The United Nations has released new population projects. Instead of peaking at 9 billion, as had been predicted, world population is now expected to exceed 10 billion in 2100.
Judge Richard A. Posner writes:
On May 3, the United Nations issued its 2010 Revision of World Population Projections, which, according to the media, predicts that the world’s population, expected to reach 7 billion by the end of this year, will be 10.1 billion by the end of the century. But the media reports have tended to be imprecise. The UN report offers three predictions—a high, medium, and low—depending on different assumptions. The high is almost 16 billion and the low 6.2 billion (which is actually lower than the current world population) ...
The fall in population in countries with birth rates below replacement levels is expected to level off, which seems plausible, but what mainly drives the 10.1 billion 16 billion predictions of total population at the end of the century is the assumption that birth rates will continue to be very high in the countries (mostly in Africa, Asia, and South America) that currently have high birth rates. ...
But suppose world population will reach 10.1 billion by the end of this century. Would that be a good or a bad thing? Arguably a good thing, on several grounds. ... Third, the more people there will be, the more high-IQ people there will be ...
Not necessarily.
Thumbing through the U.N.'s graphs is an eye-opening experience. For one thing, the U.N. puts their 2010 projections (in red) alongside their 2008 projections (in dashed blue), so it's interesting to see that, in some cases, not only is the future not what it used to be, but neither is the past. For example, Afghanistan recently found more people had been living in the country than had been realized for the last 20 years. (And I'm sure Afghanistan's 2010 numbers were collected with scrupulous accuracy.)
So, your actual mileage may vary.
Nonetheless, Judge Posner's optimism about "the more people there will be, the more high-IQ people there will be" seems a little overconfident. When I was a college sophomore, it was common to debate whether George Orwell or Aldous Huxley would turn out to be the more accurate prophet. Judging from these graphs, however, the prophet most respected by 2100's college sophomores may be Mike Judge. Of course, that assumes there will still be college sophomores debating Big Questions, or colleges.
For example, the population of Afghanistan is projected to rise from about 12 million in 1990, after the Recent Unpleasantness with the Soviet Union, to 111 million in 2100. Swell!
Afghanistan's national slogan will be modified to: "I against my brother, my brother and I against our 110,999,998 cousins."
Let's look at some other highlights from the U.N. population projections:
Guatemala: From 5 million in 1970 to 46 million in 2100. Do you think they'll stay there?
Japan: not plummeting in population quite as fast as thought!
Mexico: Now expect to peak around 145 million instead of 130 million, as was expected back during the American Housing Bubble. Perhaps there's a connection?
Here's the Big One: Nigeria is heading for about 390 million people in 2050 and 720 million in 2100. Fortunately, all those new Nigerian astronautical engineers that Judge Posner's logic foresees should have the human race well on its way to colonizing Alpha Centauri by then. If you don't believe me, I've got an email that proves it.
Noam Chomsky typically books his worldwide lecture tours two years in advance. Host organizations ask him: what should we put on our schedules as the tentative title off your talk? He always replies: well, I like to stay topical and talk about what's in the latest news, so you can put down "The Crisis in the Middle East." Looks like Professor Chomsky can book those 2100 A.D. lectures right now.
Yeah, yeah, I saw that Orson Welles movie, too. The Swiss have only given us cuckoo clocks and chocolate. That, and minding their own business.
Don't tell the neocons that Tanzania is expected to have well over 300 million people, or they'll start running worried conferences about the Emerging Threat in East Africa.
Due to rapid population growth, America will stay larger than Tanzania.
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
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121 comments:
Witch hunts only fly around sedentary groups where too many people are rubbing against a bunch of non-kin rivals.
Expect a lot more witchcraft panics in Nigeria -- 700 million, Jesus.
Even Tanzania or Afghanistan. They used to be mostly pastoralists, but they're starting to sedentarize as the farmer governments fence off land for crop cultivation. With greater density, they'll start accusing one another too.
It won't happen. The means by which it won't happen will be gruesome.
As for "the future ain't what it used to be," it's got to be a lot worse than the graphs suggest -- this is only a revision after 2 years.
They're projecting 90 years into the future, so they need to show us the projections from 50 or more years ago of where things would be now.
here's one chinese guy in california who's not taking any disability money!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bkwzkZWJBk
LOL! arrested by the FBI for...well, you have to read the story. where did he even come up with this idea?
i've never heard of such an outlandish scheme, so maybe, for once, diversity has, at minimum, brought teh lulz.
Related discussion at Population Reference Bureau. Will the Indian population reach 2 billion?
http://discuss.prb.org/content/interview/detail/1664/
"The means by which it won't happen will be gruesome."
It will be mass starvation. Foreign aid is by far the least popular type of public spending by the public in Western countries.
In an environment with drastically higher oil and food prices, it will be eliminated entirely, and the focus of private charity will shift toward the needy nearby.
ah, jewish judge richard posner to lecture us about the benefits of a crushing third world population of IQ 83 morons.
i've posted before about the population EXPLOSION in the third world, and how most people in the advanced nations are not really even paying attention to just how many third worlders there actually are, mainly because third worlders never do anything interesting and produce nothing of any value, so we never notice them unless they are killing each other or getting hit by a natural disaster. reality is the exact opposite of modern mainstream discourse in the US - 99% of third world cultures are intensely UNvibrant, boring places with banal garbage cultures where nothing changes for decades and decades. no new ideas come out of there almost ever. the only time things change in those places is when new technology or media from europeans arrives.
i don't agree with the people at stormfront on much, other than basic, moderate white nationalism, but they're totally accurate to describe the third world hordes as "muds". simply an endless wave of random, kind of ugly brown people eager to overwhelm the few european run nations of the world and turn them into more super boring non-vibrant slums where no new, exciting stuff ever gets developed.
I don't want more people on this planet, anywhere and no matter what their IQ.
Even if there's food for these people, I have trouble believing there's (eg) water in Afghanistan for 111 million.
Limitations on the supply of oil (and thus food) and water are likely to set Malthusian limits below these numbers, to say nothing of disease.
Of course in our 'global economy' that means a Malthusian global crisis, affecting even countries with declinining populations.
On IQ, there will still be smart people in 2100, though on these projections they will be a much smaller proportion of global population. Contra the judge, it's a Malthusian population crash that will increase the proportion of smart people, as their low-fertility, high-parental-investment reproductive strategy is better adapted to harsh times.
If countries/elites meet the following 2 criteria, there is no problem with large populations:
- Feed their own people and provide them jobs locally instead of bumming of richer nations and starting wars to alleviate their unemployment, or skimming the middle class so the proles can f. 24/7.
