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Does anyone have predictions on how this country will look when half of its citizens have a standard deviation lower IQ on average?
Let me rephrase this. Is there any way this won’t be a catastrophe which, in 500 years, people will look back on as a lesson in how nations fail? There’s no possible way that tens of millions of lower IQ people added to a nation is good for the nation, right?
This is why I hate empathy. I’ve got no problem letting them in to work and go back. Just don’t give them citizenship.
How many people would be interested in a $50 a day childcare, cleaning, cooking, etc when they have young kids and are working professionals. Put them in your garage or spare bedroom. They could save a ton of money to eventually go back to their home country.
But empathy gets in the way. Because if they are here in this country then they need housing, health care, education, and citizenship.
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The US depends much more on those with 3-4 or higher standard deviation higher IQ than it does having a mass of 100IQ people. The latter already just believe what smarter people come up with and work in jobs, entertain themselves, in ways said smarter people come up with. Whereas the latter ... physics, philosophy, finance, law, math, engineering, etc.
So if you're worried about tens of millions of lower IQ people added to the nation, why not worry about the hundreds of millions of similarly lower IQ people already here? There are still 15% of the population below a standard deviation anyway.
Would it, though? Let's say the new people are, on average, 94 IQ. Are the existing 100IQ voters really competently evaluating political philosophies and candidates, or are they mostly just led by politicians and media on either side? If 150M 95Iq people were airdropped into the US right now, or the next generation was significantly dumber ... it would suck, but society wouldn't collapse. You just can't have a 95IQ person write a compiler, no matter how much affirmative action wants it.
Or - a bunch of 94IQ people wouldn't destroy society, because the existing 94IQ people and existing 100IQ people don't. And both are, relative to having much more intelligent and smart and passionate etc people, worse for 'the nation' or 'the people' or anything.
It's the same issue as the race/IQ debate. You have people who are 130Iq on this site arguing that the US going from 100IQ to 95IQ is a CATASTROPHE. But what about the gap between 100 and 130? And for racism - ok, blacks are some number of points less. But - ">130IQ people" are 30 points higher than the average american. Isn't that a much more important bit?
Yeah, but the solution is for the 130IQ people to have more children, or do eugenics, in either case. The difference between 100 and 95 is swamped by 100 - 130.
this is not that stark. A lot of poorer people still vote R, esp if white. Also ... don't the democrats want higher taxes on the rich, and the republicans want lower taxes on the rich? I don't have a preference on the issue, but have never understood the 'take from the middle class' argument.
Can you name a specific way that'll happen?
The rich is an exponentially different category. If you take the upper 10%, the first 9.9% are PMC and business owners with very transparent income streams. When the government raises taxes on the rich, it targets these people first and foremost. Orthoxerox the FAANG programmer and orthoxerox the owner of a copy center chain both have to do something for a living, which makes them middle class.
Taxing the "idle rich" is much harder. They have enough money to pay other people to take care of their money. These well-paid and highly qualified people spend their days thinking about minimizing the tax burden of their customers, coming up with complex and tailor-made solutions. To counteract them, you would have to fill the IRS with equally well-paid and highly qualified people, and this just doesn't scale.
You hire one such guy for $500K, he spends a year targeting Mr Moneybags, spends another $500K on court fees and gets ten million back in taxes. That's a great rate of return, isn't it? Hire a hundred of them, and they will collect a billion tax dollars every year!
There's 130 million households in the US. The top 10.0% (or 13 000 000) can be forced to pay $10K more in taxes. Bam, 130 billion tax dollars earned.
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To be fair, if there were a country with an average IQ of 130, for them it would be a catastrophe to be reduced to an average of 100. It's possible that, for a fixed percentage of 130 IQ people a country might have (assuming it's a low percentage), having a population average of 100 is still going to get you a significantly better standard of living than a population average of 95, even if the gap between 100 and 130 is much larger.
I'm not arguing that intelligence doesn't matter, it does, I'm explicitly arguing that the difference that matters is the 130/160 vs 100, as opposed to native 100 vs migrant 95. It just sounds like a reductio ad absurdum
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Realistically, the US will fund future spending programs, no matter how large, through debt and not taxation. This has all sorts of negative externalities but none of them are what you're describing.
You want to see the worst case future of the US under a scenario of demographic semi-replacement(because no one expects the natives to pack up and move to australia like SA whites)? Argentina, not South Africa. Inflation is the killer, not tax burden or hostility driven outmigration(Hispanics think getting to live next to white people is the awesomest thing ever). And that's still bad, but talented and demographically majority Argentines aren't exactly excluded from in country opportunities the way SA whites or high caste Indians are. If anything, a scenario like that strongly encourages native talent to go to work in country in high-reward jobs because it strengthens the economy and raises tax revenues without having to raise rates(which the US is unlikely to do).
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What makes you think these migrants are a full standard deviation lower IQ? Particularly if you mean genetic potential IQ?
Also, the US hasn't even been a nation for 500 years. Indeed, few nations last that long. Making predictions about 500 years from now seems extremely overconfident.
We have studies on the IQ of native Americans, mestizos, indigenous Mexicans, and so on. By all accounts they are lower than the median iq in America. IQ isn’t everything, but successful countries all have high IQs and when countries become inundated with low iq citizens (South Africa) it makes pretty much everything worse off.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15688574/
https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/9/pdf
Your first study is of childhood IQ, which is known to be not nearly as heritable as adult IQ. It also cannot adjust for confounding factors such as malnutrition (which is generally not an issue in the First World, but Mexico is not that). Your second is Lynn, who I do not have great confidence in -- but also fails to show a full standard deviation.
Mexico is a fairly developed country which is poor and a failed state, but there’s not masses of people starving on the streets there.
These migrants come from Central America and Venezuela, and in border states are considered less assimilable than Mexicans and Caribbean Latinos. It’s not totally unreasonable to point to recent food shortages in Venezuela as depressing average IQ, but I believe Venezuelan and Honduran IQ’s were also quite a bit lower when they were ruled by US-backed dictatorships that consistently produced enough food for everyone.
Of course Hispanics also seem to interbreed with whites and be indistinguishable therefrom in a couple of generations, so YMMV.
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Here's an article from reason about exactly this, with a ton more studies and numbers (still reading). There's also the hispanic-white-iq-gap tag on human varieties.org , and - looking at the list of studies from the puerto rico article - the massive variation in result from study to study strongly suggests one can't take a random number from a random study at face value, but actually understand where they come from! (Gwern's now-deleted list of GWAS results on wikipedia felt similar, many entries with more than one study had very different results.) There are many well done studies that do have reliable, reproducible results, but that doesn't mean every or even most in some field are.
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Cheap labor might be a net benefit if welfare expectations weren't so high and if crime were more effectively dealt with, but yeah, as it is it seems to be a bad deal.
Edit: And the sociocultural problems, obviously. And the identity politics.
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