Weakening democracy lol

[lpetrich]

Linking “Micro” to “Macro” Models of State Breakdown to Improve Methods for Political Forecasting - 2017

Three predictive problems bedevil our ability to foresee political crises and state breakdown: (1) how to tell when a previously stable state falls into a situation of hidden but dangerous instability; (2) how to tell, once a certain level of instability has appeared in the form of protests, riots, or regional rebellions, whether chaos will grow and accelerate into revolution or civil war, or if the protests are likely to be contained and dampen out; and (3) how to tell which individuals and groups are likely to be the main source of mobilization for radical movements, and whether opposition networks will link up, grow and spread, or be isolated and contained.

Saying that we need to model them together.

A History of Possible Futures: Multipath Forecasting of Social Breakdown, Recovery, and Resilience

The premise of this paper is that a transdisciplinary approach to forecasting social breakdown, recovery, and resilience is entirely feasible, as a result of recent breakthroughs in statistical analysis of large-scale historical data, the qualitative insights of historical and semiotic investigations, and agent-based models that translate between micro-dynamics of interacting individuals and the collective macro-level events emerging from these interactions. Our goal is to construct a series of probabilistic scenarios of social breakdown and recovery, based on historical crises and outcomes, which can aid the analysis of potential outcomes of future crises.

The 2010 structural-demographic forecast for the 2010–2020 decade: A retrospective assessment | PLOS ONE

This article revisits the prediction, made in 2010, that the 2010–2020 decade would likely be a period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe Turchin P. 2018. This prediction was based on a computational model that quantified in the USA such structural-demographic forces for instability as popular immiseration, intraelite competition, and state weakness prior to 2010. Using these trends as inputs, the model calculated and projected forward in time the Political Stress Indicator, which in the past was strongly correlated with socio-political instability. Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom. Here we use the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive for the US, UK, and several major Western European countries to assess these structural-demographic predictions. We find that such measures of socio-political instability as anti-government demonstrations and riots increased dramatically during the 2010–2020 decade in all of these countries.

Looking at the US, the UK, France, Spain, and Italy.

 

[lpetrich]

Can History Predict the Future? - The Atlantic - "A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news."

The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”)

Since early in the Holocene. Jericho, Palestine is the oldest city with at least half-continuous occupation.

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin’s historical modeling unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: “At this point,” Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, “I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.”

Then PT comparing himself to Hari Seldon of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,” he told me as we passed Mirror Lake, which UConn’s website describes as a favorite place for students to “read, relax, or ride on the wooden swing.” The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of democratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem. Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.

“We are almost guaranteed” five hellish years, Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more. The problem, he says, is that there are too many people like me. “You are ruling class,” he said, with no more rancor than if he had informed me that I had brown hair, or a slightly newer iPhone than his.

He talked about "elite overproduction" - "the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill."

 

[lpetrich]

"The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do." Cute analogy.

Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-Yale establishment simply didn't have any vacancies. Trump's former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a *paradigmatic example" of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment a banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. "He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge," Turchin said.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners' living standards slipnot relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before-they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners' lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising insecurity becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies--and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent a civilization disintegrates.

Then on Peter Turchin growing up in the Soviet Union and his father fleeing to the US as a dissident. Then how he got into ecology - the biology of organism communities, not the ideology or environmentalist activism - and did mathematical modeling. He worked on pine beetles, and also on moths, voles (field mice), and lemmings.

Lemmings are vole-like rodents that live in far northern latitudes. They normally live in burrows, but when they multiply enough, they come out of their burrows and go on mass migrations. That isn't deliberate suicide, though they can end up dying as a result of their travels, like trying to cross a large body of water. Predator satiation?

That's what happens with long-period cicadas. Huge swarms of them come out every 13 or 17 years, too much for cicada-eaters to eat. Cicadas that come out in other years are much more vulnerable, since there aren't many of them. That's what makes this odd effect stable. Peter Turchin The Social Life of Periodical Cicadas - Peter Turchin

 

[bilby]

Was democracy ever strong?

It does not seem so.

Democracy is weak by design.

It's a feature, not a bug.

 

[bilby]

The UK doesn't have much of natural resources, they still managed to create the biggest empire in human history, simply by...

...industrialising before anyone else did, using their industrial might to build a fucking huge navy that nobody else could challenge, and using that navy to bully most of the world into giving them stuff - from slave labour and natural resources, to the knowledge and expertise necessary to further advance their industrial advantages.

