People of negative economic value

The racial problem is that stupid people can vote, that incentives for good behavior are weak or nonexistent, and that some people are unresponsive to incentives.  Stop voting, ensure that everyone has good incentives, and then the problem is reduced those people unresponsive to incentives, a markedly smaller problem.

Nations with slightly higher IQ are markedly wealthier than nations with lower IQ, but individuals with markedly higher IQ are not markedly wealthier than individuals with markedly lower IQ.

The difference between nations is well approximated if we suppose that people with an IQ above 105 all have roughly comparable productivity, and are responsible for producing almost everything, and people with IQ below 105 have negligible productivity, and are all parasites.  But individual wages do not fit this picture. Obviously a low IQ person who is working for a living in private enterprise must be producing value at least equal to his wages.

Moving from a nation with low average IQ to a nation with high average IQ substantially benefits the migrant.  No one wants to move in the other direction.

This only makes sense if people with high average IQ produce large benefits to those around them, and people with low average IQ produce large costs to those around them, negative externalities. 

A family with an income of about sixty thousand is arguably better off not working.  Thus an IQ of 105 is about the IQ where a man is likely to be earning enough money for it to be financially sensible for a woman to marry him and stay married to him and become a housewife for much of her life, rather than “marrying” Uncle Sam The Big Pimp.  It is about the IQ where it becomes sensible to work, rather than be a parasite.   Of course there are lots of people with an IQ well below 105 who work, but they tend to be looked down on as chumps, rednecks etc.  Our ruling elite does not much like such people.  Pop music is apt to denigrate them, television shows condescend to them. The show “Married with Children” implied that no one from the wrong side of the bell curve should get married or hold down a job.

That people with high average IQ benefit everyone is obvious, particularly in the extreme cases, for example Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

But what about the reverse, costs?

Obviously working people with IQ below 105 must be producing something, or else no one would pay them, but to fit the observed distribution, that contribution must be cancelled out on average by the negative externalities produced by low IQ people, and especially the negative externalities produced by non working low IQ people.

That the problem is externalities fits the fact that low IQ people can still get jobs, and also the fact that it is a good idea to be surrounded by high IQ people and a bad idea to be surrounded by stupid people, explains “white privilege”.   Blacks prefer to hang out with blacks, but hanging out with low IQ people has bad consequences.

Repeating in slightly different words:  The observed distribution of national GDPs makes sense if those stupid people with jobs are producing value similar to their wages, but have negative externalities, and those stupid people without jobs are producing nothing, and have larger negative externalities that cancel out the production of working people with IQ below 105.

Stupid people produce negative externalities.

• Directly through bad work performance, as for example with government employees, who tend to be low performing members of low performing racial voting blocks, for example the American DMV and TSA.  It is far more unpleasant to go through US airport security than Israeli airport security, because Israeli airport security is operated by humans, and US airport security by subhumans.
• By being individually and personally unemployable in private enterprise.  Many people, a great many people, due to stupidity, a propensity to punch out their boss or customers, steal stuff, or a time preference too short to allow them to contract to exchange labor for money, just cannot work for a living in private employment, and instead live on welfare, government employment, crime, and so on and so forth, producing a wide variety of negative externalities.
• Directly through crime. Subhumans render places unsafe and unpleasant.
• Directly through political redistribution, through the supposedly peaceful political process of voting, through rioting, and through the threat of rioting.  Detroit was destroyed by individual crimes, by voting for criminals and more crime, through routine arson, through large scale rioting managed by community organizers with the collaboration and support of police, and through supposedly peaceful political and legal changes obtained by voting under the continual threat of more riots and more arson.
• Through the bad apple effect, that people learn from each other.  A black person who passes out drunk in a public place is apt to get violent when woken up by a guard, and a person who is culturally raised as a black is likely to take his example from the high status people in his environment (thugs), and thus pass out drunk in a public place, and become belligerent when woken up by a guard.  Someone raised white is substantially less likely to pass out drunk in a public place, and if woken up by a guard, more likely to be apologetic about it.  Stupid people tend to set an example that people around them are apt to follow, thus have a negative externality by their social influence.  The man raised white, when a policeman stops him, imitates his dad or his employer.  The man raised black, when a policeman stops him, imitates what he thinks a thug or a pimp would do.
• Because stupid excludes smart:  Academia these days values conformity more than performance.  The dumber the average, the less smart people conform, and thus the more smart people are excluded from Academia, and thus from the elite.
• Bad average effect:  A high IQ person cannot communicate over too great a difference, thus high IQ people among a mass of stupids are rendered isolated and ineffectual (nerds).

Negative externalities need to be met by political control of those producing negative externalities, by measures against people causing negative externalities, a doctrine you have doubtless heard from every leftist complaining about pollution.  It provides an intelligent rationale for intelligent people to justify meddling in other people’s affairs, leading to leftists discovering ever more new forms of pollution whose effects are ever less significant, and whose clean up costs victimize ever increasing numbers of people, and render those people ever less free.  At present, the regulated levels of most major pollutants are about one thousandth the levels that produce statistically noticeable effects, or they regulate things like dust that are probably not much influenced by human activity.

It also provides an intelligent rationale for dealing with problem groups, which produce much greater externalities than any pollutant that the left can dream up.   If we don’t need to do anything about problem groups, we don’t need to do anything about pollution.

Conversely, if you claim that your ideal society will be able to deal with some externalities, for example anarcho capitalism can deal pretty effectively with major point sources of pollution, though not with diffuse sources of pollution, then your ideal society really should do something in at least some ways about at least some problem groups.

