Who Voted for Idiocracy?

Florida man won, obviously

In historical terms, this decline in capacity, never mind the total indifference with which it is viewed, seems extraordinary. The growth of civilisation as we know it is intimately connected with the growth in the capacity of the state and its institutions. And even today, the same western governments that are increasingly incapable of threading a needle unaided, are full of ideas for “increasing government capacity” in the Third World,  promoting “accountability,” “transparency,” fighting “corruption” and establishing “good governance,” even as they show themselves unable to govern their way out of a wet paper bag at home. What on earth is going on here? Simply put, and as horribly demonstrated during the height of the Covid epidemic, western governments no longer know how to do things, and technology tends to make this capacity problem worse, not better. So when governments or politicians announce “initiatives,” ask yourself what they actually contain, and whether any practical action is likely to result from them. In most cases, the answer is no. Aurelian.

Recently on Substack, Matthew Archer asked, What if we lost our smartest 5%? and concluded that, without our PhDs, MDs and B.Engs., we would struggle to maintain–let alone improve–our quality of life.

As I was drafting a response to Matthew (working title: What if our smartest 5% ran the country?, about China’s IQ-based political hierarchy), I realized that his dystopian future is already our daily reality. Apparently our political system is so toxic that it simultaneously repels the best Americans while attracting the lowest moral decile¹. The result is what some have called..

Idiocracy

Recently, Florida’s Governor, by combining racism and self-destructiveness, showed just how much damage idiots can do. Here’s Florida Man in action:

The University of Florida, the state’s intellectual flagship, is a Top 100 college with a strong engineering department because Chinese grad students authored 70% of its papers, just as they did at MIT, UC and Harvard. Here’s why there’s such a huge imbalance:

• America’s median IQ is 99, which produces only 10,000 native super-geniuses, folks with 160 IQs who can do original work in anything from theoretical astrophysics to crochet. We need lots of them to keep us at the forefront of science. That’s why we had to import the men who conceptualized, calculated, designed and built the first atom bomb. Our policy of foreign genius assimilation has made us rich.

• China’s median IQ is 106 and, since that produces 300,000 super-geniuses, Beijing can spare a few but, thanks to leaders like Florida Man and Washington Man, fewer come these days. That will depress the universities’ future rankings and their ability to attract foreign graduates: a death spiral. The fact that Washington Man invests one-fourth of China’s R&D budget makes matters worse.

Consequences

Washington Man has been actively cutting us off not only from top scientists, but blocking their technologies, too:

1. Sinovac’s 10¢ Covid vaccine that worked better than $35 mRNA shots, without the side-effects.

2. 5G equipment for remote medicine, manufacturing and autonomous driving. California is America’s leader in advanced manufacturing, medicine and autonomous driving, but Tibet has better 5G coverage.

3. EVs. Private firms invested billions reducing costs and now sell EVs for $10,000 when the US median price is $60,000. But US manufacturers who license Chinese EV technology lose federal subsidies.

4. Renewables. China has cut 2023 prices for wind and solar gear by 40% this year but, though installing them creates millions of jobs and slashes emissions, Washington Man has placed massive duties on them.

5. 21st century technologies. Washington Man’s decisions–if we can call them that–leave us behind China in technologies that will shape this century. Machine learning, energy storage, nuclear power, photovoltaics, quantum sensors.. China so dominates some of them that all the world’s top research institutes are in China.