I think I agree/disagree with both of you. You certainly have the facts right. Just look at the trouble a few drug addicts in Yemen can cause. Look at what South Africa looks like today. ISIS is spreading now in Africa. And Apple Pie is right about the petri dish.
However, my ideology is closer to that of Lyman here. I think his point is that it is time to put an end to parent shaming. The problem with today's world is not Africa's high fertility but rather the rest of the world's low fertility. As long as Africa is below 20-25% of the world population I think we can manage. We can put them to work at the kind of labor they are interested in and we can continue to vaccinate them. It is only the ratio of Africans to the rest of the world that is a concern. And continuing to do parent shaming only reinforces the Malthusian mentality which the modern world should have let go of a long time ago.
My general ideology is that Malthusian situations were not averted by science and technology but rather science and technology were made possible due to the pushback on zero-sum (paganist?) Malthusian attitudes. This help spread knowledge and cohesive education throughout the western world. But I admit that I get this attitude from religion, not from studying history.
I also don't believe i judging other families and assuming they are less happy than oneself.
I assume that many westerners believe that all children in families with 4+ children must not be happy, unless they are super-wealthy.
I am talking mostly from my own experience as many (most?) westerners probably think Haredim are incredibly opressed... (especially the NY Times) yet it seems that they are the happiest people on Earth. Israel is from the happiest countries on Earth and Haredim are the happiest in Israel. As a study from the Israel Democracy Institute wrote "by 'objective' standards Haredim are the least happy, yet by subjective standards they are the happiest". Perhaps something similar could be said about the Amish. So we should cut dosn on the judging.
Conservatives (i.e. religious people) believe that despite the great good brought by the Industrial Revolution, Emancipation etc. a great harm has been wrought by the destruction of family and community life. It appears to me that the only societies that will survive are those that can keep up strong and cohesive families and communities. It is high time we put more focus on that and less on just 'productivity' 'productivity' 'productivity'.
Ok, but now I am really starting to sound like Lyman.
>>I also don't believe i judging other families and assuming they are less happy than oneself.
I don't think there is any strict need to talk about happiness in the Africa question. I do assume that people who have too little to eat are less happy than those who have enough to eat. But also if I assumed that starving people are happy that wouldn't change my opinion. Starvation is physically unhealthy and leads to violence. My criticism lies on that level. I know very little about the happiness levels of current Africans so I'm definitely not judging over that.
>>The problem with today's world is not Africa's high fertility but rather the rest of the world's low fertility.
I agree. But I find it is even more unlikely that the rest of the world will become significantly more fertile than that Africa will become like the rest of the world soon. That's why I'm suggesting that it's time to talk about mitigation: There is no solution in sight.
>>As long as Africa is below 20-25% of the world population I think we can manage. We can put them to work at the kind of labor they are interested in and we can continue to vaccinate them.
We can only do what Africans allows us to do. The more they become Westerners themselves, the fewer Westerners there need to be to help them/keep order among them. But I'm afraid that powerful people in Africa will have agendas of their own and will not accept to be put to work by any foreigner.
>>It is only the ratio of Africans to the rest of the world that is a concern. And continuing to do parent shaming only reinforces the Malthusian mentality which the modern world should have let go of a long time ago.
Without advanced technology Malthusianism is not just a mentality. It is a hard fact. The only reason why I'm pronatalist for the high-tech parts of the world is that I hope that it can build space colonies or other creative solutions to the Malthusian problem. Without solutions to counter the basic Mathusian condition of humans, I think having more than two children per couple is very unwise.
"...up to five million Congolese died because aid workers were unable to get food and medicine to them."
A revealing sentence. Such moralism is the core problem, and it is solely a Western/Christian problem. East Asians do not suffer from it.
"Europe and America might happily absorb the excess population of Africa in order to make up for their own population deficits."
Sure! And happily.
The Western idea of solving African problems and developing their societies is paternalistic, eurocentric and colonialist thinking. Even a brief glimps into history shows that "nation building" is a very bad idea.
As an example: Why did Taiwan within two generations develop from a dirt poor country into a rich high tech society? Because of Western development aid? How likely is Sudan going to be the next Taiwan? Will hundred more billions and 50 more years of Western "expertise" do the trick? Really?
I don't think Lyman Stone is being honest. Not only is it probably better for global population to decline in order to mitigate the environmental effects from global warming etc., Africa is struggling right now with misery and malnutrition.
If a sensible person lived in a neighborhood where everyone was happy and doing well and had only one child, except for a cluster of starving and miserable families on the corner who averaged four children per couple, that person wouldn't merely fear for the future of the neighborhood, they would be concerned for the present. Why isn't Lyman Stone?
He asks questions like, "Seriously, what’s the threat to me if Congo has twice as many people in it?" But I don't even see this as the point. Does he care nothing for the currently endangered gorillas or elephants that will be hunted to complete extinction by an exploding African population? Does he care nothing for the way a skyrocketing unvaccinated global population will become a collosal petri dish for exciting new pandemics over the next 50 years? No, because there's no threat to him?
The real question is, who takes Lyman Stone seriously?
Oh, that second tweet made me laugh for real. It sounds so funny when people talk about "hell" and "GDP" as phenomena that exist on the same level. But, as someone was qouted saying in one Amish biography I read: Going to hell is no laughing matter. Who know who will get the last laugh?
Got to be careful. You are talking to a religious person here.
But I obviously strongly disagree with him on many levels, and one of them is that I agree that GDP and hell are totally unrelated subjects and should never come up in the same sentence. Also, I don't try to market my religion, only to give some explanation for some of our 'weird' behaviors.