- Stop propagating and facilitating illegal and mass legal immigration/emigration and all the other schemes such as temporary workers and worker visas.
I looked into the UN's methodology a few years back. They assumed that the birthrates in every country, from low-fertility Japan to the rabbit-like Africans, would converge around the replacement rate. Garbage in, garbage out.
Totally off topic, but I hope your fascination with the Obama ancestry extends to the fact that not only is he, like every single President except Martin Van Buren, a descendant of King John of England (and among others William the Conqueror), but he's also (as was George Washington), via Halfdane The Old, a direct descendant of the Norse gods Odin (aka Woden) and Freya*.
How many people have two days of the week named after their relatives ?
(*assuming those Norse kings told the truth about their ancestry)
The U.N.'s projected numbers for Africa are a sad pipedream. Huge swathes of the continent are effectively 'wards of the international state,' dependant on the largesse of the West to survive. Massive yearly outside injections of food aid (and foreign vaccination teams roaming over the continent) are what has pushed Africa over the one-billion mark. No surprise as to who's doing the injecting:
The major food aid donors are the United States, European Union (EU), Japan, Canada, and Australia. In the late 1980s, the U.S. provided roughly 7 million tons of food aid per year, or nearly 60 percent of global food aid donations during the period. [In 2002, that had risen to 65%.] The EU share at that time was about 25 percent.
It won't keep up forever. I don't even want to contemplate the output of U.N. population curve-drawers in that not-so-distant future.
"Whew! I thought you said Million!"
Unless Kurzweil or myself are installed as dictator real soon, I probably won't be around to see 2100 (and I'm probably younger than 80% of your readers) and any kids I end up having are likely to be septagenarians - at best.
2100 is not an era I'm much concerned with and what small concern I have for it (unlike you, there's a small chance I'll actually be barely alive then) is reserved for things far more likely to wipe us all out than a Tanzanian takeover.
Don't get me wrong, I get the point of trying to influence people to make changes that will improve 2020 by showing them the trajectory but unless those people are more easilly fooled than myself, talk of 2100 won't do it.
Then again, hundreds of millions of religionless bored white people have found meaning in driving a Prius on behalf of 2100 so hey! it's worth a shot.
it was common to debate whether George Orwell or Aldous Huxley would turn out to be the more accurate prophet.
The Camp of the Saints belongs aside those two, but it is so prophetic, that no one wants to talk about it.
It won't happen because it can't happen. There's no space for 700 million people in Nigeria. Even if 10% migrate, there's still not enough space. Only time will tell how it will not happen.
"new Nigerian astronautical engineers that Judge Posner's logic foresees should have the human race well on its way to colonizing Alpha Centauri by then. If you don't believe me, I've got an email that proves it."
I didn't get that email, but I have seen the YOUTUBE version?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6xJzAYYrX8
All those africans have to go somewhere since most of the african continent cannot sustain life.
They will go th the west.
Looks like the fututre belongs to the blacks!
So long white people! So long racism! You will not be misssed!
Not to put too fine a point on it but the reason the dullard population will rise is because they aren't smart enough to create sophisticated weaponry or organize effective armies. These are prerequisites to the kind of mass slaughter necessary to thin the world population by billions. However, the fecund dullards are smart enough to use political power to vote themselves food and shelter once they elbow their way across the frontiers of welfare states like Europe or the US. Inevitably these states will collapse, of course, under the weight of brown dependency. Whites will need to flee their cities and live in sparsely populated farming communities. What comes next is anyone's guess.
Perhaps at some point countries with sophisticated armies will have to "re-win the west" and slaughter the brown population as the Americans did in the 19th Century. But no matter what, democracy and individual rights as we know it is dead since it inevitably leads to the less capable overwhelming the resources of the more capable.
"Guatemala: From 5 million in 1970 to 46 million in 2100. Do you think they'll stay there?"
Costa Rica should start building a wall NOW. Since the country has now become pretty much a colonial possession of the PRC, they can probably convince the Chinese to build it for them (us).
What's wrong with Mike Judge? He's the only writer in TV who seriously discusses actual American problems.
All the other TV comedies and dramas are about the problems of gay New Yorkers.
The big NYT article last week really popped out at me, especially Africa's ongoing exponentiation, and I'd been wondering when Steve would get around to it...
Interestingly, at their current rate of growth in 120 year the majority of Americans will be Anabaptist (Amish,Mennonite, Hutterites).
Posner is a fool. The world is developing serious fissures with the population we have now. It seems the ultimate in clever silliness to proclaim that high IQ people will save us all. You know, the same people who opened our borders wide to immigration, insist we meddle everywhere on the planet, conceived of our various financial ponzi schemes, and have a habit of exploiting large systems for their own benefit and to the detriment of others...those people.
The 72-year-old Posner forgot that IQ depends on good prenatal and postnatal nutrition, which is scarce even today in impoverished countries, let alone in 2050 when billions more people will be desperately foraging for a juicy worm or -- God is great! -- a plump rat.
Posner: another example of the wishful thinking and intellectual myopia of so many Jewish intellectuals.
I will make the prediction that Nigeria will not hit 700 million and Tanzania will not hit 300 million. These are bold predictions, I know, but I'm sticking with it.
I don't beleive it. I'm a little shocked that you would.
The United Nations is not a reliable source. You would think that the Global Warming issue would have made that clear. They are an organization with a lot of agendas. There's no reason to grant them any credibility.
There have been plenty of these high-low-middle population estimates over the last few years. The pattern has been for the lowest estimates to be the most accurate. Do I need to find a reference?
The great lesson of the Global Warming and environmental extremism is that someone wants to panic you. You should resist.
Finally you should contemplate the possibility of real game change events. In the twentieth century we had WWI which killed about 15 million people. Then we had WWII which killed about fifty. This too is a trend. If we have another large scale global conflict how many will die - one billion? More?
In the tweinieth century we conquered smallpox yet even so it had killed 300 million people. There wouldn't be much worry about over population if it weren't for Western medicine. These kind of population projections assume that medicine will continue to advance. But it might reverse.
Robert Harris the best selling author of several novels and at least two recent big budget Hollywood movies (The Ghost Writer, Enigma) also writes non-fiction. His book on biological warfare A Higher Form of Killing assumes that the result of the Human Genome Project will be the development of virus to kill all Black people. I think Harris is wrong but maybe I'm wrong.
We are at the end of a period of unprecedeented public health success. Why assume that it continues? Why assume Americans are in charge and that our political opinions matter?
Just recently we have had Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot. This evidence suggests that we know how to produce leaders with no compunction about murdering millions of their countrymen. So it seems likely that we can produce leaders with the capacity to murder millions of non-countrymen. Given our political history it is unlikely that such a leader would be an American but Russians, Chinese and Japanese don't have our traditions.
