voting power to counterbalance the voting power of the productive middle class who might otherwise get uppity and impose restrictions on the elites. But ultimately, the cost of support for this rapidly growing population, including food, shelter, medical care, policing and essentially worthless but very expensive education, will overwhelm the resources available to the central state and lead to economic collapse.

We now have 50 million receiving one or more forms of working age welfare in the U.S. Public discussion of transfer payments tends to focus on the cost of old age retirement benefits and assumes, sub silentio, that the metastasizing share of working age on welfare cannot be solved because unlike the aged, the working age welfare recipients are young and potentially violent. The assumption seems to be that the aged on Social Security and Medicare can become the obligation of their adult children without those adult children becoming at a minimum angry and motivated voters. The childless aged can presumably live on the streets and gather at free soup kitchens.

In the long run, the welfare state will be forced to cut back on rapidly rising expenditures for medical care, education and policing and perhaps end the subsidy for breeding millions of low IQ babies as ever more jobs are exported over seas or the export stops when U.S. wage rates approach the levels of Myanmar or Bangladesh. But given the economic entanglement of so much middle class employment in providing medical, education, and law enforcement services to that population, the downfall is more likely to be cataclysmic rather than long, drawn out and bumpy. There are no easy policy shifts that will contain the escalating damage.

In polite society we are not allowed to even discuss the problem as it seems so terribly heartless, unfeeling and un-PC. But without a solution in place, is the problem to be left in the hands of loosely organized bands of red state gun owners when an economic crisis provokes the starving low IQ masses to attack? Or is that what the now empty FEMA camps and the militarization of local police forces is for?

It seems to me that this is the type of clearly foreseeable problem that love for our fellow man compels us to ignore. But it is the welfare state itself which will cause the problem and not the people.

19 comments:

High Plateau Drifter said...

Here is the hard data from the HHS report published in 2014:

"In fiscal 2000, only 19.8 percent of American children 5 or under were on welfare, according to the report. Between then and 2011, the percentage of American children 5 and under who were on welfare climbed about 92 percent to 38.0 percent."

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/hhs-report-percentage-americans-welfare-hits-recorded-high

One can reasonably deduce that not all mothers of the above 38 percent are sitting home watching daytime tv all day. It looks like a significant number might be marginally employed and eligible for SNAP only. In effect an indirect government subsidy for employers who can employ workers at wages below subsistence.

Nevertheless, my other son in law reports women in the doctors' offices he visits while making his rounds as a pharma salesman routinely brag about how easy it is to get $28,000 in cash benefits tax free with 3 kids and no hubby.

Taylor Conant said...

HPD,

I think your commentary is spot on. The only thing I'd like to add is to point out that many of the elite and the Left are high IQ. In fact, there probably are not many, if any, elite, that are not high IQ. Anecdotally, this suggests that high IQ is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the continuation of civilization. But I am not sure exactly how to characterize the other necessary ingredients beyond things like "moral quality" or "culture", and I am not sure how much those things are wrapped up in the phenomenon of IQ.

High Plateau Drifter said...

"Anecdotally, this suggests that high IQ is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the continuation of civilization."

High IQ people are just as susceptible to herding behavior as are all humans. Leftism - liberalism (with other peoples' money) guarantees acceptance by the High IQ herd and gives members of that herd a sense of moral superiority. Social reinforcement is what causes high IQ people to stay invested through market tops and miss the signs of impending market downturns.

Taylor Conant said...

HPD,

Thanks. I am not sure I interpreted what you wrote correctly, maybe your argument was not "High IQ is sufficient for civilization." I wanted to clarify my disagreement if that was your argument. I will try to re-read what you wrote regardless to see if I can better understand the larger point you were making, which I believe I do agree with as I had mentioned earlier.

Taylor Conant said...

Here's where I got stuck: You cannot sustain a modern civilization on the backs of a population with and average IQ of 80.

I think I read that as "high IQ is sufficient", but really you were probably just saying "low IQ is insufficient." My apologies for misinterpreting.

