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.

 

22 Responses to “People of negative economic value”

  1. […] of society economically redundant. Jim has also been talking about the costs posed by “people of negative economic value” (or, with his signature delicacy, ‘the moron […]

  2. jim says:

    But in South Africa, you cannot live without fear, in the sense that the crime rate against whites is extraordinarily high, approaching genocide or ethnic cleansing in rural areas.

    The white population of South Africa is declining and will, if present trends continue, be eventually eliminated, Rhodesia style, in the not very distant future.

  3. Mike Mellor says:

    Jim, if you saw the movie District 9 then possibly you also saw The Road, the movie of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic book.

    The Road asks the question, What makes us human? We start out with a nameless Man who will do anything to protect his son. Along the road we visit a house where people are imprisoned in a cellar and every day their cannibal captors remove a limb from this person or that. But, the way it is presented, we feel not pity for the victims, but horror. Living down there in the dark like maggots they are literally sub-humans.

    This is an important moment in the process of the Man of the story becoming less human himself. Instead of helping the prisoners, out of fear he condemns them to death.

    Now I’m not going to take a work of fiction like a movie and pretend that it offers lessons superior to those we learn in real life. But because The Road presents a borderline case, far from equilibrium, right on the edge of chaos, it can help us to define concepts like humanity, fatherhood, and morality.

    But from my own nearly 40 years of living as a privileged white in apartheid South Africa I can confirm that fear underlies all racial hatred.

    Twenty years down the line I can also confirm that South Africa is working much better now. To be honest, yes, there are things about black culture that infuriate me but when I work next to a black person I like the feeling that we can trust each other and relate as humans.

    Blacks want exactly the same things that whites do. Most of them love finding that whites are not all monsters, the same way that whites love finding that blacks are not all boogeymen. Life is so much more pleasant when you can live without fear.

  4. Red says:

    If you want an example take a look at Mexico. Since they’ve sent most of their worst people the US the country has improve economically year after during a US induced civil war with the drug cartels.

  5. Bill says:

    through the supposedly peaceful political process of voting

    Oddly, I think you underemphasize this point. Colonial Africa worked pretty well. Rhodesia worked pretty well. Apartheid S Africa worked pretty well. All these people you seem to think must have negative value, didn’t. Everyone’s value is relative to the institutions they live in.

  6. Leonard says:

    You seem to think there is a large class of people who are unemployable but not criminal. This is true in our current circumstance. Bezonians. But circumstances would be different in anarchocapitalism or in a neocameral state. I do not think that they would have anywhere near as many bezonians as you do.

    There would still be some, of course.

    Anarchocapitalism would let such people starve, or give them charity. If it is a very large class the starvation would be trying (causing many bezonians to turn criminal) and might result in the demise of the system. But that’s what the logic of it says happens.

    Neocameralism deals with the problem arguably better, in that it can create laws to internalize externalities, which AC cannot do. So, perhaps it is cheaper to maintain bezonians on welfare after neutering them. (Rather than paying for large police forces.) Or perhaps it is cheaper to kill them all. Neocameralism might provide welfare or inflict genocide, according to the rational calculation of the CEO. It can also do whatever AC does, and that’s probably what it would do unless the class of bezonians was much larger than I think.

    Moldbug argued that bezonians should be virtualized. This strikes me as ridiculous, one of the few things Moldy has said in that category. It is far easier to impose legal sanctions on someone than it is to invent a new technology, and pay for it for the rest of his life.

    • guest says:

      Anarchocapitalism would let such people starve, or give them charity. If it is a very large class the starvation would be trying (causing many bezonians to turn criminal) and might result in the demise of the system. But that’s what the logic of it says happens.

      There are plenty of commons for the poor to homestead, if government would just get out of the way.

      Also, under anarcho-capitalism, there would be plenty of stray animals to farm on those commons.

      • jim says:

        There are plenty of commons for the poor to homestead, if government would just get out of the way

        In substantial part, the poor are poor because they lack the necessary abilities to competently utilize resources, and are disinclined to accept leadership and supervision by their betters.

  7. Candide III says:

    Yet despite these extremely vigorous measures against people of small or negative economic value, the ruling whites feared the “idle and the restless”

    This doesn’t prove anything about the remaining population by itself. Japan is by all accounts a very safe country, yet to listen to all the Japanese warnings and moanings about how unsafe it is! When a new acquaintance starts telling me how Japan is not as safe as the gaijin seem to think it is — why, you might get mugged if you go into Kabukicho by night, drink yourself senseless and start abusing people! — aargh. However, the thing is Japan is a very safe country because they worry about stuff and take measures.

    • spandrell says:

      Funny thing is all stats say that the crime rate has been decreasing forever. And that’s with a million Chinese lurking around. Low fertility helps of course.

      • jim says:

        I don’t think so. Imprisonment rate has been going up and up and up. Murder rate has been going up and down, but largely up. Indictable offenses have increased hugely.

        See page 14 of this pdf

        World wide, and in the anglosphere, private crime and governmental crime is soaring out of sight.

