28 thoughts on “Diminishing Returns”

1. All foreign aid to Africa should be cease immediately.

   All developed countries need to curtail handouts to new arrivals and develop a more sensible “workfare” style system for native citizens.

2. When the inevitable pandemic hits us it’s going to be a tough few years, but nature has a way of dealing with imbalance.
   Let’s hope it’s quick and relatively painless.

   • A “tough few years”? More like turmoil and anarchy for several generations.

     What is “nature’s way of dealing with imbalance”? This is not a snarky question, but an honest inquiry.

     In our garden here at Schloss Bodissey, if I were to let nature have its way (which was the Baron’s preferred method while I used to tend toward hyper-alert vigilance and dismay), Japanese beetles would devour everything, with the leavings slurped up by thrips and such. The former have no enemies. If I did not intervene, the fruits of my work would belong to the insect world. In our cultural milieu, we need something akin to Captain Jack’s Dead Bug:

     Bonide Chemical Dead Bug Brew RTS with Hose End Sprayer 32 FL Oz

     The battle is on-going. There is nothing either quick or ‘relatively’ painless about it.

     But I do side with your sentiments. I, too, whistle past the graveyard…

     • As humans we can and will push back on the forces of nature, agreed. Some societies will be better equipped to cope in the face of a pandemic, in fact the current high fertility regions on this list, will have the least resilience. Nature will do the heavy lifting.
       Anarchy and chaos for generations, probably an accurate description.
       It would be wise to have good relationships with your immediate community, live in a location with defendable boundaries like a valley or island. A return to Tribalism sounds like a definite possibility, but then again things could continue as they are indefinitely, I doubt it but maybe.

   • The “pandemic” is already here – a certain religion/ideology we focus on at this site 😉

     And we’re only seeing the very first of its fruit. In 2002, I recall reading that in parts of Nigeria, 80% of newborn baby boys were called Osama. Unless there’s an amazingly famous Nigerian actor, or similar, going by the same name, and inspiring such a trend for the name, can there be any doubt as to the inspiration for that name – and hence the ideology that those boys are growing up with? And can the situation be that different in the rest of the Islamic world?

     Well, in just under four years, “Generation Osama” will turn 18 – incidentally, around the time that robots will start to take over more and more jobs… how will the inevitable mass unemployment affect the ambitions and world-view of all these Osamas? We’ll probably find out, in the 2020s…

     My guess is that this “pandemic” is only just getting started – but that its ultimate effects could be just as deadly as the plague, influenza or any other “doomsday disease”.

3. If the immigration stops, the population decline will lead to lower housing costs and assist in a fertility rebound. With continued immigration, the cost of having children will continue to be intimidating to Western parents, so the fertility will remain low. As is so often the case, immigration is the key. A fertility rebound will only occur when immigration is reduced.

   • Correctamundo!

   • Well it’s only a guess on my part, (as it is with all of us) but not only must immigration of useless MENA rabble stop, but those who made it into Eurabia must be repatriated before there can be any semblance of security for Europeans, without which birthrates will remain low.

     Simple as that; for most of the populace security, both financial and otherwise is an absolute must for a rising birthrate. Some may say that poor people tend to have larger families, and while that was true when I was a kid, it was simply irresponsibility.

4. Check out “Decree 770” on Wiki, regarding the attempts of the Caecescu regime to increase fertility in communist Romania, where abortion had been the default method of contraception; not a happy tale, especially for women who couldn’t afford (now) illegal birth control methods. If people in advanced “western” societies choose to limit their families, this is their own business, and indeed could be regarded as being responsible purely on the grounds that consumers in rich countries use far more resources per capita than elsewhere. This is not to advocate a general “green” agenda, just a reminder that the earth’s resources are finite, whie humans (one hopes) may be here for millions of years to come.

   • lots of resources forever, but getting to them requires technology requires intelligent people requires intelligent people having babies

5. I agree with Cark Coleman that ‘imigration is the key’ , but I believe there are aditional perspectives to this .
   The invention of contraceptives and the equality of women has destroyed Natures most powerfull way of making humans have children.
   In all developed countries this has caused fertility to nosedive far below anything you can cal healthy .
   Seen from natures point of wiev , this can best be understood as a chock-effect comparable (among other things ) to a poisoning of a population . Given time resistant individuals wil emerge, and in a relativly short time the whole polulation will be resistant .
   Nature will find a way to compensate for birthcontrol , given time enough . In any population there will be a small minority that will create big families no matter what stands in the way , and given time most of the population will become descendants of this minority .
   The big question is , if there will be time enough , or if mass-immigration will lead to a very different solution to the problem .

   • Mass unskilled immigration (pinching the bridge of my nose) how anybody with two brain cells to rub together can see that as a solution to any problem escapes me, but the Nut Jobs in office do.
     How long till Autonomous vehicles, harvesters, kabob rollers (well maybe not that last one) render most of them unemployed, 5 years, 10 max.
     How long till combined Medical breakthrough(s) extend the average persons useful working life by decades, I’ll bet you the hope diamond that generation already exists.
     How do these new imports fit into that picture, I’ll give you hint, they don’t. Will they resent us for it, yup.

   • The irony is that by my personal observation, the majority of women in western welfare states who produce higher than replacement numbers of children are those living off the welfare state and their offspring often do not have the same fathers.

     • Right on! That’s what is happening in all western countries, but particularly U.K. and USA.

