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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:18
NBC News: IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries
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It's always kind of fascinating when something you've talked about and, you know, being roundly criticized, if not condemned and attacked for, suddenly kind of hits the mainstream, like that Overton window of what you can discuss changes suddenly.
And this is very interesting.
This is from NBC News, a mainstream, full corporate media all over the place.
This is from mainstream media, NBC News.
A fellow named Evan Horowitz has written this article now with regards to the election in Ireland, with regards to other European elections and this great experiment of bringing a wide varieties of ethnicities and religions and cultures and races all together in a pretty tight geographical area.
He's got something to say about this now.
I think it's interesting that he has something to say about this, and you'll see how much it's had in common with what I've been talking about for literally years.
So just for those who don't know, the races on average, again you never judge individuals by group averages, but the races in general, like the three major races, right?
Black, East Asian, what used to be called Oriental, and White, differ on average IQ, with East Asians being the highest, Blacks being the lowest, and Whites being sort of in the middle.
And this may be shocking to you but only because this really essential information has been kind of viciously suppressed largely by the left and also by the right to some degree as well.
But the data goes back a hundred years.
I've got a whole series of interviews with 18 of the world's leading experts on IQ and if I remember rightly to a man and to a woman they all accept this basic differences in average ethnic IQ.
And the data goes back a hundred years.
It's been talked about on Sam Harris's podcast with Charles Murray.
It's been talked about all over the place.
It's very common.
It's in the textbooks of psychology.
It's just very well understood, but it's kind of kept from the general public because it goes against particular preferences of Particular ideologies.
So for those who don't know the the link is fdrurl.com forward slash IQ fdrurl.com forward slash IQ you can go through all of these expert interviews to to sort of get the data on this but Let's look at Evan's article again nbcnews.com So here he says IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries and that doesn't bode well for humanity He says, an intelligence crisis could undermine our problem-solving capacities and dim the prospects of the global economy.
And a picture of a brain.
So again, this is May 22nd, 2019.
A little late to the party, but I'm certainly glad that people are showing up.
So he says, people are getting dumber.
That's not a judgment, it's a global fact.
In a host of leading nations, IQ scores have started to decline.
Now that's very interesting.
In a host of leading nations.
One would ask if IQ scores are declining in the highest IQ countries, which would be the East Asian countries, the China, Japan, tough to tell with North Korea because it's an ex-communist dictatorship, but South Korea and so on.
Have those IQ scores started to decline?
In other words, if it's high IQs are going down and there are exceptions, And those countries do not accept mass migration from third world countries, that would be kind of a clue.
Anyway, so he goes on to say, though there are legitimate questions about the relationship between IQ and intelligence and broad recognition that success depends as much on other virtues like grit, IQ tests in use throughout the world today really do seem to capture something meaningful and durable.
So I'm not going to go into all of the details behind this, but yes, it's well known in research circles that IQ is not identical to intelligence.
The somewhat neutral term G for general intelligence has been developed to discuss that.
But IQ still measures something very important in that IQ correlates with a wide variety of not just life outcomes for individuals, but average Outcomes for countries as a whole.
High IQ countries tend to do very well economically and low IQ countries don't do well economically and nobody knows really how to change IQ fundamentally.
There are a few things that can help a little bit but nobody knows how to fundamentally change it.
And it's significantly genetic, right?
Because IQ... I had Dr. Richard Hare, editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Intelligence, on to talk about this, and he informed me that, according to all the research, by the time you're in your late teens, your IQ is 80% genetic.
In other words, you can get a wiggle room of 20%.
Now, that's not inconsiderable, and one of the reasons I do this big, giant, massively successful philosophy show is to teach people how to use their brains in the very best, most rational, most consistent, most productive possible format.
And so I recognize fully that environment is very, very important.
But 80% is pretty high when it comes to the genetic basis of IQ.
So yeah, he puts the caveats in which makes total sense and seems to me to give him some real credibility.
So he says, decades of research have shown that individual IQ scores predict such things as educational achievement and longevity.
More broadly, the average IQ score of a country is linked to economic growth and scientific innovation.
Average IQ score of a country is linked to economic growth and scientific innovation.
