Lee Kuan Yew drains your brains for short term gain
The paper, which projects 6.9 million people by 2030, charts the country’s strategies in managing a shrinking and ageing population.A question on Japan’s ageing society during the dialogue triggered the discussion.Mr Lee noted how Japan refused to take in migrants and that led to the situation it is facing today.Mr Lee said: "So I see a nation reduced to half in 20 years, and if it still continues with the same policy, reduced to a further half, and eventually, it is all over!"To have a nation, you must have people and you must have young people to be able to drive the economy and young people buy the products — all these gadgets and fine dining — and if you don’t have that, and you refuse migrants as the Japanese do, you will just dissolve into nothingness! I think before that comes, they may change (their) policy."A question on China’s one—child policy was also raised during the dialogue.Mr Lee said China is headed in the wrong direction with this policy as a shrinking and ageing population will mean assets, such as property prices, will go down."Property prices will go down, assets will go down. There is no younger generation to put the pressure up so I think it is heading towards the wrong direction," said Mr Lee.He added Singapore is in a similar position with its low total fertility rate but the difference is that Singapore takes in migrants to make up for the numbers.Mr Lee pointed out that authorities here maintain a "certain quality of control" and that is one reason why he feels other emerging ASEAN economies are unlikely to surpass Singapore anytime soon.Mr Lee said: "They will make progress but if you look at the per capita they have got, the differences are so wide. We have the advantage of quality control of the people who come in so we have bright Indians, bright Chinese, bright Caucasians so the increase in population means an increase in talent."
How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there, Harry? Surely they are not infinite. And what will they do in Singapore? Well, engage in the finance and marketing rat-race and depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting valuable genes just so your property prices don't go down. Singapore is an IQ shredder.
And using Japan as a bogeyman. Japan has 120 million people. How many bright Chinese and bright Indians is Japan supposed to take in to offset their demographic decline? 10 million? Do they exist in those numbers? And what then? Would they show any allegiance towards the Japanese nation? Of course not. But what does he care? What's important is those property prices. And fine dining! Hey, didn't he have a chat with Tyler Cowen last year?
And China is wrong to restrict fertility! Of course, why on earth would China think that 1.3 billion people are enough? The fact that it doesn't have enough water or energy to cater for them surely means something? But not to Lee Kuan Yew. For all his sham rhetoric, Singapore migrants are mostly low wage laborers. Who would build his condos if China restricts fertility?
Lee Kuan Yew is widely admired because he had the guts to stand for his tribe, the southern Chinese people in Singapore, and build a fine country for them. But that didn't last. Because the real tribe of southeastern Chinese isn't their people. It's the Money God.
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replyThis post is so spot on its perfect. Was thinking the same thing watching the interview with him. Your last paragraph is a tremendous summary. Japan remains by far the most mature of all the players here. There is no "good side" to smart people choosing fine dining over children. You can only move that problem around so much.
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I think in the early days, he did try to get Singapore to reproduce, at least the "college graduates". Despite his best efforts, Singapore's fertility rate was stuck at something like 1.2. This means in a few decades, maybe a century, the city would become so weak that the neighboring Malays would move right in anyways. At least this way he gets to choose who comes in. Japan is right not to go the immigration route, but they should try to at least shoot for replacement rate of fertility. China does have a population problem now, but I think the natural fertility trend of about 1.4 for East Asia, once set in, is very difficult to reverse. Especially with the next generation of self centered only child. They should consider population stabilization instead of cutting it in half every 30 years. I am talking about at least fertility of 1.8 to stabilize the free fall.The problem of over population will be resolved as China gets richer and the baby boomers die off in a few decades. Water problem could also be resolved if they do more water reclamation and price it correctly so it is not wasted
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Why do people always think things carry on as they are. In 1935 Japan tries to take on the colonial Powers and the USA with 75m people. It loses about 3m people in the war and the population is greater than in 1940 by 1950. Even with all those young men dead. Population growth is 5-10-15% through the 60's 70's populations is grouting 3-5-7 million every 5 years. Tokyo is becoming a unbreathable hell hole. So they eased of a bit too much. Now they have everything any civilised society could EVER want people are moving to the outlying cities as much as they move to Tokyo. Of all countries int he world there could be a financial collapse tommorow and they would work out a way to survive. I was surprised how many couples had three kids in the countryside. They are self sufficient still in rice. Of course they will financially collapse first of course.