And then they told the people they had enslaved and/or exploited that the reason a tiny nation with few natural resources was in charge was that they were wonderfully nice, kind, and benign, and had decided to let people decide how to sort themselves out as much as possible.

Just as long as they sorted themselves out in exactly the way the British government demanded that they should, so as to avoid being bombarded by Royal Naval gunboats.

 

[lpetrich]

But Peter Turchin came to feel like such population patterns are a solved problem, so he turned to humanity's history.

“All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”

Are there any general laws of humanity's history? He founded a journal, Cliodynamics, dedicated to research into that question.

To seed the journal's research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data. The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.) But once the data are entered, after vetting by Turchin and specialists in the historical period under review, they offer quick and powerful suggestions about historical phenomena.

Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods-especially "moralizing gods," the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database ("records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality") to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before. As the database expands, it will attempt to remove more questions from the realm of humanistic speculation and sock them away in a drawer marked ANSWERED.

But one less-than-flattering result is that complex societies emerge from war, from larger-scale organization making victory more likely. "No one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do because of an ugly thing like war," he says.

The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present, Turchin said. "There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival."

Something like this may be happening in Ukraine right now, because of having to fight Russia.

PT notices spikes of civil strife in US history: around 1870, 1920, and 1970, something that suggests another spike around now.

Turchin's prescriptions are, as whole, vague and unclassifiable. Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren-tax the elites until there are fewer of them-while others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism. Other policies are simply heretical. He opposes credential-oriented higher education, for example, which he says is way of mass-producing elites without also mass-producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are *creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites." A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on d constant rise.

How to do that? Turchin says he doesn't really know, and it isn't his job to know. "I don't really think in terms of specific policy,' he told me. "We need to stop the runaway process of elite overproduction, but I don't know what will work to do that, and nobody else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal basic income?" He conceded that each of these possibilities would have unpredictable effects. He recalled story he'd heard back when he was still an ecologist: The Forest Service had once implemented a plan to reduce the population of bark beetles with pesticide -- only to find that the pesticide killed off the beetles' predators even more effectively than it killed the beetles. The intervention resulted in more beetles than before. The lesson, he said, was to practice "adaptive management," changing and modulating your approach as you go.

Many historians disagree with this belief in predictability, and I think that they have been turned off by other attempts to find cycles, attempts that often seem very Procrustean.

 

[lpetrich]

... Turchin's approach is also Russian, or post-Soviet, in its rejection of the Marxist theory of historical progress that had been the official ideology of the Soviet state. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, so too did the requirement that historical writing acknowledge international communism as the condition toward which the arc of history was bending. Turchin dropped ideology altogether, he says: Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.

Seems like these American historians believe in something much like Marxist ideology, but with a different endpoint of history.

Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field. "If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it's not actual historians," Walter Scheidel, an actual historian at Stanford, told me. (Scheidel, whose books span millennia, takes Turchin's work seriously and has even co-written a paper with him.) Instead they come from scientific fields where these taboos do not dominate.

Like Jared Diamond.

Big Data and History | Dan Snow's History Hit on Acast - "Dan Hoyer and Peter Turchin joined me on the podcast to talk about the new transdisciplinary field of Cliodynamics, which uses the tools of complexity science and cultural evolution to study the dynamics of historical empires and modern nation-states."

Like counting coin hoards to get an estimate of how much strife -- surviving coin hoards are likely abandoned.

He notes that societies head into crisis in much the same way -- immiseration of the common people, overproduction of elites, and weakening of the state -- and that this happens every few hundred years (300 - 400 years) in preindustrial societies. The US is currently doing much the same thing.

 

[lpetrich]

210 Reasons for decline of Roman Empire
Source: A. Demandt, Der Fall Roms (1984) 695
See also: Karl Galinsky in Classical and Modern Interactions (1992) 53-73.

PT then discussed this: Seshat: Global History Databank - it's a big collection on data on several societies, coded in a fashion that allows straightforward comparison. He mentioned the Crisis Database (CrisisDB), that collection of crisis outcomes. Most of them are bad, like civil war, but some societies escape without much trouble. Thus, the ginkgo-leaf logo of CrisisDB, indicating one path in and several paths out.

Greater inequality - economic, political - causes trouble: popular immiseration and elite strife. Concentration of wealth leads to wasting of effort in status symbols like large yachts, and also buying of political influence.

