George Rebane

[Apologies for the ragged composition of this commentary.  I thought it important enough to get it into the RR record, and invite comments/debate by those who care to consider something beyond current events.]

How many people are necessary for humans as a species to improve its aggregate quality of life and continue reaching for the stars as AI provides more and more of our fulfillment and wealth creating needs?

We know that the answer lies somewhere between ‘way too many’ to make us all poor and miserable living in a degraded environment, and ‘way too few’ to give the remainder a sense of being members of a vibrant, enriching, and achieving global community of multiple cultures.  What the actual bookend numbers are, no one knows beyond the ‘way too many’ and the ‘way too few’, quantities that are of little use in a reasoned discussion.

Some very smart people are again beginning to ask, ‘Why does America need more people?’  Before you blow that question off with hip-level answers like ‘we need more people to work and grow the economy’ or ‘we need more people to do the work that Americans are unwilling to do’, consider some cold hard facts.

1. America’s 2018 population is 328M, growing at about 0.7% annually, consisting of over 118M households, an 18-65 workforce of 260M, of whom 159M or 61.1% have a job, with over 94M Americans of working age who are not even looking for a job.
2. In this age of accelerating technology most people can neither do nor learn to do the kinds of jobs that our rapidly changing economy is creating. (Remember AI, and also that half of the people have 2-digit IQs where 100 is the generally accepted aggregate mean and median IQ, with a standard deviation of 15; this tells us that about 68% of the population has IQs in the 85-115 range.)
3. IQ studies have been made a political minefield by the Left. Nevertheless, a large and credible amount of research into the matter is available, and the topic is now starting to be investigated again.  Extensive research summarized in notable publications like The Bell Curve and A Troublesome Inheritance report median IQs by ethnicity for Americans for which ample corroborating data exists.  And we must always remember that these are statistics that derive from aggregate distributions which do overlap considerably, therefore ascribing these numbers to everyone within a cited ethnic cohort would be in error, and exposes a dimension of racism.  (Here we won’t go into the nurture vs nature debate.)  Some data points –
   • Ashkenazi Jews – 110
   • East Asians – 105
   • Northern & Western Europeans – 100
   • Hispanic Americans – 89
   • African-Americans and Pacific Islanders – 85
   • Sub-Saharan Africans – 70
   • Australian Aborigines – 62
4. The progressive elites have purposely used the intellectual deficits of the blacks and Hispanics in a heartbreaking manner to bamboozle and marshal them into dependent constituencies without providing them any tools to excise themselves or to exercise self-determination. They must be kept on the ‘plantation’ – ignorant, poor, and perpetually discontented in order to fulfill the progressives’ agenda.
5. We are standing at a fork in the road – in one direction there lie unimaginable advances to human knowledge and quality of life (QOL), in the other lies violent revolution, tyranny, and equal opportunity misery for all mankind – there is no middle ground. We don’t yet know how to travel the first road, but if we use reason and the resources at hand, we will have a good chance at succeeding.  The other road is a very familiar and well-traveled by our ancestors, and requires no special knowledge or talents to once more bring about wholesale destruction and sorrow.  We have done it many times before.
6. In every beneficent and/or well-to-do society the population divides naturally into the Makers and the Takers. The Makers are net producers of wealth and fund its public institutions and charities; the Takers are net consumers of wealth and depend on dispensations from public institutions and charities to maintain their life styles.
7. Democracies destroy themselves through wholesale practice of the tragedy of the commons (q.v.). People ignorant of the longer-term effects join the Takers and vote for those who promise, for their benefit, to use the government gun to drain the pockets of the Makers.  This vicious cycle, once established, is self-sustaining until civil disorder invites a ‘man on a white horse’ (aka autocrat/tyrant) to abolish the old and establish a new and desperate order in the land.
8. Parents protect kids from the stress that is the indelible part and parcel of a productive education. Decades of dumbing down achievement tests and merit-based measures, along with curricula weakened in the name of promoting self-esteem, have created an electorate that knows very little, and most of what they do know just ain’t so (H/T to Will Rogers).
9. Retiree jobs are not replaced one-for-one; retirements are used to legally cut and/or redefine jobs.
10. Newly created jobs require more intellectual capital than the overwhelming fraction of new workers have to give.
11. Progressives purposely promote policies that kill jobs so that more people will become discontented and reliable socialist voters permanently on the plantation. The echoes of such policies are still felt in Russia, with many who still yearn for a return to the days of Stalin.
12. Today 4M in the 18-64 range ‘graduate’ and/or are disgorged annually from our schools. 67M of us die annually.  That still gives us a 0.7% annual population growth rate which calculates to 2.3M new people per year.  This indicates that the US jobs growth should range somewhere between 200,000 and 330,000 per month forever.  This has yet to happen.
13. Worker shortage. Today 7 out of 8 companies hiring or trying to hire report “few or no qualified applicants for the positions they were trying to fill”.  Construction and STEM industries are feeling the most pinch.  The immediate solution again is for companies to maximize the use of robots and AI, thereby putting such jobs permanently out of reach of humans.
14. World population will grow from today’s 7.5 billion to almost 10 billion by 2050. Africa’s population alone will increase over 200% from 2000 to 2050 when it will be at 2.5B+.  What will these people do to earn enough to eat and stay out of the rain, and, of course, make many more Africans?
15. What do we owe to the uncountable yet to be conceived?
16. Anticipating new lows in the global Gini Index, who will and who must buy the goods and services delivered by our smart machines and robots?

Rebane doctrine:  Africa, India, and So America will fail, and will resort to out migration for a short-term solution.  China is on the cusp and will go to war if it fails economically, a war for which it is already preparing in its ‘near abroad’.  Russia’s demographics foretell it will succumb to Islam.

So without solving the world’s population problems, the question is, what kinds of work can we Americans devise for the growing tens of millions of truly redundant workers, jobs for which we must pay them a ‘living wage’ so that they can beget more workers with similar prospects.

Now we need to go back to the top and tackle the ‘how many’ question again with the full realization that there exists no answer which would be considered rational by contending cultures.  And who will be the people who don’t need more people?

Here are a few relevant references:

https://patriotpost.us/articles/56883-porous-borders-incentivize-bad-parenting

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2009/11/art3full.pdf

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11000000

http://www.govtech.com/education/higher-ed/Industry-Leaders-Want-Education-to-Focus-on-STEM-to-Help-Fill-24M-Expected-Job-Vacancies.html?

http://aristocratsofthesoul.com/average-iq-by-race-and-ethnicity/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/give-people-money-and-the-war-on-normal-people-review-the-cure-for-poverty-1531177482

http://rebaneruminations.typepad.com/rebanes_ruminations/2009/03/our-new-course-is-declared.html