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China is doing fine with 1.3 billion people, and micro-states like Monaco or the Vatican are doing just as fine with their puny populations. The number of people living in a country means nothing, per se. The real problem developed countries are facing is an ever-increasing number of OLD people, who need pensions and healthcare. Those two expenses is where most taxpayers money goes. In this modern age of welfare, the elders are a net drain on society. Western-style mass immigration does NOT solve the problem and is essentially a sham, because the migrants are themselves recipients of welfare and an ADDITIONAL BURDEN for the state (before you even consider the problems with crime, clash of culture, etc.). To me, the most logical thing would be to abolish or reduce state pensions and have the children take care of their elderly parents, as was once the norm across all human societies. The money saved could then be redistributed to people who have children. Basically, pay the young to make babies instead of paying the old to sit around and be a leech. Another option would be to abolish abortion and contraception. But none of these solutions are workable in practice, because the uproar would be immense. Young people want their pills and their abortions... old people want their pensions... women want their divorces... and none of them want to stick together in a big cohesive family like in the good ol' days. It will be a disaster when the money runs out. Or will it? I guess governments will just keep printing and/or borrowing more of it, as they already do. The whole thing is a disaster. Everyone is living beyond their means.
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So the easy way out is to deflate the currency to the point where the obligations to the old become vanishingly small. This means that old people aren't going to get the medical care they need. Additionally, I would imagine there would be massive redistributions via government handout, to mitigate the unpopular effects of high inflation. so the middle class and eventually the rich and finally capitalism will get shafted in the process.
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can anyone explain why an aging shrinking population is a bad thing? housing prices go down.....and....? Why are low housing prices bad? Isn't family formation easier with lower housing prices? Don't wages go up with less population like they did after the black death? We don't need new gadgets either. We don't even need better health care. The latest medical inventions just keep you in a vegetative state longer for Medicare farmers.
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It's bad if you're a greedy old fuck who wants to get rents from your property holdings.
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Take the case of Japan, 120 million strong, with a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 1.4. In something like a century or less, the new born rate will be as if the country only has 20 or 30 million. Never mind property prices, Japan will cease to be much of a power in East Asia or the world. The older, infertile people won't die off until much later, so with every passing generation, while the "equilibrium" population is low and getting lower, the total population will remain much higher, masking the gravity of the problem. The Parsis of India has the highest IQ in the world. They average 120, higher than the jews, but they have low TFR and now number in the hundred thousands and will soon be extinct as they marry outside they race and fail to breed. China has a big base, so for a while, it would seem to go in the right direction as over population issues are resolved this way, but I got the feeling that TFR for China, once they are fully urbanized, will be lower then even Japan, maybe below 1. So in a century, the youngest population will be as though the country has 150 million (cut in half in every generation, assuming 25 years per generation), about the size of Japan today. It would cease to be a first order power.
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I was a little off with my math. it should be 75 million instead of 150 million in a century for China.
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Who gives a crap about being a world power, besides greedy old fucks? If Japan brings 20 million Indonesians, or Chinese to their country, Japan will still cease to be a world power anyway, because the workers won't give a shit about Japan, will undermine anything Japanese about the whole place, and they will drive down living wages, further undermining the fertility rate. You can cease to be a world power, but keep the nation, and perhaps start again in some time, or cease to be a world power, and become a third world Balkanized shithole. And anyway, being a "world power" is a relative thing. All advanced nations are losing their native high IQ populations. Who is going to replace Japan's place? The Philippines? Give me a break. Japan won't lose it's relative status. A USA where 40% of the population is Mexican will become a 40% Mexico.
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I never said to solve the problem with immigration. But to say this trend of drastically below replacement rate is OK is just plain irresponsible.
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The trend won't continue forever. After awhile, all the olds demanding handouts from the government will die off and young people will say, "Finally! My tax burden is lifted, property prices are low, and land is cheap! Let's start a family." Trends do not continue into perpetuity.
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I'm not so sure about the necessity of an especially large population to be a "world power" anyway. It's not like you need cannon fodder and hordes of guys in factories tightening bolts anymore. Force projection is becoming less and less manpower intensive all the time. Isn't Japan precariously dependent on food imports? Like, to the extent that if there was a war and international shipping shut down for a while there'd be mass starvation? I think a world power should strive for resiliency in the respect.
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Japan imports almost all its wheat, but is self-sufficient in rice. A lot of beef is imported but most pork and chicken is domestic, etc. They could manage. More so with less people.
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I am curious what a rigorous analysis of food security minus blue water shipping for a year shows for various nations. I suspect Britain would be particularly fucked among first world nations, which makes their immigration enthusiasm even sillier. Beyond I guess six months with no shipping from Chile et al we hit the problem of no nitrates and phosphates to actually grow anything in most places. If you want to be a fag call it a "black swan", but really a major world conflict at *some* point that makes shipping un-insurable is inevitable. Which government spokesman will announce: Sorry, the bottom quarter of you will be starving in a few months.
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All you need to be a world power is nuclear weapons. If some tiny island in Oceania got a stockpile of nukes, all other countries would have to be careful in their dealings with them...
