Numbers are not everything

The noted pundit Pat Buchanan, who is normally spot-on when it comes to things like international trade and the need to avoid attacking countries that don’t threaten you, recently said something very stupid: “How often in history do nations with shrinking populations invade and annex those with surging populations?” (see http://buchanan.org/blog/difference-make-6289 for the full article).

Answer: all the time!  How about this: during the Great Depression, the fertility rate of the United States fell as people were worried about having more children than they could support.  No such problems in Japan or China at that time.  So at the start of WWII the United States had an older and smaller population.  And beat the crud out of the Japanese once they got warmed up – even while spending most of their efforts fighting the Nazis – and highly populated China was so pathetically weak that it wasn’t even a factor.

Or consider ancient Rome, when low-fertility Romans routinely trounced high-fertility barbarians.

This is the sort of utter nonsense that happens when you don’t understand demographics.   With equal arms and resources per soldier, God is indeed on the side of the bigger battalions, but that’s not always the case.  Consider one modern Western soldier versus 1000 starving peasants.  The westerner is well armed, well supplied, well trained, and can move and attack whenever and wherever he chooses.  Even more important, the westerner has a chain of command, knows clearly where the enemy is and can fight and maneuver in a directed manner.  The 1,000 starving peasants, however, are malnourished and weak.  They have little if any equipment or training, and no strategic mobility.  In addition, the starving peasants have no coherent unity: unless you stir them up they spend whatever strength they have fighting each other, and more likely than not they don’t even know that the Western soldier exists.  It’s no contest.  1 vs 1,000, 1 vs 1,000,000, who cares? 

Why did a few tens of thousands of British soldiers have so little trouble conquering 100 million Indians?  Why did a handful of Westerners have so little trouble subduing the hundreds of millions of people in 19^th century China?  The weakness of societies with large and impoverished populations relative to countries with smaller and richer populations is not an ivory tower fantasy, it is how the real world works.

As always we need to avoid the extremes.  It is indeed possible for a society to have so few people that it can’t defend itself.  You need a few tens of millions to maintain the diversity of talents and economies of scale that a modern industrial state requires (although very small countries can do this via trade, or incorporation into larger unions), and you need enough “boots on the ground” to maintain your claim to the land.  Hypothetically, if the population of modern Japan were only one million, it would be almost impossible for the Japanese to avoid being colonized by refugees from the rest of Asia. But today these issues are almost nowhere a factor, and rapid increases in the population result not in strength, but in poverty, weakness, corruption, and collapse.

For a low-fertility rate country to confront third-world societies by trying to outbreed them would be like committing suicide to avoid being murdered.  Developed countries only need to leave third-world countries to themselves.

Indeed, without access to the resources of countries with low fertility rates, third world countries wouldn’t even have the advantage of numbers!  It takes more than breeding to grow a population.  It takes resources.  Which in the long run societies with sustained high fertility rates cannot develop or maintain on their own.

Despite the overwhelming military superiority of low-fertility rate Western societies vs. the overpopulated third world, Western armies can still fall into a trap.  The West is immune to conventional military attack from third-world societies (although nuclear weapons are a potential equalizing wildcard: giving this technology away should be considered treason!).  But if the West tries to actually conquer a third-world country bad things can happen.  First of all: the West should not try and conquer third-world countries, there is no point!  Just leave them alone.  Secondly, you can no more conquer a third-world country with conventional military strategy than you can drain a swamp by stabbing it with a sword.  There is no head to cut off, there are no stable institutions to take over, and killing starving peasants one at a time if anything just makes them stronger, by limiting the surplus population and increasing per-capita resources. 

Western armies can successfully conquer third-world societies, but only with a nasty strategy that hasn’t been used in a while.  You simply use fear to drive the people into small enclaves with limited resources, allow nature to do the real killing for you, and replace them with your own settlers (read your Montesquieu; or consider the anti-Indian/Native American campaigns of the United States in the 19^th century).  I am not arguing for this – it’s ugly, immoral, and pointless – but that is how it’s done.

