China

Like most of what David Brooks writes these days, I don’t understand the point of his NY Times op-ed column. He presents the following unsourced survey result: “Eighty-six percent of Chinese believe their country is headed in the right direction, compared with 37 percent of Americans.”

That seems to be a realistic assessment of the situation, in my opinion. As I wrote in a previous blog post:

Chinese people are at least as smart as Americans, they aren’t diluting their gene pool with low IQ immigrants, they work hard, they respect value-creation fields like engineering, and the leadership of China wants China to become a great superpower while a lot of the American leadership feels guilty about America being rich and powerful.

I won’t feel optimistic about the future of America until we stop the immigration, we bring back respect to value-creation fields, and our leadership stops feeling guilty about America being rich and powerful.

Comments

[mnjohn]

The best and the brightest students in America far trump the best of the students in China. We are way more creative and will always have the top companies where as the Chinese can just copy us and steal our intellectual property. This is not a valid way to build a superpower.

[Steve Johnson]

The column is a riddle. Here's the key:

"Americans could once be confident that their country would grow more productive because each generation was more skilled than the last. That’s no longer true."

The next sentence is the following:

"The political system now groans to pass anything easy — tax cuts and expanding health care coverage — and is incapable of passing anything hard — spending restraint, health care cost control."

This is the classic form of a riddle; set up the question in one sentence and misdirect in the next. Is the reason people don't have faith in productivity growth because government can't pass spending cuts or price controls on health care? Of course not. In the past there have been worse government policies (steel industry nationalization, for example) coupled with productivity growth and optimism. Now? Not so much.

The answer is at the bottom of the page a link to an editorial. The title of that editorial? "Their Future Is Ours: The country is stumbling under the challenge of integrating the children of immigrants, who need more supportive policies and programs.".

That's the answer to the riddle. The future of America is dim because almost half the children in America today are from the genetic stock of the poorest Mexicans. Everyone, even the NY Times, knows this. (BTW, read that editorial from the NY Times for some true hilarity*)

Brooks can't talk about immigration destroying the future of the country because of the doctrine of zero group differences / HBD denial. He can hint but doesn't want to lose his job.

It's funny. David Brooks is a good liberal. He doesn't want the system to collapse because he believes in it. All he would like to do is correct a fatal error in the system; unfortunately, the system as it's set up will keep generating fatal errors and has made it a (social) capital offense to point out fatal errors in the system. How long can the progressive order last if conservatives are no longer permitted to act as a sanity check?

* Key sentences from the editorial:

"Whereas native-born children’s language skills follow a bell curve, immigrants’ children were crowded in the lower ranks..."

"There is clearly a need for policies and programs to support immigrant parents and children... Millions are growing up in mixed families, with some members here illegally, others not. Bills to help immigrant families with a path to legalization have died repeatedly in Congress, and small-scale reforms like the Dream Act, a path to college or the military for children of illegal immigrants have been stymied for years. New investments in language education, citizenship preparation and after-school and preschool programs have been derailed by economic crisis, harsh immigration politics and a general lack of attention."

Yeah, because there aren't any groups who are citizens who lag behind the majority or groups who have had targeted preschool and after-school programs, etc.

[Alex]

"The best and the brightest students in America far trump the best of the students in China. We are way more creative and will always have the top companies where as the Chinese can just copy us and steal our intellectual property. This is not a valid way to build a superpower."

Can we see some evidence of this? The United States International Mathematics Olympiad team is about half Chinese, and so far as I can tell it is pretty good at getting the best mathematics students from across the country.

There is the issue of mathematics not being creative, but I see this as a moot point. Unless someone finds a "creative" intelligence factor, I'm forced to believe that the highly intelligent go into the hard sciences because of pure necessity or cultural values, and not because they lack an aptitude for the humanities.

[Peter A]

"David Brooks is a good liberal"

I think you'll find he considers himself conservative. And being pro business is really all that matters in today's GOP.

[Zorkmid]

Chinese people are still "nationalistic." Why aren't Americans? Nationalism is a generally positive social force (yeah, yeah, hitler, stalin, blah, blah... believe it or not, history records plenty of nationalistic social movements which didn't involve concentration camps).