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"can anyone explain why an aging shrinking population is a bad thing?" It's not in the long-term. There's a short-term overhang problem where the elderly population becomes a very large percentage of the total population but that is by definition temporary. The idea that it is a terrible problem - similar to the global warming nonsense - is that you can extrapolate a straight line to extinction which is nonsense. In reality it's open borders propaganda disguised as concern trolling the same way as global warming is western de-industrialization and off-shoring propaganda disguised as concern trolling. A shrinking population means: - less crowding will lead to cheaper housing will lead to more affordable family formation - the women who *want* to have more kids will pass their genes on to their daughters so at some lower population level the fertility rate will stabilize at replacement again. The other supposed problem is there'll be fewer workers - duh - good. Technology means fewer are needed to produce the same amount of stuff. # The only real problem then is managing the decline so the overhang isn't too extreme. One simple solution to that would be to confirm if there is a fertility peak with couples who are at the 4th cousin level of relatedness and add a relatedness test to dating agency search buttons for those particularly concerned with having children.
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Nothing like a nice pandemic to reactivate the economy... Manpower shortages are booms for the nations.... War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strenght and shortage is prosperity.
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And greedy old fuck's geting rent is prosperity? Fuck the economy if it's depressing my wages.
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No, it is not, but if all the anti-PAP crowd have to offer is a choice between high rents and a pandemic (the living will envy the dead, but will love being paid in Malboros...), Yew's ilk will reign in Singapore for at least one century. Regarding "fucking the economy", to use your elaborate expression,many countries, from Africa to South America, chose to do so, it is not clear how it could help real( as opposed to nominal) wages.
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I'm not against PAP rule in Singapore, they can do whatever they want. What I find distasteful is LKY to try to extrapolate his high IQ grinding machine to other countries as if it were a sustainable and smart model. It's not. If you think countries in Africa "chose" to fuck the economy, you're in the wrong blog.
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Yep, except a good old pandemic, nothing is as conducive of economical progress as good old tribal wars, good old kleptocracies (many of them backed by the West or by China, for sure, but, for all intents, they are the "countries") and good old gross monetary dismanagement. OK, colonial powers certainly bear an enormous responsibily for the problems in Africa (opression, slavery, genocide and plain looting are hardly good to the economy of the conquered ones), still there is plenty of blame to go around. It is not like the tin-plated, dictators with delusions of godhood are helping their peoples. In contrast to theirs, Yew's leadership made a First World country out of an African-like basket case.. Well, if the Singaporean model is not sustainable (we will never know unless the Japaneses pull off the "Japanese Only" signs from their businesses) and the Japanese keep refusing to bear children, "Japan will just dissolve into nothingness". Speaking candidly, I don't think he will be shedding any tears for his former colonial masters, neither would I in his place. It doesn't change the fact he is right, does it?
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You certainly are in the wrong blog. Japan has 125 million people. To sustain the population it would need 20 million immigrants ASAP. If they take them from SEA, that means sub-90 IQ barbarians that will drag everyone else down. If they bring 20 million Chinese, it means total subversion to their political enemy. Hence the dissolution of the Japanese nation. How is he right? Singapore is small enough to skim the top of the neighbouring countries. And Singapore long ago renounced to any cultural identity of their own, so they can bring anyone who speaks English. Japan can't do that, it's too big, and it has its own culture it would have to dismantle.
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It is not clear to me why they would need to absorb the equivalent to 1/6 of their population ASAP. They probably could do so in one or two decades and still be ahead of where they would be keeping the current course. Many big countries experienced massive immigration. "Japan has its own culture it would have to dismantle" is just a exquisitely verbose way of saying "Japanese Only." Notwithstanding the shills for the racist immigration policies of Japan,it is not clear why Japanese culture would be destroyed by a little immigration. Good luck telling a white Brazilian descended from the old Portuguese colonial masters from one descended from Italian, German and Spanish newcomers,whose only language is Portuguese). Good luck telling white Americans, whose sole language is English, from each other (weren't those pesky papists-the Democratic Party was called the party of "rum,romanism and rebellion"-to destroy the wonderful freedoms inherited from the British Empire?). It is even less clear why a rich country would have to content itself attracting the neighborhood bottom of the barrel . As far as I know, the USA didn't atract only Canadians, Mexicans and Cubans. Maybe if the Japanese government stopped going out of its way to make immigration, adaptation and naturalization almost impossible. Maybe if the shills stopped making excuses for the racism of the Japanese regime.
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Low fertility rates in Japan are a problem, but not an insurmountable one because they're not forced to engage in a breeding contest for demographic hegemony over the Japanese islands. As the population shrinks, family formation will become more affordable and their birth rates will move back upwards. It's also likely that segments of the Japanese population have higher fertility and will become more prominent in the future (I've unfortunately not seen any breakdowns of Japanese TFR any more detailed than by the equivalents of states).
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You cannot have a more empty place then Russia, with huge swaths of land and the population the size of Japan. Did you see them at above replacement rates? Or how about Canada, you cannot by more empty then Canada. What is their TFR?
