>The Egyptian military does receive significant foreign aid from America, and during America’s decline, Egypt will suffer relative to independent states in the region, such as Turkey. Because of this, Egypt will not be able to challenge Turkey for control of the Middle East.
Turks also have a 10 IQ point advantage over Egyptians.
I neglected to highlight the importance of IQ for most of these assessments, because I'm using the "axis of negation" theory that much of the IQ differentials between populations will be "occupied" with the task of managing the populations they come to invade and govern. So in this scenario, Turkey has to take over Saudi Arabia, which preoccupies much of its intellectual firepower. Another way of looking at this is "Egypt is more dependent on foreign aid than Turkey because it lacks human capital in the first place," which can be explained in part by IQ.
I actually wrote this article months ago, and I wish I had taken a look at your IQ dataset first, as I think it would have made me look at Ethiopia differently. I am now much more bearish on the idea of Ethiopia being able to exert any influence on its neighbors in the event of Sino-American collapse.
Ethiopia is a really interesting nature-nurture test case because, on the one hand, it has a longer experience with literate civilization than European countries, but, on the other, its basic human capital doesn't seem to be any better than any other Sub Saharan African country. Currently, it has a booming economy, but it also went through a communist disaster period (though, arguably, in a way more characteristic of higher IQ countries than the typical African 'crazy dictator steals everyone's shit then eats people' model.) It almost makes me wish we could run this experiment to see what would happen.
One thing I think missing from your article is how much international trade shocks would affect certain countries. For example, Egypt's main problem wouldn't be losing international aid, but the fact they can't make enough food for more than half their population. So, in the event of a collapse of international trade, that would be bye-bye to their population advantage.
Yeah, the entire Middle East has a huge food and water problem. I assumed that desalination tech would be good enough to solve this, but that is not very reasonable to assume in a scenario where the global economy breaks down.
If I had to redo this I would shift the Nigeria conquests further north into the Sahel. I still think that Egypt would easily conquer Libya and take the oil, but mass starvation would render it fairly weak and internally divided. There's an argument to be made that Turkey and Russian-Europe's goal would be to take the Libyan oil fields from Egypt. Russia-Europe would have a naval advantage, but Turkey would have the land advantage. Definitely an area of future conflict with no clear victory or stability.
This is all very well and good. But progressivism has a serious numbers problem. Namely: it doesn't produce any children. As Kaufmann has pointed out in his work on religion and demographics, the world is becoming more religious over time.
Religious conservatives have the most kids and liberals the least, with the mainline religious somewhere in the middle. For the last few decades, irreligiosity has grown due to the children of mainliners giving up the religion of their parents. However, with the mainline now running out of people, society is increasingly divided between the highly religious and the highly irreligious - exacerbating polarisation.
The irreligious are unlikely to make it in the long run. Their birthrates are just too low. So whatever religious ideology is going to unify everyone, it probably won't be any kind of wokeism. That's certainly the current thing, but it's merely a transitional phase to whatever comes next.
I haven't read his book. My impression is that Kaufmann, like others many others (Dutton), fails to account for or even measure "conversion rates." The children of religious people don't remain religious at a rate of 100%. None of these people have provided a simple projection of what they think the conversion rate is. It's just one number. It could be 1%, it could be 10%, (I think there's evidence for it being as high as 70% in some churches) but it's certainly not 0%.
He does factor that in. The conversion rate to secularism is much higher for religious mainliners than it is for the conservative religious. He argues that the secularisation effect is weaker than the fertility effect over the long run.
Imagine that 1% of Amish become non-Amish. Let's say that there are 350,000 Amish, and every year, 35,000 Amish babies are born. 350 of those Amish babies will then become non-Amish Christian conservatives. Then 1% of those Christian conservatives becomes a progressive atheist. That means, effectively, 350,000 Amish are having 3.5 progressive atheist babies per year, even at a conversion rate of 0.01%. So progressive atheists never "go away" or "disappear," because this was never a numbers game. Progressive atheism didn't become culturally dominant by having babies -- they became culturally dominant by being smarter and more idealistic.
