[Note: The somewhat odd tone and form of this essay are due to its having been one of two speech ideas sent to VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow for consideration for possible presentation at their April 2024 conference. Ultimately, the other speech (which I might submit for publication later) was chosen, though due to their regular lineup having been full already it was given at a breakout session on the conference’s final day. Though I will be breaking this speech up into individual parts for VDARE.com, both to elaborate on the parts and to keep the length of each within their webzine’s normal format, I thought it would be of interest to TOO readers to have it produced in its original form here.]
In this essay I’m going to lay out the evidence for something perhaps surprising even to The Occidental Observer readers, but pleasantly so. We of the Dissident Right are usually loath to fight according to the rules of engagement the left dictates for their enemies—and then disregards for themselves; we have a visceral (and quite healthy) disgust for the tactic of trying to punch while keeping your head firmly kowtowed to the ground, a la Democrats are the real racists and other such nonsense. But in this case I do suggest that we fight the Left while giving only scorn to their antinationalist premises—and completely rout them—on the terrain of their choice.
For when it comes to trade and immigration, it is actually the case that protectionism and extreme immigration restriction by the White and East Asian nations actually raises the standard of living not just of those countries but of the entire world.
Seems counterintuitive, I know. But it’s completely, logically, and empirically true. How do I know? Well, let me walk you through it. To start with, we need to ask, what determines a nation’s standard of living and what makes it increase?
Part of it is natural resources, though that’s obviously not the whole story: if it were, the resource-laden nations of Africa would have much higher standards of living than Hong Kong, which is basically a desolate rock, but the polar opposite is true. And before the arrival of the colonists, America’s living standard was stubbornly stuck in the stone age, despite its having every desirable resource since time immemorial. What did the colonists bring with them that allowed the nation to make the jump from prehistoric lifestyles to ones rivaling those of the wealthiest nations (at the time) on earth in a little over two centuries? Basically, physical and intellectual capital and the desire and ability to use the latter to increase the former per capita. In other words, the more we can increase the number of machines, tools, and devices relative to our numbers—plus a little genius here and there to improve our technological techniques and achieve a multiplier effect on that accumulation—the more our standards of living are going to rise. And the opposite is true as well, i.e., increasing the population relative to the amount of capital will see a decline in those standards.
What in turn is required for capital accumulation? Well, having a good number of STEM types relative to the population and a robust savings rate; or to put it another way, you need a people with high average IQ and low time preference. And as I said, a few geniuses, whose intelligence is not always as measurable as IQ, provide a good accelerant, but even without that x factor, a high IQ/low time preference population alone would be able to increase living standards, just not as quickly.
And what’s true on the national scale is no less true on the world scale. The more high IQ/low time preference humans as a percentage of the world’s population, the higher the standard of living will be for everyone, other things being equal. As I’ll show in a moment, this will happen regardless of the intentions of the White or East Asian countries.
While slight variation is seen from country to country, the average IQ of the White nations is 100, the average of the East Asian ones is 105, and both have relatively high saving rates when compared to other peoples (I’m excluding Ashkenazi Jews from the discussion despite the 112 average IQ and high savings rate because of how infinitesimally small their numbers are compared to the world population). So if the world population’s proportion of Whites and East Asians were to increase, you’d have more STEM types and geniuses—Whites actually lead in that regard, as they have greater numbers both above and below their average intelligence level relative to East Asians—as a percent of the total, meaning a greater potential for increasing the amount of capital per capita.
When looking toward the future, consider the above in light of this graphic I put together showing IQ vs fertility rate: read it and weep—or at least, reach for a stiff drink. (To see just how screwed the world is unless something changes, just eyeball the lines connecting a country’s ranking on the first list (fertility ranking, high to low) versus the second (IQ ranking, high to low): if the world were to be getting smarter on average or at least staying the same, most of those lines would be horizontal. The more vertical the lines, the dumber the world will be getting on average relative to now.)
As you can see, the STEM powerhouses are either declining or stagnating while the STEM deserts are exploding relative to the total.