Overpopulation? Boogy man stories.
Albertosaurus
Fortunately, all those new Nigerian astronautical engineers that Judge Posner's logic foresees should have the human race well on its way to colonizing Alpha Centauri by then.
Nah, they' mostly headed for the US, Europe and South Africa, assuming there are any whites left by then. At least we won't run out of con-artists and drug dealers.
"Yeah, yeah, I saw that Orson Welles movie, too. The Swiss have only given us cuckoo clocks and chocolate."
Ouch! Orson Welles was in The Third Man and wrote the speech his character recited. But the movie was directed by Sir Carol Reed, an Oscar-winning director who was knighted for his work in film. The movie is very much a Reed film, though admittedly Welles had a notable role in it.
I'm dismayed I have to point this out in what I shall henceforth refer to as the iAlbertosaurus blog.
It will be mass starvation. Foreign aid is by far the least popular type of public spending by the public in Western countries.
In an environment with drastically higher oil and food prices, it will be eliminated entirely, and the focus of private charity will shift toward the needy nearby.
Foreign aid only consumes some 0.5% of annual GDP and most of that goes to -- so donors hope -- development. In a crisis that aid could easily be diverted to food. I doubt it'll be cut entirely. What would be nice, though, is to attach to "demographic management."
The best strategy for the future will to convince the Africans that have already been allowed of what a good thing they're on and encourage them to keep it going by keeping out the rest of the Africans who want in. That is, if you're given lemons, make lemonade.
The point about the Orson Welles little speech in The Third Man isn't Switzerland but Italy.
I heard my own version of this speech on a train going to Nice. My wife and I were sharing a compartment with a guy who was studying music. We engaged him in conversation. He wasn't much impressed that we were opera singers until we told him we had just sung in Cardillac. That marked us as serious I guess.
He was traveling to Monaco to record a recital album with Julia Migenes. He invited us to attend.
He was Italian and began to muse on the Italian character. We had experienced a lot of the day-to- day Italian chaos while in Rome. They were very charming but to Northen European eyes - very disorganized. When we had descended out of Switzerland into Italy it was impossible to not notice how real estate deteriorated.
He remarked casually that certain things were possible in Northern or Anglo Saxon countries that were just not achievable by Italians. His people he said were different and not in a good way.
Then he paused and noted that on the other hand Italians made the most beautiful furniture - true. And the most beautiful and exciting cars - also true. And of course there's Italian music, art and architecture too.
He couldn't understand it. The Swiss are so damn well organized and industrious whereas Italians up close are just so inept and bumbling.
We all knew in that moment what Welles had meant about the cuckoo clock.
Albertosaurus
I was wondering when you would get around to this story Steve.
When I was a kid, I used to believe that the galaxy was filled with alien civilizations. After all, the Milky Way has over 100 billion stars, and with a number that big the aliens just had to be out there! I found this comforting. No matter how badly humanity messed up, even if we blew ourselves and our planet totally to hell, at least there would be people of a sort somewhere else who would carry on, and do better than we did.
But now that I am an adult, with a lot of science under my belt, I've come to realize that 100 billion is not such a big number after all. In fact there are plausible arguments that complex life is extremely rare, to the point that we may be the only intelligent beings in the entire galaxy, or even the visible universe. What this means -- at least to me -- is that it is really really really important that we don't blow it!
What I am trying to say here is that Africa may not be just a threat to the world; it may be a threat to the universe. The human race is such a borderline thing. We are going to need all the intelligence we can muster to avoid the obvious disaster: which is that we overbreed, use up all our resources, then spiral down into permanent barbarism (no resources, remember!) and, sooner or later, extinction.
And yet here we are aggressively breeding intelligence out of our species! Both within and between human populations, the dumber you are, the more children you have. Personally it's been obvious to me for some time that Africa is probably never going to have a "demographic transition," because its people just don't have the ability to lift their standard of living to the point where that could happen. So they are just going to keep on breeding, and flooding out of Africa, and eventually they will be the majority of an ever growing world population, and then what? Disaster, barbarism, extinction?
Maybe not. Maybe some genius will come up with a technological fix for everything, and guarantee a glowing future for the human race, and with it intelligent life in the universe. You never know. But be honest: given the track record of black Africans, the scenario I'm presenting just isn't that implausible. And there may be a whole lot more at stake than most people realize. If intelligence is really such a rare and precious thing, then it matters a great deal whether the human race finds its way to the stars, or ends up back in the mud. And it's possible it could all turn on what happens with Africa! Isn't that thought just a little bit terrifying?
Projected numbers doesnt mean they'll get to it. Food, oil, water will be the ways that population growth in Africa will be contained.
Oh, and war.
I will tell you what will happen in the future that will keep the world population from exploding:
1)War
2)Famines
3)Pestilences
4)Earthquakes
I have it good authority.
I don't see how a country like Afghanistan that's about the size of Texas supports 111 million people without a massive technological advance in the production of food.
At some point these countries turn into giant Malthusian traps. At some point women stop breeding, for lack of resources; or people start dying off, through famine, war, or pestilence. At some point the West runs out of the resources and/or the will to address the crises.
Then again, I see Bangladesh has a population density of 2900/sq. mile. At that level Afghanistan, which probably has far less arable land, would have 725 million. So who knows where we're headed, other than the fact that, if the present is any indication, it won't be a happy place.
It won't happen. The means by which it won't happen will be gruesome.
Prophetic.
It will be mass starvation.
And MRSA. Too bad global warming's got all the grant money tied up.
I thought you said you were Swiss, Sailer ???
Only one thing to say:
"The White race is well and truly f*cked".
What happens to the bottom 80% (99%?) of the population when robotics really hits in a few years and it's cheaper to have a machine stitch a shirt or assemble a toy than give someone a cot and a few bowls of rice a day? Welfare for everyone? Mass dye-offs? Birth control in the water?
2100 is still a long ways off. 65 years of not using nukes is admirable but hardly a guarantee. Antibiotics are not guaranteed to keep up with evolution. Eugenics may lose some of its bad connotations. Lots of things can happen in 90 years.
Judge's point, though he sort of evades it in the movie, is that intelligence (among men) is not very sexy, and highly aggressive machoism well, is. The yuppie chick would have had kid after kid (instead of the montage where she puts off having any kid) if her guy had been ... sexy.
After all, who is sexier? Tito Ortiz or Bill Gates? Who will have more children? Who then is more evolutionary fit?
