Guillaume Durocher brings us this analysis of how much of the world’s living standard is driven by a small handful of people in the developed parts of the world, mostly North America, Europe, and the Far East. The rest of the world is a basket case for the reason that they just don’t have a big enough “smart fraction” who can do intellectually demanding work. And so we have millions of people trying to come here to enjoy our higher standard of living while at the same time voting for the very policies that make that standard of living impossible to maintain.
Nature’s breakdown of scientific achievements by papers published.
Our vast material wealth (food, housing, automobiles, appliances, consumer electronics, software . . .) is created by relatively small groups of the intelligent and their workers. The modern state then redistributes this wealth through a stunning variety of schemes – the “public education” system, negotiated salary levels, hyper-regulation of labor, the vast welfare system for health, the unemployed, the elderly, and the poor, etc – according to that society’s values (to what extent do they value social welfare and equality, as against liberty?). These values, in turn, are to a large extent driven by the society’s degree of empathy and social trust.
I believe this simple model accounts for much of the diversity in economies and social systems across the world. Most societies are, by First-World standards, failed societies, having insufficient intelligence, social trust, and/or empathy the produce the material comfort they would wish.
Panglossians such as Stephen Pinker and The Economist will claim the world is getting better and better, so we’ve nothing to worry about. It is true that there is a lot of economic growth and improvement of living standards across the world. The important point they overlook is that the drivers for this growth are not endogenous to Third-World societies. The fact is that there is almost never full convergence between nations or between racial groups within a same society.
Rather, economic growth is occurring because of technological innovations produced by a very, very small portion of humanity, namely in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. This is evident in the materials we use everyday: your Apple computer was perhaps produced in Shenzhen, China, while your software and most-frequented websites were created in Silicon Valley. This is reflected in the production of scientific papers, which is dominated by the West and East Asia. The militant atheist Richard Dawkins has pointed out that the Islamic World contributes virtually nothing in terms of scientific discovery. As his goal is to demonize religion while voiding the far more important issue of race and genetics, he studiously omits the fact that the rapidly-expanding Black World contributes even less.