The graph might be labeled the confluence of globalization and biology. Long story short, as the US, Europe and its former colonies, and to a lesser extent Japan began outsourcing manufacturing to the lower income countries, the real incomes of the working and middle classes either declined or slowed relative to their potential, while the real incomes of the nations outsourced to went through the roof—as did their population numbers in most cases. As the graph makes clear, the once-poor high-IQ nations South Korea and China put their newfound wealth into increased capital and let their birthrates decline, while the low IQ nations put theirs into funding a population boom, as seen in this graph of the world’s most populous countries.
Once below the population of Germany (with an average IQ of 100), both Indonesia (average IQ of 80) and Nigeria (average IQ of 68) have left Deutschland in the demographic dust using the wealth born of the West’s capital export (and in Africa’s case, with Western aid and charity as well).
Let me quickly show you the mechanics of the betrayal of the Western working and middle classes by the globalists and how the damage done not only to them but to the country and indeed world, is even worse than it first appears. To sum up the way the initial and most obvious damage, that is, to the First World’s middle and working classes, plays out, we simply use what you might term the globalization of Say’s Law: just as Say’s Law says that the production of product A creates a demand for product B (so, a cobbler’s shoes produced and sold create the demand for the various goods he buys with his income), my version states that companies will offshore production until the decline of real incomes from diminished production in the once-wealthier nations meets with the rise of real incomes from increasing production in the once-poorer nations, ending any profits to be had from offshoring further. Let’s look at it from the standpoint of an individual company, with this graphic showing its total costs and total sales which—subtracting the former from the latter—determine profit: the left part represents the plan to produce it in America, the right the plan to do so via offshoring—and as you can see, the right has a greatly enlarged profit margin, hence, why companies initially rush to offshore.
Of course, for that differential to work, the company needs its US buyers to have the same real income. The reason the company loves those third worlders as workers is the same reason it hates them as customers: unless we’re talking about food and maybe something like a cell phone, there’s no way the man who puts in an entire day to earn what an American worker would make in an hour is going to buy the company’s product for the same price. But as offshoring continues apace and throws more and more American workers out of their manufacturing jobs and into wage competition with other US workers, both real and nominal incomes decline and those workers’ inability to buy the offshoring companies’ products reduces its sales and hence their profit margins from above at the same time that rising real wages of the third world workers begin to reduce those profits from below. This will keep going until it seems as if the two economies fuse and all things interchangeable, including labor and incomes, are mixed and evened out, to the great detriment of the West’s middle and working classes.
For a quick look at the macro effects of this, consider this brief tale of two economies.
List of characteristics:
Country A:
Total population: 120,000 (100,000 working; 20,000 nonworking)
Total incomes: 100,000,000.00
Workers:
20,000 STEM-types (they earn collectively, 30,000,000.00)
30,000 semiskilled-types (they earn collectively 30,000,000.00)
50,000 unskilled (they earn collectively 40,000,000.00)
Country B:
Total population: 120, 000 (100,000 working; 20,000 nonworking)
Total incomes: 10,000,000.00
Workers:
100,000 unskilled (they earn collectively 10,000,000.00)
Country A-B fused economy:
Total population: 240,000 (200,000 working; 40,000 nonworking)
Total incomes: 110,000,000.00
Workers:
20,000 STEM-types (they earn collectively, 30,000,000.00)
30,000 semiskilled-types (they earn collectively 30,000,000.00)
150,000 unskilled (they earn collectively 50,000,000.00)
Prefusion per capita earnings:
Country A:
STEM-type: $1,500.00
Semiskilled: $1,500.00
Unskilled: $800.00
Postfusion per capita earnings:
Country A:
STEM-type: $1,500.00
Semiskilled: $1,500.00
Unskilled: $333.33
As you can see, Country A is something like a Western nation, with a good percentage of the workforce made up of capital-creating-and-maintaining STEM-types, along with many semiskilled workers and unskilled workers earning pretty decent wages—largely as a result of the capital accumulation and maintenance that the STEM-type and semiskilled workers allow. Country B, on the other hand, is something like an impoverished African nation with virtually no capital and no STEM-types or even semiskilled workers (think something along the lines of The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s natural resources grown and harvested via primitive techniques by a population resembling Sierra Leone’s with its average IQ of 52). Abundant natural resources alone allow Country B to earn one-tenth the national income of Country A, and when they “fuse,” only the interchangeable unskilled workers of both nations are affected income-wise, with Country A’s STEM-type and semiskilled workers doing just as well, as there are no Country B workers who can compete with them for wages. What happens is essentially that manufacturing facilities in Country A shut down and ship out along with their STEM-type and semiskilled workforces (who will be getting a bit more in pay to compensate for the relocation, etc., but I’m painting with a broad brush here, and the pay of all of Country A STEM-type and semiskilled workers would not go up by that much from this) to Country B to utilize its unskilled dirt-cheap workforce; and in the process all those Country A unskilled workers laid off in manufacturing move into whatever job niches they can find, lowering the wages of unskilled workers in Country A overall.
