A reader pointed me to this from Charles Murray.
I’ve written a thought experiment for ongoing work. What happens if everyone with IQs below 110 disappears? Civilization collapses. If everyone with IQs of 110+ disappears except some engineers? Some deterioration here and there, but civilization continues.
There is a lot of cultural knowledge stored in the minds of farmers, construction workers, and others who work with things. There is also some cultural knowledge that is stored in the minds of the highly-educated elites. Murray suggests, perhaps correctly, that the cultural knowledge of the HEEs is in some sense less valuable than that of those who work with things. Why do HEEs take such a large share of income? Some possibilities.
1. The marginal revolution, which solved the diamonds-water paradox, solves this one.
2. The HEEs control the allocation of resources. For example, in a recent stimulus proposal,
Under the GOP plan, businesses could receive a second PPP loan, and schools and colleges would be granted more than $100 billion in aid, while $31 billion would go toward vaccine development and distribution.
These “needy” educational institutions are still throwing lots of money at “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” One local school district paid Ibrahim X. Kendi $20,000 to give a talk. Another advertised for an “anti-racism” consultant to be paid by big bucks. And to my knowledge, the elite colleges have not let go of a single administrator.
If we had only a profit-seeking sector, a lot of HEEs might not have such high-paying jobs.
Murray seems off base on this one, and I don’t think he really has any clue what it takes to keep the lights on in a modern civilization dependent on advanced technologies. Sure, we can go back to medieval-level civilization, but to most people that counts as “collapse”. Also, inconsistent with the disproportionate importance of a society’s “smart fraction” evidence in Garett Jones’ “Hive Mind”.
If there is a necessary or essential task which is 99% performed by <110IQ people, then most +110IQ can most likely learn how to do it reasonably quickly from practice and reference sources (even instructional videos left behind), and the market will reach equilibrium again pretty soon. If there are necessary tasks which are 99% performed by +110IQ people, then most <110IQ would have a very hard time picking them up.
Likely there are some +110IQ folks doing the former task, and they can probably train the +110IQ survivors how to do it too. There might be some <110IQ folks doing the latter task, but they are probably just under 110, and while perhaps they were just barely getting by in their field, but they will be +4SD geniuses compared to all the other people they would have to train to fill the gaps.
Let's say after each of these "IQ Reaper" events, you get 50 years to try to get a new generation up to speed enough to keep things going.
If you cut off the top of a normal distribution at some point S, with Z being the value from the Z table, then the mean of what's left is Z(^-1)(.5*Z(S)).
For IQ 110, S=0.67, Z(S) = 0.75 so the New Lower Mean = 95IQ, you took about a -0.3SD hit, but of course to the extent you depend on people at the top of the new distribution, their numbers are significantly diminished.
What if you lose the bottom? Then it's Z(^-1).5(1-Z(S)), and one gets +1.15SD or a new mean IQ of 117. Assuming you can get these people to reproduce (which we aren't doing right now) then now you've got lots and lots of people above your smart fraction threshold, and you've also got plenty of <110IQ people around to do those essential-to-civilization tasks too.
Sorry, but Murray is nuts here. Even he had to backtrack quickly.
First someone asked him what about engineers and scientists, and he had to admit that he would need IQ > 110 engineers, scientists, and doctors, either to continue moving society forward or even to keep things from breaking down. I’d probably throw in many successful business managers in there amongst other fields with productive smart people.
Then someone asked why IQ 110 instead of the more obvious IQ 100. And Murray basically said that you need IQ 100-110 because you need semi skilled workers that can act somewhat independently. Sure, but it does make one wonder whether anyone too far below that is of use at all. Seems to me we could have a thought experiment about cutting off everyone under 90 IQ versus everyone above 110 IQ, I’d rather ditch the lower than the upper.
Murray also thinks smart people couldn’t do manual labor, which seems nonsense. They could if they had to. And they could learn such tasks if they needed to. Maybe not “overnight”, but in any kind of non-magical situation they could manage. The whole point of IQ is you can pick up things quicker. Isn’t the whole Galt’s Gulch thing about how they could manage if they had to, but the moochers couldn’t manage without them.
He gives an example of a hospital, which he seems to think could operate without doctors or technology people, because of those brave nurses. I don’t know what hospital he’s been to. The last time I was in the hospital I needed to be diagnosed by a doctor (it was a difficult diagnosis and lots of specialists came in), I had receive a special high tech medicine develop by super high IQ people, and it was administered to me on a high tech machine developed by another high IQ person. No IQ above 110 and I’m dead, in fact most people go to the hospital for the services of the high IQ, which is the ultimate good being provided even if there are other people cleaning out toilets to filling in charts.
All the nurses did was hit some buttons when they were told and jab me for blood all hours of the day so that I couldn’t sleep and my arm turned black and blue (can they not coordinate a single blood drawing for multiple tests, what are they doing with those semi skilled IQs?)
Finally, don’t we have natural experiments here. Africa has a low rate of people with IQ > 110, how they doing? Didn’t they kill all the IQ > 110 in Cambodia or someplace? How did it work out?
How are countries with a high proportion of IQ > 110 doing? Is East Asia a bad place to live? Is Israel?
If you don’t like the way HEEs behave, there are better ways to voice that then this sort of nonsense. Let’s try to remember that loony leftism is mostly about one group of cognitive elite (the HEEs) robbing another group of the cognitive elite (productive smart people) with perhaps some semi skilled moderately above average IQ people getting robbed too.
110+ business managers are absolutely essential. How can one run e.g. logistics operations without intelligent people? Clausewitz’s dictum about friction in war also applies to production and business. Predictable and unpredictable problems crop up constantly and have to be dealt with, things thought out and arranged ahead of time to keep the workers productive rather than milling around waiting for something. That takes intelligence.
