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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33489 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Low effort but CW so it goes here. Its the end of the week anyways.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/115vdud/looking_for_recommendations_on_sources_for_why/

It seems to me the slatestarcodex subreddit has been fully normified. Of all those comments only 1 mention (hint) of group average IQ on why sub saharan Africa is poor??

Then theres the "woah how did you get here, you dont belong here" as a response to the guy who hinted at IQ. Does that guy even know whose blog he is in the subreddit of.

All I am saying is for those of you who still say /r/ssc is "smart", update your priors, this post is not an isolated case.

E: Ill remove if consensus building.

For context, OP (Matt Lakeman) is an old ex-regular who has an amazing blog dedicated mostly to international travel, reading on historical stuff and self-experiments. He's been to the Dominican Republic, among other places. He was not impressed. As one can expect, there's a section on the Haiti, with passages like:

Haiti was my first destination choice for this trip. But when I Googled “Haiti,” the top news story was about 17 American and Canadian missionaries being kidnapped by a Haitian gang and held for $17 million ransom. So I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to go to Haiti at the moment.

I don’t know why the two countries have diverged so dramatically. Noah Smith says no one knows the cause of the split, but it’s probably some combination of Haiti starting its independence with enormous national debt (as part of a settlement with former colonial master France), terrible land management policies, the ongoing toll of the U.S. occupation for twenty years (the Dominican Republic was invaded too, but only for eight years), constant regime change, and generally abysmal macroeconomic policy. One Dominican I talked to attributed the country’s success to mid-century dictator Rafel Truillo, who was authoritarian and oppressive (and renamed the capital after himself), but allegedly brought enough order to the country to attract foreign investment and jump start the modern tourist economy. Also, for geographic/climate reasons, Haiti gets hit far more and far harder by natural disasters than the Dominican Republic.

By chance, I spent some time with two European aid workers stationed in Haiti. Their strong consensus was that Haiti was even worse than I had imagined. Worse than anyone imagines. And it has no viable recovery plan. A few interesting things they told me:

[...]

Law and order is non-existent in the cities. There is no point in reporting crimes. The cities are essentially in a state of anarchy.

The lawlessness has gotten worse over the last few years. The two used to be able to go to restaurants and jazz clubs, but now they don’t leave their homes at night.

Taxes are not paid in Haiti (duh). But if for some reason someone wants to pay taxes in Haiti, they first have to bribe the security guards at the doors of the tax offices.

When the Haitian people get pissed off at the government, their only viable means of protest is to block roads. So they’ll cut down trees or light tires on fire and cut off major highways. There is literally no process in place for the Haitian government to clear these blockages.

The Haitian people are consumed by “fake news.” Rival political factions run radio stations and Whatsapp groups, and spread fake news to vilify the opposition and/or foreigners. The fake news is so rampant that the average Haitian seems to have a completely deluded view of politics and the world at large.

It's a mystery indeed!

By the way, Scott's trip to Haiti was what opened his eyes to biodeterminism. (this reminds me of that old text of a guy who became racist after going on a humanitarian mission to Africa, there was an incredibly parable-like bit where he helped some local set up a food stall with baked bread, but his relative came and said «you have bread! My family needs bread!», took everything – you can't deny your family – so the guy went bankrupt and never did business again; lost it again and search engines are... uncooperative). Maybe Matt should've gone after all and written something in his usual manner.

...But also.

IQ is not a mechanistic explanation. All the politically correct stuff he asks about – governments, [inability to make use of] climate, culture – are in the end products of IQ but can be studied separately. IQ only tells us why it's so inescapably and consistently bad. But then an informed person would ask: why is Russia or Ukraine or Belarus like that? Why is China like that? Why is Iran like that? Sure it's not Sub-Saharan Africa, but aren't these people clearly smart enough to at least do better than what they show? And why are they worse than, like, Portugal? So IQ can't be the full story; and so long as this is the case, one has enough wiggle room to not notice the elephant.

As I've just argued, tabooing HBD destroys a great deal more than understanding of stuff that pertains directly to HBD. It lowers the effective IQ of the group, and much faster than dysgenics. Regarding the normiefication of the sub, you're obviously correct, but barely-challenged mentions of Jared Diamond, who is an utter fraud and a just-so storyteller, are even more telling. AskHistorians link is okay. Here's a good discussion of his GGS by that Russian biologist who wrote a Tolkien fanfic from Mordor's perspective, if anyone is interested, I can... proofread Deepl/ChatGPT translation.

I think it's possibly a factor, I don't think that it's the dominant factor.

GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa varies from the $400s (Somalia, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic etc.) to $6500-9000 (Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, and Botswana). That's higher than some European countries (Albania, Azerbaijan, Armenia). Let's rule out Gabon and Equatorial Guinea as examples of GDP being misleading, since their actual "development" in any normal sense is pathetic. Let's also exclude South Africa as only recently an African-governed society. That still leaves Botswana as a huge outlier. Botswana is (a) overwhelmingly African and (b) its most important resource is diamonds, which is very badly correlated with development elsewhere. So a lot of the variance between Africa and the poorer parts of Europe can be explained by other factors - including Botswana's relatively good economic, political, and social policies.