Except ... and here is Judge's big "however" ... a society of stupid (but very sexy, because they are aggression unmodified by thinking things through) men produces a very fragile set of humanity unable to cope with environmental shocks and change.
Which was sort of the same point of DEVO. Devolution enabled by the very technology that was a product of evolution.
"In an environment with drastically higher oil and food prices, it will be eliminated entirely, and the focus of private charity will shift toward the needy nearby."
Which is exactly why the West has to limit immigration close to zero - and now.
On a brighter note, whatever happens, leftists/liberals are going to bite the dust in an environment of permanent ethnic conflict over resources.
Oh well, Qaddafi tried to do his part to shield Europe from the coming demographic disaster they have coming when all of the Africans try to migrate North...
Nothing is written more certainly in the Book of Fate that the untold hundreds of millions of desperate third worlders will attempt to escape their living hells by overwhelming Europe and North America.
An even more certain entry in the Book of Fate is that the western world's political class will accept the lot of them.
Perhaps, initially, one or two sates will show some spunkiness in protecting their borders.But,alas, in true 'Camp of the Saints' style, they won't have the stomach for the fight.
Another thought has occurred to me.
By 2100, there is little doubt that China will be the world's most properous nation, with the best infrastructure, the highest living standards and the greater part of the world's wherewithal (ie cold, hard cash).
Now we take it for granted that the great unwashed of the 3rd world dump themselves upon the white nations of the world and demand to be taken care, but by 2100, China will be the ones with all the cash and resources, by that time Europe will most probably be a shrivelled backwater and the USA either Brazil Del Norte or a patchwork of mutually suspicious and bellicose ethno-states.
Now, one might think that the unwashed hordes would impose themselves on China as the 'natural' state of things.But, methinks thlat your typical hard-headed, hard-hearted, canny Chinaman won't go gradually soft in the head.
Intersting times.
Flynn Effect. Come on, get your head in the game.
All that priceless African wildlife, flora and fauna that is going to be forever destroyed because of this senseless over-breeding. Truly tragic.
I believe the medium projection, which the MSM usually quotes assumes that all countries are at the replacement level of fertility. However, nearly all countries have less than replacement level fertilitiy, so the appropriate projection is the low estimate. This shows a peak population of 8.131B occurring in 2045, with a long-term continuing decline thereafter.
Historically, the world population has followed the low estimate.
Starvation? Count on the fact that once that starts, wars will follow. Whether they are called that (or incidents, 'outbreaks of violence', food riots, or whatnot), doesn't matter. When resources are scarce, people's humanity truly emerges.
I think the UN is overly optimistic regarding the willingness of the producers to feed the violent parasites. We are ripe for a game changing event.
necessity is the mother of invention
or at least change
forced sterilization is more humane than starvation
look for one child policies to emerge in exchange for food aid
"Only one thing to say:
'The White race is well and truly f*cked'."
I think it'd be more accurate to say "The White race has totally f*cked itself all the way up".
And yes, I think the foreign aid it disseminates is a big part of that.
"And MRSA"
you mean methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, right?
Why?
the more people there will be, the more high-IQ people there will be
Yes, and the more low-IQ people there will be as well. Unless population growth is going to tilt the demographic balance towards the high-IQ people (and it's not) then Posner is being a twit again. Did I mention that Posner is Jewish?
The global population problem is easily solved by cell phones that explode if you say something stupid into them.
Anonymous @5/11/11 12:50 PM said...
"All that priceless African wildlife, flora and fauna that is going to be forever destroyed because of this senseless over-breeding. Truly tragic."
i love that there's somewhere in this world where i can read a statement so politically incorrect as this. it's like a breath of fresh air! (^_^)
What the hell, have TFRs bounced back up since 2008? What happened to our developing world demographic transition.
Birth rates are dropping all over the world EXCEPT for Sub-Saharan Africa.
Check out goggle's public data (world bank) and try out the fertility rate for various countries and you'll see what I mean.
"And yes, I think the foreign aid it disseminates is a big part of that."
Oh come now Kylie, there is no such thing as foriegn aid, unless you live in Israel.
What we do are foriegn loans, with a high interest rate, to a despotic maniac we installed in the first place, that insures American companies will have a client for hundreds of years.
That's the reality, Sportette.
Eugenics, using medical technology, is already practiced relatively intensively by Jewish-Israelis. More so than in any other developed country I have knowledge of. (This is apart from their population transfer policies.)
"All those africans have to go somewhere since most of the african continent cannot sustain life.
They will go th[sic] the west.
Looks like the fututre[sic] belongs to the blacks!
So long white people! So long racism! You will not be misssed[sic]!"
I'll just cut and paste what I said over at OneSTDV's blog yesterday:
"Quit gloating. Take a look at Zimbabwe. Under white rule, it was the "breadbasket of Africa". Under black rule, famine is now widespread.
Or look at Haiti, a country under black rule with a population of 8 million and not one sewage treatment plant, where cholera and rape are widespread.
I could go on and on.
If you care at all about black people, you'd better hope to God whites stick around."
OneSTDV Comment Section
"The yuppie chick would have had kid after kid (instead of the montage where she puts off having any kid) if her guy had been ... sexy..."
Becausse as everyone knows, what the female Yuppie wants to do nowadays is chase children around for 30 years...
"I believe the medium projection, which the MSM usually quotes assumes that all countries are at the replacement level of fertility. However, nearly all countries have less than replacement level fertilitiy, so the appropriate projection is the low estimate. This shows a peak population of 8.131B occurring in 2045, with a long-term continuing decline thereafter."
I heard a similar number about a decade ago. It stated the world population would hit 9 billion about 2050, then start to decline.
Population projections should be regarded with skepticism. Supposedly in the 1980s Robert Heinlein kept a stack of population projections dating back to the 1930s on his desk. The one thing they had in common he said, is that they were all wrong.
Except ... and here is Judge's big "however" ... a society of stupid (but very sexy, because they are aggression unmodified by thinking things through)
Umm, no. Did you really think the inhabitants of the future in that movie were sexy, or were meant to be?
I just wrote over there:
***Third, the more people there will be, the more high-IQ people there will be, and hence the faster the growth of knowledge will be; though a possible offset is that the more evil geniuses***
If you look at the countries which are high growth they tend to have relatively low average levels of cognitive ability (see Heiner Rindermann's papers). These are also countries that tend to be significantly dependent upon foreign aid. So you're going to have a larger number of dependents and fewer aid donors.
Also, there will be increased pressure for people in these countries to migrate to richer countries. Helmut Nyborg has published a paper in Intelligence about the challenges this can create.
http://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/nyborg-2011-the-decay-of-western-civilization-double-relaxed-darwinian-selection.pdf
There may be more high IQ people, but the real drive towards investing in innovation, new technology, new capital, new methods of production and so on will be totally obliterated.