American "post nationalism" is really a lot like European "pre nationalism" when members of a small cross-breeding elite spread across the continent were united in exploiting everyone else, and more to the point, deliberately suppressing economic progress for fear that it would upset the aristocratic applecart (as it eventually did). Can you say "mercantile republic?" I knew you could.

[Eric Stratton, Rush Chairman]

A little OT, but in Barnes & Noble this afternoon, I saw two books out on the "New Non-Fiction" table, one of them by Gerry Rivers a/k/a Geraldo Rivera whose premise was that Hispanics are going to lead the USA into a new era of prosperity and "save" us.

I didn't think to ask anyone if they'd been intended for the "New Fiction" section until after I'd already left the store.

[M Stein]

Debate about future of ev psych research between Geoffrey Miller & Satoshi Kanazawa discusses these issues:

"The Asian Future of Evolutionary Psychology, by Geoffrey Miller

Abstract: Asia’s population, wealth, cognitive capital, and scientific influence are growing quickly. Reasonable demographic, economic, and psychometric projections suggest that by the mid-21st century, most of the world’s psychology will be done in Asia, by Asians. Even if evolutionary psychology wins the battles for academic respectability in the United States and European Union, if it ignores the rise of Asian psychology, it will fail to have any serious, long-term, global influence in the behavioral sciences after the current generations of researchers are dead. ...

No, It Ain't Gonna Be Like That, by Satoshi Kanazawa

Abstract: For cultural, social, and institutional reasons, Asians cannot make original contributions to basic science. I therefore doubt Miller's prediction for the Asian future of evolutionary psychology. I believe that its future will continue to be in the United States and Europe.

Asian Creativity: A Response to Satoshi Kanazawa, by Geoffrey Miller

Abstract: This article responds to Satoshi Kanazawa’s thoughtful and entertaining comments about my article concerning the Asian future of evolutionary psychology. Contra Kanazawa’s argument that Asian cultural traditions and/or character inhibit Asian scientific creativity, I review historical evidence of high Asian creativity, and psychometric evidence of high Asian intelligence (a cognitive trait) and openness to experience (a personality trait) – two key components of creativity. ..."

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/06/spent-miller-and-kanazawa.html

[mike]

Obviously, the solution is to import a whole bunch of those optimistic Chinese!

[George]

Its sad.

The Chinese are smart and good at creating highly civilized, stable, but stagnant societies. They have never showed any ability to achieve creative ferment, and it is unrealistic to expect them to suddenly develop this ability.

Whatever mysterious factor is keeping Asians back from being creative and achieving at a level their intelligence would predict - and I admit I have no idea what the mysterious factor is - it is an undoubted fact. To this day Asians lag in creativity, EVEN second and third generation American Asians.

Its depressing - once the West vanishes, where will the next wave of human progress come from?

Im not racist in the sense that I seek to promote the interests of my race - such a view seems a product of an unsophisticated mentality. I think the only view an intelligent and educated man grounded in science and able to think in complex terms can have is to see humanity as a totality and seek to advance the interests of the species as a whole. The Greeks and Romans, the peoples before us who rose to the highest and most comprehensive vision of reality and the world before us, both shed their provincialism and embraced humanity as a totality, once they became mature.

It is depressing to me that Asians havent even been able to rise to the height of this vision of a common humanity and cling to a provincial ethnic nationalism - this suggests a lack of an ability to think in complex, comprehensive terms, and an inability to subdue primitive emotion. This says something about the limits of Asians ability to be civilized, something depressing.

The tragedy is that today in the West - when we have attained to the incredible sophistication and comprehensiveness of this vision - are busy destroying it by allowing in large amounts of people who do NOT SHARE this vision, and cleave to a narrow provincial ethnic nationalism.

Once these people overwhelm us, as they are sure to do, then the vision of a common humanity will vanish once again beneath a mass of struggling ethnic nationalisms.

The tragedy is that we didnt recognize that the way to promote the vision of common humanity was to admit the stark truth that for the moment, MOST OTHER PEOPLES SIMPLY DONT SHARE THAT VIEW, and that if we let them immigrate we must do so in small amounts and make every effort to make them assimilate into that view.

Accepting that ones allegiance should be to a common humanity doesnt mean I dont accept that races differ in abilities - I do - and that I dont oppose immigration of low IQ populations. In fact that is implied in my position - low IQ populations should of course be restricted in terms of immigration and should be treated carefully when allowed in in small numbers, if at all, simply in the interests of creating an advanced society.