Sure, and moreover they did quite recently, say a century ago, before the education system became so permeable that it could suck up people of high ability from the very sticks of the sticks. They do tend to be bored out of their minds by manual labor, though.
asdf,
>—“Finally, don’t we have natural experiments here(?)”
Yes we do. The best is the settling of Australia with convicts who, you are always telling us, are sure to be of lower IQ than the general population. Within a surprisingly short time they had a very successful society of normal human intelligence there.
Evolutionarily beneficial traits spread very readily through interbreeding populations. Your own Social Darwinist, eugenicist position is a 180 degree reversal of a true understanding of Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution consists of two essential parts: 1) Reproduction with variation and 2) Selection for survival.
The mistake of Social Darwinists is to think that nature needs their help with selection because nature keeps getting it wrong. Being robust against extinction is genetic fitness in Darwinian terms. When species go extinct it is always because they lack the genetic variation to meet the survival needs of the species. Having the genetic variation to resist disease has always been one of the the most important, if not the most important, reasons genetic diversity is a good thing for any species. It is not possible to know ahead of time which genetic variations will prove crucial to future survival of the species. This is why agricultural monocultures are always fragile.
From a true Darwinian point of view it appears that man’s intelligence may have already exceeded its survival value. We now have enough nuclear weapons to easily destroy civilization as we know it. We now have the biological technology to combine the worst features of several pathogens into one superbug. And in a genuine collapse of civilization from either of those causes (or a different one) our system of routine vaccinations against the biggest killers in historically deadly infectious diseases would likely collapse leaving us about as vulnerable as Native Americans were to European diseases.
>—-“(A)t some point we will need to accept that the children of the dysgenic need to die before adulthood.”
That is an especially disgusting expression of your Social Darwinist eugenic views from a couple weeks ago in this comment section. It is a grotesque misunderstanding of Darwinian theory not to mention every type of moral theory.
“The best is the settling of Australia with convicts who, you are always telling us, are sure to be of lower IQ than the general population. ”
The number of convicts in Australia wasn’t all that high actually, despite the mythos of the matter. This can be easily gleaned from records. In addition, “convicts” means quite a different thing in that time and place. Irish separatists arrested for political crimes were some of the convicts sent to Australia. Along with variety of others that would far from match the gangbanger types of today. You can look up what % were convicts and why they were convicts, if facts mattered to you.
The rest of your response is rather strange. We could avoid nuclear war by being too dumb to industrialize. And that might make us more likely to “survive” at some impoverished standard of living until such time as some natural disaster or supernova causes our extinction. Certainly, primitive peoples won’t survive the death of the earth, whereas advanced peoples might have some chance. I suppose then we can start worrying about the eventual death of the universe or some such thing.
I propose instead that I happen to like the modern first world standard of living, even if it does come with a higher risk of nuclear catastrophe.
“The mistake of Social Darwinists is to think that nature needs their help with selection because nature keeps getting it wrong.”
My read of the eugenics movement is that they believed nature was right, but that the modern welfare state was subverting the will of nature by allowing people that would die off without assistance to reproduce. The elimination of the welfare state would be sufficient to achieve eugenic outcomes by returning things to nature.
asdf,
You can easily continue to enjoy a modern first world standard of living without trying to redesign public policy with the explicit goal of increasing the deaths of those other people’s children who you have decided don’t deserve to live.
It’s true that primitive peoples won’t survive “the death of the earth.” They will be much better equipped than we are to survive the death of civilization though.
Nature doesn’t have a “will” to subvert and humans are part of nature whether or not they have the intelligence to realize it.
“You can easily continue to enjoy a modern first world standard of living”
That’s pretty unclear. People in low IQ countries don’t have a first world standard of living, and what little they have seems dependent on spillover from high IQ countries. It doesn’t seem likely I would have a first world standard of living in a society or world with dramatically lower IQ.
“redesign public policy with the explicit goal of increasing the deaths of those other people’s children who you have decided don’t deserve to live.”
I would like to stop supporting them because people steal money from me by force without my consent.
“They will be much better equipped than we are to survive the death of civilization though.”
Yes, their lives will be miserable, brutish, and short…but they may “survive”.
>—-“I would like to stop supporting them because people steal money from me by force without my consent.”
This is a transparently fake libertarian pose.
You would love to see tax money used to subsidize more reproduction from those those whose racial genetics you judge deserving of it despite the fact that most high IQ taxpayers don’t want that.
“You would love to see tax money used to subsidize”
Currently nearly all tax revenue is provided by the eugenic classes. We’d have to go a very long way to get out of the penalized column and into the subsized column. I’m not entirely sure where you think subsidy would come from anyway. The dysgenic produce no surplus from which to subsidize.
Maybe you mean it in the progressive way that lowering the degree of progressive tax burden faced by those being robbed is a “subsidy”. “Slightly reduced rate of theft” is an awfully strange way of defining “subsidy”.
I don’t know what most high IQ taxpayers want. At an individual level they fight tooth and nail to reduce their tax burden as much as possible. At the PR level they mouth whatever is popular.
Just like everyone says how Downs Syndrome kids are equally important but most people abort. Stated vs revealed preferences and all.
I do think there is a contingent of high IQ people, let’s call then HEEs in line with the OP, that support higher taxes on OTHER high IQ people to pay for programs that benefit them, often directly (say, by paying their salary).
And, oddly enough, the HEEs that support such taxes tend to have a lot less kids than the high IQ that oppose them.
