Hacker News Reader

Your points have all been addressed before.

See this presentation about the growth in population in 3rd world countries and how immigration is completely incapable of addressing it in any meaningful way -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE

The growth rates and population amounts are simply too high for us to effectively solve the problems of population growth with massive, intercontinental migration.

You also can't solve societal and cultural problems (of which the 3rd world and developing world has many) by massive migrations of those populations into first world countries. In effect, you end up simply importing those problems. There's plenty of history and evidence for this. There's never been a case in history where the population of a society is massively overtaken by foreigners and that society hasn't changed dramatically.

Cultures and societies are not interchangeable. They aren't equal. It's not racist to say this. You can find undesirable beliefs and traditions among all races and cultures. You cannot fix problematic cultures and societies by trying to emigrate people out of those societies faster than they can produce them. It's far easier to import and export ideas and cultures than it is to migrate people.

You don't need to disavow racism. It's perfectly fine for a people to want and have a homeland .

Yes, but that would more appropriately be called cultural identity or nationalism, it isn't race-based. The English and the French and many other European countries each have very strong cultural identities. The French would equally oppose abandoning their own culture for English, or Japanese, or African cultures.

> but that would more appropriately be called cultural identity or nationalism, it isn't race-based

Correct. Unfortunately, the modern Internet meaning of the world "racism" encompasses everything, from actual racism, through ethnic, cultural, national differences, all the way to differences of opinion. In their original comment, 'api seems to have been using this extended meaning.

(My attempt at understanding this phenomenon: US is a boiling pot of nationalities, cultures and races from around the world; those distinctions end up blending together. In contrast, the rest of the world, and Europe in particular, had and has geographically-separated nations and cultures, and much less local population variety.)

For example, the reason documentaries in the 80s or 90s would, "When they wanted to convey the problem they always showed the same sorts of shots: seething hordes of mostly black and brown people in places like India and Africa. Meanwhile the scientists and other experts interviewed to argue the Malthusian case were almost entirely white men." - that's, IMO, not because of some innate racist views. Rather, it was showing what was familiar and accurate - the academic world in the US was predominantly male and white, while India and Africa were where international aid went. Nothing to do with race, everything to do with what the audience recognizes as the major high population societies suffering from starvation-level poverty.

> You can find undesirable beliefs and traditions among all races and cultures. You cannot fix problematic cultures and societies by trying to emigrate people out of those societies faster than they can produce them. It's far easier to import and export ideas and cultures than it is to migrate people.

Not only that. As you said, "cultures and societies are not interchangeable". Even beliefs and traditions that are, on their face, perfectly fine, can be a source of fear for the culture that ends up importing them. The culture you live in is yours, you feel safe and at home in it[0]. It's understandable to fear that, should the culture change too quickly, you may suddenly start feeling like an outsider, an alien, in your own home. You can adapt to changes only so fast.

--

[0] - Mostly. Everyone has some smaller or bigger issues with their local status quo, but it's still a familiar territory one grew up navigating.

I feel you might be a bit sensitive about racism here.

Growing up far away from the US, but still around western-ish culture, my experience was that overpopulation fears were primarily about resource shortage and creation of large poverty class within the same society; more recently, in context of immigration, about culture shifting to something that's alien or hostile to people living today (that's the "${immigrant group} isn't assimilating" complaint), and about housing and unemployment issues. Underpopulation, in the meantime, I see primarily talked as risk of there being not enough young people to fund old people's retirement pensions. It's a major factor why people I know in my generation all assume we won't get government-run retirement when we get old; the system will collapse due to negative population growth.

Might be a perspective of someone from the old continent, but those issues are rarely if at all viewed through a racial/ethnical perspective (immigration notwithstanding) - even the feared poverty class is just expanding within the same society.

It's a good thing fear of racism and anti-racist signalling is strong. Sometimes it comes across is as naive and whinging though. Is the wish for South Koreans to reproduce the people in their high-functioning society racist? Do we really think the hereditary composition of said society has nothing to do with how highly-functional it is? I think we can see the reality of these things in a sober way, and still maintain our human dignity - even if we aren't South Korean.

> Do we really think the hereditary composition of said society has nothing to do with how highly-functional it is?

https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/s3fs-public/imported/KoreanPe...

That's North and South Korea from space. Those people are almost genetically identical. They're practically clones. Why is the South so much stronger economically and technologically?

Could it have to do with different ideas? The North is a mixture of a monarchist family cult of personality and Marxism, while the South is closer to a Western liberal democracy.

I'm sure you can find other cases of ethnically identical people have massively different outcomes, but this is probably the most obvious. You can see it from space.

These are a problem for people who want to discount the importance of ideas and culture in favor of genetic determinism. If genes are the most important thing, North and South Korea should not have such a large gap in outcome.

It's a lot easier to think of examples of over time. Europe went from being backward and poor compared to the Middle East and China to basically ruling the world in a few generations. That's too fast to explain with genetics. There are loads more examples like this: Japan's sudden industrialization, the rise of China in the last 50 years, etc. In all these cases you had people suddenly leaping forward in development without much genetic change. Why weren't they always so developed if it's genetic?

I'm not arguing that genes have zero impact, but I think ideas are much more significant. Humans are thinking beings. Most of our efficacy comes from things that are not heritable. Genes only give you the base raw material.

I am not discounting ideas or culture at all. I chose my terms wisely and never once mentioned genes. Culture is heritable and is very difficult to completely isolate from many other heritable or semi-heritable factors. Is cultural inheritance as straightforward a process as genetic inheritance? Absolutely not - but culture is certainly heritable. Take populations with barely functional societies and introduce Marxist cults of personality and you don't get North Korea. North Korea is a rarity in this sense. How long did it take many other pseudo-Marxist states to fall apart? Many of these states destroyed themselves so quickly they were essentially lost to history. Again, nothing to do with genetic determinism or cultural determinism - we're just noticing reality here. Humans deserve dignity and nothing I am saying is aimed towards undermining that.

Ehrlich's theories is intuitive and intuitive hypotheses often sound true without being so. It actually requires scientific education to think critically and logically about a hypothesis to judge its veracity. Physics, after all, is replete with non-intuitive explanations of physical phenomena.

> Of course today the new hotness is to panic over underpopulation and demographic collapse. That's got a huge undercurrent of racism too. Desirable countries can easily compensate for any concerns over population decline by importing population, but the depopulation zealots seem to freak out even more over that. We can't just let people immigrate... because... they never quite seem to finish the sentence but you know the reason.

Agreed. Brexit is the first step in an anti-immigration wave that's poised to all sweep Western countries over the next decade.

Beautifully put

so tiresome