Elon Musk knows about this. In Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk, there is a passage about Elon saying that smart people should have more kids. That's why he keeps having kids with a lot of different women.
The woman in that relationship in that video clip isn't a very good match character-wise. Its not very fun to have such a woman as wife.
The Man meanwhile could marry a younger woman in her early 20's and still reproduce that way. If he needs to delay marrying himself.
No reason that their ages must be identical or very similar. As for Elon Musk its very bizarre that they forgo the natural abilities of their bodies predominantly and resort to IVF and similar techniques to make that happen.
- It is the social class that arose between the nobility and the peasantry in late feudal society.
- It is the class that derives its income from direct participation in the market economy, and not indirect participation (i.e., income in the form of wages or other fixed payments). With the expansion of the market economy, the middle class eventually displaced the nobility as the dominant class.
I am essentially using the Marxist definition, with "middle class" corresponding to "bourgeoisie."
"Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition – that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital." Friedrich Engels - Principles of Communism
That is not how Karl Marx defined the "middle class" or the "bourgeoisie."
Karl Marx defined the bourgeoisie primarily as the owners of the means of production under capitalism. That also appears to be how Engels is using the term in this quote you provided.
If you define middle class as "deriving its income from direct participation in the market economy" but without "income in the form of wages or other fixed payments," then I am still unclear who is in the group.
How do you get income without wages or fixed payments? Do you mean exclusively profits from owning a business/farm?
If I am understanding your definition correctly, among Europeans who earned their income directly from market participation in the early 19th century, the large majority were farmers.
Is there really any way to know the genetic composition of that group and whether it expanded/contracted over time?
The bourgeoisie did not always own the means of production. They gained ownership by participating in the emerging market economy.
Their income came from profit, as opposed to the fixed payments or levies that characterized feudal relations. Profits are volatile. They are determined by one's competitiveness in a market. Workers participate indirectly in the market as wage-earners. Yes, there is a labor market, but it developed fairly late in the formation of capitalist relations. Moreover, the need for income stability has always placed workers in a peripheral relationship to the market.
Both Marx and Engels defined the bourgeoisie in relation to the emerging market economy and the declining feudal economy:
"From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop."
Quoting Marx does not really answer my question. And relying on Marxist doctrine for your history is not persuasive. His theory is full of holes. The Communist Manifesto was an ideological manifesto, not factual history.
The bulk of the people who fit your original definition during that time period were market-oriented farmers. That is clearly not what Karl Marx meant by bourgeoisie.
Do you believe that market-oriented farmers were the driving force in increased intelligence from 1350 to late 19th Century?
If not, then this dramatically decreases the size of the middle class everywhere in Europe, except for England, Low Countries and Northern Italy.
The bourgeoisie emerged among those individuals who were better at exploiting opportunities in the market economy: yeomen farmers, merchants, and independent artisans.
Even within these three groups, some individuals were more market-oriented than others. This is where genetic/cultural factors come into the picture. It is easier for some people to navigate the market economy than others.
Such people tend to have not only higher cognitive ability but also lower time preference — or more "foresight" in plain English. They are also less likely to resort to violence as a means to resolve disputes. Finally, they are better at bargaining and gaining trust.
Very good!!! I appreciate you pointing out things about the Flynn effect such as those old school questions, over the last few years I've earned a lot about the past and oh boy could I add to that.
RE the patent increases. Its such BS, off the bat the monstrous corporatist state perversion known as the Bayh-Dole Act started having government tech patents get registered because it just began transferring tax payer funded into the exclusive control of big companies (mostly, but even when their small businesses its often time the case that its a big company, but thats too long to write here) whereas before they were just open to any citizen or businesses to use (after all, they as taxpayers paid for its production in the direct government labs and offsite indirect government labs at the research unis!) and that system grew over time which led an increasesing rate.
And thats before we get into quality and types and what even is being patented and how much is just patent troll or wannabe patent troll trap layings and on and on I could go but thats too much to write here
Thanks for the interesting and informative writing!
