Until you have a world solution, any local solution that lowers the birth rate for your group simply makes your group less relevant in the future. The world is quite robust to the conclusion that “increasing population means you are winning.”
As evidence for the above, consider that the most powerful countries have PILES of poor people (U.S., China, Russia) and the countries with the least amount of poor people are lower in power (Western Europe). Western Europe may be in the early stages of being slowly overrun by more prolific less intellectual moslems. Even Israel, with plenty of poor people, faces an Arab Moslem majority in the next few decades.
From consideration of the powerful countries, the key to winning seems to be to co-opt your poor prolific non-intellectuals. The U.S. is a rather comfortable place for non-intellectuals, I think one can conclude that from using 250 channel cable television as a sampler of US culture, but I can personally conclude it from many hours spent jet skiing and four-wheeling around the desert.
Intellectuals are in an excellent position to completely overestimate their importance to the human endeavor. After all, their special skills include 1) making convincing arguments, 2) focusing in on something to analyze it in depth. Sure, part of the skills of making convincing arguments is a great ability to actually figure things out. But focus renders this trickier at being globally accurate than one might at first realize.
For example, I have read plenty of intellectuals who think the “unique” talents of the inventor are the thing that drives production, and the labor that implements the inventions is practically a given, something that grows out of the woodwork in our society. But this territory is equally well mapped by thinking that it is labor that produces value, and that some small proportion of labor which is lazy is also lucky enough to be clever enough to do intellectual tasks that support the value of labor. Labor can be the focus, and invention can be the thing that naturally arises from a desire to avoid labor.
Intellectuals generally do a good idea of having more than a median amount of resources available to them. But the lesson of the industrial and post-industrial world it seems should be that intellectuals are a side show, and real power and production comes from people who are not primarily intellectual. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Gates, Jobs, and so on. To the extent any “captain of industry” was part of an intellectual structure, they all ultimately abandoned it for something more productive.
Until you have a world solution, any local solution that lowers the birth rate for your group simply makes your group less relevant in the future. The world is quite robust to the conclusion that “increasing population means you are winning.”
As evidence for the above, consider that the most powerful countries have PILES of poor people (U.S., China, Russia) and the countries with the least amount of poor people are lower in power (Western Europe). Western Europe may be in the early stages of being slowly overrun by more prolific less intellectual moslems. Even Israel, with plenty of poor people, faces an Arab Moslem majority in the next few decades.
From consideration of the powerful countries, the key to winning seems to be to co-opt your poor prolific non-intellectuals. The U.S. is a rather comfortable place for non-intellectuals, I think one can conclude that from using 250 channel cable television as a sampler of US culture, but I can personally conclude it from many hours spent jet skiing and four-wheeling around the desert.
Intellectuals are in an excellent position to completely overestimate their importance to the human endeavor. After all, their special skills include 1) making convincing arguments, 2) focusing in on something to analyze it in depth. Sure, part of the skills of making convincing arguments is a great ability to actually figure things out. But focus renders this trickier at being globally accurate than one might at first realize.
For example, I have read plenty of intellectuals who think the “unique” talents of the inventor are the thing that drives production, and the labor that implements the inventions is practically a given, something that grows out of the woodwork in our society. But this territory is equally well mapped by thinking that it is labor that produces value, and that some small proportion of labor which is lazy is also lucky enough to be clever enough to do intellectual tasks that support the value of labor. Labor can be the focus, and invention can be the thing that naturally arises from a desire to avoid labor.
Intellectuals generally do a good idea of having more than a median amount of resources available to them. But the lesson of the industrial and post-industrial world it seems should be that intellectuals are a side show, and real power and production comes from people who are not primarily intellectual. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Gates, Jobs, and so on. To the extent any “captain of industry” was part of an intellectual structure, they all ultimately abandoned it for something more productive.