The bottom line: numbers are not everything.  Societies with surging population are not strong they are weak (well at least without an open frontier or colonies – that’s pretty much everywhere now).  High-fertility rate societies can only conquer societies with more stable populations if the elites in the low-fertility countries betray their societies by letting the third-worlders in as a source of cheap labor. 

THIS is the weakness of low-fertility societies: that the resultant high wages produce an irresistible temptation for the elites to open the borders and let all that wonderful profitable low-wage misery come on in…   THIS is what low-fertility societies need to guard against, NOT having too few children.

Perhaps the Russians are not having enough children – or it might be an appropriate response of the Russian people to their current circumstances.  We should let the Russian people be the arbiter of how many children they should have.  I note that, without exception, when the rich of a country use propaganda to force fertility rates higher, or import massive numbers of third-world refugees, the result is almost always disastrous. 

The only reason that the Russian people should have more children is if their circumstances improve and they feel hope for the future and see a clear path for earning a steady living and supporting a family.  If Putin wants more Russians, he should ensure that this is true – not give medals to women with seven children and declare that they need to do that to compete in a breeding war with the Chechens.

So yes, Mr. Buchanan, numbers are an important thing.  They are just not the only thing.  It’s funny how conservatives, who demonize inner city American blacks for having one or two children out of wedlock without a father present, and demand that people should wait until they have stable jobs before starting a family, nonetheless idolize societies where the norm is for everyone to have six kids starting at age 14 even when there is no hope of supporting them.  There is a logical disconnect here, humans.

    

First They Came for the Broccoli

First they came for the broccoli.  ‘Broccoli uses too much water to grow!’ they said.  ‘If we stopped eating broccoli, just think of how many more people we could feed!’

Well, I never cared all that much for broccoli, so I stopped eating broccoli.  The water saved was used to feed ever more people, however, and still water was in short supply.

Then they came for the beef and chicken.  ‘Beef and chicken are inefficient uses of food!  Think of how many more people we can jam into the world if we cut out the middleman – so to speak – and just ate beans and rice!’  Well I missed my beef and chicken, but I still ate well enough, so I said nothing.  The water and resources saved, however were soon gobbled up by ever more people.

Then they came for the wine and beer.  ‘Turning grain into alcohol is inefficient!  We must ban beer and wine for the working classes and only let them eat beans and rice!’  Well I was sad about that – I liked my beer and wine – but I did not see what I could do about it, and I still had enough beans and rice.

But still the population was forced ever upwards – after all, without constant population growth we might run out of workers and then who would work the farms and we would all starve? 

Then they came for my beans and rice.  ‘Why should you eat when so many others are hungry?’ they said.  ‘You are old and less efficient than all these younger workers – you should starve to make room for newer and more profitable workers!’

And then I objected.  “Why should I give up everything just so that the rich can jam in ever more people?  And why is it that these rich people who have constantly pushed for ever more people, and who have constantly demanded that those of us who work for a living should give up everything of value to us, why do they themselves make no sacrifice?  The rich advocates of ‘efficiency’ eat broccoli, and beef and chicken and beer and wine in abundant quantities.  Where is the fairness in this?”

But at this point the world had been turned into an overpopulated hellhole and nobody cared what I thought and I died hungry and miserable.  The end.

The moral of the story is: eat your broccoli. 

Conserving resources only so the rich can grow the number of people will not save the world, it will only make you poorer and the rich richer.  And when some wealthy hypocrite – or their hired media and neoliberal economist whores – demand that you make do with less and less, insist that their wealthy masters set the example and start ‘conserving’ first.

Yes, let’s see the oh-so-noble Kennedys and Obamas and Clintons and Kochs and Gores and Bloombergs practice what they preach for the rest of us and live on subsistence diets in tiny unheated apartments, let them give up their jet travel and air conditioning and wine and heated swimming pools and – yes – even their broccoli. Good luck with that.  ‘Conservation’ is, of course, only for little people.

When you hear the word ‘conservation’, think poverty.  When you hear the word ‘efficiency’, think slave-labor camp.  It’s still not too late to turn things around, humans, but you must stop passively letting the terms of the debate be dictated to you. You are fighting on the terms of your enemies' choosing: and that's always bad choice.