   • Humans like to think that somehow, they have a special status and that population pressures, dynamics and evolutionary pressure do not relate to them. Speaking as a biologist, this is mostly untrue. Having a welfare state that allows every human to breed, removes evolutionary pressure. This is quite a recent phenomenon, if you were born severely handicapped or suffered disease until recent centuries, you had a significant chance of dying before reproducing and thus not passing on your poor quality genes to future generations. The West has become effete, Africa and Asia have not. And they are breeding, and we are helping them to do so, with our aid programmes. There are potentially 2 scenarios for the future.
     They outbreed us, we return to an agrarian economy, something like the middle ages. No new discoveries will be made, if Islam is the predominant ideology, ideas will be hunted out and destroyed as being Haram. My Granddaughters will be wearing a Burkha. My Great Granddaughters will be brown.
     The west finally wakes up and fights. This could be very nasty indeed, and may result in parts of the planet suffering nuclear attack.
     What we should have done of course, is post war, kept a very tight lid on things, and left very few non-white people in, only those with an exceptional skill, which of course would be very few anyway. We should not wail ”Mea Culpa” over any colonial past, otherwise we would have a strong case against Italy, for the slaves they took from Western Europe, and the exploitation of the known world.

     • That’s a clear view of the bigger picture – and a precise summary of our choices. That’s how it will be.

       Delaying a decision only serves to worsen the situation – or put us further down the path of our genocide.

6. A word on Turkey.
   The fertility rate of ehtnic Turcs is also dropping, while kurdish women still have more children.
   So by mid of the century there could be for the first time a generation of kurdish children that outnumbers the same turkish generation (Source: Asia Times, Spengler).
   One aspect that explains the policy of Erdogan, who is quiet aware of this fact.

   What it will mean for Europe is not clear yet.

   • I’m sure the Burqa Brigade outside of Ankara and Istanbul, especially in rural Anatolia, will have something to say about that!

7. “When they become predominant in the population, their inherited intellectual capabilities will preclude the maintenance of any sophisticated robotics, and their skills and/or work ethic will not provide the level of wealth to which their host countries had previously been accustomed.”

   Are we sure about that?? Here in England, many of my fellow engineers are “brown” – and very capable, especially in programming/IT. (btw, some of them also hate Islam with a passion – if that gives any clues as to what sort of “brown people” they largely are 😉 ) . Besides – how many IT or robot experts will one need to maintain an army of robots? How many were needed to create Windows, the iPhone, Facebook, Google, Pokemon Go or any other staples of the modern world? Surely the whole point of IT and robotics is that extremely few people are needed to maintain it – be they white, brown or any other…

   • I’ll wager that very few of those engineers hail from sub-Saharan Africa, which is where the bulk of the population pressure is coming from.

     • Sure. But my point was that surely the influx of IT/tech specialists, alongside the home-grown ones, will be enough to serve the growing number of computers and robots – regardless of the intellectual skills of the additional “irregular arrivals” from the Calais Jungle?

       • And when the ‘irregulars’ overwhelm your ‘capable’ brown skinned IT/tech specialists along with you?

       • Not necessarily. The quality of life in the new Eurostans will be such that qualified people may find it more in their interest to decamp to China, Russia, or New Zealand.

         Think of East London, a.k.a. “Banglatown”, but spread throughout all the large and medium-sized urban areas of the entire country. Unless your hypothetical engineer is a Muslim already, would he want to live in such a dirty, crime-infested environment, where his children are at risk of becoming sex-toys for the new culture-enriching masters?

         How many qualified engineers and other highly-skilled workers are required for every thousand imams and “job-seekers”? I don’t know the answer, but I’m not convinced that the new Islamic Republics will be able to attract and keep enough of them. Especially when the educational system will turn out fewer and fewer of them every year.

         • It’s true, that the qualified people may eventually decide they’ve had enough, and decamp to somewhere more pleasant. Especially if taxes go higher, in order to finance the spiralling welfare costs…

           However, right now, the influx of qualified workers is still continuing – if anything, only affected by some unforeseen developments such as Brexit.

           However for, say, qualified Indians already used to living in a country where they can hear the Azaan five times a day, why would they not want to move to Britain if the money’s good – Islamic or not?

           A lot probably depends on what model of “Islamic republic” the Western Euro states take. If they’re largely peaceful, firmly-led states like Morocco, Indonesia or UAE, then my guess is that skilled workers will continue to flood in. However if Europe becomes a civil war-ridden hellhole like Libya, Syria, Iraq or Lebanon in the 70s then sure – there’ll be an exodus… my money’s on the latter, but you never know!

     • I’m sure an illiterate triple amputee could count them.

8. The Jewish fertility rate in Israel is actually growing while that of the Arab population, both Muslim and Christian, is in decline.
   http://www.wsj.com/articles/jewish-baby-boom-alters-israeli-palestinian-dynamic-1468499825

9. 1) Argentines are *the only* white nation (mostly descedants of Italians, along with Spanish) with TFR>2.1.

   2) Christians of Middle East have also a much lower TFR than their Muslim “compartiots”. Lebanon used to be a country with a Christian majority; no more.

   3) Even worse, a percentage of white children in Europe are products of a “bad fertility”: Teenager pregnancies etc.

10. Just picking up your comment on Israel and the fertility rate among the orthodox Jewish population. From what I have read,( and comment from your Israeli correspondent would be interesting) the Orthodox Jewish community is rapidly growing while the secular Israeli population is barely replacing itself. So the prospects are in 30-40 years that secular Israel will be a lot more religious.

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