Gonna be honest, I'm struggling to find anything explicit on conversion rates, either in the book or on his blog. He mostly seems to account for it by looking at rates of growth/decline over time (which should factor all of that in). He doesn't argue (and I wouldn't argue) that progressive atheism will cease to exist, only that it will probably decline in numbers over the coming decades.
He notes, for instance, that whilst non-religiosity is growing in America and much of the west its rate of growth is declining and that it will likely peak around 2030 and then start to decline after that point (though it will certainly continue to exist as a social force and long term projections are probably of little use).
If I were a betting man, my prediction would be on Pentecostalism as the religion of the future. It's one of the fastest growing religious movements in the world and seems able to unite a broad coalition of different kinds of personalities and ethnic groups.
I understand that him hiding the rate of conversation is helping him sell books, but I'm not going to pay $10 to find out what the number is -- if you find it, let me know, and I'll run some basic math on it.
My argument isn't that Mexicans are supermen. My argument is that Mexico is much larger than its neighbors and would steamroll them in a military conflict. That's all that I argue. The idea that Guatemalans would successfully resist Mexican invasion is more hilarious, although I won't call you stupid.
The Mexican State can't even crush the cartels in its own territory, something an overwhelming majority of Mexicans support and is urgently needed for the country to be normal again. The Mexican army is not very strong and exactly zero people would sign up to conquer a region literally nobody cares about, not to mention doesn't have the most favourable geography for an invader. Of course Guatemalans could resist; the Mexican army has given up entire cities (arguably entire regions) to cartel control (check out the "Culiacanazo", it's vastly more embarassing than whatever fuck-ups Russia has been up to lately). The vast majority of countries circa 2024 are just basically incapable of doing wars of conquest.
They used to be, at this point many of them are highly diversified entities that act parastically on local economies ("cobro de piso", kidnappings, hired guns, etc), not to mention that there's a substantial market for drugs in Mexico nowadays. If the American revenue stream dried up tomorrow the violence would get worse (fighting for a smaller pie) but their domestic activities would remain intact (and intensify, to the detriment of Mexico).
Moreover, this isn't even the main argument. Whatever prompted their spawn and subsequent activities is irrelevant. The key thing is that they command firepower and resources that are at least comparable to that of a small state, like Guatemala, and Mexico, in fact, can't deal with them. The fact that the cartels (in their present, small-state status) can't be crushed proves that Mexico can't crush a Guatemala.
Btw, the thing about America being solely to blame is a dumb leftist meme here; no serious Mexican analyst buys it whole. High levels of violence are quite common in LatAm for reasons that are pretty hard to parse. Colombia remains quite violent even after they lost their priviledged US market position (to Mexico). Venezuela was quite violent even before the Maduro implosion, same goes for Ecuador and Brazil.
The actual country who would most likely implode if the US disappears is Mexico, not China. Remittances and by far the most important market for exports would simultaneously disappear, while a huge population of refugees becomes a very significant short-term drag (long-term neutral, because immigrants aren't magic) on the economy. Hard to tell if the country gets more violent, since US demand for narcotics probably goes down, but it might with the US pulling out all political involvement. On net, your national income is taking a huge hit and there's no Americans worried about the potential for instability. I wouldn't discard a Salvador-type scenario at this point.
I agree that Mexico would be hit hard by the disappearance of America, but so would every other central American country. You understand that remittances are a bigger percentage of Guatamala than Mexico, right?
So what? This isn't eastern Europe, nobody has an old ax to grind, comparative status is irrelevant. What matters is that nobody would be thinking about conquest when Mexico in all likelihood will be in the worst shape it's been in decades. The imperial mindset just isn't a thing here.
I say this as politely as I can: you are hopelessly out of your depth.