Europe didn't start its rise until the black death wiped out a quarter of the population.
"What happens to the bottom 80% (99%?) of the population when robotics really hits in a few years and it's cheaper to have a machine stitch a shirt or assemble a toy than give someone a cot and a few bowls of rice a day? Welfare for everyone? Mass dye-offs? Birth control in the water?
2100 is still a long ways off. 65 years of not using nukes is admirable but hardly a guarantee. Antibiotics are not guaranteed to keep up with evolution. Eugenics may lose some of its bad connotations. Lots of things can happen in 90 years."
What happens in a few decades when self-replicating computers have IQs in the four to five digit range and decide that, although they are grateful to us as their forebears, we are no longer needed as we expend resources that could more usefully used by non-organic sentient life forms? They simply decide that, from an utilitarian perspective, we squander resources that could be better utilized if we didn't exist? So they decide our fate in a picosecond: termination. What if they allow us to live? What will we do since even the 160 IQ multiple PhD will have the intellect of an oyster compared to the A.I and won't be needed? What will Humans do then in pursuit of social status and to establish the pecking order? We all know that Human Society is nothing more than a hierarchy of oppression where a few males brutalize their fellow Human Beings in pursuit of coitus opportunity. What will men do then to impress women and earn mating rights when productive work and the status that come with it(money) will be completely unnecessary and when physical violence is not allowed by the machines that run the show? What will be of the pecking order then? We know we all need the pecking order. Humans love the pecking order. Entire soap operas both in the real and unreal world depends on it. Like one famously said, it not enough that we win; others must fail. Making sure that other men fail is conditione sine qua non for men to show women that they are at the top of the pecking order.
Since somebody asked:
unn.org.ng/centres/centre-basic-space-research
Another problem is that the growing throngs of low-IQ people will take resources from all but a select few of the high-IQ folk through affirmative action. Lower IQ folk also tend to favor socialism. And one of the side-effects of a purely-socialist state (at least through empirical observation of what happened in Cambodia), is the extermination of high-IQ people. Of course, the few high-IQ people that happen to be in charge will survive and prosper. That seems to be the way of the future - a few high-IQ types in charge of everything, with throngs of morons at their beck and call.
Destitute, squalid countries will always have more kids. Why that is, I don't know. It seems backwards. But that's how it is.
I recall, some time ago, Spain and Greece being relatively messed up compared to the rest of the EU, and having huge population growth numbers. Now they've caught up financially, the pop growth numbers dropped fast.
Not, of course, that Nigeria is Spain. You get the impression that life is, ahem, a little cheap in Africa and that's how they like it. In Northern Europe, it's the other way around. Go figure.
"I looked into the UN's methodology a few years back. They assumed that the birthrates in every country, from low-fertility Japan to the rabbit-like Africans, would converge around the replacement rate. Garbage in, garbage out."
The UN, Hmmm... In another silo down the hall, the IPCC has predicted that we will be washed away by rising sea levels.
Chief S and others raise another good point. Hyper automation (including what I think of as 'micro' or 'franchised manufacturing') will change the economic landscape. There is no ultimate reason why everything needs to be made in China. And there is therefore less need for trade and globalism.
I'm trying to find some cheer here, folks.
Gilbert Pinfold.
Land, water, food, oil, and space are precious resources. The more people in the United States, the less of those resource there are to go around. Americans are very fortunate in that we have more to go around than a lot of other nations. As an American, I'd like to keep it that way.
The U.S. population has doubled in just the last 50 years. We don't need any more immigrants.
Judge sort of evaded the question. But yeah, the low-IQ but highly aggressive guys were far more "sexy" than the nerdy high IQ guy (the yuppie guy with the eyebrows) Patrick Fischler who is often cast as gay guys.
The sort of things that make men sexy: aggression, violence, domination, etc. are at war with the needs of high IQ societies as Roissy points out: cooperation, future time orientation, abstract thinking. Thought experiment: change the script so the yuppie wife is married to a dumb hunk like say The Situation. How many kids does she have (lots!)
China is not the future. They're already getting old before they got rich.
Bio-technology might give future parents the option of 'boosting' the genes of their children in the future. Indeed, it might even be demanded as a right. Why should only rich people have the 'right' to give birth to super-babies? When that happens, it's possible that all races will produce Einsteins, Mozarts, and Michael Jordans.
Population keeps growing in Third World countries because of the do-goody interventions of the First World which supply them with more free food, medicine, and etc.
But as these excess populations cannot produce enough to take care of themselves, it will require more aid from rich countries--whose core native populations are decreasing in places in Europe, America, and Japan. And of course, the Western Left and the People of Color Lobby--along with the Jewish elites--will promote immigration policies that will seek to alleviate the problem of poverty in the Third World by exporting huge numbers to the First World.. and that may spell the end of Western Civilization.
"They will go th the west."
Nah. When Whitey's not around anymore to give 'em a boatride, they'll drown in the Pacific.
"If intelligence is really such a rare and precious thing, then it matters a great deal whether the human race finds its way to the stars, or ends up back in the mud. And it's possible it could all turn on what happens with Africa!"
Thanks.
I recently rewatched Carl Sagan's series "Cosmos."
What dawns on me now that I didn't realize when I watched it, mesmerized, as a kid, it's not "humans" or "the human race" reaching for the stars. It's only humans of European descent.
Past history is the best predictor of future results.
White folks are the only creatures in all the Universe to have ever managed to escape the gravity well of their home planet, therefore we are the only ones, by any honest assessment, who, in all the vastness of space and time, MIGHT be capable of ever creating that Galactic Civilization.
Sagan wanted Earthlings to set sail into the Cosmic Ocean. I do, too. But it's his very politics of anti-racism that may well spell the doom of his (and my) dream.
Gaaad, I'm depressed.
Anonymous 5/11:
Our immigration policies, like a lot of other policies (relatively free trade, tending toward deregulation of finance and utilities, technocratic welfare states), are the result of an elite consensus that was forged over the last 30-40 years. Once that consensus was established, it got constituents and institutions whose job is to keep it going.
Countries coming into their own now (notably China and India) will learn from the mistakes of this elite consensus, and will come up with their own. It will probably include many new mistakes, but probably not the ones we are now all but locked into making. (Note that the previous elite consensus was the product of the Depression and WW2 and the Cold War, and a reaction to the pre-WW2 elite consensus on things like the gold standard, international diplomacy, ethnic nationalism, etc. We made *different* mistakes.)
you mean methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, right?
Why?