Though the details would be far more complex in real life, this is, broadly speaking, what happens in globalization and free trade (and unchecked immigration produces a similar effect with the additional burdens of rising crime, diminishing social capital, etc., within the wealthier higher-IQ countries). So in the case of its fusion with a country such as India with its low average IQ overall (77) but its vast reserves of high-IQ Brahmin types thanks to its overall massive population, even Western STEM-types would begin to feel the pressure, with the only overall winners at least from the perspective of Country A being the globalist oligarchs financing the whole thing. So basically, while offshoring seems like a sweet deal to those who take advantage of its initial effects, in the end, the only possible true winners are those of the poorer, lower-IQ nations—and even for them it’s a Pyrrhic victory in the long run.
To see why even the third world’s victory is somewhat Pyrrhic, we need to analyze why globalism’s damage is even more pernicious than you’d think, for two reasons. First, for what you might call the overqualified worker effect. Let me illustrate it with a graph[1] and a personal story. First, the graph, which is from Robert M. Hauser of The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Demography and Ecology:
As it shows, there’s a pretty wide IQ range within the various fields, with some of the high-end workers in stereotypically middling- and even low-IQ professions having a number higher than the low end of the high-IQ professions—yeah, it even shocked me to see some in the janitorial line of work come out ahead of the dimmer STEM-types, but I guess that’s life, as my personal story illustrates (in a slightly less extreme way). In the early 1900s, my mother’s grandfather emigrated from Germany to the US and settled in Nebraska as a farmer. He had eight kids and took on seasonal help from other German immigrants. When the dust bowl came, he left Nebraska for Ohio where he worked in a factory doing what was de facto engineering work: constructing dies, repairing and calibrating equipment, often doing the math required mentally or just with paper and pencil. Some of his German hired help was that smart as well. So for various reasons, including circumstances, temperament, etc., there are many with STEM-level IQs (119 on average according to a 2009 article by Jonathan Wai et al.[2]) who remain in fields for which they are overqualified. While they might not directly contribute to the pool of STEM workers, their earning enough to raise large families—a thing made impossible when mass immigration pits them against low-IQ, low-wage workers who are just barely qualified for their jobs—helps ensure enough at least potential STEM types in the next generation.
Also, consider this. Per conventional genetics, when you have a population of the same type of organism in which a trait is highly prevalent but not necessarily present in each individual, it’s far more likely for members of that group that don’t themselves show the trait to produce offspring that do than would be the case with the don’t-show-the-trait members of a population in which the trait occurs but is very rare. To put it in human terms, if White or East Asian working-class couples with 90 IQs are earning real incomes that allow them to have four kids each, its far more likely that they’ll produce at least one of STEM-level IQ (which is about 119 on average) than a Hispanic or Black couple with IQs of 90. And as the middle and working classes tend to have more kids than the high-average-IQ upper classes, this provides an extra support for keeping STEM numbers up.
For both of those reasons, those who wish to maintain a modern economy and the standard of living it allows MUST stop forcing the lower and middle classes of heritage Americans into cutthroat wage competition with workers from low-IQ nations who meet just the minimum qualifications for their positions.