Darwin himself was kind of moralistic but modern evolutionary theory simply says that those who survive survive. What makes for survival depends on the circumstances. It can be smarts or it can be lack of smarts–brains require tremendous amounts of energy. It can be good eyes or lack of eyes. Cave dwelling creatures lose their eye function; it would involve spending energy for no return. In fact, “loss of function” is a not uncommon occurrence in the history of life. Some genetic diversity is good but you don’t want too much or the wrong kind (and it’s awful hard, a priori, to predict what is the right amount of the right kind).
Eugenics done honestly involves a moral judgment of what is good and what is bad. For ordinary people, there is “revealed preference”. Almost all potential Down Syndrome babies are now aborted. People who buy from sperm banks have definite preferences regarding the characteristics of their child’s father. It is definitely not just letting nature take it’s course. If we ever did, there would be no eyeglasses. No one would be shot full of vaccines. Cataracts would just blind people. And so on and so on.
Roger,
>—” People who buy from sperm banks have definite preferences regarding the characteristics of their child’s father.”
Sounds very much like people who don’t rely on sperm banks. So what?
>—” It is definitely not just letting nature take it’s course. If we ever did, there would be no eyeglasses. No one would be shot full of vaccines. Cataracts would just blind people. And so on and so on.”
Now you are just moving the goalposts. Calling every attempt to cure disease eugenics is simply inventing your own entirely different definition of the term.
>—“Almost all potential Down Syndrome babies are now aborted. ”
Regardless of your position on it, abortion is a much more complicated issue. I have a nephew with Down’s Syndrome and no one in the family wishes he had been aborted.
You can call all forms of birth control and abortion eugenics if you like. But don’t you think there ought to be a big bright line between supporting birth control or abortion as options for the mother and deliberately designing policy with the GOAL of causing more deaths of those OTHER people’s children that you decide are “dysgenic”?
“deliberately designing policy with the GOAL of causing more deaths of those OTHER people’s children that you decide”
If you think not providing people with welfare they didn’t earn themselves is designing a policy with the goal of causing more deaths, then basically everything is eugenics. Anytime you don’t spend infinite resources to save someone from themselves you are practicing eugenics.
asdf,
You are forgetting that you have already admitted that those deaths are a desired outcome and positive goal for you, not some regrettable but unavoidable side effect of reduced support. For you they “need to die.” It was you who wrote this:
>—-“(A)t some point we will need to accept that the children of the dysgenic need to die before adulthood.”
For you, these children’s deaths are a feature, not a bug, of the policy. It’s a bit late to be claiming otherwise after you wrote that.
Yes, I think there should be a bright line against coercive eugenics–or the ultimate coercion, killing someone. But my reason is that coercion of that sort is bad, not that “eugenics” is bad. Anything that tries to increase the odds of good offspring is “eugenics”. All the Ashkenazim who have their genomes sequenced so they don’t have kids with Tay-Sachs are practicing eugenics.
(Though I realize there are grey areas. Would it be coercive to pay someone who is poor and dumb to get sterilized? How about someone who cannot care for him/herself, let alone a child. Would mandatory sterilization pass an ethics test there? What about conditioning “public assistance” on sterilization?)
I’m sorry I wasn’t clear about glasses, vaccinations, etc. I wasn’t talking about eugenics there, just trying to make the point that they–and many other things we do–are not letting nature take its course. Nevertheless, most of us think they are good things. I’d go further and say that most of what we do is not letting nature take its course (Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization is a wonderful look at how many unnatural things had to be done to get the cloth we take for granted today).
Your nephew’s parents made a hard choice. I’m glad that the family welcomes him, and hope that you all can take care of him.
I don’t regret that when people that can’t make it on their own don’t make it on their own. That isn’t the same as killing someone.
What’s the alternative Greg? That they continue to make it on the backs of others through the use of violence until those backs collapse under the ever growing weight?
>—-“I don’t regret that when people that can’t make it on their own don’t make it on their own. That isn’t the same as killing someone.”
Of course it is true that saying that children “need to die” isn’t the same as actually killing them.
Feeling a positive need for those deaths is not just the absence of regret. Your racial theories make these deaths a needed feature, not a bug.
>—“What’s the alternative Greg? That they continue to make it on the backs of others through the use of violence until those backs collapse under the ever growing weight?”
One thing never changes. You are always the victim.
“(A)t some point we will need to accept that the children of the dysgenic need to die before adulthood.”
This is obviously a ridiculous statement. No one supports this (except for asdf) and it’s counterproductive overall.
That said, many of the males at the lower will end up permanently unemployed and unemployable, part of the revolving door of the criminal justice system or murdered.
“Feeling a positive need for those deaths is not just the absence of regret.”
I believe that at absence of an ability to provide for your own survival without using violence against others makes someone a drag on society, and that it’s a mathematical fact that society can only afford so many drags before it’s dragged down. This is literally what is said in The Bell Curve.
If people simply denied these individuals the ability to use violence against others (including through the government) I believe their population level would settle at some manageable equilibrium on its own, in part through the premature deaths and lack of surviving fertility of many of them.
I do in fact not feel a great deal of empathy for people that use violence to extort me, and even less empathy when they try to justify it in ridiculous ways (as say blacks do when blaming whites for their inadequacies).
Murray also thinks smart people couldn’t do manual labor, which seems nonsense. They could if they had to.
No doubt they could. But I’ll bet they would raise hell and make life miserable for the rest of society.
The optimistic take is that since there would be a shortage of people wanting to do manual labor, there would be a corresponding increase in prestige (non-pecuniary utility) to get them to do it.
Maybe some of both.
Smart people pay money to pick apples, or to run a hobby farm, etc. My Dad always preferred “real work” to office work. Its primarily the low pay and physical degradation that turn people off to such endeavors, but if you solve those problems I think lots of smart people would prefer it over office nonsense.