Yes, I agree absolutely! All forms of life have their technologies, most are body-internal-built-in-endosomatic...organs, special body structures and sensory abilities. They also exploit resources using those techs that they have in order to survive and seek to increase their power, power as energy and resource control and hroughput (Population X per capita energy and resource possession/use). That's the very essence of life...that which uses up energy and material resources, creates entropy, according to Jeremy England and Friedrich Nietzsche) Humans and a few other species have developed exosomatic tech, ability to use tools, but because of other built-in tech unique to us (esp our language and our brains' reality modeling abilities) we have become the great masters-lords of exosomatic tech that uses exosomatic energy. New exosomatic techs can evolve far faster than those that rely on genetic evolution, and we are constantly seeking new paradigms or energy and material resources to reach ever higher levels of power. Since we are living things, and therefore by necessity-definition seek to increase our power always, as long as our tech & resource paradigm's (TRP's) limits have not been reached, we will inevitably keep doing so. Today, we are in the midst of a deep crisis-challenge though: establishing the next TRP (beyond-fossil-energy and recycling of materials) before the old one is exhausted to the point that we can't even make the transition. The sower's paradox is beginning to be felt, esp in the "developing world". Socio-economic stress is on the rise as this happens.
I think difference in fertility is not the only factor. And perhaps, at least up until the Boomer generation, fertility difference is actually a minor factor. My hypothesis: most intelligence decline comes from a natural drift / entropy, accompanied with a growing standard deviation (distribution broadening mostly toward the stupid side), i.e. Bratsberg & Rosenberg's “within-family variation” even in monogamous families.
Side note: I would also hesitate to underestimate an environmental/lifestyle impact on our health. The field of medicine has regressed in some important ways since the 1930s.
The term "monogamous family" is just a legalism if the children have different fathers.
I'm not convinced by Ed's reasoning. The fall in infant mortality was much greater during the first half of the 20th century, yet the decline in polygenic scores is about the same, perhaps even worse during the second half if we take survivorship bias into account.
Medicine made many improvements during the 1940s and 1950s, particularly with the introduction of antibiotics. Even today, there are significant advances. The problem is that we are losing our social and cultural safety net. Mean lifespan is declining because more people are living alone without any social interaction, especially men in their 40s and up.
Environmental pollution is a big factor. Areas which have a higher concentration of synthetic chemicals in the soil and water also have a higher incidence of cancer and other debilitating diseases. Decline in IQ and cognition is consistent with a more polluted environment. Everything people eat and drink is now full of microplastics and the air in urban areas is full of rubber particles from tires which are small enough to drift on air currents and end up in human lungs.
Author thinks this has something to do with fertility but there is an obvious problem with that hypothesis. There are more people than ever and the parts of the world with the highest fertility have some of the worst problems with governance and technological development. If the fertility hypothsis was true then we'd expect the places with the highest fertility to have the smartest people but this is not the case.
It's not fertility per se that's driving the decline in mean cognitive ability. It's the class difference in fertility, particularly between the middle class and the lower class.
Actually, there is evidence that the same cognitive decline is occurring in the non-Western world, notably in Latin America, Iran, and Turkey. I can't say more because that evidence is presented in a paper currently under peer review (and it's not one of my papers).
Remember Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"? What's happening today is a natural, technology-induced, equalization creeping normalcy process...Vonnegut's story had "handicaps" added to effect equalization, but I bet Vonnegut (who made clear his anti-tech-"progress" view in "Cat's Cradle", et alia) could see how technological "progress" was having the same effect. The overall tendency of our technological "progress", beginning with the first great tech transition from H&Ger to agricultural economics-life support has been to domesticate-tame-ant-ify/borg-ify us. It continues now at an accelerating pace. Just making sure the more intelligent among us are more reproductive cannot stop this process. Technological "progress" must be stopped, and a guy like Musk is sure not onboard with that...he'll have us all hooked up to AI with brain implants as soon as he can.