Well, of course!
Of course it is, because you need super smart people to grow the economy.
If you have a bell curve of intelligence, right, like most people are grouped around the middle, there are a small number of people at the lower end of intelligence, a small number of people at the higher end of intelligence, so if your average is lower, you're just going to have fewer smart people, and those fewer smart people may be viewed with great suspicion and hostility in that particular country.
Dr. Helmuth Nyberg I had on my show was talking about how you simply have never seen a sort of functional, peaceful, relatively non-corrupt democracy in any population with an average IQ below 90.
It just doesn't seem to work, right?
So yes, it's not just educational achievement and longevity.
It is to do with general health.
IQ is related to general health.
IQ is related to How well people drive.
IQ is related to criminality.
There's a sweet spot for criminality around IQ 85 and so on, which is really tragic and unfortunate, but a reality.
IQ is also related to the stability of marriage and to whether you spank or not.
A lot of things related to IQ.
So he goes on to say, so if IQ scores are really dropping, that could not only mean 15 more seasons of the Kardashians.
Yeah, see?
I can understand what he's doing here, because he's, uh, what is it they call social security in American politics?
It's the third rail.
You touch it, you die!
Well, IQ is one of the great challenges.
Like, the hysterical anti-science Fundamentalism that characterized some aspects of religious societies in the past has now transferred to, in many cases, the left, who have anti-scientific hysteria regarding average IQ differences between groups.
And this is also males and females.
There are IQ differences between males and females.
I've gone into that a bunch of times before, so I won't bore you with that here.
You can look into my other presentations.
But yeah, so he drops You know this bomb IQ is is really really significant and average IQ scores of a country.
Now average IQ scores of a country is um he doesn't really explicate it here.
I'm of course not speaking for him but I will explicate it for him based upon this.
The average IQ score of a country.
Now whites for instance uh have an average IQ of 100 pretty much all over the world in the same way that whites Murder about the same rate all over the world and that's just very much in common with with whites So why would the average IQ score of a country change because the contents of the ethnicity within that country?
Tend to change right in other words the ethnic composition of a country is one of the main driving forces of of that country's average IQ.
If you change the ethnicity of a country, you're going to change the average IQ score of a country, right?
Because, again, East Asians have pretty average IQs, about 104, 105, 106.
You've got whites with an average IQ score of 100, and other ethnicities with different IQ scores.
It's pretty common, again, lots of exceptions, and you never judge individuals, but we're talking about countries, so we can generalize, right?
Again, this is stuff that I've been talking about.
You know, I guess some people got pretty mad about this.
And I'm just sort of pointing out that, you know, don't shoot the messenger.
These are the facts we need to deal with.
Okay, so he puts in a joke, right?
Oh, 15 more seasons of the Kardashians.
And I understand that, you know, he said something that if people sort of sit and think about it's like really explosive according to a lot of people uh Jordan Peterson doesn't talk about IQ differences between ethnicities he's just touched on it really briefly when asked because he says people get killed for this topic and it's like well If there wasn't sort of mass migration into Western countries, it would be a less important topic.
So the fact that there is means it's an important topic.
So he goes to say, if IQ scores are really dropping, 50 more seasons of the Kardashians, ba-dum-bump, and then he says, but also the potential end of progress on all these other fronts, ultimately leading to fewer scientific breakthroughs, stagnant economies, and a general dimming of our collective future.
Terrifying, right?
I mean, we are getting more and more and more people, which means that we have to be more and more productive, right?
We have to have more food, we have to have more jobs, we have to have more efficiency, we have to have better education, because there are more and more people, so we need more and more productivity.
Keep those people alive!
If we have a lot of extra people and IQ is going down, This is the greatest conceivable catastrophe in the history of the world.
Do you understand?
We have more and more people who are buoyed up by the incredible productivity of the free market and high IQ people.
Right?
Vast masses of the economy are dependent on very, very few people.
Right?
I've mentioned this before, called the Pareto Principle.
Some people call it Price's Law.
And basically the square root of any group produces half the value.
You've got 9 people, 3 are producing half the value.
You've got 100 people, 10 are producing half the value.