I agree with Arnold every time he makes the for-profit/ non-profit argument. I also agree with the other commenters on Murray being wrong. I worked in manufacturing and warehousing for 10 plus years. 4 plus years at a major food manufacturer on the floor in production. This was not a rote task job. It was at least semi-skilled if not skilled labor. The company claimed to produce 30 percent of the worlds popcorn. Very few people had IQs below 100. Those people couldn’t even get in the door or were weeded out quickly. They fired on average 3 or 4 full time people every two months, and this doesn’t include the temp to hire people who were cycled through at greater rates. My boss claimed to have an IQ above 130 from childhood testing. I believed him too. He was a sharp guy, but probably only read 2 books in his whole life. The most productive blue collar workers have high IQs. The most productive farmers probably have high IQs. These people just don’t have the credentials of HEEs.
Right. If Murray had restricted himself to credentials, he could have said if we lost every single PhD in grievance studies, some amount of civilizational collapse would actually be reversed.
How would we get by without plumbers, electricians, mechanics and farmers? Does he really believe they are in the <110 IQ group?
What’s there to live for?
Who needs the peace corps?
Think I’ll just DROP OUT
I’ll go to Frisco
Buy a wig & sleep
On Owsley’s floor
Walked past the wig store
Danced at the Fillmore
I’m completely stoned
I’m hippy & I’m trippy
I’m a gypsy on my own
I’ll stay a week & get the crabs &
Take a bus back home
I’m really just a phony
But forgive me
‘Cause I’m stoned
Every town must have a place
Where phony hippies meet
Psychedelic dungeons
Popping up on every street
GO TO SAN FRANCISCO . . .
How I love ya, How I love ya
How I love ya, How I love ya Frisco!
How I love ya, How I love ya
How I love ya, How I love ya
[spoken] Oh, my hair is getting good in the back!
Every town must have a place
Where phony hippies meet
Psychedelic dungeons
Popping up on every street
GO TO SAN FRANCISCO . . .
Hotcha!
[spoken] First I’ll buy some beads
And then perhaps a leather band
To go around my head
Some feathers and bells
And a book of Indian lore
I will ask the Chamber Of Commerce
How to get to Haight Street
And smoke an awful lot of dope
I will wander around barefoot
I will have a psychedelic gleam in my eye at all times
I will love everyone
I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street
I will sleep . . .
I will, I will go to a house
That’s, that’s what I will do
I will go to a house
Where there’s a rock & roll band
‘Cause the groups all live together
And I will join a rock & roll band
I will be their road manager
And I will stay there with them
And I will get the crabs
But I won’t care
Frank Zappa, from “We’re Only in it for the Money” (1968)
Murray is obviously, hillariously, embarrassing, understandingly wrong. He’s an academic. He’s a book author. He’s an op ed writer. The high IQ folks he deals with are academics, educrats, authors, pundits, and publishers. They could go poof and society would barely blink.
The high IQ folks in medicine, law, business (both in the C suites and popcorn floors) and tech services, we’d miss them. But keep them and drop the taste makers? Horror of horrors they’ll need to write their own hot takes. (Engineers out side of tech services like those keeping your lights on and your packages flowing are probably not needed to maintain society, just to move it forward. Source: I’m an engineer)
The “they won’t do manual labor” bit can be disposed of in the same way.
I think if anyone else would have made such a careless and baseless statement, Murray would have been able to think of a dozen good counterarguments and examples right away. So the question is why would he make such a statement himself.
Having paid attention for a long time to lots of people who live in the “crimethink cancellation” borderlands, my impression of a pattern is that a lot of these people live with a kind of subconscious desperation and perpetual urge to signal some kind of disaffiliation with the evil heresies they are accused of believing, and with those labeled groups of terrible hater morons heretics. So they tend to incautiously jump at these chances to surprise their critics and show they are actually aligned with the orthodoxy in some way associated with the basis of their unjust infamy.
This is not totally crazy. It is what noticeably happens all the time when a former heretic and blasphemer defects in a publicly conspicuous manner that is useful for the left and suddenly gets “strange new respect”.
It was the great Joe Sobran who first noticed this as a pattern even many decades ago and coined the term, though even more heterodox journalist Tom Bethell often gets the credit, for example, in Powerline’s “Strange New Respect Award”, though that is only the retrospective comparison version of the phenomenon, when a liberal says, “Donald Trump makes me miss George W Bush”, or “Buckley was a national treasure”.
(Actually it’s funny because the great awokening had led to a lot of SJW historical narrative revisionism, so even formerly leftist heroes now get a “Strange New Disrespect”, like Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, FDR, etc.)
But a defamed heretic who can’t help hoping and fishing for a little bit of social redemption and reputational rehabilitation by the grace of the leftist owners of the means of influence over status and elite opinion is suffering from “Strange New Respect Syndrome”, and it creates a tendency and urge for them to blurt uncharacteristically silly things by autonomous reflex before they are able to reflect on it.
This is also probably another manifestation of why the internet and especially Twitter are bad for us, because it makes saying things quick, without taking time to think things through or cool down emotionally, just too easy and tempting.
Well I certainly agree that this is yet another example of Twitter amplifying everyone’s dumbest ideas. A much better thought experiment would be to contemplate how much better it would be if Twitter disappeared.
The idea that Murray has subconsciously bent the knee to wokeness is just silly. No one has been more fearless for longer in wading into the most treacherous intellectual battlefields to take on conventional political correctness.
He has long been concerned with the growing cultural divide and disrespect between educated and uneducated, white collar and blue collar, urban and rural. This unfortunate tweet was just a ham handed expression of that long time theme for him.