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That's a very stupid thing to say. It's not about land, it's about arable land, food production, water and other resources. Most of Russia and Canada is totally unproductive arctic wasteland. And anyway the fertility rate won't come back. Today it doesn't make economic sense to have more than 2 children for the vast majority of people. Hell, we make our women work outside the home. How is one supposed to afford big families? And 30% of the population is psychologically fucked up and unable/unwilling to marry. That's not going to change in short term. There's only two solutions: you lose population and deal with it, or you let third world barbarians to prop up the land rents of old fucks so they can get see their savings grow for the last 10 years before they die. Then the whole world becomes South America.
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For your information, Canada is a big exporter of grain, bread basket for the world. While it is true that much of the country is frozen much of the year, there are loads of minerals which could be exchanged for everything under the sun. Water and other resources per capita is the envy of most of the world. If crowding was a concern for Japan, this issue does not exist for Canada. I was responding to Jehu who expected the TFR to change once the population drops. Canada is an example that shows this is not going to happen. So instead of complaining about over population in this thread, you have now resigned your self to say nothing could be done about depopulation. I would call that progress :)
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The birth rate in the modern world is control by how much freedom and status you give your women. Low status = high birth rate. High status = low birthrate. The left even admits as such as they view exporting feminism to India as birth control for the nation. This is also why very strict religions groups who lower the status of their women reproduce in huge numbers.
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Your analysis may be correct, unfortunately, the train had left the station, the horse left the barn. In the U.S. even the ultra religious, who had large number of kids, after a few generations, ultimately lose their great grand kids to the cathedral. Only in places like Utah where the Mormons own everything, were they able to hold out. Outside of U.S. we are seeing even more secular leanings for the other high IQ countries. Even the place where women have relatively low status, like South Korea and Japan, you don't see high fertility. and I don't think the other Western countries are going back to even the Korean model of female status any time soon.
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Not really. Birth rates in Muslim countries such as Iran are plummeting right along. It is not at all a question of low vs. high status. It is a question of men and women playing realistic gender roles while united in an overarching common enterprise. I mean, your doctor isn't of lower status than your lawyer, just because you wouldn't consult him for legal advice.
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Well the minerals *are* being exchanged. But who gets that money? The people at large? Hell no. The people at large work their asses in corporate jobs while the old fucks keep the profits from the minerals. My view on demographics it's that it's a psychological problem. Most people just don't want to deal with 2 children. Of course not having money doesn't help, but even if they had, if you're playing around until 30 you just don't have time to have that many kids.
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Rising tides lift all boats. Are you going to tell me that living standards for the average joe in Canada did not improve over the past couple of decades? What I was driving at with Canada did not even require their living standard to improve. Heck, even if they stayed the same for the last fifty years, they should be able to at least have a break even birth rate. Cyber bullying is a psychological problem. Low self esteem is a psychological problem. The current demographic trend goes way beyond psychological issues. It has not yet done so, but in a century, which is a blink of an eye from a historic perspective, it will come to threaten all the developed and many developing nations. For many, it will be an existential threat.I hope that some of you are correct, and that it will reverse itself in due course of time, but I am not optimistic that it will do so in time to stop our demise.
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Rising tides lift all boats equally, surely the rising tide since the 1970 hasn't been doing so. Any way of calculating living standards that doesn't include the ability to raise a family doesn't count for shit. "The current demographic trend goes way beyond psychological issues. " Then what do you think it is? My simple model is that people are too busy having fun and defining their individuality until they are 30 years old. It's hard to have more than 2 children after that, no matter how conservative you are. I don't see how people are going to refuse to party until their late 20s and have children with women they can't stand.
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Since the dawn of human history, life is so hard that evolution dictated a certain combination of cultural/genetics that works. Religion and community was a very big part of our lives. People lived and worked for the greater good. Secularism had stripped away religion and community, which were once present at every successful society and for good reasons. They were the glue that held them together. Material success further removed the evolutionary pressure for both culture and genetics. Procreation was once a duty for the faithful and a necessity for one's old age. No longer. Humanity has entered a new age where the old rules and pressures don't apply any longer. If everyone was at the same phase as developed nations, in time, a new order will evolved to replace the old. However, it is just as likely that the third world will come to replace the emptied first world. In fact, it already is being done in many places, Europe and the U.S.are among them. How to stop this? I don't claim to offer any solutions, as I am an atheist myself and waited until I am in my thirties to marry. But I think all of us have to try to stop this somehow or we are doomed.