High Plateau Drifter said...

The problem is that maintaining large numbers of low IQ people drains resources away from those who are capable of being productive and who add to economic output. Thus the rewards of being productive decline dramatically as output must be shared with those who have no capacity to produce. Right now the unemployable are being supported by ever increasing issuance of debt. But once the capacity of markets for debt peaks, the full burden will be felt by the productive sector of the work force.

To your point, high IQ people are just as susceptible to herding as other humans. The need for social acceptance drives most high IQ people to be leftist and liberal.

Taylor Conant said...

HPD,

One other point of clarification. When you refer to people as "unemployable" do you mean "within the current context of costs imposed by wage laws, regulations, legal liabilities, etc., against their potential productive output" or do you mean something more objective as in "People who are completely incapable of working productively for other people because of their personal qualities and characteristics"?

I ask because I have often debated with people the idea of how much of the population truly "needs" welfare (or a private equivalent, like charity), versus how much of the population is being incentivized to use it. My thinking is that there are far fewer people who are truly handicapped in the objective sense of the word and that we might find many more people seeking productive employment, and cleaning up their act, as it were, if they were responsible for caring for themselves. But one thing I have been considering as of late is that there is a kind of epigenetic phenomenon wrapped up in all of this such that people are becoming objectively handicapped and/or selectively breeding for objective handicaps and so the population of people who can not exist independently of others is growing as a percent of the total populace over time.

Curious about your thoughts on this.

Anonymous said...

We can tie this back to the Brexit thread now. The US treasuries are financing obsolete military hardware and welfare to the underclass - there's no collateral - which means the loans are unsound.

I wonder if the US deep state got the PIGS into the EU as a way to prevent a real competing currency to the USD from developing, thereby lengthening the amount of time the US can borrow money for the purposes of squandering.

High Plateau Drifter said...

@Taylor Conant

You post an important question two posts above and my answer is that people with IQs from 75 to 85 or 90 can certainly perform manual agricultural labor and perform the tasks with dexterity and skill. Thus they could be reasonably good subsistence farmers. Where they are likely to fail is anticipating weather pattern changes, new plant disease problems, following fertilization routines, etc. The problem is that the planting and harvesting of cotton is all done mechanically, as is true for wheat, corn and grains and most livestock operations - chickens, pigs and cattle. Modern agriculture has eliminated most manual labor except for picking vegetables, strawberries, apples, etc. which are done by migrant Mexican workers. BTW, that IQ range from 75 to 90 generally yields sub par infantry riflemen as well. The ability to concentrate under fire correlates positively with rising IQ.

Thus if we were to outlaw migrant mexican work gangs and abolish welfare we would have a very nasty transition process getting welfare recipients to replace the Mexican work crews. But then African tribes with 70 IQ,s can subsist and raise crops with manual labor and hand held implements. It is the evolution of the industrial machine age that has made low IQ labor obsolete.

B said...

Sometime in the near future, white countries will not be able to generate enough economic surplus to afford a welfare system because of the refusal of intelligent white people to reproduce in numbers large enough to replace themseves.

The average IQ of white people, as measured by reaction time, has fallen by 14 points since 1889. That means that white people with IQs of 126 are as rare today as white people with IQs of 140 were in 1889.

An IQ of 126 is insufficient to learn calculus, physics, or chemistry, or to be an engineer.

IQ is a function of organic, biological variables such as brain volume, thickness of insulation (myelin sheaths) of the axons of neurons and the number of glial cells in the brain that support the functioning of neurons. These brain variables are under the control of genes

The collapse of white intelligence is a key reason for the decline of white countries and the passing of the torch to Asia.

Taylor Conant said...

Who says the torch is being passed? If anything it's being dropped and smoldering in the ground. Or is IQ supposed to make up for collectivist identities and socialist politicking?

High Plateau Drifter said...

"Who says the torch is being passed? If anything it's being dropped and smoldering in the ground. Or is IQ supposed to make up for collectivist identities and socialist politicking?"