The fact that someone could write that about 'belief in Jesus' really bothers me. I grapple enough re saying such things about belief in the concept of God - which was almost universal until recently and still not that far from universal. Besides, why would an atheist care if someone thinks he is going to hell? Also, I think in my opinion, recognizing that that we have a teleological purpose is important.
But 'belief in Jesus'!?
But hey, what do I know? I never studied Christianity much.
>>Got to be careful. You are talking to a religious person here.
I took the risk in the hope of maybe getting to know something about what religious people make jokes about.
That Jesus thing really is weird. And interesting. Also for me who have grown up in a (somewhat) Christian society and have had Christian family members, the trinity idea is really opaque. I imagine that this opacity is one of the factors behind the great success of Christianity. Since the idea of a god divided in three is so difficult to understand, people can do a little as they please with it. Or, rather, groups of people. I guess that could be a reason why Christianity is the most viral religion in world history.
>>The real question is, who takes Lyman Stone seriously?
I did, until I read his new Substack. One reason why I publish unpaywalled blog posts rather infrequently is that I'm afraid that if I don't read the things I write over and over again, I will also write something as intelligent as "Seriously, what’s the threat to me if Congo has twice as many people in it?"
However, my intention was not to prove that Lyman Stone writes stupid things, but to raise a topic that I have thought a lot about. Lyman's text just became an excuse to start writing. Also, I think that Lyman Stone represents many people in his refusal to think of these questions seriously. The thoughts he expressed so pointedly probably are very common in a more watered-down version. People really think that they don't need to care, or even that they should not care.
I definitely think that's the case. He was obviously directing his remarks at IQ monger (and not exactly nice guy) Kirkegaard, but does he really think addressing unpopular people with unpopular ideas requires nothing more than saying things like Africans are "not gonna build ballistic missiles at that IQ?" Well thank you! I feel so much better knowing that the colossal humanitarian crisis that's been growing for the last hundred years isn't going to shoot missiles at everyone, too!
I think you finally connected me with someone online who genuinely bothers me so much I'm having a real difficulty just shrugging and letting him be stupid. I want him to go to the Congo, drink the water, talk to the people, hear about the forced evictions and casual violence of security forces, see the frequency of sexual assault women are subjected to and the conditions children actually live in, and talk to *them* about all the missiles he's not afraid of.
On the plus side, you also connected me to Charlatan, who actually does live in Africa (specifically, Nigeria). https://isoe.substack.com/p/of-nigeria-and-the-lack-of-originality Charlatan is a good writer: "The majority is the invisible hand that shapes the visible qualities of any society and if that majority is deficient in mind and spirit, the society cannot rise above its dictate."
This is true everywhere. Just as you said, "People really think that they don't need to care, or even that they should not care."
Thanks for grappling with the African question(s). This is certainly a more thoughtful consideration than can be said of most African intellectuals who are frustratingly reactionary, allowing their overbloated and insecure egos to dictate their thinking.
I'm a Nigerian who lives in Nigeria and has no intention of leaving now or in the future. As popular as the discourse of national IQs is in the West or among academics, I'm yet to come across a single African commentator or public intellectual engaging with this discourse. I think it further confirms the claim of low IQ when a people are not even self-aware enough to grapple with this question.
The overwhelmingly predominant attitude among the educated elite in Africa is that Africa's problem has nothing to do with cognitive disadvantage and more to do with Western oppression or bad leadership or colonialism or... whatever other external agent they can think of. One of the consequences of low IQ is the inability to organize at scale and mobilize collective actions while setting a far reaching national goals that transcend tribal sentiments.
I watch with pity as we continue to hope for some kind of cultural/political revolution and wonder how this is expected to happen when even the most elite among our people are incredibly self-serving and cowardly in the face of moral moral, spiritual, and political corruption.
It's a big utter mess from top to bottom of the hierarchy!!!
Can I ask you a few questions about how the intellectual abilities of Nigerians appear to you? When I “discovered” the global IQ question about a decade ago, I asked all people I knew who had met any greater number of allegedly high IQ and low IQ populations, in order to get an impression of what the numbers could mean in reality. Since I didn't know any people who had met numerous Africans more than superficially, I didn't get any good answer to the question how people in Africa actually appear in everyday life.
One conclusion I have drawn is that IQ 70 simply must mean something else in Africa compared to in Europe. On an academic level, it might mean the same thing as in Europe. But on a social level it just can't mean the same thing as in Europe, because the few percent of Europeans who have an IQ below 70 tend to be not only intellectually backward, but also socially backward. If an important share of Africans can meaningfully be said to have an IQ below 70, then that should mean that there is a very common phenotype in Africa that does not exist much in Europe: A kind of person who is not good at reading, math and logic, but who is socially capable and witty. (I think that this is what Arthur Jensen (cited by Cremieux Recueil) meant by concluding that low IQ black children were “normal”).
As an African, and a psychologist, what would you say about this speculation? From my side it is little more than an educated guess, because I have never been to Africa and met a representative sample of people. Do you have any thoughts on how it could be possible, or impossible, that a large part of Africans have IQs below the level on which Westerners are unable to function normally in society?
Also I would like to ask you about the upper distribution of IQ in Africa. Are IQs of 120 really as rare in Nigeria as IQs of 150 are in the West? (And I'm a bit skeptical of the notion of “IQ 150” in general - I don't believe that IQ tests are meaningful above a certain point). Obviously, there is intelligent life in Africa and also, Africa is much more genetically diverse than Europe. Those are reasons to suspect that the bell curve is not entirely bell shaped in at least some parts of Africa. What is your impression? How does high intelligence manifest itself where you live?
