The cyclical curse

On the one hand, this will present opportunities for the cognitive elite. On the other, the downward trajectory of society and civilization is almost certainly going to increase as time goes on, IQ continues to decline, and the r/selected increasingly outnumber the K/selected. The welfare system was bad enough, but combining it with low-quality mass immigration is fatal. The longer the negative cycle persists, the more likely it is that the people of the West will eventually have to choose between utterly ruthless eugenics and total civilizational collapse.

I keep seeing this argument, and it keeps being wrong. Low-quality immigration is a problem because of undesirable social consequences and possible strain/depletion of public goods/welfare. Corporations such as Google, Target, and Walmart reap the top-line growth from immigrants, who are reliable consumers, but the cost of immigration is shouldered not by companies but bond holders and possibly tax payers and society. That’s why immigration is good for stocks. It’s free customers.

As for the argument, it is possibly wrong because dysgenics can only occur if low-quality immigrants (if we use IQ as a proxy for quality) procreate with a high-IQ native population, but this does not seem to be the case. Rather, due to assortative mating, there are high-IQ and low-IQ factions that seldom commingle. This also means it’s possible for the mean national IQ to fall but total intellectual output to rise or stay flat, which is sorta counter-intuitive, but it is mathematically possible to have more smart people but a lower mean IQ. This explains why there is so much progress in math, physics, computer science , AI, etc. in the 21 century despite the insistence by Vox and others of a dysgenic collapse, or in spite of increased low-quality immigration in America and the population explosion in Africa, India and other low-IQ regions. The evidence just does not support it, sorry Vox. But I support eugenics, not because of dysgenics, but as way to improving human stock even more so. Imagine how much better the economy would be if mean IQ were raised a couple points a decade.

If it weren’t for the Silicon Valley ‘tech elite’ and the Manhattan ‘financial elite’, America, rather than being the economic, intellectual, and financial superpower it is today, would be more like the U.K., France, Germany, or Canada, which tend to be more sluggish and less intelligent and more socially and economically left-wing. That’s still pretty good (compared to low-IQ, dysfunctional countries like Venezuela, Argentina, Serbia, Turkey, and Brazil (pretty much all of the Middle East, Africa, South America, and much of Eastern Europe)) but it would mean more stagnation, weaker stock market performance, a lower standard of living, longer recessions, and no Ubers or Netflixes. 50-75% of people are dead weight. They are good for consumer spending but do not advance the economy or technological progress. America is in an especially fortuitous position of being a magnet and incubator for the top 1% intellectual cream of the crop who are the drivers of innovation and economic growth. Low fertility rates among high-IQ populations is a problem, but the influx of high-IQ immigrants and assortative mating is enough to offset this for now.