Our "smoldering on the ground" problem is simply that so many high IQ people seek and obtain secure jobs in government "managing" those of us who face career risk and ultimately investment risk. There is no effective block on the demand that .gov bureaucracies can generate for ever more personnel. Government employment is a damaging allocation of a scarce resource.

Anonymous said...

There seems to be a misunderstanding of the term "IQ" in this entire conversation. IQ is a relative measure with the median in a population being 100. 1 std dev = ~15 pts. It says nothing about what that average level is.

Recent studies have indeed shown that traits governing IQ are heritable in a range of 0.45-0.75... which means that as a proportion of variation vs the mean genes governing intelligence contribute 45-75%, the rest being the environment and other factors.

As an example, height has a heritability of 0.8 - higher than IQ. The Indian and Chinese populations have generally been shorter than the average human over the last 100 years+. They have also reproduced more / had higher fertility rates than than the taller people and have outgrown the taller races in number. That does not mean that the average human has not gotten taller over this time... average height has clearly increased even though the shorter people have been more fertile than the taller ones.

B said...

The US Army does not accept recruits with IQs less than 85. That eliminates the majority of American Indians in both hemispheres, Arabs, black Africans, American negoes and southeast Asians such as Malaysians.

Anonymous said...

"There seems to be a misunderstanding of the term "IQ" in this entire conversation. IQ is a relative measure with the median in a population being 100. 1 std dev = ~15 pts. It says nothing about what that average level is."

This is true, as far as it goes. However, reaction time measures intelligence on a ratio scale, i.e. it has a zero point and equal units all along the scale, similar to weight, height, or volume.

Today, people can simultaneously have their reaction times measured with timers and their IQs measured with paper-an-pencil tests. These reaction times are absolute, not relative, the same way that 6-feet of height is absolute, not relative. They give rise to a present-day population distribution of reaction times that can be compared with the distribution of the reaction time measurements that Sir Francis Galton got at his lab in 1889.

Each of these two reaction time distributions is normal, or it can be normalized. In either case, the mean and standard deviation of each reaction time distribution can be determined. The mean and standard deviation of the reaction time measurements from Galton's lab can be compared with the mean and standard deviation of present-day reaction time scores.

For simplicity of explanation, suppose the mean of the distribution of present-day reaction time measurements is 14/15 of a present-day standard deviation below the mean of Galton's reaction time measurements from 1889.

Suppose that the mean of paper-an-pencil IQ test scores of cases whose reaction times were measured recently is 100. Suppose their standard deviation is 15. Then, and equivalent IQ test score of the case from 1889 is 114, or 14/15 of a standard deviation above the mean of present-day scores.

Giving an IQ score like this, is a convenience or readers who cannot relate reaction time to any other cognitive variable.

Anonymous said,

"Recent studies have indeed shown that traits governing IQ are heritable in a range of 0.45-0.75... which means that as a proportion of variation vs the mean genes governing intelligence contribute 45-75%, the rest being the environment and other factors"

Heritability only appears this low because error variance is grouped with variance from environment without correcting for error variance. This is a way to understate genetic variance. Intelligence researchers generally agree that heritability of intelligence is around 80%.

DrU said...

B said: Heritability only appears this low because error variance is grouped with variance from environment without correcting for error variance. This is a way to understate genetic variance. Intelligence researchers generally agree that heritability of intelligence is around 80%.

I dont disagree... while the studies have wide outcomes and tend towards 45% in children and 75% in adults... the heritability of IQ could indeed be ~80% when factoring for error. However my point is that "heritability" is defined as variation from the mean . Hence my example on height, which has similarly high heritability and much more intuitively so.

So lets take the argument being made in this thread: "People with low IQ are outbreeding people with high IQ, so the average intelligence of the population will undeniably decline over time."... this is not a neccessary / sufficiently valid statement. The increase or decrease of the mean value is not solely dependent on the difference in fertility rates between the quartiles. The mean may be moved much more by external social or environmental factors even if the variation around that mean is genetically determined.

