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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Personally I always thought Texas and other border states were just playing national politics with the border crisis. Creating a crisis as an issue to run for re-election on.

https://www.axios.com/2022/10/07/new-york-adams-emergency-migrant-buses

NYC has received 17k migrants since April. That seems tiny compared to what Texas has dealt with.

Adams said the city is receiving on average 5-6 buses a day. I will assume 40 people per bus or about 240 a day. That’s about 75k a year and he says it will cost the city a billion a year.

Now 75k a year of migrants is probably NYC fair share of migrants for how many are coming. NYC population around 9 million or 1/35 of the US.

He says it’s not an issue they asked for, but they did declare themselves a sanctuary city.

Maybe Adams is actually a Republican. Because his complaining is exactly what Republicans would want from busing them for political reasons. Conversely maybe Texas GOP complaining about migrants was not just politics but a real issue they were having trouble dealing with. I assumed it was politics.

I think this also shows some weaknesses with the blue city state capacity. The basic agreement before was we have some globally competitive people we can tax a lot to fund our local poor plus civil servants. Blue cities aren’t that good at building more housing and infrastructure anymore. It’s about $20k a year for them per migrant. Texas and the south can just give them a mortgage for $20k to buy a used a trailer and use their land which can house multiple people though jobs might be a problem theirs only so many meat processing plant and ranch hands you need.

Honestly NYC should just ship them to Chicago and write a $20k a head check. There’s plenty of abandoned property on the southside that needs people (though has violence issues but better than where they came from).

If Adams was going to be a good Democrat he should just pay the tab and tell Abbot he will take his proportional share.’

Does anyone have predictions on how this country will look when half of its citizens have a standard deviation lower IQ on average?

Let me rephrase this. Is there any way this won’t be a catastrophe which, in 500 years, people will look back on as a lesson in how nations fail? There’s no possible way that tens of millions of lower IQ people added to a nation is good for the nation, right?

What makes you think these migrants are a full standard deviation lower IQ? Particularly if you mean genetic potential IQ?

Also, the US hasn't even been a nation for 500 years. Indeed, few nations last that long. Making predictions about 500 years from now seems extremely overconfident.

We have studies on the IQ of native Americans, mestizos, indigenous Mexicans, and so on. By all accounts they are lower than the median iq in America. IQ isn’t everything, but successful countries all have high IQs and when countries become inundated with low iq citizens (South Africa) it makes pretty much everything worse off.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15688574/

https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/9/pdf

Your first study is of childhood IQ, which is known to be not nearly as heritable as adult IQ. It also cannot adjust for confounding factors such as malnutrition (which is generally not an issue in the First World, but Mexico is not that). Your second is Lynn, who I do not have great confidence in -- but also fails to show a full standard deviation.

Mexico is a fairly developed country which is poor and a failed state, but there’s not masses of people starving on the streets there.

These migrants come from Central America and Venezuela, and in border states are considered less assimilable than Mexicans and Caribbean Latinos. It’s not totally unreasonable to point to recent food shortages in Venezuela as depressing average IQ, but I believe Venezuelan and Honduran IQ’s were also quite a bit lower when they were ruled by US-backed dictatorships that consistently produced enough food for everyone.

Of course Hispanics also seem to interbreed with whites and be indistinguishable therefrom in a couple of generations, so YMMV.