I never argued that Mexico would conquer for status. I argued that it would be to control the Panama Canal firstly, and secondly, to gain access to oil.
Some of this analysis uses Zeihan logic. Mexico has 140 million Mexicans, not 140 million people. India has been a population center for much of history but rarely been anything resembling a great power in the same way China was with a similar population. It’s hard to imagine Mexico or Brazil accomplishing anything besides maintaining their current borders without a drastic shift in governance and culture
They are people, but zeihan thinks all people are equally fungible. He doesn’t consider why native Americans never lost any wars with Americas navigable rivers, or why America with a population of 300 million is less dynamic and capable of manufacturing and long term power projection than America with 100 million people a century ago.
If you listen to him, you will find that he clearly distinguishes between different nations in their level of education and human capital. Sorry he isn't biologically racist enough for you.
I don't agree with Matthew Yglesias's plan, and I don't argue for it in this article. This article is a "what if" about if America suddenly disappeared, and how the rest of the world would re-order itself. It's a fun article -- not an endorsement of whatever you're implying.
Entertaining scenario, though presumably not entirely serious(?)
I think the China scenario is probably the most astute one, and would probably replicate itself in a lot of places. Ideological actors who believe the only thing holding them back from revolution is uncle sam’s neoliberal thumb on the scale would probably spring into action and immediately self-detonate, making things worse for everyone. But on the whole things might return to a social/political equilibrium not dissimilar to the present soon enough anyway. I don’t think we’re going to have this resumption of history and geopolitics like its the 18th century even without America.
>The Egyptian military does receive significant foreign aid from America, and during America’s decline, Egypt will suffer relative to independent states in the region, such as Turkey. Because of this, Egypt will not be able to challenge Turkey for control of the Middle East.
Turks also have a 10 IQ point advantage over Egyptians.
I neglected to highlight the importance of IQ for most of these assessments, because I'm using the "axis of negation" theory that much of the IQ differentials between populations will be "occupied" with the task of managing the populations they come to invade and govern. So in this scenario, Turkey has to take over Saudi Arabia, which preoccupies much of its intellectual firepower. Another way of looking at this is "Egypt is more dependent on foreign aid than Turkey because it lacks human capital in the first place," which can be explained in part by IQ.
I actually wrote this article months ago, and I wish I had taken a look at your IQ dataset first, as I think it would have made me look at Ethiopia differently. I am now much more bearish on the idea of Ethiopia being able to exert any influence on its neighbors in the event of Sino-American collapse.
Ethiopia is a really interesting nature-nurture test case because, on the one hand, it has a longer experience with literate civilization than European countries, but, on the other, its basic human capital doesn't seem to be any better than any other Sub Saharan African country. Currently, it has a booming economy, but it also went through a communist disaster period (though, arguably, in a way more characteristic of higher IQ countries than the typical African 'crazy dictator steals everyone's shit then eats people' model.) It almost makes me wish we could run this experiment to see what would happen.
One thing I think missing from your article is how much international trade shocks would affect certain countries. For example, Egypt's main problem wouldn't be losing international aid, but the fact they can't make enough food for more than half their population. So, in the event of a collapse of international trade, that would be bye-bye to their population advantage.
Yeah, the entire Middle East has a huge food and water problem. I assumed that desalination tech would be good enough to solve this, but that is not very reasonable to assume in a scenario where the global economy breaks down.
If I had to redo this I would shift the Nigeria conquests further north into the Sahel. I still think that Egypt would easily conquer Libya and take the oil, but mass starvation would render it fairly weak and internally divided. There's an argument to be made that Turkey and Russian-Europe's goal would be to take the Libyan oil fields from Egypt. Russia-Europe would have a naval advantage, but Turkey would have the land advantage. Definitely an area of future conflict with no clear victory or stability.
This is all very well and good. But progressivism has a serious numbers problem. Namely: it doesn't produce any children. As Kaufmann has pointed out in his work on religion and demographics, the world is becoming more religious over time.