"I don't believe that IQ tests are meaningful above a certain point" This is generally understood to be correct. I don't have a handy reference. The sigma for a western IQ test is 15. My recall, again based on reading long ago, results starting at 3 sigma need further evaluation to yield a meaningful number - and also, at some point IQ doesn't mean much - good at IQ tests?
However, a parallel line of thought suggests that a mean shift of 30 points is telling us about the population, but perhaps not about IQ. A curious investigator would surely probe the population to understand how member of the test group understood the questions or figures or instructions to stack blocks.
>>and also, at some point IQ doesn't mean much - good at IQ tests?
Yes, really. A Westerner with an IQ of 150 probably is an IQ test specialist most of all (although I don't say very high IQ correlates with nothing else than IQ test taking ability, for example it seems to correlate with very early intellectual development too). But an educated African with an IQ of 120-130 is most probably is not a freak who is extremely good at IQ tests, but a fairly bright person. That makes me wonder if ordinary bright people are really as unusual in Africa as natural test-taking specialists are on the West.
There are certainly people who land in the 140-160 range without any prep. Further testing can show the subject and test designers more about the subject. What I meant about "not meaning much" is that once someone is above a certain point, say 125 - 135, pretty much anything needing smarts is within reach. In other words, other factors start to matter more.
The more interesting question in this discussion isn't about the raw scores, but what about culture and environment affect a score. A person reared in a western society with an IQ of 70 is pretty much helpless. An entire continent with a wider genetic pool and heritage than the rest of the world combined is not filled uniformly "low IQ" peoples. There are other factors in play here.
The poorest countries in Africa are about as poor, or poorer, per capita as North Korea, which has an average national IQ of about thirty points higher. Start by comparing all the things the North Koreans can do that we don't see Africans do. For instance, there's to my knowledge only two symphony orchestras in the entirety of Central Africa, which has about two-hundred-million people: the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra, and the Kaposoka Orchestra. North Korea, which has almost ten times fewer people, has at least three active symphony orchestras listen on Wikipedia today. Meaning even if that's all there is as of now, that's still over one-hundred times the number of symphony orchestras per capita as Central Africa.
That to me is already a pretty good indicator of the cognitive gap.
To be honest, I felt mentally overwhelmed contemplating your questions for reasons I believe, if I examine deeply, are worth discoursing on their own. I've been led to all sorts of places in my thought while mulling over your questions. And because you're not familiar at all with Nigeria, let alone Africa, I felt like you'll need a lot of contexts and sub contexts as well as anecdotal examples to help you properly weigh the merits of my answers (much of which is not backed with hard data). When I started typing my response, I realized I had typed about 4 long paragraphs without having exhausted half of what I wanted to communicate. I therefore decided to address your questions as well as those asked by Apple Pie in a standalone post on my Substack.
I should have it published before the end of next week.
Thank you for making this comment. Most of us don't have any direct experience with Africa; do you see any avenues for improvement? I can see from this comment ( and also your post at https://isoe.substack.com/p/of-nigeria-and-the-lack-of-originality ) that you're pretty pessimistic about change arising from within, but what are the most likely avenues by which external aid could make a genuine difference? Do you think education, or nutritional supplementation (say, via iodine) would have a meaningful impact? What about reducing the birth rate among the poorer classes to reduce the rates of malnutrition and stunting?
I guess what I'm asking is, if you had $10,000,000 and a hundred humanitarian aid workers ready to focus on improving one thing in Nigeria, what do *you* think would be the element that would bring the most improvement to your country? Would it be trying to improve roads, or reduce government corruption, or conditions in schools, or what?
I think high-fertility Africa is very unlikely. Africa is urbanized very fast and african cities is not high quality. My guess Africa and Middle East would become poor and old.
1. This is one of the reasons that my catch-phrase is now "this is the Century of Consequences".
2. History is indeed a guide to the future. For example, look how ably our global political elite is forestalling climate change, which they (now) claim to be a huge threat.
First we will have decades of Lyman Stone's attitude, that Africa is not a problem, and then eventually the admission that well, maybe it is, but it's easy to fix. Just a matter of adjusting some market regulations.
3. IQ is indeed only a part of the problem in Africa. Culture is the majority of it, and culture takes many, many decades to change.
Africa (certainly the Bantu-peopled parts of it, which is most of sub-Saharan Africa) suffers from a family system that is incompatible with industrial civilisation: very clan focused, often polygynous, oppressive of women and neglectful of children.
Things like property rights, the rule of law, and due process are rather silly notions to most Africans as well. Disputes get settled by force of arms. Again, these institutional issues would take multiple decades to fix, even if Africa wanted to.
Any resources that Europeans provide will just be diverted to the clans of the people in charge. Again, history is a guide for this.
I still believe that the population forecasts for Africa are overstated. They still assume that fertility patterns in Africa will slowly change. I think it's more plausible that there will be a quick step-change instead. I cannot imagine that young urban African women with access to smartphones and social media will not want to emulate the lives they see there. Yes, cultural fertility expectations count for something, but a confluence of the influence of the internet, extremely cramped living conditions in cities and a possible shortfall of food will probably push down the fertility patterns of an entire generation.
The world has been waiting for this quick step-change for many decades now. Instead, Africa has continued to defy population forecasts and continues producing many more children than estimated. Not even urbanization seems to be that much of a barrier to fertility in Africa. If you look at Nigeria, one of the richest and most urbanized countries of sub-Saharan Africa, they have a rural TFR of 5.6 and a lower, but still impressively high, urban TFR of 3.9. These numbers are coming down, but on current trends Nigeria will not have anything resembling Western fertility levels this century.