Murray’s concern for the underclass has always been genuine. He doesn’t get credit for this from the left because it leads him to policy preferences that are the opposite of theirs and because many people cite his work to justify conclusions that are openly hostile to minorities and opposite from Murray’s own conclusions.
So then Murray supports a UBI while asdf cites his work in advocating no safety net at all because “the children of the dysgenic need to die.”
Meanwhile those on the right tend to see his expressions of a real desire to help the underclass as insincere and cowardly capitulations to the left. Which is preposterous because no one has shown more courage than him in stepping forward to take fire on these issues. He is long past not saying what he thinks because he is worried about anyone’s disapproval. In fact, he has made that his brand.
It’s a bit much to see people hiding behind anonymous comment section monikers questioning his intellectual courage.
Murray has made it clear that he doesn’t support UBI whenever it can’t be afforded, including in most of the third world (where most poor people live).
He’s come out against immigration in part because combined with the welfare state it means bankruptcy. When you won’t let third worlders immigrate, some of them will inevitably die due to poverty. He literally says that he wants to cut off low IQ immigration so we don’t end up like some dysfunctional Central American hellhole.
—
“Perhaps our central thought ahout immigration is that present policy assumes an indifference to the
individual characteristics of immigrants that no society can indefinitely maintain without danger.”
p.549 of the bell curve
—
Murray’s math on UBI is also bit dodgy (it involves seniors taking a big haircut to balance the funding) and he never addressed healthcare all that well (he proposes a catastrophic plan that he believes will only cost $3k, though that doesn’t seem in line with current costs, and the cost shares on such a plan would be too high for the poor).
The bottom line, and this relates directly to your quote, is that most welfare comes in the form of services the biggest of which is free medical care. If you are serious about tackling the issue of welfare reform in an non cosmetic way, it means in some way curtailing unlimited subsidies to the medical care of the poor. If you take away those subsidies, then some of the poor will die due to lack of medical care. This is an inevitability.
Murray has DIRECTLY said in the bell curve that poor single mothers should get less welfare to stop encouraging their fertility (Dealing with Demography on page 548-549).
—
“The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also dis-proportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended.”
—–
I take Murray to be a more serious thinker than you. I believe his empathy for the less genetically endowed is genuine, but that he is a lot more realistic about what can be done here. He understands that
1) charity comes from surplus
2) surplus will only be available so long as the productive exist in sufficient number relative to the unproductive
3) policies that provide unlimited subsidy to the birth and immigration of the unproductive inevitably destroy #2 and thus #1
Having empathy and not being a fool aren’t mutually exclusive, except for ideologues like you.
“It’s a bit much to see people hiding behind anonymous comment section monikers questioning his intellectual courage.”
Murray is independently wealthy and set for live. If he got cancelled tomorrow, his life goes on. I appreciate his bravery, but he’s not literally going to be unable to pay the bills like most people would if they got cancelled.
There are always going to be people with enough Fuck You Money to say what they want and know that they can. I think Slate Start Codex did a whole thing on how that doesn’t really prove anything about the state of censorship. It’s mostly about whether the vulnerable feel they can speak up.
Doesn’t most of the unskilled workforce work in the service sector? Large swaths of that sector are already unnecessary. Fine dining, movie theaters, the hospitality sector, etc. could disappear and it would be sad, but it would not make life unlivable. Even many service sector jobs that are more necessary could be readily automated with self-checkout kiosks and vending machines. I think there’s an uncomfortable opposite conclusion that Murray is missing: that a troublingly large sector of the low-skill population only has a job because people like interacting with human beings when they buy stuff.
As Askblogs posts go, yours is definitely one of the more ominous ones.
Meeting ID: 963 6602 3607 By phone, dial +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) or +1 929 205 6099 US (New York)
The hospitality sector was already under siege from Air BNB and Uber, well before the pandemic.
Restaurants in particular have been an uncredited national employment program for years.
It will take a number of years to re-employ all the persons who are and will be laid off. I think we will need a combination of entrepreneurs plus basic food-stamps type benefits to get through this.
please ignore the zoom address in my email above, Not sure how it got in there
In places with less cheap labor, like Japan, they just have some kind of interface to do that sort of stuff. You sit down, type your order into the computer, it comes to you via the conveyer belt. Why bother with having this human being come out and take your order? Seems like a waste and often an inconvenience.
Last I read, Japan has no minorities of any kind. This makes it a lot easier to wipe out hospitality jobs.
In Northern Europe, the immigrant minorities are kept in their suburbs. No one seems to worry if they are jobless. (this is my impression of France, Germany, and the Nordic countries.)
America has supported jobless minorities for 60 years, to varying degrees, and most consider the result to be wretched.
We need to get people into jobs.
Not sure IQ or credentials really mean a lot.According to the National Center for Education Statistics:
“Of the 1,956,000 bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2016–17, the greatest numbers of degrees were conferred in the fields of business (381,000), health professions and related programs (238,000), social sciences and history (159,000), psychology (117,000), biological and biomedical sciences (117,000), engineering (116,000), communication, journalism, and related programs (94,000), and visual and performing arts (91,000). At the master’s degree level, the greatest numbers of degrees were conferred in the fields of business (187,000), education (146,000), and health professions and related programs (119,000). At the doctor’s degree level, the greatest numbers of degrees were conferred in the fields of health professions and related programs (77,700), legal professions and studies (35,100), education (12,700), engineering (10,400), biological and biomedical sciences (8,100), psychology (6,700), and physical sciences and science technologies (6,000).”
Given that a nurse with an associates degree is largely fungible in the health care delivery setting with most nurses with advanced degrees (the exceptions being nurse practitioners and anesthesiologists) one could conclude that a fairly large share of the health profession HEEs have irrelevant status degrees and the world would get by fine without the HEEs.