Immigration Maximizes Global Population Growth

The rich use two methods to increase population.  First, they encourage or compel people to have more children than they can support, because you need an oversupply of labor to drive wages down.  When this is not possible, the rich use immigration from other lands to cancel out the effects of low domestic fertility rates.  It is not true that migration only moves people around: migration maximizes total world population.  Consider the potential population growth of China from 1800 to 1975.  This one country had the potential to export 37 billion people without any decrease in its own population!  When people are persuaded or forced to have enormous numbers of children, the resulting exponential growth can and does fill every space available.  A world without borders is a world whose population will soon be set by places like Bangladesh and Haiti. 

There are many examples of societies with high fertility rates that, when they were prevented from exporting their surplus population, had a fall in the fertility rate.  America at the closing of the frontier, and Japan and Western Europe at the end of WWII come to mind.  This demonstrates that preventing people from emigrating from a country with a high fertility rate can often lower the rate of population growth in that country.  If not, then sooner or later natural forces will cull the population by itself.  By fair means or foul, limiting the emigration of people from societies with high fertility rates does indeed limit global population growth, and vice-versa.

The idea that migration does not grow net global population is not only false, it is usually irrelevant.  As far as a specific country is concerned, if immigration causes a net population increase, then the economic effect is exactly the same as if the fertility rate had been increased.  When large numbers of immigrants enter a country, the advocates of this forced population growth often (falsely) intone that migration does not increase total population, but only moves it around.  And of what relevance is this possibility to those crushed into poverty by a sudden increase in the number of people competing for jobs?  None at all.

The propagandists defending the importation of large numbers of foreigners to drive down wages often couch their arguments in terms of morality.  The idea is that the people living in a rich country have no right to deny refugees from poorer countries the ability to move in with them, even if it costs them their standard of living: we must sacrifice to help others poorer than ourselves.  However, almost without exception the advocates of this sacrifice have no intention of making any sacrifice themselves.  Indeed, they stand to make enormous profits.  The wealthy advocates of sacrifice would be deeply insulted if you suggested that they share in the sacrifice they so piously urge on others, but you won’t be able to make this suggestion because people like you are not allowed to talk back to their betters.  Note also the aggressiveness with which the rich defend their own walled estates and private country clubs from trespassers.   “There shall be open borders” is only for little people.  Any argument about having to accept large numbers of foreigners into a country made by such wealthy hypocrites must be rejected with prejudice.  Let the rich practice what they preach and we’ll discuss morality.  But not before.

Saying that you want to import foreign nationals in vast numbers in order to create widespread poverty so you can make a quick buck does not sound very attractive.  So the rich don’t say it.  Instead they claim they are ‘celebrating diversity’ or creating ‘multiculturalism’.  What rot.  Follow the money: it’s ALL about the numbers.  Therefore the rich will always try to avoid talking about the numbers, and to make the debate entirely about the nature of the foreigners themselves.  They will shift the debate away from how many foreign nationals a country should admit in the next year, to a discussion of the personal worth of citizens who happen to be immigrants vs. those who are native born.  This lets the rich make it personal, it helps them divide the population against itself, and lets them slander any opponent of forced population growth as a racist.  Don’t let them.  Instead of debating whether it is good or bad that the United States should be majority ethnic Latin American and Asian by 2040, you should be debating why the United States needs to increase its population to a half billion and beyond.  If someone tries to get you to admit that your opposition to forced population growth is not motivated by racism, it is suggested that you counter by asking if they are still beating their children, and that if they are going to ask sleazy questions, turnabout is fair play.

When the rich use immigration to maximize population growth, this requires an all-encompassing propaganda campaign to defuse the natural opposition of the people at the receiving end of all these surplus people.  This in turn requires convincing people that too-rapid population growth is not a problem (or at least intimidating people into remaining silent), and this affects the entire world in that it prevents an honest discussion of the issues and allows the oligarchies in other societies to increase the primary fertility rate without opposition.  This distortion and corruption of public debate about population growth may be the single most harmful aspect of using immigration to force population growth.  Because demographics is central to so many aspects of economics and environmental issues, the Orwellian elimination of its mention causes distortions of radical and far-ranging import.  Imagine if you were to eliminate any reference to the law of gravity from the fields of engineering and physics: the result would be almost incoherent.