Nigeria has a northern half and a southern half with almost nothing in common and which are diverging further and further and further. Yes 'Nigeria' is one of the richest and most urbanised countries of sub Saharan Africa, but this misleads because much of the north is nearer to Niger or other Sahelian countries in its fortunes than is the southern half of its own country.
In the poorest areas of the rural north the fertility rate is 7 or 8. In the wealthier, Christian, more urban south it's as you say something like 3.5 - 4, and I imagine lower again in the big cities like Lagos, Port Harcourt etc, especially amongst the middle classes (such as they exist).
The national fertility rate obscures the variance. It is from the south that by far the most immigration to the US, UK and Canada emanates. An analogy may be that if everyone in the world was either 2 feet tall or 10 feet tall it wouldn't be very helpful to know that the average height was 6 feet tall. This is a bit like the mediocristan/extremistan concept of Nassim Taleb's.
Nigeria is very interesting. I'm a westerner and recently concluded three years of living and working there. I met a local tribal chief sort of guy once who told me had 17 kids to four wives. He was Christian. Nothing unusual.
I'd be very interested in reading more about your experiences there. I realize starting a substack is a hell of a lot of work, but you could gain a following writing about things like this.
Anders, I think especially Nigeria is a good example for how projections can err. Take the UN projections for the 2100 population, I quote: "For example, the 2012 report predicted that the population of Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, would rise to 914 million by 2100; the 2022 report lowers that to 546 million, a reduction of 368 million; the 2024 report lowered that further to 477 million, a reduction of 69 million." The acceleration of fertility decline has led to a halving of Nigerias expected population in 2100 within a dozen years. I cannot say for certain how this will develop further, but my gut tells me that even the current projections underestimate the effects of cultural change. I am curious how this will play out during the rest of the decade and if I am wrong.
Nigeria's regional funding is population based. Every region had incentives to overstate its population.
Recent satellite-based methods of estimating population (like the night-time illumination picture above) are causing estimates to be revised. It is that more than fertility decline that has caused projections of future population to be revised down.
Isn't that the same problem, though: the statistics given by the regions are unreliable. Whether it is current, snap shot population or fertility, presumably in part based on changes in population levels along with questionable records of births, chances seem pretty good that the estimates are pretty poor, and as you point out, biased upwards.
It is fiendishly difficult to know what will happen in the future. No one can say with certainty what will happen with the fertility numbers in Africa. What we can be certain of is that Africa's population will increase rapidly for at least the next fifty years or so, only due to inertia. For that reason alone the 477 million estimate for Nigeria is almost certainly wrong. Last year there were 7.5 million new Nigerians born. The average life expectancy in Nigeria is 53 years. If the fertility rate of Nigeria suddenly dropped to replacement level and life expectancy stayed the same, both highly unlikely, Nigeria's population in 2100 would still be 398 million. A more plausible scenario, where fertility rates stay elevated for at least a couple of decades more and life expectancy increases by 20% should give a Nigerian population in 2100 of 600-800 million. But now I am speculating again.
Worth the additional insight that in 1980 the population of Nigeria was something like 50-60 million. It has ALREADY had massive demographic expanse as it is, and the inability of the political economy to cope with it this has amongst other things led directly to awful conflict.
I agree Tove. I especially think the idea that Europe could just refuse to admit masses of desperate Africans is extremely misguided.
I think there are two issues here: (1) people struggle to comprehend what a population of a million is; and (2) people underestimate human ingenuity in the face of desperate necessity (even very low-IQ individuals).
For example, the drug-abusing population of America hardly represents “elite human capital” but think how much their demand for drugs is able to circumvent borders, bribe judges and set up sophisticated logistics networks etc to supply their need. Or consider a typical prison, where the inmates are locked-down, mail searched, visitors frisked etc and yet still these places are often awash in drugs. Never underestimate human ingenuity.
The ultimate example is perhaps the 2 million supposedly low-IQ Palestinians in Gaza and the famously high-IQ Jews of Israel. Yet despite the city being walled-off and bombed to rubble, as far as I’m aware, Hamas were able to keep manufacturing makeshift rockets to fire at the IDF right up until the end of this war—even while ordinary Palestinians didn’t have enough food to eat.
Hamas has a lot of advantage in that they see the population of Gaza as nothing but war matériel. And while Israel has the advantage of an American alliance, it also has the disadvantage of an American alliance, like when we forced them to give up most of their territory for the sake of a face-saving peace deal with Egypt, lest they kick too much Arab ass. Now said territory is infested with terrorists, and the Egyptians still haven't made things easier on everybody by just taking back Gaza and managing counterterrorism with the same Arab heartlessness nobody in the Western World cares about unless attempted by Euro-descended peoples.
I think I agree/disagree with both of you. You certainly have the facts right. Just look at the trouble a few drug addicts in Yemen can cause. Look at what South Africa looks like today. ISIS is spreading now in Africa. And Apple Pie is right about the petri dish.
However, my ideology is closer to that of Lyman here. I think his point is that it is time to put an end to parent shaming. The problem with today's world is not Africa's high fertility but rather the rest of the world's low fertility. As long as Africa is below 20-25% of the world population I think we can manage. We can put them to work at the kind of labor they are interested in and we can continue to vaccinate them. It is only the ratio of Africans to the rest of the world that is a concern. And continuing to do parent shaming only reinforces the Malthusian mentality which the modern world should have let go of a long time ago.