Educational outcomes for students have bee determined to be negatively correlated with teachers advanced degrees, that is students achieve less when their teacher has a graduate degree. Similar results are no doubt likely in other fields. And the ability of most students to progress at their prior rates or better during shutdown calls into question the actual need for credentialed instructors at all. The USA wastes enormous amounts of money on education with nothing to show for it relative to other countries that out perform the USA while spending much less.
Indeed, despite having an average IQ of only 98, the USA has much higher levels of educational credentials than many countries with higher average IQs. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country
Whether HEE status correlates with anything positive should really be considered an open question.
I don’t buy it. The cultural knowledge we need to live in a free orderly and dynamics society is far more in the heads of lawyers than among bakers or engineers.
The problem we face is that the lawyer class is hell bent on replacing that knowledge with critical theory.
I think you underestimate the value of academics. Without academics, who would study wombat butts? Folks get upset about big inequality billionaires vs regular folk, but I’m much more annoyed that you can make $300,000 studying wombat butts and only $60K fixing potholes when 95% of taxpayers asked to allocate $360K would most certainly allocate the bulk of it to the pot holes. And at least the wombat butt lady is an actual scientist not someone exploring the impact of neoliberalism on gender expression and toxic masculinity in matriarchal societies of Eastern New Guinea.
I looked up the definition of Anti-intellectualism on wikipedia. And even though the article was clearly against anti-intellecutalism, I think it made me more anti-intellectual.
I just looked at the framework – they are going to spend more on broadband than testing to find out who has covid in a covid relief bill.
Only an elite could come up with something that stupid.
It has upset me for a long time that a tenured professor of art history can make $150,000 a year (plus health insurance and pension) for enjoyable work at his/her own pace with no supervision…..
but the person who drives a bus or picks up garbage or works in a nursing home is lucky to get $40,000 and even then is subject to arbitrary scheduling and usually constant supervision.
This awful contrast has nothing to do with productivity….the art history professor might ‘produce’ one obscure tome in ten years. The nursing home attendant provides aide and comfort every single day.
There is I think a social theory that explains it. I cannot put into a few words at this time.
I think that Charles Murray is on the edge of this theory, but he cannot put it into words either.
Maybe 1 or 2 do.
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/posting/tenured-professor-salary
Kling expresses anti-HEE sentiment. Would this crowd consider this sentiment populist? In my view, populism is defined by anti-HEE sentiment which makes Kling absolutely populist even if he doesn’t want to brand himself that way.
Also, I imagine this crowd respects those who pursue education and succeed doing something productive that benefits others. But many HEEs aren’t genuinely productive and are just good at capturing large amounts of government money.
I don’t think this statement is particularly defensible, but if it is defensible it would be because large amounts of high IQ work has been built into the structures of our power grids, roads, power plants etc.
I don’t think it is true that either case would function, dropping 40 or 60% of the population simply means there is far to much infrastructure for far to few people. Maintenance is simply to much of a cost and many of these systems aren’t set up to have half of them degrade without ruining the other half as well.
I so love how this blog seems to be Lyssenko as revised by the Red Guards.
“L’éclat des fusillades ajoute au paysage
une gaieté jusqu’alors inconnue
ce sont des ingénieurs des médecins qu’on exécute”
“The light of the shootings adds to the landscape
an heretofore unknown gaiety
these are engineers and physicians being executed”
Louis Aragon, french stalinist poet
The ultimate anti-HEE statement
If you reduce the population by 20%, overnight, society collapses no matter what the makeup of the 20%. 66 million people gone overnight. 30 million workers gone overnight.
Chain reaction collapse to follow.
While on the way to read this blog, I stopped by Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution.
He cited the job market paper of an economics PhD candidate. In the candidate’s resume was a summary of the research grants he had obtained over the last decade or so…..
020: Development Economics Challenge, UC Berkeley CEGA ($15,000); Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study, UC Berkeley Graduate Division ($4,000).
2019: J-PAL Governance Initiative, MIT ($49,872); Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study, UC Berkeley Graduate Division ($4,000); The Sacheti Family Fellowship, UC Berkeley ARE ($1,500); Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies Graduate Fellowship, UC Berkeley Law ($1,000).
2018: Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics, Harvard University Economics ($39,978); Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study, UC Berkeley Graduate Division ($4,000).
2017: Global Development Lab, USAID ($1,551,468); Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics, Harvard University Economics ($4,820).
2016: Research Grant Sponsored by Apple, BMW Group, Samsung SDI, Sony, and anonymous donors ($421,358).
2015: Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study, UC Berkeley Graduate Division ($122,456).
2012: Magis Alumni Award — Young alumni of the year, Xavier University.
2009: William C. Foster Award — Most outstanding graduate of 2009, Johns Hopkins SAIS.
2007: Schwartz International Development Fellowship, Johns Hopkins SAIS ($40,000).
There is a lot of money sloshing around for academic studies, of what I suspect are very questionable usefulness to anyone besides the grantees.
So, based on the comments here, I guess I’m one of the lone few to mostly agree with Murray.
Given an immediate shock as he describes, I’m going with practical learned skills over IQ every single time, particularly when it relates to the basics like food, clothing and shelter.
Also, and this is important, I don’t think that the average high IQ individual has the work ethic to make it happen. I watched my home get built brick-by-brick and the drudgery combined with nuance was incredible to watch. I would probably last 2 days max at this.
And, if there are any implications to this, I’m thinking that a much lower rate of reproduction at the lower end of the IQ distribution would significantly improve the wages and the social status of these folks.
I watched my home get built recently too. I admire a lot of what the people did, especially working in bad weather conditions.