You've got 10,000 people, 100 are producing half the value.
So if you think about it, this is why people get paid so much as organizations get bigger.
You've got a company of 10,000 people, right?
100 people are producing half the value, so of course they're going to get paid more.
You take those 100 people out of the equation, the entire organization collapses in a matter of days if not weeks.
Now think of it, 10,000 people Square root, square root, 10 people out of 10,000 people are producing fully 25% of the value of that entire company.
Just think about that.
The wages of 9,000, 990 people are largely dependent upon the enthusiasm and productivity of 10 people.
Now think about this in terms of a farm.
You've got a farm organization, it's got 10,000 people.
10 of those people are producing 25% of the food.
I don't necessarily mean physically, but they're creating 25% of the value of that company.
The company's productivity is food, right?
So you've got 100 people out of 10,000 producing half the food in this organization.
10 people out of 10,000 producing 25% of the food.
So if you lose those high IQ people, if they begin to diminish, Literally, food stocks collapse.
Plumbing decays.
Sewage decays.
Electricity falters.
Because in all of these organizations, it's like this inverted pyramid.
The vast majority of us are living on the outlier brains of very, very, very few people in the world.
And it's like playing the lottery.
You've got to have a lot of people to get the high IQ people.
And they've got to come from a high IQ population as a whole.
So...
We have billions and billions of people who are literally physically dependent upon very few high IQ brains being massively productive, which requires a free market, a meritocracy, right?
The more the government controls the free market, diminishes our economic freedoms, the less incentive it is for the giant brain productivity squids to spray their massive productivity ink all over the planet.
Sorry, that's a bad analogy, but hey, sometimes they work and sometimes they don't.
I'm sure a higher IQ person could have come up with a better analogy.
Right?
But it's magic.
Literally, it is a kind of brain alchemy magic that the free market, a meritocracy, and the incentive of profit produces.
Destroy or diminish the free market, productivity collapses.
Reduce the IQ of the general population as a whole, that productivity is going to decline You know, every single human life in the world at the moment depends on $30,000 of debt, right?
In other words, the debt per capita of the world is $30,000.
Now, if we have a free market and we sort of respect the conditions necessary to produce all of the food that keeps people alive, the electricity, the energy, the The cleaning of the water, all of this, to keep people the medicine, the innovation.
If we respect the IQ necessary for all of that, and all of the conditions necessary for high IQ people to have the incentive and capacity and basic ability to produce all of this incredible wealth that keeps us all alive, then we can deal with this higher population.
But if the higher population is told, as it so often is, if the higher population is told, oh, there's just a few people, and those people are super rich because they've stolen from everyone else, and they're bad people, and they're capitalists, and they're exploiters, and they're predators, and they stole from your ancestors, and they stole from you.
Well, what happens?
You rouse the mob to cut down the high IQ people.
either physically or restrict their capacity to redistribute all their income, which just destroys their incentives to actually produce all of the goods and services that keep people alive.
It's a form of suicidality of half the species.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are smart people who are predators.
They generally are in charge of the central banking system and fiat currency and all of this type what you want in your own bank account nonsense that passes for actual currency in the world.
But they don't point at those people, right?
They point at someone who's running an efficient business and hiring a lot of people.
So...
Billions of lives hang upon our capacity, or our willingness, to accept the inevitable economic inequality that results from allowing high-IQ people to pursue the profit motive in the free market and keep significant portions of what they make.
Right?
If you don't have that, and you can see this of course in the Holodomor, After the Soviets took power, or after the Communists took power in Russia, and created the USSR in 1917, they went into Ukraine, and they said, oh, there's all these farmers who have these big crops, and this big land, and everything, and they're predators, and they're preying upon the poor, and we've got to get the poor to own the means of production, which in this case was the land.
They collectivized the farm.
Same thing happened in China.
Same thing happened, of course, in Cambodia.
Same thing happens all over when the Commies get in power.
And everyone starved to death because you took the resource away from the highest IQ people who were best able to be productive with those resources.
This is the old story of the killing the goose that lays the golden egg, right?
You got this goose, lays a golden egg, and you're like, wow, there must be all this great, this fantastic gold mine in there.