Peter Turchin and Dan Hoyer: "The History of the Near Future"; Disrupting Politics Conference Day 1 - YouTube

Shows a graph of "Deaths of Despair" - alcohol-related, drug overdoses, suicide - something rising over the last few decades.

Dan Hoyer notes Walter Scheidel's book "The Great Leveler". He has a slide:

Can Politics Be 'Disrupted'???

The pessimistic view: "Death is the Great Leveler"

Inequality can decrease only by major, violent shocks:

• Mass-mobilization warfare
• Transformative revolution
• State failure/collapse
• Lethal pandemic

 

[lpetrich]

Then the ginkgo diagram: recovery, continuing instability, collapse. Outcomes of Crisis:

• More Severe: assassinations, population loss, civil war
• Less Severe: mass protests, institutional reform

Like in the US:

• More Severe: Partisan fighting, US Civil War
• Less Severe: Labour strikes, antitrust regulation, wage / safety protection

It's a great virtue of democracy that it enables alternatives to rebellion and civil war.

Successful exit from crisis:

• Roman Republic 4th cy. BCE
• Britain 1830's
• Russia 1860

Major reforms led to peaceful outcomes.

The Political Stress Index for the US: 1800 (initial): -0.5 -- 1820's (Era of Good Feelings): -0.7 -- 1860 (Civil War): +0.6 -- 1900's (Progressive Era): +1.2 -- 1950 (Era of Good Feelings II): -1.0

 

[lpetrich]

Then talking about Europe vs. China - what crises?Europe had revolutions back in 1848 or so, but it had two big wars in the early to mid 20th cy. China, however, got out of its humiliation by the West around 1970. PT predicts that the next wave of instability in China is some decades ahead.

Dan Hoyer thinks that the issue of democracy is secondary.

SocArXiv Papers | Multipath Forecasting: the Aftermath of the 2020 American Crisis

Our main goal is to construct a series of probabilistic scenarios of social breakdown and recovery. We called this approach—similar to ensemble forecasting in weather prediction—multipath forecasting (MPF). In this article I develop a “prototype” of the MPF engine with the goal of illustrating the utility a fully developed version may have. I first apply the computational model to the period of American history from the beginning of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, with the goal of parameterizing the model and testing it against data. Then I use the parameterized model to forecast the dynamics of instability in the USA beyond 2020 and illustrate how the MPF engine can be used to explore the effects of different policy interventions.

Has a diagram showing relative wages in the US: a peak around 1830, then a trough in 1910, then a broad peak over 1940 - 1960, then a decline to ca. 1910 levels.

Also "youth bulges", showing a big peak for the baby boomers.

SocArXiv Papers | Decline and Fall, Growth and Spread, or Resilience? Approaches to Studying How and Why Societies Change

Here, I take stock of previous approaches to studying function – from growth and development to crisis and collapse to resilience – and ask what is the most fruitful lens with which to view fluctuations in how societies function and change over time, as this review essay attempts to accomplish.

 

[lpetrich]

SocArXiv Papers | Flattening the Curve: Learning the lessons of world history to mitigate societal crises

The world is experiencing myriad crises, from global climate change to a major pandemic to runaway inequality, mass impoverishment, and rising sectarian violence. Such crises are not new, but have been recurrent features of past societies. Although these periods have typically led to massive loss of life, the failure of critical institutions, and even complete societal collapse, lessons can be learned from societies that managed to avoid the more devastating and destructive outcomes. Here, we present a preliminary analysis of outcomes from periods of crisis in 50 historical societies and examine closely four cases of averted crisis in world history, highlighting common features. A key observation is that the structural-demographic cycles that give rise to societal crises typically incorporate a ‘gilded age’ during which more future-minded governance could avert future crises. To accomplish more forward-thinking public policy, capable not just of ‘flattening the curve’, but of actually breaking the cycle that produces societal crises in the first place, we argue that systematic quantitative analysis of patterns in world history is a necessary first step.

Then a histogram of counts of crises with various bad consequences: 0: 3, 1: 7, 2: 8, 3: 26, 4: 20, 5: 17, 6: 9, 7: 4, 8: 6

Figure 2. Preliminary analysis of 100 historical societies and severity of outcomes from periods of crisis. See Appendix 2 for description of the cases. Each case is coded for 12 'consequences': 1. Population decline, 2. population collapse, 3. epidemic outbreak, 4. elite downward mobility, 5. extermination of elite groups, 6. major popular revolution, 7. civil war, 8. crisis lasting longer than a century, 9. political fragmentation, 10. destruction or conquest of polity capital, 11. polity conquest by external power, 12. assassin of ruler(s)

 

[lpetrich]

Then discussing some cases of averted crises.