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"What is their TFR?" 1) Populations pretty much everywhere show a secular downward transition in fertility with industrialization and urbanization. 2) There's research showing that couples have peak fertility when they're related at the level of 4th cousins dropping both if they're too closely related or too far. How might those two things be related? Maybe people moving from the rural countryside where they were related to everyone around them - including the person they married - at around the level of 4th cousins to the city where they were related to everyone around them - including the person they married - at the level of maybe 8th or 9th cousins (or whatever it might have been). If this is correct and human fertility works best when not too related and not too unrelated then a very simple solution for countries like Russia and Japan would be for dating sites to take in dna samples and add cousinage level to the search criterion e.g. male looking for brains (but not more than me), big hips, nice tits, good sense of humour, between 3rd and 6th cousin.
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That sounds great, but I think you are confusing the cause and the effect. What you are describing is the effect. In the same way you cannot ask people to eat less to avoid diabetes because overeating cause diabetes, you can not drive up the fertility based on this bit of research. Truth is, for the people in the dating scene, maximizing fertility is the last thing on their minds when they select a mate. Even if you made everyone aware of this, they are simply not interested.
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Population collapse inevitably leads to societal collapse within a few generations. All of the West's physical and infrastructure has been built with the implicit assumption of a steady or growing population to use/maintain it. Furthermore, the population collapse is not symmetrical across social classes; the most productive are hit the hardest, unless they have resiliency through religion. Unfortunately, pretty much all of the world's religions (mine excepted, of course) have been built leaning on Malthusian privation as an implicit assumption. In a situation where there is enough for all to receive according to their needs and have a comfortable studio apartment with plenty of ramen noodles, protein powder, hand lotion and bandwidth, the religions collapse, taking social conventions and communication protocols right along with them. Since some of those conventions and protocols include family formation and maintenance, the population collapses. Of course, we had this nailed a long time ago, in typically terse form: "it was not the Jews that kept Shabbat, it was Shabbat which kept the Jews." In any case, I digress-with the collapse of all this stuff, the most productive part of society is hardest hit, causing a positive feedback loop of decay and falling productivity and failing infrastructure. If automation can compensate for the latter (of which I am unsure-see Detroit, Birmingham, Flint, etc.) it can't compensate for social decay. See the Chinese and their new society of brotherless, sisterless, auntless, uncleless, cousinless jerkoffs. LKY is trying to make the worst of a shitty situation, the roots of which are inherently outside his scope of practice (he is a social engineer, not a prophet.) The fact that some of the shittiness is expressed as falling real estate values and the depreciating portfolios of rich old fucks, and that any solution addressing the roots would cause real estate values and portfolios to appreciate doesn't mean that this is the main motivator or issue at hand.
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"Population collapse inevitably leads to societal collapse within a few generations. All of the West’s physical and infrastructure has been built with the implicit assumption of a steady or growing population to use/maintain it." Nonsense. Technology = more stuff for less work. It's the collapse in innovation that is the problem and the collapse in innovation is the result in the deliberate destruction of the west's average human capital.
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I think it's worth pointing out here that at least as Moldbug sees it, the corporate states of the future will act just like Singapore. That is they'd be "greedy old fucks", as you put it. They would not be interested in preserving a nation as such. Fnargls all, they worship the money god. The point is that their Fnargldom works for the people, generally. As for the population declines due to birth control and feminism, they will not last forever. Fnargl-states will be effective, unlike democracy. So, to the extent they see population decline as a problem, they will work to ameliorate it (as Lee Kuan Yew is doing). They will do whatever it takes to get the smart and hardworking subjects they want. Currently, the cheapest means is brain-draining other countries; that's what Yew is doing. Perhaps in future it will not be. If the cheapest means is paying women large sums to gestate expensively created embryos, who will then be adopted out to good environments homes, and expensively schooled, then they will do that. In the long run, the only certainty is that evolution will continue and we will evolve (or design ourselves) the trait of wanting children.
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I don't know of this imaginary corporate state you are talking about. Even in the ultra controlling (by Western country standard) Singapore, there is only so much that could be done by LKY, and that is the state. The corporations inside Singapore does not act in this coercive manner. Maybe someday this corporate state will come to be, but right now it is a fantasy in your head. Culturally, the West is not pre-disposed to tolerate coercion from the companies they work for. There are plenty of examples where human resources runs low in the area where the company works. The company just pick up and move to a new location instead of coercing the local population to make more.
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Singapore has no need to engineer its population outside of controlling immigration -- which it does. This is all any modern state needs, because 99% of the worlds population live in ineffective, insecure states. With so many lucrative taxpayers up for grabs, paying to homegrow would be financially irresponsible. Singapore is also constrained by its existence within the Pax Americana. Auntie Samantha does not smile upon effective states, and is only willing to ignore the smallest and richest. As for how much coercion Westerners are prepared to accept from the government: really? We will accept anything. Strip searching children in airports? Here you are, Mr. TSA! Praise be upon you for keeping us safe! Oh right, you said "company". Strange how the state doing something changes the valence, isn't it? All I need to do to get a Westerner to accept some random depredation of liberty is to have the plusgood state do it, "for the children" or whatever, instead of some plusungood "company". Check.