But you know, most of what they did was use a tool and follow instructions. The tool was probably designed by a high IQ person. As was the manufacturing machine that made the tool, as was the computer program that designed the tool, as was the inventory system that sources its parts from all over the globe to produce the tool, as was the airplane that transported the to the store, etc.
Without the tool, what could this person do? They would be no more productive than a medieval peasant. In fact countries where there are no high IQ to make those things they aren’t any more productive.
Temperamentally I like the skilled tradesmen the most of anyone in the society, but I don’t pretend for a minute they could have built the kind of society we live in without the high IQ. The semi skilled are valuable because they can use the tools the high IQ make without overbearing levels of instruction and supervision, but they can’t make them, can’t maintain them, and often need to have some degree of oversight.
Discovering new techniques: difficult
Teaching and replicating new techniques: easy
In the short run, when forced to choose, I’m all about sustaining existing techniques vs. discovering new ones.
So, for my fantasy team, I’m drafting for immediate practical skills and work ethic over intelligence.
However, in the longer term, IQ will probably make a much more significant difference.
That’s what I took as Murray’s point, which doesn’t seem that controversial to me. But, I’m obviously in a minority.
I suspect that even basic maintenance of crucial systems couldn’t be done over an even relatively short timeframe without IQ > 110 people. Countries with low proportions of such people have a hard time maintaining such infrastructure, despite often having it provided for them like mana from heaven by outsiders.
When my home builder goes to use his power tool and the power doesn’t come through the outlet because the power plant has a malfunction or the electrical grids computer systems hit a bug, what is the guy going to do? When he gets sick and goes to the doctor but his antibiotic from India isn’t here because the planes that deliver it can’t be fixed what does he do?
Anyway, it just seems a little silly of a thought exercise. If he wanted to prove he didn’t think people with worthless PhDs were worth much, he could think of a better way to express it. I suspect that the high IQ engineer that designed the home builders power tools could probably figure out how to use those tools in a relatively short timeframe.
I frankly think HEEs were more successful and productive for society when they were under cultural and administrative constraints to support bourgeois values and promote the general good rather than firstly for self-expression and actualization. Literature, music, and art were greatest in periods like the late 19th and early 20th century when artists and creatives constantly felt under pressure to conform, yet worked to expand the limits of those constraints. In the mid to late 20th century when almost all constraints were revoked, what we got was academic music that is unlistenable, and poetry that almost no one reads, and literature that was either boring or obtuse, unless writing within a genre or for a broad audience. Letting journalists or artists believe they have the fate of the universe in their hands has been one of the worst cultural changes in history. And it also points out the weakness of the market system. Overly specialized and Aspergery nerds and creeps can earn nearly unlimited sums of money and popularity and direct their influence to areas in which they have neither expertise nor good sense. Driving out the steady, wise, and boring.
Sorry, Arnold. This is a terrible post, a TC’s type of post to entertain readers and evade the discussion of relevant issues. Your comparative advantage is not as an entertainer.
Rather than wasting time on adding to what some readers have commented, let me call your attention to two articles. The first one in the NYT (ask TC why he didn’t refer to it)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/magazine/covid-research-behavior-.html
which refers to some important work on behavioral sciences by Christina Bicchieri, Robert Cialdini, and others. Pay special attention to a new paper by Bicchieri and colleagues (and if you don’t know her previous work, take some time and review it).
The other article is about the vaccine (again ignored by both TC and AT) with the exciting title “We had the vaccine the whole time”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html
and attempts to explain why it was not ready by May.
I always argue that we know little but the serious problem is how often we ignore the little we know when making decisions. Misinformation, misperception, or both? Malice or stupidity?
Please don’t take this the wrong way but I find it is much more helpful to describe what an article is saying and why the reader should be interested than to give a url and say, “this is about important work; read it.” That means your comment will have more text and take up more space but you can gain some of that space back by using html hyperlinks that readers can click on rather than showing the url.
Thanks.
One way to look at Murray’s claim is to think about it in terms of risk analysis.
In the military (and I suppose in the engineering of very expensive, complex, and inherently dangerous objects like nuclear power plants, and software in general these days, upon which everything it dependent), one is supposed to try to do planning with a heavy focus on likely risks and to make your plan or build your system as “fail-safe” as possible.
Usually one breaks risks apart into those that are “most likely” (the typical failure modes in the field), and “most dangerous” which, while they are often highly unlikely, if they occur, would have catastrophic consequences.
One mistake people often make is that we are so used to “status quo assumption bias” – “things will stay similar to the way they are now, trends will continue at the expected pace, what is working and available to me now will remain working and available” – that it’s hard to realize all the things we are taking for granted.
The original motivation for the design of the internet is a good example: “Can we build a robust digital communications system that will adjust automatically and still work even if a bunch of the lines are cut or nodes get blown up?” It turns out a lot of IT systems will go down or get overloaded for all kind of reasons not related to physical damage, and so this design proved to be extremely useful for contexts outside nuclear-war-insurance.
In general, I suspect many of our economy’s and civilization’s “systems of systems” are built in ways that are extremely fragile if those status-quo assumptions were to suddenly prove very false.
To put it another way, no one would do many of the things we do, or the way we do them, if they had to secure it against the risk of that assumption not holding.
So, for example, where I work, the IT systems we use are essential and indispensable. If they go down, it is a “work stoppage”. And of course, the way the “social control” part of the system works, the end user or even low-level administrators are absolutely locked-out from even seeing certain states of the system, let alone adjust them, and everyone is utterly helpless and passive until a “higher tier” individual – 100% high-IQ and highly paid in my experience – can come in and use their demi-god-mode magic on the issue. And at some point even these people reach the end of their powers and authorities and one must get help from some Microsoft or Adobe or Hewlett Packard ultra-god-mode engineering team.