How do we stop this process of globalist-induced world immiserization? By having the West embrace true economic nationalism: put an immediate cap on all third-world immigration, including all H-1 types (a true nationalist ought to wish them to stay and help grow the wealth of their own nations); close the border and actually deport the illegals; stop making our smartest and most productive citizens pay for the dimmest and least productive to breed; and end the tax incentives that reward offshoring and replace them with what I like to call veraprotectionism (or true protectionism) consisting of equalizing tariffs tied to the difference in costs of labor and environmental regulations between the US and other nations.
That last part’s especially important. We need true economic nationalism, not crony capitalism: let the pols set the individual rates by industry or some such scheme and you’ll turn the whole thing into a vast, seething caldron of corruption and waste; set it for all countries based on the different average costs of labor etc., and then sit back and let consumers decide which products are best for their costs—without having to worry that choosing the foreign-made will impoverish unseen workers in some part of the nation.
This while you do help the workers of other nations—but only after you’ve helped your own, in the same way that your main duty is to your family: this being the essence of genuine nationalism, which sees true nations as families, united by blood, culture, and law, writ large. See, because all that capital requires complimentary factors in order to use it, including labor, at some point the high-capital-production country reaches a saturation level where it can’t utilize its capital in domestic production, the tariffs having no way and no intention of stopping this. At that point two things happen: 1) there develops a very strong incentive to push for more extensive automation and better capital that can do more with the same amount of labor, and 2) you get a spillover effect whereby capital begins to flow to the third-world nations whose own standards of living then rise even faster. I say even faster because the increasing efficiency of White/East Asian capital and consumer goods enriches the rest of the world as well: either by the obsolete-to-us-but-not-to-them equipment they get or by the increasingly advanced and low-cost goods that we make (how many rural Africans had a phone in the land-line era vs now when there are inexpensive cell phones that use satellites?). And as I’ve said, all that capital accumulation and technological advancement depend entirely on keeping the number of high IQ/low time preference and genius individuals high relative to the overall population, be it on the national or world scale, a condition the Great Replacement is uniquely designed to undo.
Hence, ironically, in battle between true nationalists and globalists it is we, we who merely seek to defend our peoples and nation, who are unintentionally fighting to increase the wealth of all nations while those opposing us, nominally in the name of humanity as a whole, are fighting for its impoverishment. Although we ought never to apologize for looking out for our own peoples and nations first, I hope that after today we can feel confident that, even if we lack the smug arrogance to do so, we would be wholly justified in demanding that those claim to oppose us out of love for the world’s teaming masses thank us for our efforts.
Thank you.
[1] Jonathan Wai, David Lubinski, and Camilla P. Benbow, “(Pdf) Spatial Ability for STEM Domains: Aligning over 50 Years …,” ResearchGate, November 2009, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228627975_Spatial_Ability_for_STEM_Domains_Aligning_Over_50_Years_of_Cumulative_Psychological_Knowledge_Solidifies_Its_Importance.
[1] Rodrigo de la Jara, “Modern IQ Ranges for Various Occupations,” IQ Comparison Site, accessed March 22, 2024, https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx. This graph was adapted from Figure 12 of Hauser, Robert M. 2002. “Meritocracy, cognitive ability, and the sources of occupational success.” CDE Working Paper 98-07 (rev). Center for Demography and Ecology, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. The figure is labelled “Wisconsin Men’s Henmon-Nelson IQ Distributions for 1992-94 Occupation Groups with 30 Cases or More” and is found at http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/98-07.pdf.
[2] Jonathan Wai, David Lubinski, and Camilla P. Benbow, “(Pdf) Spatial Ability for STEM Domains: Aligning over 50 Years …,” ResearchGate, November 2009, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228627975_Spatial_Ability_for_STEM_Domains_Aligning_Over_50_Years_of_Cumulative_Psychological_Knowledge_Solidifies_Its_Importance.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2024/05/16/how-economic-and-ethnic-nationalism-by-white-and-east-asian-nations-raises-world-living-standards-and-how-open-borders-and-multiculturalism-lowers-them/