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I think the reason Moldbug was talking about a corporate state and not just a state is that most states are pretty bad at doing their jobs. Our government, intrusive though they maybe, are especially bad at these social engineering things. The motto seems to be, when it does not work, you double the budget, when people point out that you are working on faulty theories, you bludgeon them with a hammer. It was his wish that the more efficient corporations take over also as states and be given omnipotent power to to do as they please. I just don't see that happening in real life. At least not in the most likely scenarios.
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Well, Google already has the ability to control the flow of information (by rigging their algorithm and censoring pages) as well as to spy upon people and collect data on their movements (Maps), communications (Gmail), search histories, and whatnot. Microsoft's Bill Gates is involved in some questionable activities in Africa with birth control and vaccines. Amazon owns a newspaper and is making people increasingly dependent on it for their daily shopping. All of these companies are also heavily involved in politics. If this is a taste of things to come, we should be very careful. There's no telling what a big monopoly could look like in 2050 or 2100... by that point they might really matter more than governments, since technology and not policy-making is driving all human progress, for better or worse. Let's just hope no single company gets to have a monopoly on artificial intelligence or eugenics, that could be a really messy situation.
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Evolution does not requires that the highest IQ group wins, nor does it require high tech and high degree of civilization, just ones who leaves the most offspring.. If all the high IQ countries are emptying out, the Africans, etc, would simply move in and they will represent the future of humanity.
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Perhaps. There's only one Singapore in the world though.
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All things shall pass. Singapore didn't even exist until a few decades ago, and I doubt it will still exist a thousand years from now. Ebb and flow. Countries, empires and dynasties die off, and new ones are born, as was always the case throughout history. And frankly, we can't worry about the entire world. All we can do is choose one country to fight for, or fight for ourselves as individuals and move to whichever place is most convenient at any given time. Lastly, I wouldn't be shocked if the Africans ended up conquering the earth. Ironically, they are the "fittest" to survive in that they are big, strong and violent. This cushy and technology-driven civilization of our times may well be an aberration in the eyes of nature, since it's making people soft, weak, and physically and mentally ill. Modernity sure does have an unnatural and sterile feeling about it.
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>John, Yeah, that's quite accurate. "How to stop this? I don’t claim to offer any solutions, as I am an atheist myself and waited until I am in my thirties to marry. But I think all of us have to try to stop this somehow or we are doomed." As long as we keep the third world out, we can rebound later. It'll be painful but it's feasible. If you bring them in, though, they will take over. It's as simple as that.
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I think it has to be both. Once the population plummets, the logic and the allure to bring in outsiders are going to be significant and growing. Unless HBD is a widely disseminated concept, there is no good reason to keep them out. Even if the central government knows about this hazard, the locals are just going to circumvent the law. Do you think the third world problem in the U.S. rest solely on "greedy old fucks"? No, everyday I go to work, the Mexicans stand in front of Home Depot. Some individuals working on their home improvement project hire them. The general population are part of this problem and contributes to their own demise. I went back to China, even such an over populated country with still somewhat third world living standards, there are Africans walking around, living there now. Imagine what it would be like in a decade or two, when life in China is significantly better then it is now.
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True enough, true enough. Old fucks should mean rentists in general of which old fucks are an overwhelming majority. Most blacks I've seen in China are students or traders, not really contributing labor though. I don't see China importing them in any significant manner after the shit hits the fan in a demographic collapse. Mexicans are kinda productive, Africans surely not. China is lucky in that Southeast Asia has low fertility too, so it does have an easy source of cheap labor to fuck the country with.
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The general population are part of this problem Indeed. I need to vent my little anecdote: a couple of local Jehovah Witnesses pointed out the lead story in their tract, some treacly (and probably fake) story (among others) essentially about someone travelling from Ghana to France who had to suffer three days without cell phone service. Now the Jehovah's are about as conservative as one can expect, yet in the clamor to fill the pews, the Church (Catherdral?) is willing to import bodies of a dubious nature. Now, my area is full of cartoonishly bad immigrants, who, if they are not outright killing people, are selling drugs, running insurance scams, or the usual welfare/disability fraud. I mentioned these to the local White Jehovah's, and they agreed that immigration has been a disaster locally, but wouldn't make a larger connection to the country at large.
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Good stuff from Span but good rejoinders I think from John re Canada. Most people live within 100 mi of the border but there is shedloads of space up there compared to Japan. Nor does it all at once become unbearable or something to live 135 mi N of the border. Noram is just not very crowded in general, ain't no Holland. I have rode the bus more than 10,000 miles across her, ain't crowded. I have heard it's de facto illegal to start a new small town, or just not really possible, so that helps keep housing rents up. Granted, in the SW there is arguably not enough water.
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Also as per Sailer dirt theory, there is also no place to expand the great metropoli that are maritime or poised on great rivers.