Let's rip open the goose.
You kill the goose.
You don't get any more golden eggs.
And people are like, oh, there's all these rich people.
It's unfair.
So we're gonna go and take all their stuff, and restrict them, and control them, and harass them, and Kill their motivations.
And look, we're going to get all this wealth!
You know, like the people, when the society breaks down and they're like, oh, I'm going to go steal all this stuff from the local stores.
It's like, okay, great.
Great.
You got a big screen TV and now no one is ever going to open a store in your neighborhood again.
But seeing the consequences of all of that is kind of like an IQ test to begin with, right?
So, I really wanted to point this out that this guy is saying IQ scores are dropping.
We are losing the fundamental driver that keeps billions of people alive!
I don't know why people can't see this disaster coming.
There's a reason I take these ridiculous risks to talk about these highly challenging topics.
It's not because I'm a masochist.
It's not because I enjoy people yelling at me and calling me racist.
It's because I care for the lives of billions of people and those lives are going to end if we lose IQ and the free market.
They're going to die.
Hundreds of millions or billions of people are going to look at what happened in Venezuela.
What's happening in Venezuela, right?
They voted in a bunch of socialists who redistributed income, nationalized everything, took control, destroyed the incentives for high IQ people.
High IQ people flee!
From those countries, and now the entire society and economy is collapsing, and people are starving to death, and mothers are selling their children for medicine, and middle-aged housewives are crossing over into Colombia to become prostitutes because they need to eat.
That is what happens.
The other thing, too, of course, you know, people say, oh, the West pillaged all of these resources from the third world.
It's like, well, if the people coming in from the third world are the smartest people in the third world, it just means that the third world is going to collapse even more.
Right?
Strip mining high IQ people from poor countries means that those poor countries are going to fail in catastrophic ways.
Well, I mean, just, I mean, you can look at South Africa.
So, just wanted to sort of point that out.
It's absolutely essential stuff.
Now, he has here something which is interesting.
This is a sidebar.
He says, even children born to high IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder.
Well, of course they are.
Of course they are.
It's called regression to the mean.
Average IQ is 100.
Let's talk about the white population.
Average IQ is 100.
You're going to get some super smart people.
Got IQ 140, 150, 160, whatever.
And they're going to have kids, but their kids are not going to be most likely IQ 150, 160.
They're going to be IQ 120, 125.
And then they're like, there's a regression to the mean.
Tall parents have kids who are taller than average but shorter than they are.
Short parents have kids who are taller than they are but shorter than average, right?
There's this regression to the mean.
So you need a continual influx or creation of high IQ people otherwise it's going to keep going down.
So he goes down and he says, as yet the United States hasn't hit this IQ wall despite what you may be tempted to surmise from the current state of the political debate.
But don't rush to celebrate American exceptionalism if IQs are dropping in other advanced countries but not here.
Maybe that means we're not really an advanced country.
Too much poverty, too little social support.
Well, see, again, this is sort of inevitable, right?
So people say, well, there's rich people, and the rich people, if they become rich as a result of providing goods and services in a meritocracy, it means that they're helping people heat their homes or feed their children or not die from disease or whatever it is.
Then people are like, oh, that's really, really bad.
We've got to equalize that out.
In other words, we have to reduce the incentive for high IQ people to be productive.
And you've seen this with dating, right?
There's a whole men-going-their-own-way movement where men are like, it's way too risky to date women.
They can take you to court and they call it divorce rape and they can strip you of half your stuff and you can go to jail for not paying alimony and child support and could destroy your life.
So when you reduce incentives by redistributing income, you are destroying the very foundation that produces the wealth in the first place, right?
So I've had this analogy for years.
I will revisit it because I really need people to understand this.
It's called Marxism, but it's Marx like school Marx.
So just imagine, right?
You've got a university and the teacher says at the beginning, you know what?
Some people are just naturally smart.
They get good marks.
They didn't really earn it.
It's just genetic, right?
So we're going to take the marks of the highest marks and we're going to put everyone's... We're going to put everyone's marks into a big giant bucket and then everyone's going to end up with the same average mark, right?
So we're going to take the people who get 100% on a test.