I don't worry much about the climate change caused by higher population. See the many articles on this substack https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/ Also see here https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/climate-change-the-marginal-impact
My general ideology is that Malthusian situations were not averted by science and technology but rather science and technology were made possible due to the pushback on zero-sum (paganist?) Malthusian attitudes. This help spread knowledge and cohesive education throughout the western world. But I admit that I get this attitude from religion, not from studying history.
I also don't believe i judging other families and assuming they are less happy than oneself.
I assume that many westerners believe that all children in families with 4+ children must not be happy, unless they are super-wealthy.
I am talking mostly from my own experience as many (most?) westerners probably think Haredim are incredibly opressed... (especially the NY Times) yet it seems that they are the happiest people on Earth. Israel is from the happiest countries on Earth and Haredim are the happiest in Israel. As a study from the Israel Democracy Institute wrote "by 'objective' standards Haredim are the least happy, yet by subjective standards they are the happiest". Perhaps something similar could be said about the Amish. So we should cut dosn on the judging.
Conservatives (i.e. religious people) believe that despite the great good brought by the Industrial Revolution, Emancipation etc. a great harm has been wrought by the destruction of family and community life. It appears to me that the only societies that will survive are those that can keep up strong and cohesive families and communities. It is high time we put more focus on that and less on just 'productivity' 'productivity' 'productivity'.
Ok, but now I am really starting to sound like Lyman.
>>I also don't believe i judging other families and assuming they are less happy than oneself.
I don't think there is any strict need to talk about happiness in the Africa question. I do assume that people who have too little to eat are less happy than those who have enough to eat. But also if I assumed that starving people are happy that wouldn't change my opinion. Starvation is physically unhealthy and leads to violence. My criticism lies on that level. I know very little about the happiness levels of current Africans so I'm definitely not judging over that.
>>The problem with today's world is not Africa's high fertility but rather the rest of the world's low fertility.
I agree. But I find it is even more unlikely that the rest of the world will become significantly more fertile than that Africa will become like the rest of the world soon. That's why I'm suggesting that it's time to talk about mitigation: There is no solution in sight.
>>As long as Africa is below 20-25% of the world population I think we can manage. We can put them to work at the kind of labor they are interested in and we can continue to vaccinate them.
We can only do what Africans allows us to do. The more they become Westerners themselves, the fewer Westerners there need to be to help them/keep order among them. But I'm afraid that powerful people in Africa will have agendas of their own and will not accept to be put to work by any foreigner.
>>It is only the ratio of Africans to the rest of the world that is a concern. And continuing to do parent shaming only reinforces the Malthusian mentality which the modern world should have let go of a long time ago.
Without advanced technology Malthusianism is not just a mentality. It is a hard fact. The only reason why I'm pronatalist for the high-tech parts of the world is that I hope that it can build space colonies or other creative solutions to the Malthusian problem. Without solutions to counter the basic Mathusian condition of humans, I think having more than two children per couple is very unwise.
"...up to five million Congolese died because aid workers were unable to get food and medicine to them."
A revealing sentence. Such moralism is the core problem, and it is solely a Western/Christian problem. East Asians do not suffer from it.
"Europe and America might happily absorb the excess population of Africa in order to make up for their own population deficits."
Sure! And happily.
The Western idea of solving African problems and developing their societies is paternalistic, eurocentric and colonialist thinking. Even a brief glimps into history shows that "nation building" is a very bad idea.
As an example: Why did Taiwan within two generations develop from a dirt poor country into a rich high tech society? Because of Western development aid? How likely is Sudan going to be the next Taiwan? Will hundred more billions and 50 more years of Western "expertise" do the trick? Really?
I don't think Lyman Stone is being honest. Not only is it probably better for global population to decline in order to mitigate the environmental effects from global warming etc., Africa is struggling right now with misery and malnutrition.
If a sensible person lived in a neighborhood where everyone was happy and doing well and had only one child, except for a cluster of starving and miserable families on the corner who averaged four children per couple, that person wouldn't merely fear for the future of the neighborhood, they would be concerned for the present. Why isn't Lyman Stone?
He asks questions like, "Seriously, what’s the threat to me if Congo has twice as many people in it?" But I don't even see this as the point. Does he care nothing for the currently endangered gorillas or elephants that will be hunted to complete extinction by an exploding African population? Does he care nothing for the way a skyrocketing unvaccinated global population will become a collosal petri dish for exciting new pandemics over the next 50 years? No, because there's no threat to him?
The real question is, who takes Lyman Stone seriously?
Stone is a fervent Christian. I suspect he values the multitudes of Africans who flock to his religion far more than secular Westerners.
The Collinses have been complaining about this for a while now.
But at least he is fairly open about it.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F922dd392-d16b-4a97-b545-5d6e095a5314_680x423.jpeg
Oh, that second tweet made me laugh for real. It sounds so funny when people talk about "hell" and "GDP" as phenomena that exist on the same level. But, as someone was qouted saying in one Amish biography I read: Going to hell is no laughing matter. Who know who will get the last laugh?
Got to be careful. You are talking to a religious person here.
But I obviously strongly disagree with him on many levels, and one of them is that I agree that GDP and hell are totally unrelated subjects and should never come up in the same sentence. Also, I don't try to market my religion, only to give some explanation for some of our 'weird' behaviors.
Also other things, obviously.
Ok, I think I'll say a little more.
The fact that someone could write that about 'belief in Jesus' really bothers me. I grapple enough re saying such things about belief in the concept of God - which was almost universal until recently and still not that far from universal. Besides, why would an atheist care if someone thinks he is going to hell? Also, I think in my opinion, recognizing that that we have a teleological purpose is important.
