Dysgenics by the Numbers. By George Francis.
We are Homo Sapiens – ‘thinking men’. It is ironic that our species, which is defined by our big brains, is evolving to become stupid. Countless articles of scientific research have found the less intelligent to be having more surviving offspring and breeding faster than the intelligent. The problem was noticed by Darwin and his contemporaries, yet it has mostly been ignored throughout the 20th century. …
A major issue is that we really don’t know the magnitude of the problem. …
There are three parts to estimating future global IQ. The first is estimating the future population of each country and its current IQ. The second part is estimating the rate of dysgenics within countries. The third part is estimating the Flynn Effect within countries, but that appears to be stopping and it is not clear that Flynn Effects are anything more than a sort of ‘IQ inflation’ where our measurements increase but intelligence does not. … So then we add these parts together, but I’m going to ignore the Flynn Effect.
Another note on ignoring the Flynn Effect — national IQ so far correlates 0.9 with genetic estimates of intelligence (polygenic scores), making it perfectly reasonable to think of national IQs as a very strong proxy for ‘real’ genetic differences in intelligence. Yes, there are confounding problems in comparing polygenic scores across racial groups, but r = 0.9 cannot be easily explained by alternative hypotheses. …
The Industrial Revolution kicked off the fertility transition. Countries that became rich were able to prevent starvation and improve health so the number of surviving children skyrocketed. Then with the advent of contraception, abortion and enjoyable alternatives to raising children, fertility plummeted. Many of the poorer, less intelligent countries started this process later meaning that as the natives of smart countries shrink in their population, the low IQ countries are still rapidly expanding …
[This] implies that the centre of population mass is going to move to the developing world, substantially reducing per capita welfare.
My favourite estimate of the rate of dysgenics comes from Woodley’s calculation in At Our Wits’ End. He takes the Icelandic estimate for the rate of dysgenics on the educational attainment (years in education) polygenic score, adjusts it for the higher heritability of intelligence (about 80% heritable) and estimates a 0.8 IQ point decline per decade. That’s a lot. My guess is that this is an overestimate. Education attainment correlates negatively with fertility because it captures both the effect of intelligence and the effect of education, creating an overestimate. On the other hand, years in education is less heritable than IQ, causing the unaltered Icelandic estimate of about 0.3 IQ points to be an underestimate.
This is tricky, so let’s be cautious, split the difference and round up. IQ is falling by 0.6 points a decade. …
We have UN estimates of predicted population by country till 2100 (assuming 0 migration) and we have assumed a 0.6 within-country IQ point decline per decade. We take our starting national IQs from David Becker’s IQ dataset normed at 1991 and apply dysgenics forwards and backwards.
In 1950 the average genotypic IQ was around 93.6. If you are not a high school graduate you need an IQ of 93 to join the US military. In 1950 something like half of the world’s population was too dumb to be in a professional army.
Currently, the global average IQ is around 85 and by the end of the century, it will be 74. Then only an elite fraction would be capable of even being part of a professional army. …
Economically, dsygenics is a fair bigger problem than climate change, even if the climate models were correct:
Let’s imagine the world is one country with an average IQ of 74 in 2100 and an average IQ of 85 as of 2020. … In Francis and Kirkegaard (forthcoming) we estimate that each national IQ point is associated with a 7.8% increase in GDP per capita. … The effect of this dysgenic decline will be to cut GDP in half! And of course, that doesn’t even begin to consider the intangible factors GDP doesn’t necessarily include — low crime, social trust, science, culture and the arts. …
Climate change is currently predicted to cost us a whopping 4% of world GDP by 2050. My numbers imply dysgenics will cost us 30% of GDP by 2050. We should be willing to spend huge amounts of money to solve this problem. Dysgenics is truly an ‘unknown unknown’ that we are too afraid to even talk about.
Declining intelligence is a big problem, which will cost us half of the economy annually.
The narrative people completely deny this and strictly forbid any conversation on the topic. Follow their science, they say.
The movie Idiocracy fell afoul of the narrative, back when it was made in 2006:
“Idiocracy” couldn’t be more undercover if it were wearing a burka: a film released without an ad campaign, without movie trailers, without media screenings. …
Why has Fox deep-sixed this film? A Fox spokesman tells me that “Idiocracy” was “a limited release, that’s it, nothing to really talk about.”
The narrative people instructed their followers not to watch it, even more strongly as woke revved up — e.g. from 2014:
That movie is cruel and terrible and you should be ashamed for liking it. Seriously. …
What’s so wrong with this thinking? Unlike other films that satirize the media and the soul-crushing consequences of sensationalized entertainment (my personal favorite being 1951’s Ace in the Hole), Idiocracy lays the blame at the feet of an undeserved target (the poor) while implicitly advocating a terrible solution (eugenics). The movie’s underlying premise is a fundamentally dangerous and backwards way to understand the world.
The origin story for Idiocracy’s future world of half-wits is that uneducated people in the early 2000s are having kids and smart people don’t reproduce enough. It’s clear from the film that the intelligent people are wealthy, while the uneducated people are poor. So we’re starting from a position of believing that wealthy people are inherently more intelligent and, by extension, deserve their wealth. This link between intelligence and wealth is perhaps the most dangerous idea of the film and pretty quickly slips into advocating for some form of soft eugenics to build a better world. …
We’re frustrated by the world, believing that encouraging smarter people to breed would somehow fix our problems. But it simply isn’t so. It’s a distraction from the institutional problems of our society.
The problem isn’t that stupid people (again, read: poor) are having too many children. The problem is that we aren’t living up to the ideals and promises we’ve given to each generation of Americans that have come before us. A livable wage, paid maternity leave, proper funding of scientific research — these are the things a functional, civilized society are built upon; the ways that we can improve our world. We don’t build a better society by getting more smart people to fuck each other.
Don’t you love it when they deny the data in the name of ideology? Meanwhile, then sneer at the religious for putting faith over modern science. It’s only ok when they do it.