My concerns is to see the human species make a new advance - and I dont care if its done by Chine or by Westerners. But the Chinese dont seem to have the right stuff, and the West is dead and bent on destroying itself.

So where - and in how long - will the next advance arise?

[Felix]

Some good points about China. But they've got a demographic time bomb caused by the one child policy. If their population base decreases, they're in for tough times.

And the one child policy has also resulted in the "little emperor" syndrome, with Chinese kids being coddled and turning into clones of spoilt American brats.

To take up Steve Johnson's points, the answer to the riddle is partly that "almost half the children in America today are from the genetic stock of the poorest Mexicans".

But another part of the answer is that liberal policies are gutting the American education system. Kids are not taught to work and think hard. And they're not doing the tough subjects, math and science.

[kurt9]

George makes some relevant points here. The East Asians are certainly capable of creativity, but they lack the pioneering spirit which used to define America. For that matter, the vast majority of "white" people also lack the pioneering spirit.

I am slowing coming to the conviction that transhumanism, as a meme and a movement, is the only thing that can save Western civilization and the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, many people here at home seem to be hostile towards it.

[Different idea]

Once upon time, Romans and Greeks looked at themself as only people of creativity. The vast north is only land for primitive, uncreative barbarians. So do some modern westerns.

[S]

"Im not racist in the sense that I seek to promote the interests of my race - such a view seems a product of an unsophisticated mentality. I think the only view an intelligent and educated man grounded in science and able to think in complex terms can have is to see humanity as a totality and seek to advance the interests of the species as a whole."
..."Once these people overwhelm us, as they are sure to do, then the vision of a common humanity will vanish once again beneath a mass of struggling..."

George,

You realize you've just made, to yourself, all the very same arguments those awful, racist, colonizing, supremacist Dead White Males made to themselves?
They saw themselves -- because they realized they were the only ones capable -- responsible for improving the morality and welfare of the lesser races.
They called it "The White Man's Burden."

"The practice of sati, and its later legal abolition by the British (along with the suppression of the thuggee) went on to become one of the standard justifications for British rule. British attitudes in their later history in India are usually given in the following much repeated quote, usually ascribed to General Napier -

"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours"

[pzed]

those fine upstanding western brits also saw fit to force chinese to buy opium with a gun pointed at their head. that's so wonderfully civilized and demonstrates that westerners seek to benefit humanity as a whole.

oh, but u say whites aren't like that anymore? it's only been 15 years since apartheid ended and 50ish since segregation.

and those wonderful romans! their favorite spectator sport was watching ppl kill each other in an arena. their most famous method of execution was crucifixion which they used on those oh-so-terrible threats to civilization, the christians. common humanity my ass.

[Kirk]

I fear that we will no longer be a nation that builds much, or accomplishes much. Space programs, a military, and non-medical research will all dwindle.

We will, instead, continue to gravitate towards being a nation that tends to the elderly. This will kill younger generations--untold billions of dollars for medicare will never be enough, not when the elderly just insist on more.

Can't afford a baby? Tough shit.

And as this nation focuses more and more on the elderly, it will become elderly. Like in Western Europe, depopulation will wreak havoc.

And please don't tell me about how the Mexicans will rescue us from this. Italy is predominantly Catholic, yet in some places there, for every child under the age of five, there are 25 people over the age of fifty.

[Melykin]

The main thing that is holding China back is corruption, which pervades every aspect of life in China. Unless they get a grip on that, there universities, for example, will never be world class. At all the universities in China you can bribe your way to any degree you want. How could any research coming from such a place be respected?

This is why so many of them come to the west to attend university, and this is why even degrees from the small university I work at in Canada are considered more valuable, apparently, than degrees from China.

Our faculty can't be bought, and we stamp out cheating in every way we can. Our integrity is almost the only valuable thing we have now in the west. Hold fast to it.

If you look at the map at Transparency.org, you will see that most of the world is very corrupt. The least corrupt places are the historically Protestant countries of Europe, and places populated with diaspora of that Protestant stock such as Canada, New Zealand, USA and Australia. And it is to these countries that most of the people in the other countries want to move. But if they move here in great numbers (as they are presently doing) and bring their lousy ethics with them (as many of them are presently doing) we are all screwed.