Africa is a basket case, but so was China until recently, despite high IQs. Additionally, the European or East Asian genetics for IQs have presumably not undergone any massive transformations in the past 500 years, but the discontinuity in the rate economic development with all of previous economic history is huge.

At most, a genetic tendency to high IQ would be comparable to a natural resource. That can be good! For example, Norway has been able to turn its oil into extreme economic development. Venezuela has not. Countries with very limited natural resources have done well. Botswana has done well with a low IQ level by global standards, though IIRC Botswana's IQ is rising relative to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa due to the better childhood nutrition that comes with development.

I don't know of good evidence that the full awfulness of Sub-Saharan African development needs to be explained by IQ, rather than historical factors (it's hard to imagine Liberia ever being a great comparative success when you know its history) or policy factors (Africa had the misfortune to become independent in the heyday of socialism, dirigism, and Cold War power politics that led even the democratic countries to support dictators).

In addition to what @No_one said, China also has to be graded on a curve because before their recent rise the last hundred years or so had been absolutely awful:

*Great Leap Forward: tens of millions starved

*Korean War intervention: ~180,000 Chinese military casualties

*WWII (chinese theater): tens of millions killed, plus huge swathes of the country's vital agricultural instrastructure purposefully destroyed as a military tactic.

*"Boxer" Rebellion: hundreds of thousands killed/displaced

*Taiping Rebellion: tens of millions killed, tens of millions displaced, major portions of southern China depopulated - literally the worst civil war in human history that we know of.

Plus all the internecine fighting between factions, attempted/successful revolutions, several minor wars fought on Chinese soil (Russo-Japanese war, first Sino-Japanese war), and a normal dose of the floodings, droughts, and other natural disasters that have punctuated Chinese history.

China had one of the worst stretches any civilization has ever had, to my reckoning. Getting conquered by the Mongols again probably would have been significantly preferable. Honestly, I'm kindof amazed that there still is a china after all that. A lot of ruin in a nation, indeed.

So there's been a lot of instability, wars, and bad policies in China?

If these are sufficiently retarding to hold back China until the 1980s, then why aren't the instability, wars, and bad policies in Sub-Saharan sufficient to explain more or less all of its backwardness? When Sub-Saharan Africa has had stability, peace, and relatively good policies, it's prospered more than China: see Botswana. And I don't accept Botswana's diamonds as an explanation: if there's one thing that we know about economics, it's that tremendous natural resources are not sufficient for development, and in much of Africa they seem to be a curse (see the DRC or Zimbabwe).

The answer is that none of this is true, China was literally never (in historical record) as backward as Africa, despite value judgements of some racist whites who pooh-poohed remarkable Chinese traits as «mere» industriousness and servility or some such. China was in a very bad place very recently; but it has not been barbaric for millenia.

It's disingenuous to compare, say, modern North Korea (73 years life expectancy, universal literacy, zero AIDS, regimented functional society, nukes, ≈$1300 GDP per capita) and Mozambique (61 years life expectancy, 63.42% literacy, 13% AIDS, anarcho-tyranny, no industry, $1300 GDP per capita), and claim this is an argument against HBD. This is an argument against GDP, if anything. Likewise disingenuous, only for more complex reasons, to compare China and Africa as a whole.

When Sub-Saharan Africa has had stability, peace, and relatively good policies, it's prospered more than China: see Botswana. And I don't accept Botswana's diamonds as an explanation

See what?

65 years life expectancy, 86.82% literacy, 20.8% AIDS, all economy runs on a De Beers mining contract. Botswana is maybe a big success by African standards, but that success belies the hypothesis that Africans with unusually good policies would just converge with non-Africans in all other things that matter – matter for maintaining stability, peace and good policies, too. So it will not be a huge surprise if Botswana one day just fails.

Why are you pointing out AIDS? Like, yeah, it's a problem, but I'm not sure it's in the top 10 priorities for nations to worry about. And I'm skeptical that North Korea is at 0% anyways.

China was literally never (in historical record) as backward as Africa

I never said that it was.

It's disingenuous to compare, say, modern North Korea (73 years life expectancy, universal literacy, zero AIDS, regimented functional society, nukes, ≈$1300 GDP per capita) and Mozambique (61 years life expectancy, 63.42% literacy, 13% AIDS, anarcho-tyranny, no industry, $1300 GDP per capita),

Good thing I didn't make that comparison.

claim this is an argument against HBD

Who is arguing against HBD? I never questioned it. The point is that, with respect to economic success or failure, there just isn't a lot or anything for HBD to explain once you account for bad policies and history. Bizzarely, many responses have been "Ah, but those facts you cite are due to bad policies and history."

See what?

My figures were out of date: in terms of GDP per capita, China has caught up with Botswana in the past 10 years. However, at Botswana's independence in the late 1960s, they were the same, and until recently, China was behind:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=10gui

China is ranked 31st for "Ease of Doing Business", Botswana is ranked 87th. So, even in China's catch-up, there just doesn't seem to be much if anything for HBD to explain. That doesn't mean that HBD is false, and AFAIK the evidence for HBD is psychometric rather than macroeconomic (and much the better for that fact). What doesn't do well is trying to explain differences in the wealth of nations in terms of IQ rather than cultural and historical explanations.

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