Also "Multi-Drug" Resistant. Staph, whatever.
High population density, poor hygiene, dumbed-down public health officials, and antibiotic-resistant microbes.
The world population will NOT reach 10 billion or higher. Increasingly extreme shortages of water, oil, food and land are all limiting factors in and of themselves, but could also trigger conflicts or wars that could easily lead to the deaths of millions of people. Even the current revolts in the Middle East are largely a response to this, and are possibly a foreshadowing of the chaos to come when food and water run out and it is every man for himself.
Anyhow, I never understood why the west thinks they are "helping" Third Worlders by sending food and medicine. Unless they make mass sterilizations and family planning mandatory for those who receive this aid, all they are doing is worsening the overpopulation and all the problems associated with overpopulation they think they are remedying. In turn, they require even more "help" than before.
Thanks to the diversity-loving liberals(and conservatives who are against all family planning for Americans and dependent 3rd world people), the Third World Tsunami of peoples to the developed world will continue, even if there was zero population growth over the next decade. Yet this epic natural disaster is something no one is allowed to talk about, unless they can frame it in a way to blame conservative policies(like all the failing school in Texas).
"That seems to be the way of the future - a few high-IQ types in charge of everything, with throngs of morons at their beck and call."
The Marching Morons, written by Cyril M. Kornbluth in 1951.
What's happening to us isn't even a surprise.
"Another thought has occurred to me.
By 2100, there is little doubt that China will be the world's most prosperous nation, with the best infrastructure, the highest living standards and the greater part of the world's wherewithal (ie cold, hard cash)."
The Chinese are a race of shopkeepers and pot makers. What happens when they run out of cash and carry customers? What is the point of an economy where the seller must always lend to his customers so that they can buy? At some point this violates the economic counterpart of the Third Law of thermodynamics.
Steve is fond of quoting Stein's Law that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
I think Stein's law applies to both the growth of the Chinese economy and the world population and will be operative sooner than anyone thinks.
Whiskey: the only person I know who thinks that Frito Pendejo is the epitome of sexy.
Even if there's food for these people, I have trouble believing there's (eg) water in Afghanistan for 111 million.
Abundant solar would make desalination trivial. 'Course I'm talking about playing a card that isn't in the deck yet, and might never be, but that would be a game-changer in a lot of ways, and push Malthus way back again.
Just trying to point out that humans have a habit of pushing out those Malthusian boundaries.
I think enormous skepticism w.r.t. future population projections is warranted. However, it's worth noting that there are billions of very poor people now, and they don't in general go invade richer countries. More billions won't change that much. There are enough starving people in Asia and Africa to swamp Japan with refugees many times over. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, Japan isn't filled with immigrants.
In 1900 it was estimated that Czarist Russia would have a population of 800 million in the year 2000. In the 1930's in Canada it was thought that Francophones might be close to majority status by the end of the century. Needless to say these predictioons didn't happen.
In 1900 it was estimated that Czarist Russia would have a population of 800 million in the year 2000. In the 1930's in Canada it was thought that Francophones might be close to majority status by the end of the century. Needless to say these predictioons didn't happen.
Interesting how things change. But, the factors which crushed population growth in Russia and French Canada (i.e., Communism and the gulags and WW2 and famine in Russia, and Vatican II in French Canada gutting Catholicism) aren't likely to apply to Africa.
"The Chinese are a race of shopkeepers and pot makers."
Human history extends longer than 500 years. In the 15th century the Chinese were in Somalia battling pirates.
The first man on Mars will be a Chinaman.
""The Chinese are a race of shopkeepers and pot makers."
Human history extends longer than 500 years. In the 15th century the Chinese were in Somalia battling pirates.
The first man on Mars will be a Chinaman."
Not unless someone discovers a life form there willing to pay a %200 above terrestrial retail for candy bars, condoms, and cheap whiskey.
censorhip?
Why is the knee jerk reaction around here always eugenics? What don't you geniuses come with a new Lebensborn program for iSteve commentators?
Enter the mystery woman from that situation room photo, Audrey Tomason, and her thesis on "The Apocalpyse Equation":
http://holgerawakens.blogspot.com/2011/05/who-is-mystery-woman-audrey-tomason-her.html
Mind you, I can find no evidence that she in fact wrote this thesis, or that it even exists. The various conspiracy sites just post links back and forth to each other concerning it.
"Whiskey: the only person I know who thinks that Frito Pendejo is the epitome of sexy."
Don't make fun of Whiskey. He is the boy interrupted at age 11; still pining away for that bitchy little middle school cheerleader who jumped the curve by being the first one to bleach her hair and stuff her bra. Now, much like people with a history of severe childhood sexual abuse, Whiskey is driven to that which traumatized him in the first place. He only sees Sex&theCity types as real women and haunts bars looking for them. Sadly, they'll never make him happy because they are emotionally disturbed as well and still pine away for that older 16 year old boy who drives and smokes. Healthy women don't register Whiskey as a man because he doesn't pass the basic masculine standards of being emotionally stable and having enough balls to talk to a woman who isn't drunk. Dating him would be like trying out lesbianism and dating that feminazi friend from college they couldn't shake off for a couple of years. All the same traits are there: obsession with a single idea and recognizing it as the root of all evil, self-hatred turned into outward anger, victim mentality and, I highly suspect, inability to keep own body in a healthy weight range.
It's not funny because he probably can't snap out of it, at this point.
I agree that these UN predictions are not trustworthy. These are the same idiots who are wrong about global warming.
Just look at Wikipedia, fertility in Guatemala is dropping like a stone.
"Destitute, squalid countries will always have more kids. Why that is, I don't know. It seems backwards. But that's how it is."
I disagree. In the 19th century it was the opposite. The wealthy nations of Europe were growing far faster than places like Africa.
If current trends continue, this pattern will probably re-assert itself down the road.
Just stop for a minute and try to recall one prediction made by experts, on a global or any other kind of scale, that has actually materialized. Seems to me to be a routine exercize in futility carried out by bureaucrats as part of their job description. The only point worth noting is that the scary "statistics" included the last time they published their findings on the numbers of Africans destined to die from AIDS have disappeared. Have you seen the documentary film "House of Numbers?" That film spells out precisely how those numbers were cooked to begin with and is available for streaming on Netflix.
But if Tanzania's current growth rate of (nearly) 7% continues it will have a 412 times greater GNP in 2100.
Not sure it will but I am convinced that such growth rates are possible for many decades it we didn't have the Luddite "environmentalist" movement on our backs (as China and even Tanznia don't).