In the case of height... clearly nutrition and better healthcare has helped increase the average even as the population of "shorter" individuals has grown faster than "taller" populations.

Similar effects can clearly be seen in intelligence over time. It was said somewhere on this thread that an IQ of ~125 is needed to learn calculus. But that means an IQ of 125 as measured today . Leornado da Vinci would struggle to do what we consider intermediate math today and he was clearly a man with far above average IQ. That does not mean that an average joe who can differentiate an equation has a "higher IQ" than da Vinci... clearly not... but that average joe does have more computational/learned intelligence that can be applied to gainful employment (which i think is what this thread is getting at)!

Or to look at something in more recent times: when Einstein first wrote about Special Relatvity it was said that only 12 men in the world understood him. Yet Special Relativity is something that is rountinely taught in 11th grade these days (General, of course, is still a far different animal). This doesn't make the 11th graders have higher IQ than Einstein + 12 of his day... but the mean has clearly moved.

James said...

this is not a neccessary / sufficiently valid statement

This is the comment section on an internet blog, not a logical proof in a PhD thesis. No one here is trying to make an airtight theoretical argument about changes in intelligence.

The Flynn Effect was a one-time thing that coincided with rising literacy rates and increasing familiarity with tests--there isn't an ongoing rise in mean intelligence of the kind you've posited. No, I can't prove that to your exacting academic standard, but that is what common sense suggests.


Or to look at something in more recent times: when Einstein first wrote about Special Relatvity it was said that only 12 men in the world understood him. Yet Special Relativity is something that is rountinely taught in 11th grade these days (General, of course, is still a far different animal). This doesn't make the 11th graders have higher IQ than Einstein + 12 of his day... but the mean has clearly moved.

Only 12 men understood him because Special Relativity was at the theoretical edge at the time. High-schoolers can learn it today because it's become part of an accepted, widely-studied body of work. It doesn't prove that intelligence has risen. If you're going to call out people for not making "a neccessary / sufficiently valid statement," don't do it yourself!

DrU said...

This is the comment section on an internet blog, not a logical proof in a PhD thesis. No one here is trying to make an airtight theoretical argument about changes in intelligence.

Actually, I am a regular reader of this blog because the author and commentators usually offer cogent, defensible and well-thought-out arguments in support of their theses. This is not a typical internet blog. There is no need for this group to plead ignorance, and no need for me not to respond.

High-schoolers can learn it today because it's become part of an accepted, widely-studied body of work. It doesn't prove that intelligence has risen.

If you read my comment, I am NOT saying that intelligence has risen. My quote: "This doesn't make the 11th graders have higher IQ than Einstein + 12 of his day... but the mean has clearly moved." The average high school student is much more likely to grasp concepts like relativity (or physics in general) than 100 years ago. For the ultimate matter that we started debating... "intelligence" as it relates to the prospects of the population finding gainful employment, that mean matters.

Taylor Conant said...

While I appreciate James's comments, I have to agree with DrU that there is really no reason to "dumb down" one's correspondence to fit a particular medium or audience. I don't think we need annotated bibliographies, but that's partly because I don't think those are helpful or useful in general. If something is illogical, it's illogical, and it doesn't get a pass because it's being discussed on a blog.

I don't think that's what you meant, James, but that is what was implied anyway.

CP said...

"The very stability and internal peace that strong empires impose contain within them the seeds of future chaos. Stability and internal peace bring prosperity, and prosperity causes population increase. Demographic growth leads to overpopulation, overpopulation causes lower wages, higher land rents, and falling per capita incomes for the commoners. At first, low wages and high rents bring unparalleled wealth to the upper classes, but as their numbers and appetites grow, they also begin to suffer from falling incomes. Declining standards of life breed discontent and strife. The elites turn to the state for employment and additional income and drive up its expenditures at the same time that the tax revenues decline because of the growing misery of the population. When the state's finances collapse, it loses control of the army and police."

http://www.creditbubblestocks.com/2016/06/review-of-war-and-peace-and-war-rise.html