We're going to take the people who get 20% on a test.
We're going to put all those people into one bucket and we'll just redistribute the marks evenly.
Because he would look last year and say, well, the grand total of marks was, I don't know, like 5,000, but 5,000% out of the entire, right?
So we just divide it by whatever, right?
So what will happen?
Well, because the highest IQ people or the smartest people or the best students no longer have the incentive to study or work hard to raise their marks because they don't get to keep the marks that they've earned, nobody's going to work that hard and you're going to have almost no marks to redistribute.
The only reason you had the marks to redistribute was because you didn't redistribute them.
The moment you start redistributing them, you've got no marks to redistribute because no one's going to bother working hard or even take the course.
And smart people aren't even going to take the course, of course, because they'll say, well, I don't want a bad mark because other people aren't going to work.
Anyway.
So he says, or, just as troubling, if we are keeping up with the Joneses or Johansons and Jacques in terms of national development, that means we are likely to experience similarly plummeting IQs in the near future, at which point the US will face the same dangers of intellectual and economic stagnation.
If we want to prevent America from suffering this fate, we'd better figure out why IQs are dropping elsewhere.
But it's uncharted territory.
Until recently, IQ scores only moved in one direction, up.
And if you're thinking, isn't the test set up so that 100 is always the average IQ?
That's only true because researchers rescaled the test to correct for improving raw scores.
Also, congrats, that's the kind of critical thinking we don't want to lose.
So this is the Flynn effect, and I've had Dr. Flynn on this show, and the Flynn effect doesn't seem to be related to G, to general intelligence.
There are a few specific abilities, somewhat trained by modernity, that have improved, but general intelligence has not really budged at all.
So he says, these raw scores have been rising on a variety of standard IQ tests for over half a century.
That may sound odd if you think of IQ as largely hereditary.
But current IQ tests are designed to measure cognitive skills, such as short-term memory, problem-solving speed, and visual processing, and rising scores show that these cognitive capabilities can actually be sharpened by environmental factors, such as higher quality schools and more demanding workplaces.
This is the 20% right?
So blacks in America average IQ in the mid 80s and that did go up a little bit and that increase has remained stagnant for the last couple of decades.
So you can look at it this way.
Let's say you have a twin and you're raised in America and your twin for some reason is raised in North Korea or some other place where there isn't enough food.
So your twin suffers from malnutrition so your twin doesn't grow up to be as tall as you are.
So extra food would have made your twin taller, but it would not allow your twin to go beyond the genetic ceiling of your height, right?
Extra food doesn't make you grow to seven or eight feet tall.
It just, I guess it just makes you wider instead of taller.
So you can remediate some deficiencies with better nutrition and so on, but it doesn't move you beyond your maximum set intelligence or whatever, which is, uh, seems to be somewhat, well, significantly genetic, right?
So, the guy says here, for a while, rising IQ scores seemed like a clear evidence of social progress, palpable proof that humanity was getting steadily smarter, and might even be able to boost brain power indefinitely.
Scholars call it the Flynn effect.
Okay, the Flynn himself concedes that, quote, the IQ gains of the 20th century have faltered.
And he said he doesn't know, doesn't know really if we're getting smarter or just more modern, right?
So he says a range of, I'm sorry, the writer says a range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.
Huh!
Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.
Now what could be similar or what could those countries have in common?
Well, two things.
One, of course, is the welfare state, and the other is mass immigration, generally from the third world, from countries that have low average IQ scores, right?
Somalia has an average IQ in the 60s.
And you say, ah, yes, but if they're exposed to modernity, if they get modern education, and they get better nutrition, and so on, then their IQs will rise to 100.
But there's no evidence for that.
There's no evidence for that, which is, again, tragic.
But a real fact.
We don't have to process any reality, but there are consequences for not doing it, right?
Plus, of course, if you think about the trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars that have been poured into the third world from largely Western countries in terms of medicine and education and sanitation, better sewage and food and all of that, I mean that is one of the largest wealth transfers in history is from the first world to the third world in terms of foreign aid and even just the intellectual understanding that the free market is better and so on.
And what's happened?
Well, there's been small changes, but nothing particularly major.