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> Not really. Birth rates in Muslim countries such as Iran are plummeting right along. It is not at all a question of low vs. high status. Turkey, Iran yes, Kurds not so much, Pak still high at 4.0 not sure of dy/dx. NorAf, not so sure.
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Saudi, high but with plummeting dy/dx as you say. India same.
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> China is lucky in that Southeast Asia has low fertility too, so it does have an easy source of cheap labor to fuck the country with. Yeah but look how South Korea has fucked itself up. Sad to read Peter Frost's posts on that. China has the advantage of being less in thrall to Washington.
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> I am curious what a rigorous analysis of food security minus blue water shipping for a year shows for various nations. I suspect Britain would be particularly fucked among first world nations, which makes their immigration enthusiasm even sillier. If you are interested in historical examples, either 200 K or I think 500,000 Krauts perished in the blockade in the first war. Strikes me as likely a major factor in the victory over the Central Powers. Guernica and Madrid were not the first late-modern resorts to mass anti-civvie warfare. In the long run of course you need other stuff too. Germany was iron-poor though they could get some from Franco in WWII. They were oil-poor. They and their Western conquests were as a unit pretty undersupplied with coal, much of which had been traditionally imported from Britain. Cochran was recently noting how the US economy of the time was not only vastly larger, but almost totally self-sufficient in raw materials. There wasn't even enough food to keep the miners strapping, hence at least in part the atrocity of killing the captured Slavs and starving Leningrad by blockade in order to take the net savings in food. According to Tooze's Wages of Destruction, total iron/steel production in the empire took a steep and progressive hit from mid '43 or so. The whole thing has something of the sorry-ass aspect of the later Confederate economy/ war machine, where people injected morphine with thorns IIRC.
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One thing America has going for it, no matter how bad the polls fuck up, is immense natural resources. As long as you keep those resources in country there really is no reason for Americans to go without the basics.
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"There’s a short-term overhang problem where the elderly population becomes a very large percentage of the total population but that is by definition temporary." If the fertility rates are lower than replacement, how is that temporary? "is that you can extrapolate a straight line to extinction which is nonsense." yep, it's a spiral that grows onto you.
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"Replacement" means "keeping the status quo" in economic terms... It doesn't *literally* mean the survival of the people. Even if your population goes down from one billion to a few thousands, you still have a country and a society. I'm sure you'll find someone who can be a doctor, someone to clean the streets, etc. The only real problem is that old people cost money (in terms of pensions and healthcare), so you need young workers (i.e. tax cows) to keep the old farts alive, as well as being consumers and buying all kinds of useless crap (which the old farts won't do) to keep the big corporations profiting. This is the big headache. However, as soon as the old farts die off (which they will do eventually), suddenly the government has a lot more budget at its disposal, and the population is suddenly young, and all is fine and dandy again. The question is, what to do while we wait for the old farts to die. There are probably dozens of creative ways to go through that uneasy phase, without resorting to mass immigration.
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Which is why I've been arguing that pension systems and public healthcare for people above 75 shouldn't exist. We would have 0 financial problems if not for the overabundance of old people.
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Well, in those Confucian filial piety socities people would be more than willing to pay the cost of living and healthcare of their parents out of pocket? Implying they themselves would live in even smaller apartments and their fertility rates would drop further. I think most people would pay that for their parents here, too. Heck, I am doing it anyway despite that my mother is receiving pension. But some extra is nice.
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Yes, many marriages are destroyed or never happen because of apprehension of the filial duties they can foresee arising later on.
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I don't think that today's young people ever give a thought to filial duties. Especially when Social Security assumes the cost of maintaining alive old people. There are 500,000 Third World care servants in Germany alone, living with dying old people, paid by the generous German State. Do you know anyone saying: "I'll not marry you because of your sick parents?"
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[…] great man is dead. I had my issues with the man, and I believe that history will not be kind to him. His great work in Singapore will soon be […]
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[…] term itself was coined by the blogger Spandrell in this post from a couple of years back. Nick Land discussed it also, last year, […]
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[…] plodnosti. Da li u svetu u kojem je ekonomska moć glavna arena nadmetanja zemlje koje „kasape IQ“ svojih populacija (kroz dugo školovanje, valorizaciju rada nad […]
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[…] But hey, don’t let me discourage you. Because I’m also the guy with the best theory about what the alt-right is about, why it happened, why it’s getting bigger, and why it isn’t going anywhere. Unless the solution we don’t want happens. Or the dysgenic trends just keep going on forever. […]
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Nick Land gave this post a plug in the Jacobite, and since I was busy and got scooped on the German TFR numbers, I'll make up here. The cynical position is that Mr. Lee probably knew well that there would always be more than enough smart Chinese and Indians to immigrate into his city. The key factor is that Singapore is small and cannot grow much larger than it is in population. Back-of-the-envelope calculation goes like this: Singapore's resident population is 4 million. Assuming a straight population pyramid typical for highly developed nations and average lifetime of 80 years, Singapore needs 50,000 people each year to keep afloat. The crude birth rate in China now stands at 12,4/1000/yr and in India at 19,6/1000/yr (IndexMundi). The total population of these two countries is over 2,5 billion. Taking the lower Chinese figure for India to compensate for the difference in national average IQs, and assuming that Singapore's "quality controls" only allow IQ 125 and higher, that's a million potential immigrants each year. Even if we assume that nobody ever reproduces in Singapore, which is a stretch, it would need just 5% of that number. So Singapore's strategy is in fact quite sustainable. If selection in the mainland countries is not exceedingly weak, this small dysgenic drain does not matter much.