Kurt Vonnegut is my favorite author, rather than Aldous Huxley or George Orwell. He was the only one (to the best of my knowledge) who foresaw the current dystopia we are living through.
Much rings true indeed. Too bad he didn't foresee much improvement in digital communications i.e. the internet. The biggest inaccuracy in Player Piano is not the punch cards, but that people go to bars, have sex, and procreate.
Humanity will merge with the machines because we already live in a machine society and merging with computers is the obvious next step of technobiological evolution.
Yes, that's certainly our trajectory in the developed world under the leadership of our elite owner-investor class and it's also where the developing world wants to be since they follow whatever the leaders are doing. Thankfully though, it's not for sure that we'll get there...social unrest as the gap between elite and sub-elite widens, the collapse of modern economics due to failure to transition to beyond-fossil energy and/or due to crucial material inputs being exhausted, a "black ball" event (Bostrom's "Vulnerable World Hypothesis" which is just Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" translated into philosophical language.) including the possibility that machines just take over and we go extinct/are extincted entirely, maybe a natural catastrophe (the Old Testament metaphor of the Tower of Babel?). Bottom line: We are going to have to BE derailed because we aren't going to derail ourselves. Even if some should try (like Ted Kaczynski), they'd be over-powered-marginalized-to-insignificance by those who have the technological power, and also by the sub-elites who are hooked on technology like addicts who keep on shooting-up/snorting even though it;s destroying them.
I don't think it is possible to stop technological development. Technology has a will of its own as evidenced by increasing energy utilization and depletion of all exploitable resources.
The opening scene of the movie Idiocracy sums this up in a funnier and more accessible way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
Elon Musk knows about this. In Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk, there is a passage about Elon saying that smart people should have more kids. That's why he keeps having kids with a lot of different women.
I envy him. He runs three companies and has done more to rein in Big Tech than any politician in Washington. Plus, he has ten kids.
The woman in that relationship in that video clip isn't a very good match character-wise. Its not very fun to have such a woman as wife.
The Man meanwhile could marry a younger woman in her early 20's and still reproduce that way. If he needs to delay marrying himself.
No reason that their ages must be identical or very similar. As for Elon Musk its very bizarre that they forgo the natural abilities of their bodies predominantly and resort to IVF and similar techniques to make that happen.
Very weirdly disconnected from their bodies.
Because it is so central to your argument, I think that you need a very specific and measurable definition of “middle class.”
- It is the social class that arose between the nobility and the peasantry in late feudal society.
- It is the class that derives its income from direct participation in the market economy, and not indirect participation (i.e., income in the form of wages or other fixed payments). With the expansion of the market economy, the middle class eventually displaced the nobility as the dominant class.
I am essentially using the Marxist definition, with "middle class" corresponding to "bourgeoisie."
"Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition – that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital." Friedrich Engels - Principles of Communism
That is not how Karl Marx defined the "middle class" or the "bourgeoisie."
Karl Marx defined the bourgeoisie primarily as the owners of the means of production under capitalism. That also appears to be how Engels is using the term in this quote you provided.
If you define middle class as "deriving its income from direct participation in the market economy" but without "income in the form of wages or other fixed payments," then I am still unclear who is in the group.
How do you get income without wages or fixed payments? Do you mean exclusively profits from owning a business/farm?
If I am understanding your definition correctly, among Europeans who earned their income directly from market participation in the early 19th century, the large majority were farmers.
Is there really any way to know the genetic composition of that group and whether it expanded/contracted over time?
The bourgeoisie did not always own the means of production. They gained ownership by participating in the emerging market economy.
Their income came from profit, as opposed to the fixed payments or levies that characterized feudal relations. Profits are volatile. They are determined by one's competitiveness in a market. Workers participate indirectly in the market as wage-earners. Yes, there is a labor market, but it developed fairly late in the formation of capitalist relations. Moreover, the need for income stability has always placed workers in a peripheral relationship to the market.