Religious conservatives have the most kids and liberals the least, with the mainline religious somewhere in the middle. For the last few decades, irreligiosity has grown due to the children of mainliners giving up the religion of their parents. However, with the mainline now running out of people, society is increasingly divided between the highly religious and the highly irreligious - exacerbating polarisation.
The irreligious are unlikely to make it in the long run. Their birthrates are just too low. So whatever religious ideology is going to unify everyone, it probably won't be any kind of wokeism. That's certainly the current thing, but it's merely a transitional phase to whatever comes next.
I disagree with Kaufmann, and I don't even know who that is -- there's several Kaufmanns out there.
Ah sorry, it's Eric Kaufmann and the book in question is "Shall the Religious inherit the earth?" He's on Substack too.
I haven't read his book. My impression is that Kaufmann, like others many others (Dutton), fails to account for or even measure "conversion rates." The children of religious people don't remain religious at a rate of 100%. None of these people have provided a simple projection of what they think the conversion rate is. It's just one number. It could be 1%, it could be 10%, (I think there's evidence for it being as high as 70% in some churches) but it's certainly not 0%.
He does factor that in. The conversion rate to secularism is much higher for religious mainliners than it is for the conservative religious. He argues that the secularisation effect is weaker than the fertility effect over the long run.
Ok just to jump the shark here:
Imagine that 1% of Amish become non-Amish. Let's say that there are 350,000 Amish, and every year, 35,000 Amish babies are born. 350 of those Amish babies will then become non-Amish Christian conservatives. Then 1% of those Christian conservatives becomes a progressive atheist. That means, effectively, 350,000 Amish are having 3.5 progressive atheist babies per year, even at a conversion rate of 0.01%. So progressive atheists never "go away" or "disappear," because this was never a numbers game. Progressive atheism didn't become culturally dominant by having babies -- they became culturally dominant by being smarter and more idealistic.
Gonna be honest, I'm struggling to find anything explicit on conversion rates, either in the book or on his blog. He mostly seems to account for it by looking at rates of growth/decline over time (which should factor all of that in). He doesn't argue (and I wouldn't argue) that progressive atheism will cease to exist, only that it will probably decline in numbers over the coming decades.
He notes, for instance, that whilst non-religiosity is growing in America and much of the west its rate of growth is declining and that it will likely peak around 2030 and then start to decline after that point (though it will certainly continue to exist as a social force and long term projections are probably of little use).
If I were a betting man, my prediction would be on Pentecostalism as the religion of the future. It's one of the fastest growing religious movements in the world and seems able to unite a broad coalition of different kinds of personalities and ethnic groups.
I understand that him hiding the rate of conversation is helping him sell books, but I'm not going to pay $10 to find out what the number is -- if you find it, let me know, and I'll run some basic math on it.
I agree with everything you're saying. I'll double check the kindle version I have and see what I can find in terms of conversion rates.
The Mexican thing is hilarious and very stupid (I am Mexican, trust me on it)
My argument isn't that Mexicans are supermen. My argument is that Mexico is much larger than its neighbors and would steamroll them in a military conflict. That's all that I argue. The idea that Guatemalans would successfully resist Mexican invasion is more hilarious, although I won't call you stupid.
The Mexican State can't even crush the cartels in its own territory, something an overwhelming majority of Mexicans support and is urgently needed for the country to be normal again. The Mexican army is not very strong and exactly zero people would sign up to conquer a region literally nobody cares about, not to mention doesn't have the most favourable geography for an invader. Of course Guatemalans could resist; the Mexican army has given up entire cities (arguably entire regions) to cartel control (check out the "Culiacanazo", it's vastly more embarassing than whatever fuck-ups Russia has been up to lately). The vast majority of countries circa 2024 are just basically incapable of doing wars of conquest.
"Mexican State can't even crush the cartels" -- This is not true. The cartels are a product of American drug consumption.