Republican Rome: Conflict of the Orders (494-287 BCE)

In 509 BCE the last King of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, was expelled. Rome became an aristocratic republic governed by a Senate made up of wealthy, land-owning men from prominent families, known as ‘patricians’. In 494 BCE, a group of non-patrician Romans occupied a hill north of the city to protest the burdens placed on ordinary citizens by the patrician elite. This became known as the first secession of the plebs (common citizen), which is often seen as the beginning of the Crisis of the Orders period.

The first succession signalled popular dissatisfaction with how the state was being run and the stranglehold on wealth, power, and opportunity held by Rome’s elite families. Rome’s citizens sought relief from the taxes and rents they owed on their lands and refused to fight for the state. The Senate, faced with rising hostilities from neighbours, particularly nearby Etruscan city-states, felt that the potential loss of soldiers was too great to bear. A new office, the tribune of the plebs, was created to represent the concerns of the majority in the Senate. This was enough to resolve the crisis, at least for a while. A century-long period of high tension and instability followed, and although there was some civil violence, a major revolution or civil war were avoided.

This arrangement lasted until the last decades of the 2nd cy. BCE, when the plebs started suffering from the same issues again, but this time, it was much worse. Rome suffered almost a century of civil war before Augustus Caesar decisively emerged on top, as a monarch in all but name.

 

[lpetrich]

England: Chartist Movement: 1819-1867 CE

What we are calling the Chartist period in England begins in 1819 with the Peterloo riot, a massive popular protest demanding full male suffrage and improvement in working conditions, which was met with violent suppression and resulted in a number of deaths. The crisis lasted until 1867, when the franchise was extended to all male citizens. In between, several more riots and protests occurred while a series of labour laws and other reforms aimed at improving the living conditions for the urban working poor were passed. The period is named after the People’s Charter, a formal document of protestation signed in 1838 calling for these reforms.

Much better documented than ancient Rome, and one can get lots of good numbers.

Britain's elites were divided between supporting and opposing the reforms, and it took sustained activism to enact those reforms. But it is a virtue of democracy that it provides a mechanism for having such reforms.

Like the Roman Republic, with its expansion, Britain's empire building gave its citizens plenty of emigration opportunities, to other British Empire countries like Canada and Australia, and also to the now-independent North American colonies.

Russia: Reform Period: 1855-1881 CE

Under Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855-1881), major economic and social reforms were passed aimed at alleviating the poverty of Russia’s large population of enserfed labourers. Russia’s amelioration of unrest is the shortest-lived of those explored here. Alexander II’s reforms created as many tensions as they solved and he was assassinated in 1881 by a small, disaffected segment of the elite intelligentsia.

Russia had a revolution in 1905, and then in 1917. The 1905 one failed, but the 1917 one was cataclysmic, destroying the upper crust of society. The Bolsheviks murdered the royal family, and they and rebellious peasants murdered many aristocrats. The surviving ones either fled or suffered a big fall in social status. The 1917 revolution is one of the highest-scoring crises, with a score of 8, along with the French Revolution and some earlier crises.

 

[lpetrich]

USA: Progressive Era: 1914-1939 CE

Typically the Progressive Era, named for the number of reforms passed during this time, is dated 1890–1914. This period is not typically described as a ‘crisis’, largely because, as we will see, many of the factors driving unrest through the nineteenth century had largely dissipated by this time. Here, we focus on the subsequent decades, marking this period as a crisis due to the signs of rising social tension along with the turmoil and violence that preceded further reforms in the 1920s and 1930s, detailed below.

The authors describe what happened before, from the mid-19th-cy. to WWI.

As in the major industrial centres of England, American industrial workers in the nineteenth century suffered harsh conditions, long hours and often unsafe and unregulated environments. Additionally, there were few legal protections for workers injured on the job, or anything to prevent employers from firing protestors or strikers and replacing them with non-union workers, supporting fairly high unemployment rates during the period. Thus, while the country’s economy grew and real wages increased, an even greater share went to the factory and railroad owners. Increasingly crowded cities and poor sanitation led to a
sharp decline in many key indicators of well-being during the late nineteenth century ((Turchin 2016); Figure A6.a). Popular immiseration was thus on the rise not only leading up to the Civil War, but even in its aftermath.