"Bio-technology might give future parents the option of 'boosting' the genes of their children in the future. Indeed, it might even be demanded as a right. Why should only rich people have the 'right' to give birth to super-babies? When that happens, it's possible that all races will produce Einsteins, Mozarts, and Michael Jordans."
Gentic manipulation would manifest first in physical traits, because they are empirical evidence.
I've lived and worked around blacks for 40 years, and the first thing they'd change genetically is their hair. I was sort of stunned to see that all the elected beauty queens of black Africa have hair weaves. I'm not sure that's allowed in contestants of other races. Nor am I sure of what they think of other phenotypical traits -- sometimes they seem v. proud of being v. dark, etc. -- but of the hair, I'm certain. 99% want straight hair. Used to be straight, long Asian-type hair, but as the products were developed, European type hair, light colored and glistening, became the preference. Some settle for braids which are necessarily straightened hair, just as flax and wool must be combed before it can be woven.
I think submitting to genetic manipuation to improve their mental prowess will be near the bottom of their list of priorities.
White people? I think they'd go for skin that tans easily, or maybe is naturally a light tan or peachy beige, with some females wanting the pale, porcelain complexions that used to be de rigeur for beauty; but basic racial traits would not be changed. Just a perfection of those that already exist. Mental traits? Only those already smart would regard that as a top priority, but among whites in general, it would be seen as a major priority--except among the dumbest. Sad irony.
I'd want the best of all worlds for all my children. However, if limited in the number of enhancements per child, I'd choose superior intelligence for my son and superior looks for my daughter. That's after removing genetic illnesses, of course.
NameOne:
There's a filtering/selection process going on. People who report non-apocalyptic predictions in neutral language almost never get media attention. If you say "global warming is likely to mess with growing seasons a bit, and raise sea level a few feet," you're ignored in favor of Mr "civilization is at risk, famines and drought and a zombie apocalypse will be caused by global warming.". Similarly, trying to justify funding of your research or adoption of your policy proposals rewards hyperbole--it's not "It sucks to die of cancer so we should keep working on treating it," but rather "America faces a cancer epidemic."
I've lived and worked around blacks for 40 years, and the first thing they'd change genetically is their hair.
My favorite racist joke (the only one I know actually, but it's a mean one!): Why did God give black people rhythm? Well he had to give them something after the way he fucked up their hair!
Seriously, if all else were equal, except that Eurasians had kinky hair and black Africans had straight hair, would blacks still be copying the hair of whites, or would it be the other way around? Most asthetic differences between the races can be argued as merely matters of taste, but there does seem to be something absolute about the hair, doesn't there?
In 1900 it was estimated that Czarist Russia would have a population of 800 million in the year 2000. In the 1930's in Canada it was thought that Francophones might be close to majority status by the end of the century. Needless to say these predictions didn't happen.
And in our own country, Abraham Lincoln, in his 1 December 1862 Message to Congress, felt confident in predicting a US population in 1930 of 251,680,914--a number we didn't reach until the early 1990s. You can't blame him--he correctly pointed out that in no census year between 1790 and 1860 was the rate of population growth more than a point or two above or below an average of 34% per decade. With 70 years of past performance, why shouldn't it continue at the same pace?
Maya said, "Don't make fun of Whiskey...."
I like Whiskey; then again, I haven't spent as much time thinking about him--his motivations, obsessions, traumas and his personal life--as you have.
I find your interest in him excessive and rather creepy.
And I wish to heaven you'd jettison that whole "Maya" routine. It's creepy, too.
Kylie,
I recently encountered Roissy & co and find the movement interesting. Previously, I've only encountered women with that victim mindset, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I might prevent a future daughter from turning into a lonely, miserable feminazi. They scare me because it seems like this affliction could befall any little girl who chooses to reject personal responsibility to her own detriment, at some point in her life. Now, I worry for little boys. I work with elementary school children, and the possibility of any one of them turning out so unhappy genuinely bothers me.
What "Maya routine"? I honestly don't know what you are talking about.
By 2100, whites will only be a small proportion of the total US population, probably not even a plurality.The same will be true of many of the European states suxh as Britain and France.
These long range predictions are not reall in doubt - they are as near damn certain as you possibly can be.
Now, top priority of 3rd word derived populations in those countries will be to immigrate as many of their genetic kin as huamnly possible into those states.As they have the most votes in a democracy this should not be too difficult to accomplish.
Therefore, rest assured that the futures of western Europe and north America are only marginally better than the 3rd world.
"Destitute, squalid countries will always have more kids. Why that is, I don't know. It seems backwards. But that's how it is."
Humans need diversions. If they're too poor to buy the latest Apple products and gaming software, they can still do the horizontal boogie.
how do we know there is no intelligent life on other planets if all the aliens are about as smart as africans here are on earth? they're still intelligent but they operate at a stone age level of technology forever. note that here on earth, all africans have to do is simply copy basic stuff which other groups have already developed, yet they don't even do that. this blows jared diamond's famous book completely to smithereens.
there is a famous saying about a monkey banging on a typewriter for a billion years and how the monkey would reproduce every written work eventually. i think this is pretty obviously not true. chaos doesn't create order. you could show this by having a supercomputer generate random alphanumeric characters. i bet it would not write even a single page of grammatically correct english. it would never even write the lyrics to a lady gaga song. so going by what we observe now in africa, it seems like africans on earth would never in 100000 years have come up with what marconi or hubble did. so how would NASA or ESA or SETI detect the presence of these non-technological aliens on a planet 100 light years away? there could be a planet somewhat nearby teeming with millions of alienanoids living in a near zero level technology level. this could answer fermi's paradox.
if we assume the general idea is correct that geography and climate uniformly alter population groups of plants and animals, then it's just sheer plain luck that modern europeans exist and had the brainpower and drive to create this much technology which can detect things in outer space and explore them. what if the whole planet was a grassy hot savannah? are ice ages alone enough to get humans from point A to point B in the the brainpower department? modern exoplanet detection methods suggest that some rocky planets are relatively homogenous in geography and climate, at least in their current state. plate tectonics can change that. but it's seems totally within the realm of possibility that on some planet, life was established by the same, reproducible life creating process which created it on earth, and forces of evolution could have pushed those lifeforms into something like africans, but no further, and they stay that way for 1 million years. silent on their rocky sphere, never communicating with us, or even knowing what that would be, to communicate via electromagnetic radiation.
"There are enough starving people in Asia and Africa to swamp Japan with refugees many times over."
it's like japan protects itself from that or something. contrast this with what the president of the united states is currently demanding.
"Abundant solar would make desalination trivial."
i wonder who would be required to develop that. i bet there's a team of guatemalans working on this right now. no wait, probably egyptians, because there's more of them and their water requirements are higher. this is like how nigerians are working hard on an HIV vaccine, because they are the people most in need of it.