Both Marx and Engels defined the bourgeoisie in relation to the emerging market economy and the declining feudal economy:
"From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop."
Karl Marx - Communist Manifesto
Quoting Marx does not really answer my question. And relying on Marxist doctrine for your history is not persuasive. His theory is full of holes. The Communist Manifesto was an ideological manifesto, not factual history.
The bulk of the people who fit your original definition during that time period were market-oriented farmers. That is clearly not what Karl Marx meant by bourgeoisie.
Do you believe that market-oriented farmers were the driving force in increased intelligence from 1350 to late 19th Century?
If not, then this dramatically decreases the size of the middle class everywhere in Europe, except for England, Low Countries and Northern Italy.
The bourgeoisie emerged among those individuals who were better at exploiting opportunities in the market economy: yeomen farmers, merchants, and independent artisans.
Even within these three groups, some individuals were more market-oriented than others. This is where genetic/cultural factors come into the picture. It is easier for some people to navigate the market economy than others.
Such people tend to have not only higher cognitive ability but also lower time preference — or more "foresight" in plain English. They are also less likely to resort to violence as a means to resolve disputes. Finally, they are better at bargaining and gaining trust.
Very good!!! I appreciate you pointing out things about the Flynn effect such as those old school questions, over the last few years I've earned a lot about the past and oh boy could I add to that.
RE the patent increases. Its such BS, off the bat the monstrous corporatist state perversion known as the Bayh-Dole Act started having government tech patents get registered because it just began transferring tax payer funded into the exclusive control of big companies (mostly, but even when their small businesses its often time the case that its a big company, but thats too long to write here) whereas before they were just open to any citizen or businesses to use (after all, they as taxpayers paid for its production in the direct government labs and offsite indirect government labs at the research unis!) and that system grew over time which led an increasesing rate.
And thats before we get into quality and types and what even is being patented and how much is just patent troll or wannabe patent troll trap layings and on and on I could go but thats too much to write here
Thanks for the interesting and informative writing!
I hope your having a nice weekend so far.
---Mike
Yes, I agree absolutely! All forms of life have their technologies, most are body-internal-built-in-endosomatic...organs, special body structures and sensory abilities. They also exploit resources using those techs that they have in order to survive and seek to increase their power, power as energy and resource control and hroughput (Population X per capita energy and resource possession/use). That's the very essence of life...that which uses up energy and material resources, creates entropy, according to Jeremy England and Friedrich Nietzsche) Humans and a few other species have developed exosomatic tech, ability to use tools, but because of other built-in tech unique to us (esp our language and our brains' reality modeling abilities) we have become the great masters-lords of exosomatic tech that uses exosomatic energy. New exosomatic techs can evolve far faster than those that rely on genetic evolution, and we are constantly seeking new paradigms or energy and material resources to reach ever higher levels of power. Since we are living things, and therefore by necessity-definition seek to increase our power always, as long as our tech & resource paradigm's (TRP's) limits have not been reached, we will inevitably keep doing so. Today, we are in the midst of a deep crisis-challenge though: establishing the next TRP (beyond-fossil-energy and recycling of materials) before the old one is exhausted to the point that we can't even make the transition. The sower's paradox is beginning to be felt, esp in the "developing world". Socio-economic stress is on the rise as this happens.
I think difference in fertility is not the only factor. And perhaps, at least up until the Boomer generation, fertility difference is actually a minor factor. My hypothesis: most intelligence decline comes from a natural drift / entropy, accompanied with a growing standard deviation (distribution broadening mostly toward the stupid side), i.e. Bratsberg & Rosenberg's “within-family variation” even in monogamous families.
https://odysee.com/@JollyHeretic:d/the-fall-in-iq-and-genius-will-not-be:6?lc=940b40bbb6760f36b2005328acb15bde884f9c748fbd356a4d55f823d3dcf216
Comments / refutations?