They used to be, at this point many of them are highly diversified entities that act parastically on local economies ("cobro de piso", kidnappings, hired guns, etc), not to mention that there's a substantial market for drugs in Mexico nowadays. If the American revenue stream dried up tomorrow the violence would get worse (fighting for a smaller pie) but their domestic activities would remain intact (and intensify, to the detriment of Mexico).
Moreover, this isn't even the main argument. Whatever prompted their spawn and subsequent activities is irrelevant. The key thing is that they command firepower and resources that are at least comparable to that of a small state, like Guatemala, and Mexico, in fact, can't deal with them. The fact that the cartels (in their present, small-state status) can't be crushed proves that Mexico can't crush a Guatemala.
Without their main source of income they would integrate.
Do you even speak Spanish?
Btw, the thing about America being solely to blame is a dumb leftist meme here; no serious Mexican analyst buys it whole. High levels of violence are quite common in LatAm for reasons that are pretty hard to parse. Colombia remains quite violent even after they lost their priviledged US market position (to Mexico). Venezuela was quite violent even before the Maduro implosion, same goes for Ecuador and Brazil.
The actual country who would most likely implode if the US disappears is Mexico, not China. Remittances and by far the most important market for exports would simultaneously disappear, while a huge population of refugees becomes a very significant short-term drag (long-term neutral, because immigrants aren't magic) on the economy. Hard to tell if the country gets more violent, since US demand for narcotics probably goes down, but it might with the US pulling out all political involvement. On net, your national income is taking a huge hit and there's no Americans worried about the potential for instability. I wouldn't discard a Salvador-type scenario at this point.
I agree that Mexico would be hit hard by the disappearance of America, but so would every other central American country. You understand that remittances are a bigger percentage of Guatamala than Mexico, right?
So what? This isn't eastern Europe, nobody has an old ax to grind, comparative status is irrelevant. What matters is that nobody would be thinking about conquest when Mexico in all likelihood will be in the worst shape it's been in decades. The imperial mindset just isn't a thing here.
I say this as politely as I can: you are hopelessly out of your depth.
I never argued that Mexico would conquer for status. I argued that it would be to control the Panama Canal firstly, and secondly, to gain access to oil.
Some of this analysis uses Zeihan logic. Mexico has 140 million Mexicans, not 140 million people. India has been a population center for much of history but rarely been anything resembling a great power in the same way China was with a similar population. It’s hard to imagine Mexico or Brazil accomplishing anything besides maintaining their current borders without a drastic shift in governance and culture
You calling Mexicans "not people" leads me to take Zeihan more seriously than whatever you have to say.
They are people, but zeihan thinks all people are equally fungible. He doesn’t consider why native Americans never lost any wars with Americas navigable rivers, or why America with a population of 300 million is less dynamic and capable of manufacturing and long term power projection than America with 100 million people a century ago.
If you listen to him, you will find that he clearly distinguishes between different nations in their level of education and human capital. Sorry he isn't biologically racist enough for you.
Do you believe in Matt yglesias’s plan, that one billion Americans would produce a stronger, more prosperous USA?
I don't agree with Matthew Yglesias's plan, and I don't argue for it in this article. This article is a "what if" about if America suddenly disappeared, and how the rest of the world would re-order itself. It's a fun article -- not an endorsement of whatever you're implying.
Entertaining scenario, though presumably not entirely serious(?)
I think the China scenario is probably the most astute one, and would probably replicate itself in a lot of places. Ideological actors who believe the only thing holding them back from revolution is uncle sam’s neoliberal thumb on the scale would probably spring into action and immediately self-detonate, making things worse for everyone. But on the whole things might return to a social/political equilibrium not dissimilar to the present soon enough anyway. I don’t think we’re going to have this resumption of history and geopolitics like its the 18th century even without America.
You're right that it's not a serious venture to predict the future past 20 years, but I agree that it is entertaining ;)