Okay, so he goes on to say, details vary from study to study and from place to place, given the available data.
IQ shortfalls in Norway and Denmark appear in long-standing tests of military conscripts, whereas information about France is based on a smaller sample and a different test.
But the broad pattern has become clearer.
Beginning around the turn of the 21st century, many of the most economically advanced nations began experiencing some kind of decline in IQ.
Q. Now, of course, if you look at it, Tony Blair opened up England in 1997, I think it was, to mass migration, and that really started to happen.
Now, the pushback against that is saying, look, some of this stuff is within the white population, and that's certainly valid as well.
So, the other explanation, I think, that stands the sort of smell test or the logic test of reason and so on, is that Single motherhood has become, well, catastrophic throughout the West.
And the problem, of course, with single motherhood is that single mothers in general have a lower IQ than the general population.
IQ for single mothers is sort of in the low to mid 90s compared to 100 for the general population.
Now that, of course, is a problem.
Because there's some arguments that intelligence is matrilineal, it comes down through the mother.
So if women are choosing to have children outside of marriage, it would generally be, as the data shows, the less intelligent women who are having that, and therefore you're going to have a drop in intelligence.
Now that drop in intelligence isn't going to be immediate, it's going to be generational, right?
Because you generally will only test people for IQ later on.
in life so if you kind of look at sort of the late 60s early 70s when the welfare state really began to take hold well what happened well What happened was women no longer had to choose highly productive and reliable and dependable men for mates because if things didn't work out with the man, they could just get money from the welfare state.
They could just get money from other taxpayers through the coercive arm of the government, right?
So there was this forced redistribution fundamentally from more responsible and far-seeing people who had jobs and were paying taxes to, again, on average, less far-seeing and less well-planned people.
who were having kids outside of wedlock.
And then that process is going to repeat itself.
And it's sort of like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy just getting blurrier and blurrier.
So the idea that one and a half to two generations after the introduction of the welfare state you start to see a significant drop in intelligence is not shocking.
Not shocking.
And again, There's no hate on single moms, I mean, there's no hate on anything like that, but we simply do have to look at the facts, because I'm telling you, my friends, literally billions of lives, yours and mine included, really hang on the balance of all of this.
So, I'm sorry if people are upset, but they'll be a lot more upset if we starve to death and run out of electricity.
So let's go honey.
So one potential explanation was quasi-eugenic.
As the movie Idiocracy, as in the movie Idiocracy, it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because the lower IQ families are having more children.
It's called dysgenic fertility as a technical term.
Alternatively widening immigration, this is amazing here, says alternatively widening immigration might be bringing less intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So...
Those are two things that I've talked about before.
Now in the past, of course, the way that it worked was, and people have seen this from studies of the Black Death, and in particular studies of the sort of 700-year history of Ashkenazi Jews having the most intelligent members of their society have the most children, right?
You can see the rabbis who have to speak multiple languages and so on, sort of quasi IQ tests, having the most kids.
And so in the past, children, which cost money, You could afford more if you had more money.
And since income is somewhat of a proxy for intelligence, higher incomes represent higher intelligence, which means that if you have more money, you can afford more kids, which generally tends to spread higher IQ genetics.
Now that's completely changed for a variety of reasons, some of which are economic, some of which are political, and some of which are just ideological, right?
So when you say to women, well you have to go and get educated and then you have to go have a career and so on, that's most tempting for the smartest women, which means the smartest women are going to have the fewest Children.
The less intelligent women are going to look and say, well, you know, what's the best job I can get?
Something at McDonald's or whatever it is.
That's terrible.
I can make more money just having kids.
And therefore you are taking money from the smartest women and you are giving money to the least smart women or the less smart women on the condition that those women have the most children.
The less smart women.
So come on.
This is not that complicated and it's kind of hard to escape.
And again, no hate on anyone.
I'm just Talking about the realities of the situation.
So he has a pushback against this, which is very interesting.
So he says, however, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies, but within families.
In other words, the issue is not that educated Norwegians are increasingly outnumbered by lower IQ immigrants or the children of less educated citizens.
Even children born to high IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder.
That's very interesting.