  8. […] People of negative economic value « Jim’s Blog […]

  9. spandrell says:

    Why call them subhumans? They are arguably a big majority of humanity. Might as well call high-IQ people superhumans.

  10. guest says:

    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.

    System-wide negative externalities are the fault of government interventions, rather than the average IQ or skin color.

    The solution is not government intervention, but for government to protect property rights and to stay out of the economy.

    The minimum wage keeps unskilled labor unemployed, while government interventions in the housing market remove the profit motive from those who would be willing to build smaller homes for lower wage earners (economy of scale).

    These are relevant free market perspectives, if anyone’s interested:

    How to Reach the Left | Roderick T. Long
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4hjO1ak4_M

    Defending the Undefendable (Chapter 20: The Slumlord) by Walter Block
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhURIycWHRI

    • jim says:

      What is the libertarian solution to people who pass out in railway stations, and when woken up, start fighting?

      Well, obviously, the libertarian solution is that the railroad can do what it likes with such people. Lets sell them into slavery. Oops, no one is buying, because slavery is uneconomic these days.

      Suppose you have people who do not live by working. You can be pretty sure that whatever means they are using to live are likely to be causing problems to other people. It is that whole “no visible means of support” problem. If someone has an invisible means of support, it is probably because he does not want people to see what it is.

      Now this is profiling: If someone fits certain characteristics, you ask how he feeds himself. If he has no answer … you probably don’t want him feeding himself that way.

      The ultimate libertarian solution is anarcho capitalism, where the streets are privately owned. Suburban streets are privately owned by the residents or a corporation in which they are shareholders, the shops are all in malls. OK. You own a street or a mall. Do you want people with no visible means of support on your streets? You are going to move them somewhere out of sight and out of mind and make sure they stay there.

      • Jehu says:

        Libertarianism would work fine in a society composed of nothing but INTJs with IQ>115. Unfortunately that demographic mix exists nowhere outside a few hothouses.

        • jim says:

          I think the difference between libertarianism and moldbuggery, is that Moldbug wants the state off his back, and on some other people’s backs.

          He wants the state off the backs of people who work and save, and on the backs of people who will fight when they are woken up in a railway station.

          If you have had a traffic accident in California that destroyed your car and endangered your life, as I have, chances are that the other driver was at fault, spoke little English, had no driver’s license, no insurance, no ID – and the police let him off, because he is part of the permanent electoral majority, and I am part of the permanent electoral minority.

          We cannot deport a wetback who is a threat to the lives of everyone on the road, because he will in due course become, or father, a Democrat voter.

          People say we need the state to make sure we are qualified to drive before we get on the roads. There is, however, no need for the state to check that wetbacks are qualified to drive before they get on the roads. For them, it is indeed Libertopia while for me it is despotism.

          The idea of treating the superior equally to the inferior was always a bad idea, and quite inevitably and predictably turned into systematically elevating the inferior over the superior – as gets demonstrated with great regularity on California roads. If the superior are not going to get equality, they should not concede equality.

          The state is on my back, and it is not on his back. It does not need to be on my back, because I would not drive if not safe to do so. It does need to be on his back, because if he is allowed to make his own decisions he will probably kill himself and kill someone like me in the process, so someone else needs to make his decisions for him. Instead, the state makes my decisions for me.

          The early advocates of democracy argued that the masses would always vote libertarian, because no one likes other people making decisions for them. They almost got it right. The people always vote for the state making decisions for the permanent minority, but not, however, for the permanent majority, a situation that has reached its logical conclusion on California’s roads.

          Should I drive without a license on California roads it is a criminal offense, not just a mere traffic infringement, but, in practice, not for hispanics. If it was enforced on hispanics, they would carry Mexican driver’s licenses.

          • guest says:

            If you have had a traffic accident in California that destroyed your car and endangered your life, as I have, chances are that the other driver was at fault, spoke little English, had no driver’s license, no insurance, no ID – and the police let him off, because he is part of the permanent electoral majority, and I am part of the permanent electoral minority.

            Proper enforcement of private property rights would see the offender having to work off his debt to you.

            The flip side, though, is that, except when an owner of private property has made car insurance a requirement for driving on it, a car owner is under no obligation to be insured.

            • jim says:

              But if mestizos are equal to whites, whites will not be equal to mestizos, because you do not get proper enforcement of property rights.

          • guest says:

            The reason mestizos are paid attention to by politicians is because they can be used to justify more spending on an unnecessary bureaucracy.

            If we get rid of the bureaucracy, then selective enforcement of property rights will end, because there will not exist an agency to be captured by special interests.

      • guest says:

        The ultimate libertarian solution is anarcho capitalism, where the streets are privately owned.

        OK. You own a street or a mall. Do you want people with no visible means of support on your streets? You are going to move them somewhere out of sight and out of mind and make sure they stay there.

        True, but the owner has a right to do so, as a matter of property rights; whereas “the collective” does not, since Majority does not equal Authority.

        And people have a right to defend themselves if attacked, so it wouldn’t be wrong for a railway station owner to arm himself when waking up someone who is sleeping on their railway station.

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