Accepting Individualism is almost impossible because differences don’t just reflect our ideals but define our individuality.
Far from promising peace, Lennon who sang of no countries was really threatening us all with unspeakable violence, psychic and physical. No borders means anything goes, a pure description for disaster. No laws; no rules; no normal and we need normal to survive.
From The Hive Mind, UNZ review; “smarter groups of people are more creative, cooperative, more patient, and more likely to choose correct policies through the political process. All of these facts have important economic implications.
“If it takes two people one hour to make a vase but when worker drops the vase, it is ruined. If a company has four workers, two of them high quality individuals (Hi) that never drop a vase, and two low quality workers (Lo) who drop a vase 50 percent of the time. How should you split up the teams to maximize efficiency?
“If you put a Hi and a Lo together you get two teams with a 50% success rate each, and they make an average of one vase per hour. But if you pair Hi with Hi and Lo with Lo, you will end up with an average of 1.25 vases per hour, based on the success rate of the Hi team of 100% and the success rate of the Lo team of 25%.
“Society as a whole gains when the highest quality workers are on the same team. Societies with lower IQs have many inefficient industries.
“Society as a whole gains when the highest quality workers are on the same team. Societies with lower IQs have many inefficient industries.
When considering crime, society must take into account the capabilities of the most dangerous members. Public schools dedicated to educating all children must dumb the curriculum down so as not to leave behind the dullest students. And, as can be seen today in many universities, the level of discourse of a community is sometimes held hostage to the most disruptive, and often mentally ill, activists.
The worst people have a wildly disproportionate effect on the overall standard of living. The lower a country’s average IQ, the more people you have on the extreme left end of the bell curve. Furthermore, higher IQ groups, by having individuals who are better behaved, create conformity norms that create positive externalities for the rest of society.
The evidence should lead most rational observers to the conclusion that genetics are a major driving force behind group differences in IQ. The discussion on sub-Sahara Africa is particularly illuminating. Richard Lynn and others have argued that the average IQ of that region of the world is about 67. Although critics contend that Lynn relies on flawed studies, when Dutch psychologist Jelte Wicherts and his coauthors went back and eliminated the studies that they thought were of low quality, they came up with an estimate of 82.[ A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 2010 PDF] As Jones points out, that means that at best the average sub-Saharan African is at about the 12th percentile relative to Western populations.
While it may seem reasonable to think that poverty is the reason that African IQs are so low, Jones notes that already by the 1960s scholars were struck that residents of Taiwan and Hong Kong, despite living in extreme poverty, had IQ scores that were higher than the European average. China remains poor by Western standards,yet outscores all non-East Asian countries that are at a similar level of development. The hypothesis that wealth is the primary reason behind group differences cannot account for these facts, while a theory that genetics cause such disparities can.
The implications of all this for the immigration debate seem pretty straightforward. Yet after about 160 pages arguing that low IQ individuals make their society worse, Jones ends his book by calling for more immigration from poorer countries! His argument: moving people to richer countries is a surefire way to improve their income. To be fair, Jones does also go on to say that in the long run this can degrade the institutions of the receiving countries, but he appears to on balance think that wide scale immigration to the developed world does more good than harm.
So do immigration patriots have any ways to answer this kind of case for immigration, made in universalist terms? After all, many who examine Jones’s evidence will arrive at the opposite of his conclusions.
And indeed, it seems even Jones may have changed his mind in the time since he wrote the book. He is now arguing that if immigrants cause the slightest decline in the institutions of First World countries and if this reduces research and innovation, that alone may pretty quickly wipe out the gains to the immigrants themselves. [Are the global benefits of open borders a fallacy of composition? Three examples,by Garett Jones June 2017]
Even those who believe that it is immoral to prioritize the well-being of one’s fellow citizens should consider how mass migration might threaten the values and progress that all reasonable people hold dear.
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