Now that could be also because Eggs that are older are being increasingly used particularly for high IQ women, right?
Because high IQ women generally have children later, get married later, have children later, because they got to get educated and they got to go have a career as they believe, right?
So it could be that you just have lower quality eggs.
There could be any number of things that are occurring based on this.
So again, high IQ families, you would assume, are going to have less intelligent children.
Because again, there's that regression to the mean.
Like some guy who's seven foot tall is not going to have a kid, most likely, who's seven feet tall.
You know, it's going to be like 6'6 or 6'4 or whatever.
So that is natural.
There is going to be a fall.
So think of it like a fountain, right?
So there's this explosion.
Sometimes you get these high IQ geniuses born to very average parents.
Up they go, right?
And think of the top of the arc.
There then is going to be a fall down back to the ground, right?
Because the high IQ parents can have lower IQ children.
It's part of the churn of society.
What makes society kind of fundamentally more fair than if there was just some elite aristocracy that, you know, had a grip on this IQ?
There is shuffle the deck and deal in genetics, right?
So the problem is not so much that the high IQ parents are having lower IQ children because that's inevitable.
It's where's the geister coming from that's going to push up the new high IQ people to replace them.
So, some environmental factor or collection of factors, he says, is causing a drop in the IQ scores of parents and their own children and older kids and their younger siblings.
One leading explanation is that the rise of lower skilled service jobs has made work less intellectually demanding, leaving IQs to atrophy as people flex their brains less.
Yeah, I mean, but the problem is, of course, lower skill service jobs, the rise of those jobs is tied to lower IQ immigration, right, which he's talked about earlier.
So again, don't get mad at me.
I'm just quoting what the guy says, and I know that it's true, right?
So what's happened, of course, is because you have a massive flood of low IQ people coming into the country, or lower IQ, again, on average, some brilliant, some geniuses and all that, but just on average, right?
Then what happens is the desire for automation goes down, right?
So, I mean, one of the cliched examples, of course, is that mestizos or Hispanics from Mexico and Central America, South America, Have an average IQ in the high 80s, right?
Now, they, of course, come pouring across the border in the South of America and they work in farming, right?
They work as fruit pickers and all that kind of stuff, right?
Now, do you know that there are actually robots that can pick fruit, even delicate fruit, strawberries, grapes, and so on?
Do you have robots that can do it?
But because you have a constant influx of people willing, let's just say willing to work for less, right, then it makes more economic sense to pay people who will work very cheaply rather than invest in machinery that will replace them.
That's one of the reasons why the ancient world, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, never had an industrial revolution because they had slaves, right?
So you're not going to invest in labor-saving devices when you've already invested in labor.
So the idea that there's this rise of lower-skill service jobs at the same time as we have massive AI and automation and robots and kiosks and tablets and order by phone and order on your computer and so on,
The idea that there's this weird rise of lower skill service jobs, well no, it's because you have this mass immigration and also because if you have a bunch of women who have lower intelligence on average having a bunch of kids, those kids are going to get kind of stuck in lower skill service jobs as well.
He says there are also other possibilities, largely untested, such as global warming making food less nutritious or information age devices sapping our ability to focus.
Squirrel!
Ultimately, it'd be nice to pin down the precise reason IQ scores are dropping before we're too stupid to figure it out, especially as these scores really do seem to connect to long-term productivity and economic successes.
And these are all hyperlinks.
I'll, of course, link the article below.
You can go and check it out yourself.
And he says, and while we might be able to compensate with skills beside intelligence, like determination or passion, in a world where IQ scores continue to fall and where the drop expands to places like the United States, there's also a bleaker scenario, a global intelligence crisis that undermines humanity's problem-solving capacity and leaves us ill-equipped to tackle the complex challenges posed by AI, global warming, and developments we have yet to imagine.
Very, very big and important stuff.
So what does this all mean?
Well, I'm going to lay it out for you very clearly.
I don't want there to be any misunderstandings.
The current process of bringing millions of people from the third world into primarily white Western countries is going to result in catastrophe.
And it is A policy of almost superhuman cruelty to do all of this.
First of all, as we all know, Western countries are horrendously indebted.