Elite overproduction is likewise apparent in the US case, as wealthy factory owners, merchants, rail barons, and other industrialists profited from the same conditions explored above that worked to drive down popular well-being. The economic gains made by this group produced more elites and elite aspirants. Enrollments in post-secondary education soared in the second half of the nineteenth century, while the number of millionaires and the size of fortunes likewise rose steadily ((Turchin 2016); Figure A6.b).

As elite fortunes and numbers grew, so did intra-elite competition. The most dramatic and significant illustration of this is, of course, the US Civil War. Though this war was bloody and decisive in many respects, it failed to fully allay tension between elites with very different visions for the country’s economic future.

Then noting that the Federal Government did not spend very much -- and did not raise as much in taxes as local and state governments did. So while the FG was solvent, it was not in a position to react to anything big.

All this led to a lengthy period of high political stress, from the 1850s to the start of the First World War. The Civil War, a major outpouring of intra-elite competition, only resolved the most extreme, violent outcomes of tension. The major underlying drivers – increasing immiseration among labourers in the industrial economy, rising elite numbers and fortunes, and a relatively weak, underfunded state – remained after fighting ceased. Indeed, instability continued to rise after the 1860s, cresting only in the early twentieth century (Figure 6). The 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s witnessed major protests, labour disruptions, and riots mostly involving factory and railroad workers. Through most of the nineteenth century federal and state governments largely sided with employers.

 

[lpetrich]

This seems like a recipe for a civil war. But Civil War II didn't happen. The authors note the US willingness to enter WWI, a war which was a diversion from conditions at home, but that was only toward the end of it. President Woodrow Wilson famously proclaimed that the US was "too proud to fight" after the Germans sank the Lusitania, but after the Zimmermann telegram, he turned around and claimed that the US must make the world "safe for democracy".

They also note some improving social indicators of before the war.

After the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt took office and began to shift some of the government’s stance towards workers. In 1902, the federal government successfully mediated a labour dispute involving unionized coal miners in Pennsylvania, signalling at least a willingness to engage in compromise and recognizing the concerns of labour, though the government was careful to avoid being seen as explicitly acknowledging worker’s right to collective bargaining. A few years later, during Roosevelt’s last year in office in 1908, the Federal Employer’s Liability Act was passed, which provided a means for railroad workers injured on the job to seek compensation from employers. In 1910, unionized railroad workers won a work-day limited to no more than 10 hours and more protected wage scales. Although several major instances of popular uprising and violent protest occurred in the following decade, union membership continued to grow and the government slowly but surely loosened its stance against labour collectivization and action, culminating in the 1933 passing of the National Labour Relations Act.

Part of it was divisions in the elites themselves. "Indeed, by the early twentieth century many of the industrialists who had benefited from the lax rules regarding treatment of employees came to support many of the reforms workers had been calling for."

Also helpful was the curtailing of immigration in 1924, by using quota fractions from some decades earlier, when many more Nordics were immigrating. That was the time of Madison Grant, with his book "The Passing of the Great Race" about how the Nordic race was being overrun by non-Nordics.

Several of the country’s premiere Universities also imposed much stricter admissions standards in the 1920s (Calavita 2020; Domhoff and Webber 2011; Karabel 2005; Turchin 2016). Largely, these were driven on class and ethnic grounds, though the result was a similar curtailing of elite overproduction.

They wanted mostly upper-class White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and the like; upper-class Nordics.

Their response to Jews being very studious was that they wanted well-rounded students, those who did a lot of upper-class sports and the like.

 

[DrZoidberg]

The UK doesn't have much of natural resources, they still managed to create the biggest empire in human history, simply by deciding that we're all better off if we let people sort themselves out as much possible.

Yesterday I noted an article (at Al-Jazeera?) claiming excess deaths in India were 100 million over the time-span of the Raj, besting the combined homicide tolls of Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin AND Hitler. GINI soared under the Raj with half of Indians getting only the barest minimum to sustain life.

So much for the British Empire being some anarchist utopia, which is what DrZoidberg implied that it was.

I did? I can't follow your logic

 

[DrZoidberg]

We are today more educated and wiser than at any time prior in history. Just because you think people are dumb now, doesn't mean they were smarter before.

Science and education have advanced, yet Stupidism and other symptoms are still rampant, even among the "educated." Brexit and Trump are obvious examples where today's democracies seem not particularly "wise." Stupidism feeds on lies, and it is with modern communication that lies travel at breakneck speed.