Anarchocapitalists tend to assume that everyone has positive economic value, or savings, or insurance, or a support network, and those that do not are sufficiently few, and sufficiently appealing (the deserving poor) to be taken care of by private charity.

But, what, however about the undeserving poor?  For example people who are not only stupid, but whose stupidity inclines them to display unpleasant personal characteristics at inopportune times, such as during job interviews or conversations with police or guards.  By and large, the people who are unemployable at any wage, any job, are for the most part not only stupid but also scary, unpleasant, menacing, nasty people.

People of negative economic value tend to be overwhelmingly of certain races and not others, for both genetic and cultural reasons, thus the difficult to see and measure problem of people of negative economic value tends to manifest as the highly visible problem of race. To suppose that all people of one race have positive economic value is clearly false, and to suppose that all people of another race have negative economic value is clearly ridiculous, but nonetheless any measure that efficiently addresses the problem of people of negative economic value is going to have radically disparate impact, and thus will look racist, and indeed, will be racist, racist in the old fashioned colonialist style, will occasionally result in terrible things happening where the victims of those terrible things are almost all of a particular race.

In the West Indies as depicted in the book “the west indies as they are”, if I correctly understand his depiction of the workhouse, it took a firm hand with the idle.  The workhouse functioned rather as a nokill dogpound does today.  An occupant was likely to be sold into slavery, or if he could not be sold, given away into slavery, or if he could not be given away, his owner or former owner would be found and forced to take him back or pay for his support.  And if all else failed, then the county would pay to support him and detain him.

Yet despite these extremely vigorous measures against people of small or negative economic value,  the ruling whites feared the “idle and the restless” – a mostly black population of freemen.

It seems that in the West Indies, despite the option of forcing people to work under the whip, and despite the fact that a primitive low tech economy has plenty of mindless brute force work suitable for work under the whip, a significant number of blacks still had negative economic value even as slave laborers, enough of them to be a problem.  They had not done anything wrong enough to justify killing them, or even severely punishing them, yet, somehow, managed to make themselves thoroughly unwanted.

With the improvement in technology, the proportion of people, and especially the proportion of blacks and mestizos, who are of no economic value, useless to a non government employer, must be much larger than it used to be, and the option of selling useless people into slavery, or giving them away into slavery like a dog pound for humans, less appealing than it used to be – and it was not really sufficiently appealing even in the West Indies.

What abolished slavery was not meddling do gooders, but improving technology.  Slavery in Europe largely ended as a result of the invention of the horse collar, which made it possible for a horse to do much of the work that had formerly been suitable for slaves, and the problem of useless unwanted people has been getting steadily worse since then.

It used to be that slavery gave private enterprise the incentive to look after, protect, and supervise, problem people.  Now, however, less incentive, so what do you do with problem people?

Slavery was not a primarily a product of slaver raiders, but rather problem populations.  Suppose you were a cattle rancher in Africa, a Tutsi or a white settler.  Primitive people keep eating your cattle.  What do you do with them?  You hold a roundup, and then march them off to anyone who will take them.  If no one takes them, you have to kill them, which may make subsequent roundups difficult.  The value of slaves near the point of capture was usually  low, zero or negative.

Ever since the development of the horse collar, the problem of what to with unwanted problem populations has become more difficult.

I don’t think slavery is immoral.  Many people are naturally slaves.  What is immoral is enslaving someone who is not naturally a slave.  Rather, the problem with slavery is that because there is less and less work that can be usefully done by someone who is whipped into doing it, slavery has ceased to be a useful solution to problem populations, to people who cause problems and reduce other people’s standard of living.

Slavery used to be a useful and necessary institution for disposing of and taking care of those that were no #@^&*# good.  Its abolition was premature.  That slavery is now considerably less useful leaves us with big problems.

One solution to this problem is the casual and frequent use of execution as in the middle ages, but, of course, the problem with that is:  who do we trust to execute the right people?  They might execute the wrong people!

Another solution is segregation:  You send all the presumably useless people (profiling, discrimination) into certain suburbs (segregation), and don’t let them out, except that they get jobs in suburbs where the useful people live.  Although it is no longer economically viable for private enterprise to take care of those that need whips to keep them adequately behaved, it is economically viable for private enterprise to sort out who respond to financial incentives for good behavior, and who will not.

Presumably those who will respond to financial incentives are better behaved, or capable of being induced to be better behaved, hence produce substantially smaller negative externalities.

If they burn down their own suburbs, you let them, if they start burning down other people’s suburbs, then proceed with warlike measures until peace is restored.  If they are particularly difficult, you intern the males in one area and the females in another or castrate those males that seem to be producing the greatest amount of difficulty.

Because slavery has become less useful than it used to be, probably need to rely on ethnic cleansing and segregation ameliorated with job based integration – people allowed to integrate if they get jobs, rather than integrating them by law and then manufacturing fake jobs for them.    People who are employable, though somewhat dimwitted, will still produce substantial negative externalities, probably negative externalities much higher than their wages, but removing the rapidly increasing category of those unemployable due to bad character will reduce these problems substantially.

In summary:

• All adult males should have financial incentives for good behavior and holding down a job, and all women should have financial incentives for good behavior and either holding down a job or being a good wife.
• We should try to exclude the stupid and include the smart by non coercive means.
• We should employ drastic and coercive means to exclude those too stupid or too obnoxious to respond to such incentives because such people generate large negative externalities. We should shove them somewhere out of sight and out of mind, and should they insist on obtruding on sight and mind, do whatever it takes to get them out of the way.

Racial problems will then disappear, except that such measures are apt to have grossly disparate impact on different races.The measures employed in the West Indies back in the days of slavery suggest that a significant proportion of blacks are unresponsive to incentives even when those incentives are extreme.