But 'belief in Jesus'!?
But hey, what do I know? I never studied Christianity much.
>>Got to be careful. You are talking to a religious person here.
I took the risk in the hope of maybe getting to know something about what religious people make jokes about.
That Jesus thing really is weird. And interesting. Also for me who have grown up in a (somewhat) Christian society and have had Christian family members, the trinity idea is really opaque. I imagine that this opacity is one of the factors behind the great success of Christianity. Since the idea of a god divided in three is so difficult to understand, people can do a little as they please with it. Or, rather, groups of people. I guess that could be a reason why Christianity is the most viral religion in world history.
You know what? I think that probably explains everything. Thank you.
>>The real question is, who takes Lyman Stone seriously?
I did, until I read his new Substack. One reason why I publish unpaywalled blog posts rather infrequently is that I'm afraid that if I don't read the things I write over and over again, I will also write something as intelligent as "Seriously, what’s the threat to me if Congo has twice as many people in it?"
However, my intention was not to prove that Lyman Stone writes stupid things, but to raise a topic that I have thought a lot about. Lyman's text just became an excuse to start writing. Also, I think that Lyman Stone represents many people in his refusal to think of these questions seriously. The thoughts he expressed so pointedly probably are very common in a more watered-down version. People really think that they don't need to care, or even that they should not care.
I definitely think that's the case. He was obviously directing his remarks at IQ monger (and not exactly nice guy) Kirkegaard, but does he really think addressing unpopular people with unpopular ideas requires nothing more than saying things like Africans are "not gonna build ballistic missiles at that IQ?" Well thank you! I feel so much better knowing that the colossal humanitarian crisis that's been growing for the last hundred years isn't going to shoot missiles at everyone, too!
I think you finally connected me with someone online who genuinely bothers me so much I'm having a real difficulty just shrugging and letting him be stupid. I want him to go to the Congo, drink the water, talk to the people, hear about the forced evictions and casual violence of security forces, see the frequency of sexual assault women are subjected to and the conditions children actually live in, and talk to *them* about all the missiles he's not afraid of.
On the plus side, you also connected me to Charlatan, who actually does live in Africa (specifically, Nigeria). https://isoe.substack.com/p/of-nigeria-and-the-lack-of-originality Charlatan is a good writer: "The majority is the invisible hand that shapes the visible qualities of any society and if that majority is deficient in mind and spirit, the society cannot rise above its dictate."
This is true everywhere. Just as you said, "People really think that they don't need to care, or even that they should not care."
Thanks for grappling with the African question(s). This is certainly a more thoughtful consideration than can be said of most African intellectuals who are frustratingly reactionary, allowing their overbloated and insecure egos to dictate their thinking.
I'm a Nigerian who lives in Nigeria and has no intention of leaving now or in the future. As popular as the discourse of national IQs is in the West or among academics, I'm yet to come across a single African commentator or public intellectual engaging with this discourse. I think it further confirms the claim of low IQ when a people are not even self-aware enough to grapple with this question.
The overwhelmingly predominant attitude among the educated elite in Africa is that Africa's problem has nothing to do with cognitive disadvantage and more to do with Western oppression or bad leadership or colonialism or... whatever other external agent they can think of. One of the consequences of low IQ is the inability to organize at scale and mobilize collective actions while setting a far reaching national goals that transcend tribal sentiments.
I watch with pity as we continue to hope for some kind of cultural/political revolution and wonder how this is expected to happen when even the most elite among our people are incredibly self-serving and cowardly in the face of moral moral, spiritual, and political corruption.
It's a big utter mess from top to bottom of the hierarchy!!!
Can I ask you a few questions about how the intellectual abilities of Nigerians appear to you? When I “discovered” the global IQ question about a decade ago, I asked all people I knew who had met any greater number of allegedly high IQ and low IQ populations, in order to get an impression of what the numbers could mean in reality. Since I didn't know any people who had met numerous Africans more than superficially, I didn't get any good answer to the question how people in Africa actually appear in everyday life.
One conclusion I have drawn is that IQ 70 simply must mean something else in Africa compared to in Europe. On an academic level, it might mean the same thing as in Europe. But on a social level it just can't mean the same thing as in Europe, because the few percent of Europeans who have an IQ below 70 tend to be not only intellectually backward, but also socially backward. If an important share of Africans can meaningfully be said to have an IQ below 70, then that should mean that there is a very common phenotype in Africa that does not exist much in Europe: A kind of person who is not good at reading, math and logic, but who is socially capable and witty. (I think that this is what Arthur Jensen (cited by Cremieux Recueil) meant by concluding that low IQ black children were “normal”).
As an African, and a psychologist, what would you say about this speculation? From my side it is little more than an educated guess, because I have never been to Africa and met a representative sample of people. Do you have any thoughts on how it could be possible, or impossible, that a large part of Africans have IQs below the level on which Westerners are unable to function normally in society?
Also I would like to ask you about the upper distribution of IQ in Africa. Are IQs of 120 really as rare in Nigeria as IQs of 150 are in the West? (And I'm a bit skeptical of the notion of “IQ 150” in general - I don't believe that IQ tests are meaningful above a certain point). Obviously, there is intelligent life in Africa and also, Africa is much more genetically diverse than Europe. Those are reasons to suspect that the bell curve is not entirely bell shaped in at least some parts of Africa. What is your impression? How does high intelligence manifest itself where you live?
"I don't believe that IQ tests are meaningful above a certain point" This is generally understood to be correct. I don't have a handy reference. The sigma for a western IQ test is 15. My recall, again based on reading long ago, results starting at 3 sigma need further evaluation to yield a meaningful number - and also, at some point IQ doesn't mean much - good at IQ tests?