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Mr. Lee was personally quite dismayed by it; if only because his only daughter is the perfect, most acute and in-your-face example of the effects of techno-commercialism to a country's womenfolk. Take a look at Lee Weiling. But of course he could do anything about it because he was a technocrat; I guess he run the numbers you did and concluded that it didn't matter that much long term. Of course the problem isn't the one city of Singapore. The problem is that all similar cities have the exact same problem; and once you run the numbers with 500 million people instead of 5, the problem starts to get serious. And most importantly, it's getting worse. At any rate this post was about the completely disingenuous claim that Japan could plausibly learn anything from Singapore.
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Indeed, I remember him discussing this problem in the second volume of his memoirs. However, his own experience proved that he could do nothing about the dysgenics, or "the effects of techno-commercialism to a country’s womenfolk" as you put it. He tried, but maybe he didn't try very hard because
run the numbers you did and concluded that it didn’t matter that much long term.
We don't know. If he had actually made these simple calculations, then his advice to Japan about immigration was indeed very disingenuous, but ultimately he was looking out for Singapore, not Japan. I did say the above was the cynical explanation. A lot of policies work for Singapore only because it's Singapore and are unsuitable for a "real" nation. For instance, its position as banker (in the broad sense) for the surrounding SEA countries. Though if you think forward several decades to a Brazilified North America and Europe, a small white country might be able to occupy a similar position relative to white minorities that Singapore occupies (or used to occupy) for the Chinese minorities in SEA. Not that I believe it's a future worth aspiring to, just pointing out possiblities.
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About time somebody started a Singapore in the Caribbean. Maybe when USG collapses we can get some marauding Marines looking for blood.
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[…] First there’s this article by Nick Land on Jacobite, where he quotes my coinage of Singapore Singapore as an IQ Shredder, and notes how we don’t yet have a fix to perhaps the biggest problem we […]
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[…] is a problem of cities becoming IQ Shredders for both the middle and upper classes. In Singapore which is a high IQ, high density city state […]
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[…] is also the problem of cities becoming IQ Shredders for both the middle and upper classes. In Singapore which is a high IQ, high density City State, […]
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[…] super small units can lead to the problem of problem of cities becoming IQ Shredders for both the middle and upper classes, these statistics prove that you can have a wealthy society […]
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[…] is also the problem of cities becoming IQ Shredders for both the middle and upper classes. In Singapore which is a high IQ, high density City State, […]
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[…] super small units can lead to the problem of cities becoming IQ Shredders for both the middle and upper classes, these statistics prove that you can have a wealthy society […]
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[…] super small units can lead to the problem of cities becoming IQ Shredders for both the middle and upper classes, these statistics prove that you can have a wealthy society […]
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[…] their precious genes, wasting them into these massive IQ shredders which dominate the modern world. I called them IQ shredders as IQ is the most pressing concern (no IQ no electricity, folks), but it’s really shredding all […]
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[…] high-status to commit suicide. Oh the irony! Because what are status instincts good for if not survival and […]
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People are cognitive misers. I am not especially familiar with Singaporean history, but from my understanding, real estate development is a key part of the puzzle. Real estate and entertainment seem to be Lee's hammer in search of a nail even though he sees them as a Swiss Army knife. It seems new leadership with fresh ideas is needed.
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Hi Guy, I've kinda been in the wilderness, haven't supped on good intellectual writing ,such as this, off the internet in half a decade. Part of the reason was living in China, and having no time between working and bedding women, the other half is that I was under a lot of work pressure so gave up some good habits and took up some bad ones. However I want to say that Ive lived in India, the USA and China for over half a decade each and therefore would like to weigh in on a couple of things. My reading is more classical so I would prefer to use Nietzsche-an Ressentiment over "biological leninism' but I do believe there are two sides to both progressivism and conservativism. With your permission ID like to submit a more thought out mini post, because this excellent , historic post of yours demands further study.
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Actually I meant to comment on 'biological leninism'.
Well, the mature Japanese are very smart people and are choosing dining (I don't if fine, but they are not complaining) and virtualy everything else over children. How is it working for them?