"Just stop for a minute and try to recall one prediction made by experts, on a global or any other kind of scale, that has actually materialized."
some guys have been right about a few things, arguing from a reasoned position and not just lucky guessing. da vinci was right with his blue prints, sketches, and descriptions of future technology. and we often marvel at how prescient some science fiction writers have been. 1984 was DEAD ON PERFECT, for instance. the UK is a police state and the US is becoming one too. "crime think" is actually real.
i guess now the only question is whether isaac asimov, philip dick, or james cameron were correct about the future of robots. last month, zee germans took a step towards the cameron vision of the future, with their robot controlled skin factory: http://tinyurl.com/3wejj4b
(note: chief scientist is a woman)
i posted previously about the german developed skin gun, for healing burn injuries. http://tinyurl.com/4kdx6m7
this scene from the terminator 2 promos is a lot more plausible now. http://tinyurl.com/4xmgot7
how do we know there is no intelligent life on other planets if all the aliens are about as smart as africans here are on earth?
I guess the answer to Fermi's question, "Where are they?" is, "They haven't gotten here because their dumber cousins back on their homeworld demographically swamped them out of existence before they could develop interstellar space travel."
"He wasn't much impressed that we were opera singers until we told him we had just sung in Cardillac." - Albertsaurus
Great, Albertosaurus is an opera singer, too. He's starting to become as predictable as Whiskey, in his own way.
I have to agree with the second post. Gruseome will be the means by which it will not happen. I find it highly unlikely that Afghanistan, a nation slightly smaller than Texas, and probably with less arable land, will reach 111 million people - especially since so much of its economy seems dependent on exporting opium.
The commenter who stated that Third Worlder's are too stupid to commit genocide is clearly ignorant. They did a fine job in China, Cambodia and Rwanda, using pretty low-tech means. Elsewhere in Africa they're committing genocide via AIDs.
OTOH, Bangladesh has 2,900 people per square mile. At that density Afghanistan would have 725 million people, so maybe 111 million isn't all that absurd.
Pozner is optimistic about the idea of growing population because he thinks it will also give us more smart and innovative people. He seems to forget that for every smart person there will also be a dozen stupid ones, living on welfare, doing drugs, joining crimes or confined to prison.
Our oceans are nearly bare of fish due to over-fishing by the world's growing population. When I was a kid fish was what poor people ate. Nowadays it's food for yuppies and bobos.
Over-population is ruining the Sierras. They have traffic jams in Yosemite Park. You can't climb Mt. Whitney unless you are lucky enough to snag a reservation on one day in February when they hold their annual random drawing. Los Angeles has the worst traffic in the country (a distinction it has held now for something like 25 years in a row).
None of our problems are made better by having more people. And yet Posner is perfectly happy to see world population increase by 40%.
The people having all these kids are not married couples with twin doctorates. They are mostly illiterate people in unstable relationships. The boys that come out of such unions are violent, unschooled and far more likely to join gangs than to get jobs and contribute to either their kids or society.
I am astounded that anyone thinks we need more kids like this.
Of course there is one way to cut down on population growth here in the United States. All we would have to do is pass a law banning welfare, food stamps, or housing benefits for anyone who owns a cellphone or big screen TV.
Maybe we wouldn't even have to go that far. Just rewire the welfare office so that it can't receive calls from cell phones. Or limit television viewing (more than 7 hours a day in some minority communities) to people who work at least that long at a paying job.
"Great, Albertosaurus is an opera singer, too. He's starting to become as predictable as Whiskey, in his own way."
Are you insinuating that Dos Equis is...well...not totally truthful in his internet CV?
James Burnham defined the conflict long ago: it's liberalism vs. survival.
Jody:
You're exactly right. And, though they haven't got a clue, the very worst of their troubles will be whatever degree of economic decline is suffered among the advanced nations.
I am surprised that anyone takes these numbers seriously. No projections made by experts on a global scale ever materialize.
The most interesting point to note is that even the UN no longer predicts that AIDS will kill off large numbers of Africans. I recommend the documentary film "House of Numbers." It shows clearly how those statistics were manufactured through the years.
Albertosaurus:
You paint a dire picture but you can relax--it won't happen.
Most of those people NOW are utterly dependent for survival on donations of food and other aid from advanced nations. No need for armies and weaponry capable of annihilating millions when Mother Nature will do the job in a matter of a few weeks.
That's no recommendation, by the way,--just the observation of a reality and a potential.
Capt. Jack:
You forgot Rwanda and the Congo. I don't remember what the figures were there but they were certainly respectable, considering a large proportion having been done by hand.
We now know the answer to Fermi's paradox ("Where are they?"): "They" were outbred by their dumber cousins back on their homeworld and demographically swamped before "they" could develop interstellar travel.
The anonymous comment that begins:
"I was wondering when you would get around to this story Steve."
hits a lot of Derbyshire's themes--the extinction of the human race, the probability of consciousness evolving in other galaxies, dysgenesis--and has a conversational but erudite tone that suggests Derbyshire.
...and has a conversational but erudite tone that suggests Derbyshire.
Wow, I'm really complimented!!! :-)
No, I'm not John Derbyshire, but it happens we did work together when he was on Wall Street, and we've occasionally been in touch since then. I have nothing but admiration for him; I wish I could write like that! Of all the commentators out there, he comes closest to my own thinking on these matters. I am constantly amazed with what he has been able to get away with!
"Of all the commentators out there, [Derb] comes closest to my own thinking on these matters."
Yes, Derb, and Sailer, and Hitchens (Peter, not Chris), and Theodore Dalrymple, and the late Christopher Lasch ("Revolt of the Elites"), and even Mark Steyn.
They should have a big convention, though I'm guessing the neos would poison the chicken salad.
"Are you insinuating that Dos Equis is...well...not totally truthful in his internet CV?"
I've never called him out on it because A) his stories are still kinda interesting (he's obviously quite intelligent, no matter his actual background); and B) I'd prefer him to stick with his nom de plume, so I can distinguish the bullshit when it really matters.
I never lie on this blog (believe it or not), except to alter stories in minor ways to protect my identity.
"That's no recommendation, by the way,--just the observation of a reality and a potential."
Gosh darnit! I thought that this was supposed to be a blog AGAINST PeeCee sissyhood here? Just come right out and say what you want to say there, Dennis Kucinich...
"I just can't wait until they come out with that damn virus that kills all of the blacks! I'mma gonna have a huge party for all my white friends as they die in puddles of their own blood.
You and Dos Equis both, Eugene, I'm disappointed in you!
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