The people living in a country have the perfect right to regulate how many people they let in, the same as a rich person has the right to restrict who may enter his or her house or country club or business.   It is sometimes said that a country needs to have an open-borders immigration policy in order to attract the best talent, but this is opposite to reality.  The immigration policy that gave the United States people like Einstein, Fermi and Szilard was a restrictive one, that used a high standard of living to attract the best and brightest from around the world, while limiting the total numbers to levels that did not drive down wages or increase crowding.  If you completely open the borders a country will eventually lose the ability to attract the best people: Einsteins never move to miserably poor countries, they move to rich countries.

A moderate and practical restrictionist immigration policy is anathema to the lovers of cheap labor.  In their view working people are cattle, and if the rich want to increase their profits by jamming in more cattle then the cattle should have no say in the matter.  How dare the average person have any input into how many people there shall be!  They must be racists.  Pass the champagne, dear, and make sure the guards close the gates after our invited guests have arrived.

In summary: yes, mass migration maximizes net global population growth.  When the rich take it upon themselves to move populations around, to replace a people with another people, to decide who gets to live where and how many, to cancel out the effects of low fertility rates in one place by importing the surplus from a place with a high fertility rate, then this is managing the human herd as surely as a farmer manages livestock.

If you do not want your descendants to live like cattle, you should object now while there is still time, humans.

Immigration, Prosperity and Race - Don’t Fight by the Rules of your Enemy

If the government forces you to share your house with 50 random Swedes, do you debate whether people of Swedish ancestry are genetically 0.02% better than people of Irish ancestry?  Or do you say: “Who says I have to put up with 50 more people jammed into my house anyway?!”

In America the rich are using an excessively high rate of immigration to force population growth, in order to increase competition for jobs, lower wages for the many, and increase profits for the few.  But this doesn’t sound good, so the rich change the debate to ‘diversity’ or ‘multiculturalism’ in order to hide the main issues, slander the opposition as racist, and play divide-and-conquer.  There is nothing wrong with discussing average differences between races, but in the present context it’s mostly a distraction.  

Most Americans only want the rate at which foreign nationals come to their country to be limited to a level that does not depress wages or increase crowding.  This is so reasonable that it can’t be argued against: so the rich change the subject to pitting Americans who immigrated from somewhere else against those who are native born, which is not the issue at all.  You should not allow yourselves to be baited into fighting the wrong battle.

It may well be that, if everything else is equal, a society that is ethnically homogenous will be more cohesive than one that is more ethnically diverse, but it’s clearly a minor effect.  There is no diamond so flawless that, with enough pressure, it will not eventually fracture along some fault.  There is no society so ethnically uniform that, crushed beneath the brute yoke of a thousand starving people competing for every job, it will not eventually fracture and tear itself apart.  On the other hand, even ethnically diverse societies, if they have a shared prosperity and language and culture, can usually do fine. 

Australia was founded by criminals: if you believe that criminality has a genetic basis, Australia should be in chaos.  But with a low fertility rate, the Australians have abundant resources and it is not for nothing called “The Lucky Country”.  On the other hand, even though ethnic Chinese may perhaps be on average somewhat more intelligent and hardworking than ethnic Europeans, with a culture that encouraged people to have enormous numbers of children as a source of cheap labor, for most of its history China was a cesspit of almost unimaginable poverty that periodically tore itself apart as criminal gangs challenged the central government for power.   And yes, in the years before the start of WWII, with the poverty created by the Japanese government’s policy of maximizing population growth, Japanese society was also on the verge of tearing itself apart: the Japanese only started WWII because they were desperate to acquire new resources before their country collapsed. 

Switzerland has three major language groups, and it is currently as peaceful and prosperous a nation as has ever existed.  If, however, the average Swiss fertility rate were to shoot up to six kids starting at age 14, before long Switzerland would be as miserably poor as Bangladesh, and I guarantee that the staid and boring Swiss would be tearing into each other with sadistic ferocity. 

