Solutions, Again

Following up on my three previous posts, I want to talk again about what to do with this HBD knowledge. It is now clear, or at least should be, that demographic issues drive many of our current problems. Indeed, changes in the population drive history, and these changes are the primary reasons that civilizations rise and fall.

Our current problems involve dysgenic breeding within racial groups (that is, lower IQ individuals outbreeding higher IQ ones) and the Hispanicization of the country (with a decent smattering of Asians out west). Left undisturbed, these patterns are likely to continue, reducing America’s economic, technological, and societal standing in the future. Can these be stopped? I believe that they can, if we act now. As I discussed before, here are the fronts on which these issues could be addressed:

Immigration:

Immigration reform is key to addressing the demographic problems we have. Steps we should take include:

Drastically curtailing the number of allowed legal immigrants, from all parts of the world, including Europe. Quotas should be established for the number of immigrants permitted from each part of the world, varying in this order, from highest to lowest: Europe, the other Anglo countries, and Israel Japan The rest of East and South Asia Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa The Muslim world

Family members imported by naturalized citizens should have to go through a similar screening procedure as do first-time immigrants, to ensure quality among these immigrants. People considering coming to America should be made aware of this limitation, so they can factor that into their decision to immigrate.

Extremely high-IQ immigrants, from all parts of the world, should be allowed to enter.

Welfare and other benefits to new immigrants should be drastically reduced or eliminated.

All current legal immigrants should be considered “grandfathered”, and exempt from these changes (except with regard to importing family members).

We should crack down on illegal immigration. This is easiest to do by going after employers who hire illegal immigrants. Stiff fines could be levied on all such firms and individuals. The DREAM Act and its de facto implementation by Obama are fine. If we got to choose which illegals to keep, it ought be the best and the brightest. The challenge comes in that the other side of it—deporting the rest—needs to be enforced as well; otherwise, it does no good to give the smart, well-behaved subset of illegals amnesty.

Eugenics, negative sense:

Curbing reproduction of the low IQ individuals—of all races—would be the next important measure after immigration reform. Any sort of forced or coercive forms should be completely off the table. However, as mentioned before, an outright eugenics program, even if based on voluntary sterilization with incentives, is highly unlikely to fly. There are some workarounds, however:

Planned Parenthood (which was founded by a eugenicist): It exists as a type of under-the-radar eugenics program. Planned Parenthood centers could be built and heavily marketed in low-income areas, with heavy availability and marketing of long-term contraceptive measures, such as Norplant. Long-term, fool-proof measures are preferred, because low-IQ women can’t necessarily be depended upon to take birth control pills or use condoms regularly.

Welfare reform: Welfare should incentivize childlessness, not having more children as it currently does. Generous welfare benefits should be made available to single, childless individuals, with static or decreasing benefits for having children. Coupled with the visibility of Planned Parenthood, a campaign promoting the consequences of having children while broke should provide enough immediate reinforcement to get low-IQ individuals to behave responsibly with respect to reproduction. Work requirements are unnecessary—the goal is to get low-IQ individuals to live contently and not breed, not satisfy some moral desire to see everyone do “their fair share”. As noted in my previous post, most low-IQ individuals cannot pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and it is silly to expect them to do so.

Sterilization to escape child support: One instance where incentivized sterilization might fly is cases of fecund deadbeat dads (and moms). Individuals who keep popping out children but keep failing to support them should be offered free sterilization in exchange for release from child support responsibilities.

Eugenics, positive sense:

The flip side of eugenics, encouraging the high-IQ and accomplished to reproduce more, is considerably more difficult. However, I believe it can be done, if properly undertaken. As we saw, the main problem in this area are White, educated, secular liberals. The biggest issue with this group is that women in this category delay marriage and childbirth, often because of the pursuit of lengthy educations. As well, in contrast to the “pro-natalist” attitude of conservative and religious Whites, secular liberals have an “anti-natalist” attitude—that is, they are often reticent to actively disinterested in having children (as the exchange between Chelsea Handler and Bill Maher on this past Friday’s episode of Real Time exemplifies, complete with plenty of cheers from the audience to Handler’s declaration of her decision to remain unmarried and childless):

This will be one tough mountain to climb, but it can be scaled by:

Reducing the cost of living: The previous measures to address immigration and low-IQ reproduction should cause wages to rise (as per Dennis Mangan’s discovery about wages and immigration) and land values to fall, boosting high-IQ fertility.

Subsidizing childbirth among the high-IQ: generous cash bonuses to educated and accomplished couples who have children can be made. I would propose a higher subsidy based on higher IQ, as measured by say SAT or GRE scores, with additional preference given to those in good physical health.

Student loan forgiveness: This can be coupled with student loan reform in general. High-IQ individuals, especially women, who complete their educations and obtain gainful employment or enter into marriage should have their loans partially or completely forgiven upon having their first child (with more forgiveness for each additional child). This will specifically target young couples starting out, as having children earlier will tend the increase the total number of children had.

Reducing the need for lengthy educations by relying more heavily on cognitive tests: Education’s primary role these days is signalling, and that has a costly impact on female fertility especially. More heavy reliance on IQ (along with lots of repeat testing to decrease the testing error) can reduce employers’ reliance on proxies such as higher degrees. Of course, college degrees signal more than just IQ, but the increased quality of potential candidates from IQ testing alone should more than compensate for the less conscientious and less conformist individuals that slip through. This can shorten the length of time one needs to delay entering the workforce and hence allow smart women and men to start families earlier.

Special encouragement of exceptionally high-IQ individuals: The true geniuses, especially the most physically healthy and accomplished ones, should be strongly encouraged to reproduce, and reproduce a lot. Encouraging them (paying them money) to donate to sperm and egg banks could be undertaken, as well as even a free “genius dating network” of sorts to encourage them to find mates and marry.

Workplace reform, both for working and stay-at-home moms: For the high-IQ, we could make being a working mom easier, and we could do this while making being a stay-at-home mom easier as well (I don’t see these as being mutually exclusive). In addition to the above subsidy for high-IQ couples, which will be of greatest help to stay-at-home moms, making quality day care cheaper and more available (as well as providing job security for working moms), as it is in much of Western Europe, will help working moms as well.

One could ask where all the money will come from for all these subsidies and incentives. I say from taxing the uber-rich. Wealthy elites have more than enough money that their fertility will not be impacted by paying increased taxes. And unlike some of the uses of tax revenue today, these measures will go towards improving the population, which would benefit everyone down the line.

Genetic engineering:

Much talk is made about the possibility of parents tailoring their children to suit their own desires, most easily through embryo selection. While in the very long term, this offers promise of improving the quality of people born, let’s be clear, we are a long way from this becoming much of a practical reality. For one, the percentage of couples that use any sort of fertility treatments to have children is still very small, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. The cost is also likely to remain high, limiting who can participate. As well, we are still utterly clueless about function of the bulk of the genome, limiting our ability to select for desired traits. Eventually, this will change. However, this is firmly tomorrow’s problem.

These are valid, concrete solutions to the demographic problems we face. Some are no doubt more feasible and practical than others. Some of these rest on public acceptance of HBD while others do not. However, many of these run contrary to the interests of wealthy elites (particularly the part of about taxation), which is a good reason why they may never happen, unfortunately.