Side note: I would also hesitate to underestimate an environmental/lifestyle impact on our health. The field of medicine has regressed in some important ways since the 1930s.
The term "monogamous family" is just a legalism if the children have different fathers.
I'm not convinced by Ed's reasoning. The fall in infant mortality was much greater during the first half of the 20th century, yet the decline in polygenic scores is about the same, perhaps even worse during the second half if we take survivorship bias into account.
Medicine made many improvements during the 1940s and 1950s, particularly with the introduction of antibiotics. Even today, there are significant advances. The problem is that we are losing our social and cultural safety net. Mean lifespan is declining because more people are living alone without any social interaction, especially men in their 40s and up.
Environmental pollution is a big factor. Areas which have a higher concentration of synthetic chemicals in the soil and water also have a higher incidence of cancer and other debilitating diseases. Decline in IQ and cognition is consistent with a more polluted environment. Everything people eat and drink is now full of microplastics and the air in urban areas is full of rubber particles from tires which are small enough to drift on air currents and end up in human lungs.
Author thinks this has something to do with fertility but there is an obvious problem with that hypothesis. There are more people than ever and the parts of the world with the highest fertility have some of the worst problems with governance and technological development. If the fertility hypothsis was true then we'd expect the places with the highest fertility to have the smartest people but this is not the case.
It's not fertility per se that's driving the decline in mean cognitive ability. It's the class difference in fertility, particularly between the middle class and the lower class.
Actually, there is evidence that the same cognitive decline is occurring in the non-Western world, notably in Latin America, Iran, and Turkey. I can't say more because that evidence is presented in a paper currently under peer review (and it's not one of my papers).
Remember Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"? What's happening today is a natural, technology-induced, equalization creeping normalcy process...Vonnegut's story had "handicaps" added to effect equalization, but I bet Vonnegut (who made clear his anti-tech-"progress" view in "Cat's Cradle", et alia) could see how technological "progress" was having the same effect. The overall tendency of our technological "progress", beginning with the first great tech transition from H&Ger to agricultural economics-life support has been to domesticate-tame-ant-ify/borg-ify us. It continues now at an accelerating pace. Just making sure the more intelligent among us are more reproductive cannot stop this process. Technological "progress" must be stopped, and a guy like Musk is sure not onboard with that...he'll have us all hooked up to AI with brain implants as soon as he can.
Kurt Vonnegut is my favorite author, rather than Aldous Huxley or George Orwell. He was the only one (to the best of my knowledge) who foresaw the current dystopia we are living through.
Best book of his you'd recommend?
Player Piano.
Much rings true indeed. Too bad he didn't foresee much improvement in digital communications i.e. the internet. The biggest inaccuracy in Player Piano is not the punch cards, but that people go to bars, have sex, and procreate.
Humanity will merge with the machines because we already live in a machine society and merging with computers is the obvious next step of technobiological evolution.
Yes, that's certainly our trajectory in the developed world under the leadership of our elite owner-investor class and it's also where the developing world wants to be since they follow whatever the leaders are doing. Thankfully though, it's not for sure that we'll get there...social unrest as the gap between elite and sub-elite widens, the collapse of modern economics due to failure to transition to beyond-fossil energy and/or due to crucial material inputs being exhausted, a "black ball" event (Bostrom's "Vulnerable World Hypothesis" which is just Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" translated into philosophical language.) including the possibility that machines just take over and we go extinct/are extincted entirely, maybe a natural catastrophe (the Old Testament metaphor of the Tower of Babel?). Bottom line: We are going to have to BE derailed because we aren't going to derail ourselves. Even if some should try (like Ted Kaczynski), they'd be over-powered-marginalized-to-insignificance by those who have the technological power, and also by the sub-elites who are hooked on technology like addicts who keep on shooting-up/snorting even though it;s destroying them.
I don't think it is possible to stop technological development. Technology has a will of its own as evidenced by increasing energy utilization and depletion of all exploitable resources.
The civilization will collapse before humans merge with machines.