They cannot pay their own existing bills.
So the idea that you're going to bring a lot of people in, many of whom are going to end up on welfare and have children and get used to, I don't know, damp air and a steady diet of potatoes, Is incredibly cruel when the system cannot be sustained.
It literally is like inviting people onto your boat knowing for sure that your boat is gonna sink.
It is a policy of superhuman cruelty to do that.
There is A massively increased population in the world as it stands, largely the result of Western technology, East Asian technology, improved farming methods, improved transportation, energy generation, you name it.
This has massively swelled the human population.
The genius of the very few are what is keeping all of us aloft.
It's like that hot air balloon, you need that fire for it to keep going up.
If we lose the productivity that sustains all of these human lives, it will be without a doubt the greatest single catastrophe in the history of the planet.
And by that I include whatever killed off the dinosaurs, right?
It is the single greatest Death count that can be conceived of in human history if we cannot maintain the circumstances the environment of the situations that allow highly intelligent people to exert their massive productivity muscles in a meritocracy like the free market.
This is a simple fact.
It cannot be ignored.
It cannot be bypassed.
It cannot be avoided.
It will fulfill.
We know this.
We know this based upon all the times in history when the meritocracy of the free market is interfered with to the point where it ceases to function.
We know this.
Praxeologically, we know this through Austrian economics.
We know this through IQ research.
This is a simple, basic fact.
Very few people keep most of us alive.
If we resent those people and get mad at them for having swimming pools and destroy their incentive to produce, billions of us are going to die.
It's not even a prediction like, I wonder if it's going to rain tomorrow.
This is a prediction like, the sun is coming up tomorrow.
This is a fact.
So we really only have one choice.
If we wish to, as I desperately do, because the thought of this human carnage that results in a fall of economic productivity is so horrifying, I can't even speak about it with any coherence.
It's so absolutely appalling.
We really only have one solution at the moment, which is we need to maintain the circumstances that allow for the higher IQ productive economies to continue to pump out the massive amount of goods and services that they do.
We need scientific innovation to continue.
Now how it works out between the more productive economies and the less productive economies is for me a matter of private charity, of kindness, of sympathy, of concern, and a recognition that we have inherited one hell of a dilemma as the result of incredibly poor policy decisions in the past.
Right?
I mean, as far as in the past goes, sending trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars, stripped from people by force, to other countries has destroyed their local economies, has corrupted their government.
I mean, you dump a whole bunch of free food on an African country, what happens to the local farmers?
They can't sell their food!
You've destroyed their entire agricultural system!
Now, this is not the fault of the people on the whole, this is the fault of terrible government policies.
You can't blame the people for what their governments do, because people are lied to so much and nobody gets the facts, if you understand, right?
I mean, the media has not been talking about this kind of disaster.
So we've inherited this massive disaster, and it's particularly not the fault of the people who were young, who weren't even alive when these policy decisions were made.
We can't blame the West as a whole, or East Asia as a whole, or whatever.
It's not fair.
It's not valid.
It's kind of collective judgment.
It's morally repulsive.
I have to judge individuals.
So we've inherited this giant mess.
Now, if the policy is To take millions and millions of people from the third world into the first world, it is going to break the backs of the first world economies and everyone's going to starve.
I'm not kidding.
That is what is going to happen.
It is as sure as sunrise.
The only chance we have for any kind of civilized, kind, and compassionate solution to this messy, massive, inherited problem
The only way out of this situation without massive catastrophe to human life is very, very simple, and it's based on reason, evidence, facts, science, and morality, which is to cease as much as humanly possible to interfere with the productive incentives of the smartest people around the world.
to stop massive income redistribution, massive government programs like mass migration.
This is going to result in unfathomable disaster as I have been lamenting and crying with my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world low these many years.
We have to encourage and allow and respect the smartest people around the world to have access to the freest markets to produce the most goods and services Because if we don't do that, hundreds of millions if not billions of people will curse our blindness with their dying breaths.
So, mass immigration is incredibly cruel, it's incredibly destructive.
Whatever the problem is, freedom, free markets, private property, respect for property rights, that is the solution.
There is no other.
There is no other.
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