This system works ok most of the time, because we are at peace, few things are genuinely life-and-death urgent (at least for the functionary working the matter) and there is plenty of money to spend.
So the system is built with a lot of problems popping up for no comprehensible reason many times a year, all paid for under contract, and the delays and downtime being accepted and absorbed as tolerable costs of modern life. (Compare to Amazon’s system design philosophy, in which downtime is considered a catastrophe).
But where I work, the system is also absolutely dependent on infrastructure the maintenance of which is in turn absolutely dependent exclusively on +110IQ people. If they all disappeared suddenly, everything would crumble into dust in a few weeks – (a lot of analysis of mega-scale EMP attacks is not pretty at all) – and this is since we have abandoned all the social technologies and organizational capital that would serve as a contingency, and there is no warehouse full of mechanical typewriters held in reserve.
Indeed, those typewriters are now expensive antiques on ebay, and there was that funny story a while bad about some guy in Trinidad having to shell out for one to give to the government office so the bureaucrat could mechanically type out his license – another example of a tolerated work stoppage, though at a lower level of technology.
Now, looking at it this way, it seems to me that if the status quo assumption is “More than 10% of +110IQ people continue to exist” or “More than 10% of <110IQ people continue to exist", then the infrastructure holding up our whole modern lifestyle and apparatus is *much* more fragile to the failure of the first assumption than the second.
Of course, like I said, no one would do things even close to the way we do them now if they had to build them to be robust to the failure of *either* of those assumptions.
A second-level question is, if you tried to build our systems of systems in such a robust manner to insure against those risks, *which risk would be easier to handle* by redesign? My hunch is that it would be much harder to design any system close to our present living standard and level of technology and robust to the loss of most of your +110IQ people. Again, you could always start by teaching smart people to learn how to do a lot of the <110IQ jobs now, and if <110IQ people disappeared, they would know already know what to do and be able to step in to fill the gaps.
But you can't teach people to perform past their potential, whether it's strength, height, or cognitive horsepower, and just like only certain people could ever be trained to life hundreds of pounds of weight, only certain people could even be trained to handle certain functions necessary to sustain a high level of civilization and technology.
Murray already conceded your point in his original scenario. The engineers are sticking around with the <110 crowd. Did you miss it?
“If everyone with IQs of 110+ disappears except some engineers?”
So what is the point of his thought exercise if its “people with IQ > 110 that I don’t like disappear”?
I mean, why not “people I don’t like at any level of IQ disappear”?
It’s just kind of dumb. Why even bring up some a ham fisted idea?
Murray should just say flat out he doesn’t think productive high IQ people should let unproductive high IQ people boss them around. Why are the people that make robots that run Amazon warehouses outsourcing their ethics, philosophy, and politics to lunatics?
The whole plot of Ayn Rands novels boils down to this doesn’t it. Why be a scab? What would it take for the productive to break free from the unproductive?
Of course her scenario is so far fetched to make it work that it kind of answers itself as to why people put up with it.
Because they have better things to do with their lives. It is a rational decision in the short term. To them, all these things you listed are a chore. But the principle that a people either feeds its own army or its enemies’ army holds here as well: if people do not spend of their life to do these chores themselves, they will have to spend of their (and their children’s) life on treadmills devised by someone else for someone else’s benefit, and, in the worst cases, spend much more than they would have had to otherwise. This observation also provides a rationale for restricting the scope of politics and simplifying/encapsulating/containerizing governance functions as much as possible.
Sure, we’ve talked about this at length.
Rand imagined basically superheroes with no ties to anyone or anything inventing flat out magical devices and running pirate raids in order to make her way of life come about (until all her childless supermen die off). It’s so ridiculous is just highlights the scale of the problem.
It would be more productive to try and figure out realistic ways of the mess we are in then try to convince smart people to have a lower opinion of themselves (some should, some shouldn’t, and it depends on the context for each person).
My own view is that having a large unproductive dependent class genetically incapable of self sufficiency is a ready army to be used by Randian villains against Randian heroes, and so I don’t consider subsidizing the increased supply of such people as some primary moral good that must be pursued at all cost.
“Murray should just say flat out he doesn’t think productive high IQ people should let unproductive high IQ people boss them around.”
+1 but, in actuality they readily embrace getting bossed around (with only a few exceptions).
Likewise, high productive individuals with average or lower than average IQs shouldn’t let the non-productive high IQ crowd dictate anything whatsoever either.
Rand got it mostly correct – it’s about productive vs. non-productive regardless of IQ.
An experiment in getting rid of pesky HEE
Enemies of the people were the educated elite, targeted by the Soviet authorities for they posed a threat to the propaganda-dependent regime. Along with millions of other non-political criminals, they were sent to forced labor camps scattered across the Soviet Union, the Gulag.
https://twitter.com/pl_vezina/status/1337436848847720450
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Since enemies were the educated elite, and accounted for about 30% of the prisoners, the Gulag had a more educated population than the rest of the USSR. And camps with more enemies were the most educated.
And these education levels persisted across generations. The grandchildren of enemies are more likely than others to have a tertiary educated today, and so were their parents.
And this education persistence translates into better local development outcomes in the long run. Firms near camps which had a higher share of enemies pay higher wages today, and make more profits per employee.
This is also reflected in brighter night lights per capita, a proxy for local development captured by satellite pictures.
Our paper can be seen as a natural experiment that identifies the long-run persistence of higher education and its effect on long-run prosperity. Sadly, it also highlights how atrocious acts by mad individuals
can shape the development path of localities over many generations.
Thanks for referring to an interesting and important research paper.