I think it's just a result of the Internet. Before Internet journalists had immense power. Through weaving narratives in their publications they could simplify ideological conflicts to just a couple of issues. Essentially, journalists, who all lived in big cities, would meet at parties. It was a small community where everybody would meet everybody and talk things through, They had collectively total control of what we thought and valued about politics. But they were also a very specific group of people. They were urban, well educated, middle-class and privileged. So policies tended to benefit that group. This group lost their ability to control the public discourse.

What has happened since is that people who traditionally have been locked out of having a public voice, have now been given a voice. So it's the voices of rural, working class, non-privilged and/or non-educated. I don't see it as a problem that they have now been given clout and a political voice. These people's opinions used to be covered by some journalists LARPing their democrafic. While now they get to speak with their own voice. I don't see them as necessarily stupid. I just see them as having other priorities in life than me, (urban, white, well educated, middle-class and middle-aged). I'm totally cool with my group having lost some power.

I think the rurals, who are predominantly conservative, have been force fed progressive values for decades, by their liberal journalist representatives. They're now reacting to this, and we see that reflected in government policies.

I'm a progressive liberal. But I'm also for democracy. I don't want my values forced upon anyone. I don't want anyone's values forced onto anyone. I think conservatives also have a right to be heard.

 

[Swammerdami]

Science and education have advanced, yet Stupidism and other symptoms are still rampant, even among the "educated." Brexit and Trump are obvious examples where today's democracies seem not particularly "wise." Stupidism feeds on lies, and it is with modern communication that lies travel at breakneck speed.

I think it's just a result of the Internet. Before Internet journalists had immense power.

Two points:

(1) You ignore my point that politics once was primarily LOCAL. A farmer was interested in how a politician's policies affected his farm. Local schools were an issue. Largely ignored was crap like lies about Hunter Biden's laptop. Voters are wll informed when the focus is on local issues.

(2) Journalists reported to editors and publishers. They, in turn, were influenced by advertisers. An "elite" had great influence. with journalists their investigative branch.

Some members of the "elite" favor policies to make the rich richer. Other "elites" have more progressive humanitarian values. Provided that information channels are not swamped with lies, citizens may be able to make good guesses about which sort of "elite" is speaking to them.

... journalists ... had collectively total control of what we thought and valued about politics. But they were also a very specific group of people. They were urban, well educated, middle-class and privileged. So policies tended to benefit that group. This group lost their ability to control the public discourse.

What has happened since is that people who traditionally have been locked out of having a public voice, have now been given a voice. So it's the voices of rural, working class, non-privilged and/or non-educated. I don't see it as a problem that they have now been given clout and a political voice. ...

Your ideas may have merit in Scandinavia — I don't know. But in the U.S.A. the average voter is surprisingly ignorant and stupid and 49% of voters are even stupider than that! Hitler came to power democratically in the early 1930's; today's American voters may be even stupider than those Germans.

I suppose the average IQ is 100+, and much of the stupidity manifests itself only on political topics. I have a smart friend who composes music, operates a business, and built a good App, but he thinks that Covid cases are ordinary flu, that magnets prove that Covid vaccines are malicious bots. Obama was born in Kenya, the FedRes is a scam that should be abolished, etc. Remember: This is a smart guy! (His village got hit hard with Covid-19, with him and his family refusing to vaccinate or wear masks; they all got seriously sick. "I guess it was a bad flu" he told me, evidently refusing to take the $3 test.)

People will call me elitist for saying so, but DrZ's perspective turns America over to the FauxPotato/QAnon crowd and has bad consequences. Within the decade I'm afraid this will be proven all-too-true.

 

[bilby]

I suppose the average IQ is 100+

The average IQ of a population is exactly 100, by definition.

People with an IQ of 100 are pretty unintelligent, and exactly half of the population are less intelligent than that.

 

[Elixir]

The average IQ of a population is exactly 100, by definition.

That always seemed simple to understand. If you could IQ test an entire population, the average score Would be designated IQ100. But what constitutes a population?
A country’s total inhabitants? The world’s? Including age-adjustments or only adult scores? If only adult scores, what’s an adult? If not, what is the age adjustment algorithm?
IQ is meaningless except as a measure of an individual’s ability to perform on IQ tests.
But the stupidity of the average human is a self evident objective reality that doesn’t need to be quantified.