Individual intelligence is important.  In the real world Forest Gump will never be a competent brain surgeon, and a society that pretends differently and allocates jobs according to race or nepotism is not headed in a good direction.  However, the average IQ of an entire society is little more than irrelevant.  Historically we see many societies where the average genetic IQ should be 101, but where excessively rapid population growth or other economic factors have resulted in crushing poverty and overall stagnation.  We also see many societies where the average genetic IQ should be 99, that have combined modest fertility rates with modestly regulated market economies, and have slowly built up significant per-capita wealth. 

Consider someone with an IQ of 101 naked and starving to death in the middle of a dirt field.  Now consider someone with an IQ of 99 who has $250,000 worth of advanced tools and abundant resources.  Who is most likely to prosper and create new wealth?  Small differences in average population IQ are nothing compared to societal factors, including but not limited to fertility rates, that allow the accumulation of a significant economic surplus, and encourage its re-investment in productive enterprises.

Every society has more than enough smart people to go around.  Most jobs don’t need a genius to be performed competently.  A handful of smart engineers can create computerized cash registers that allow millions of high school dropouts to make change faster and more accurately than Albert Einstein.  What matters is that individual people are allowed to rise to the extent that their talents permit, and that the most talented people have abundant tools and resources with which to work, and a stable and peaceful society in which to build.

You are reminded that there is no such thing as a ‘bad’ job.  When the labor market is tight, you don’t need to be a PhD astronaut brain surgeon to do well.  As Adam Smith pointed out, the economic value of a commodity has nothing to do with its intrinsic utility, only the relative balance of supply and demand.  That’s why truck drivers in Denmark make so much more money than software engineers in India.  And why ‘education’ is not the answer.

The problem with the black community in America today is not that blacks are genetically inferior than whites.  I mean, it is indeed possible that your average black will spot your average white an IQ point or two.  So what?  If there was a tight labor market, people with IQs of 90 would be making good money driving trucks, and people with IQs of 110 would be making slightly better money acting as dispatchers.  And everyone could go home and have a beer and play with their kids and grill steaks and who would have the energy to fight with each other?

Suppose that, in a tight labor market, truck drivers were disproportionately black and dispatchers were disproportionately non-black.  Is this due to racism or inherent differences between races?  The issue is not simple and could easily engender hard feelings.  But if both truck drivers and dispatchers are doing really well, surely the divisiveness could be minimized - and perhaps ultimately more of the sort of arcana that PhD sociology theses are concerned with than a matter of great public import.

Remember, a tight labor market does not just increase wages, it also tends to compress the wage gap between skill levels, because all workers are in short supply and thus all workers have strong leverage.

For a time in the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s, American blacks had unionized jobs, life was far from perfect but the trend was up.  A black man could support a family on an honest wage.  Then the blacks were all fired and replaced with Mexican immigrants – without the ability to support a family through honest work, black men became useless, and the black family structure broke up.  BUT YOU ARE NEXT.  Consider American inner city blacks like the canary in the coal mine.  When there are toxic gases, a canary bird will pass out before a miner does – but if nothing is done the miner dies next! 

There is no culture or race that can survive a condition when young men of average ability are consistently unable to get a job and support a family.  This is the core of all stable societies.  Blaming the collapse of the black American family structure on the blacks is like cutting a man's legs off with a chainsaw and then blaming his inability to walk on a lack of motivation.  It's disgusting.

When there is plenty to go around, people are mostly happy to live and let live.  But when the only way to avoid starving is to steal from someone else, sooner or later it does not end well.  This applies to all races and ethnicities.  But the rich like poverty – “competitive labor costs” – so they will often push for policies that create poverty, which is profitable in the short run, but corrosive to societal stability in the long run.  I respectfully submit that focusing only on the differences between ethnic groups has the potential to distract from more important issues.

The rich are using talk of race to play divide and conquer.  The real issue is class war.  The sooner you working-class humans realize this, the sooner you will have a chance of fighting back.