However, a parallel line of thought suggests that a mean shift of 30 points is telling us about the population, but perhaps not about IQ. A curious investigator would surely probe the population to understand how member of the test group understood the questions or figures or instructions to stack blocks.
>>and also, at some point IQ doesn't mean much - good at IQ tests?
Yes, really. A Westerner with an IQ of 150 probably is an IQ test specialist most of all (although I don't say very high IQ correlates with nothing else than IQ test taking ability, for example it seems to correlate with very early intellectual development too). But an educated African with an IQ of 120-130 is most probably is not a freak who is extremely good at IQ tests, but a fairly bright person. That makes me wonder if ordinary bright people are really as unusual in Africa as natural test-taking specialists are on the West.
There are certainly people who land in the 140-160 range without any prep. Further testing can show the subject and test designers more about the subject. What I meant about "not meaning much" is that once someone is above a certain point, say 125 - 135, pretty much anything needing smarts is within reach. In other words, other factors start to matter more.
The more interesting question in this discussion isn't about the raw scores, but what about culture and environment affect a score. A person reared in a western society with an IQ of 70 is pretty much helpless. An entire continent with a wider genetic pool and heritage than the rest of the world combined is not filled uniformly "low IQ" peoples. There are other factors in play here.
The poorest countries in Africa are about as poor, or poorer, per capita as North Korea, which has an average national IQ of about thirty points higher. Start by comparing all the things the North Koreans can do that we don't see Africans do. For instance, there's to my knowledge only two symphony orchestras in the entirety of Central Africa, which has about two-hundred-million people: the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra, and the Kaposoka Orchestra. North Korea, which has almost ten times fewer people, has at least three active symphony orchestras listen on Wikipedia today. Meaning even if that's all there is as of now, that's still over one-hundred times the number of symphony orchestras per capita as Central Africa.
That to me is already a pretty good indicator of the cognitive gap.
Thanks for your questions.
To be honest, I felt mentally overwhelmed contemplating your questions for reasons I believe, if I examine deeply, are worth discoursing on their own. I've been led to all sorts of places in my thought while mulling over your questions. And because you're not familiar at all with Nigeria, let alone Africa, I felt like you'll need a lot of contexts and sub contexts as well as anecdotal examples to help you properly weigh the merits of my answers (much of which is not backed with hard data). When I started typing my response, I realized I had typed about 4 long paragraphs without having exhausted half of what I wanted to communicate. I therefore decided to address your questions as well as those asked by Apple Pie in a standalone post on my Substack.
I should have it published before the end of next week.
Thank you very much! I'm really looking forward to read it.
Thank you for making this comment. Most of us don't have any direct experience with Africa; do you see any avenues for improvement? I can see from this comment ( and also your post at https://isoe.substack.com/p/of-nigeria-and-the-lack-of-originality ) that you're pretty pessimistic about change arising from within, but what are the most likely avenues by which external aid could make a genuine difference? Do you think education, or nutritional supplementation (say, via iodine) would have a meaningful impact? What about reducing the birth rate among the poorer classes to reduce the rates of malnutrition and stunting?
I guess what I'm asking is, if you had $10,000,000 and a hundred humanitarian aid workers ready to focus on improving one thing in Nigeria, what do *you* think would be the element that would bring the most improvement to your country? Would it be trying to improve roads, or reduce government corruption, or conditions in schools, or what?
I think high-fertility Africa is very unlikely. Africa is urbanized very fast and african cities is not high quality. My guess Africa and Middle East would become poor and old.
Technology, as always, is the answer. Just like energy and green revolution helped west escape malthusian trap .
AI, genetic engineering and new forms of reliable, non-corruptible governance will help Africa. ( And rest of the world of course)
We live in the beggining of the next technological leap. Projecting the past without taking into account incoming tsunami of changes is pointless .
I would not go as far as saying that technology is always the answer; but it is the only answer. And the only hope.
1. This is one of the reasons that my catch-phrase is now "this is the Century of Consequences".
2. History is indeed a guide to the future. For example, look how ably our global political elite is forestalling climate change, which they (now) claim to be a huge threat.
First we will have decades of Lyman Stone's attitude, that Africa is not a problem, and then eventually the admission that well, maybe it is, but it's easy to fix. Just a matter of adjusting some market regulations.
3. IQ is indeed only a part of the problem in Africa. Culture is the majority of it, and culture takes many, many decades to change.
Africa (certainly the Bantu-peopled parts of it, which is most of sub-Saharan Africa) suffers from a family system that is incompatible with industrial civilisation: very clan focused, often polygynous, oppressive of women and neglectful of children.
Things like property rights, the rule of law, and due process are rather silly notions to most Africans as well. Disputes get settled by force of arms. Again, these institutional issues would take multiple decades to fix, even if Africa wanted to.
Any resources that Europeans provide will just be diverted to the clans of the people in charge. Again, history is a guide for this.
I still believe that the population forecasts for Africa are overstated. They still assume that fertility patterns in Africa will slowly change. I think it's more plausible that there will be a quick step-change instead. I cannot imagine that young urban African women with access to smartphones and social media will not want to emulate the lives they see there. Yes, cultural fertility expectations count for something, but a confluence of the influence of the internet, extremely cramped living conditions in cities and a possible shortfall of food will probably push down the fertility patterns of an entire generation.
The world has been waiting for this quick step-change for many decades now. Instead, Africa has continued to defy population forecasts and continues producing many more children than estimated. Not even urbanization seems to be that much of a barrier to fertility in Africa. If you look at Nigeria, one of the richest and most urbanized countries of sub-Saharan Africa, they have a rural TFR of 5.6 and a lower, but still impressively high, urban TFR of 3.9. These numbers are coming down, but on current trends Nigeria will not have anything resembling Western fertility levels this century.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria#Demographic_and_Health_Surveys
Nigeria has a northern half and a southern half with almost nothing in common and which are diverging further and further and further. Yes 'Nigeria' is one of the richest and most urbanised countries of sub Saharan Africa, but this misleads because much of the north is nearer to Niger or other Sahelian countries in its fortunes than is the southern half of its own country.
In the poorest areas of the rural north the fertility rate is 7 or 8. In the wealthier, Christian, more urban south it's as you say something like 3.5 - 4, and I imagine lower again in the big cities like Lagos, Port Harcourt etc, especially amongst the middle classes (such as they exist).
The national fertility rate obscures the variance. It is from the south that by far the most immigration to the US, UK and Canada emanates. An analogy may be that if everyone in the world was either 2 feet tall or 10 feet tall it wouldn't be very helpful to know that the average height was 6 feet tall. This is a bit like the mediocristan/extremistan concept of Nassim Taleb's.
Nigeria is very interesting. I'm a westerner and recently concluded three years of living and working there. I met a local tribal chief sort of guy once who told me had 17 kids to four wives. He was Christian. Nothing unusual.
I'd be very interested in reading more about your experiences there. I realize starting a substack is a hell of a lot of work, but you could gain a following writing about things like this.
I would definitely read it!
Good grief, the very thought! I'm flattered, so thank you, but things were a lot more quotidian than perhaps I've made them sound!
Anders, I think especially Nigeria is a good example for how projections can err. Take the UN projections for the 2100 population, I quote: "For example, the 2012 report predicted that the population of Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, would rise to 914 million by 2100; the 2022 report lowers that to 546 million, a reduction of 368 million; the 2024 report lowered that further to 477 million, a reduction of 69 million." The acceleration of fertility decline has led to a halving of Nigerias expected population in 2100 within a dozen years. I cannot say for certain how this will develop further, but my gut tells me that even the current projections underestimate the effects of cultural change. I am curious how this will play out during the rest of the decade and if I am wrong.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections#21st_century
Nigeria's regional funding is population based. Every region had incentives to overstate its population.
Recent satellite-based methods of estimating population (like the night-time illumination picture above) are causing estimates to be revised. It is that more than fertility decline that has caused projections of future population to be revised down.
Isn't that the same problem, though: the statistics given by the regions are unreliable. Whether it is current, snap shot population or fertility, presumably in part based on changes in population levels along with questionable records of births, chances seem pretty good that the estimates are pretty poor, and as you point out, biased upwards.
It is fiendishly difficult to know what will happen in the future. No one can say with certainty what will happen with the fertility numbers in Africa. What we can be certain of is that Africa's population will increase rapidly for at least the next fifty years or so, only due to inertia. For that reason alone the 477 million estimate for Nigeria is almost certainly wrong. Last year there were 7.5 million new Nigerians born. The average life expectancy in Nigeria is 53 years. If the fertility rate of Nigeria suddenly dropped to replacement level and life expectancy stayed the same, both highly unlikely, Nigeria's population in 2100 would still be 398 million. A more plausible scenario, where fertility rates stay elevated for at least a couple of decades more and life expectancy increases by 20% should give a Nigerian population in 2100 of 600-800 million. But now I am speculating again.
Worth the additional insight that in 1980 the population of Nigeria was something like 50-60 million. It has ALREADY had massive demographic expanse as it is, and the inability of the political economy to cope with it this has amongst other things led directly to awful conflict.
I agree Tove. I especially think the idea that Europe could just refuse to admit masses of desperate Africans is extremely misguided.
I think there are two issues here: (1) people struggle to comprehend what a population of a million is; and (2) people underestimate human ingenuity in the face of desperate necessity (even very low-IQ individuals).
For example, the drug-abusing population of America hardly represents “elite human capital” but think how much their demand for drugs is able to circumvent borders, bribe judges and set up sophisticated logistics networks etc to supply their need. Or consider a typical prison, where the inmates are locked-down, mail searched, visitors frisked etc and yet still these places are often awash in drugs. Never underestimate human ingenuity.
The ultimate example is perhaps the 2 million supposedly low-IQ Palestinians in Gaza and the famously high-IQ Jews of Israel. Yet despite the city being walled-off and bombed to rubble, as far as I’m aware, Hamas were able to keep manufacturing makeshift rockets to fire at the IDF right up until the end of this war—even while ordinary Palestinians didn’t have enough food to eat.
Hamas has a lot of advantage in that they see the population of Gaza as nothing but war matériel. And while Israel has the advantage of an American alliance, it also has the disadvantage of an American alliance, like when we forced them to give up most of their territory for the sake of a face-saving peace deal with Egypt, lest they kick too much Arab ass. Now said territory is infested with terrorists, and the Egyptians still haven't made things easier on everybody by just taking back Gaza and managing counterterrorism with the same Arab heartlessness nobody in the Western World cares about unless attempted by Euro-descended peoples.
I think Tove K clearly had Israel in the back of her mind when writing this.
And I think she understands well that Israel/Palestine is just a hint of the rest of the world will face if they don't deal with the demographics.
In Israel Ben Gurion warned about this many times, but his warning was not heeded in time.
https://www.academia.edu/80515257/David_Ben_Gurion_and_the_Demographic_Threat_His_Dualistic_Approach_to_Natalism_1936_63