patrick.net

this is why you cannot just drop such low trust non-golden rule people into high trust golden rule societies and expect to lift them up

systems are not all crumbling by accident, they are being pulled down by people who play on one move look ahead and cannot pass a marshmallow test

The Marshmallow Test is a famous psychological study in which children are offered a choice between a small sweet now or a big sweet later. Kids who can’t resist the former tend to be have more trouble in life.

Interestingly, this famous experiment started in Trinidad to look into why Asian Indians had more money than blacks: because the Indians were better at resisting immediate temptation for long term benefits. Fortunately, the academic Walter Mischel came up with a rather transparent rationale for why the big race gap on his test wasn’t really, when you stop and think about it, about race, it was about whether the child’s father lived with him (which seems to correlate closely with race, but hey look a squirrel!)

The Marshmallow Test is a famous psychological study in which children are offered a choice between a small sweet now or a big sweet later. Kids who can’t resist the former tend to be have more trouble in life.

Patrick says

The Marshmallow Test is a famous psychological study in which children are offered a choice between a small sweet now or a big sweet later. Kids who can’t resist the former tend to be have more trouble in life.

What the kids have learned to do is take the marshmallow now and then whine and complain about not getting the big sweet later.

The logical conclusion from the observation that low Gini coefficients correlate to better societies would be to advocate for full communism. This should make us suspicious, however, because every time communism has been tried it’s been catastrophic, and the same is true in a gentler and more gradual but no less pernicious way of its more milquetoast cousin socialism. On closer examination, we see that there is an important confounding variable. Countries with low Gini coefficients, such as Sweden or Japan, tend to be more ethnically homogeneous than countries with high Gini coefficients, such as South Africa or Brazil: that is, racial diversity is correlated with high levels of income inequality. The inhabitants of homogeneous countries are competing with near-peers, naturally leading to low Gini coefficients since you don’t expect large differences in outcome in the absence of small variances in ability; at the same time the inhabitants of homogeneous communities are also more inclined to cooperate with one another, resulting in lower crime and higher levels of happiness (particularly amongst people such as the Swedes or the Japanese, who are very cooperative, high-trust peoples).

If we look at what has happened in our own societies as we have tried to make them more equal and, simultaneously, more diverse (which we are obligated to do, because we are all equal), we find that the consequences of our fanatical embrace of total equality have been, without exception, entropic. Our institutions are crumbling under the burden of the self-imposed incompetence of DEI. Standards drop every year in the education system, from kindergarten all the way through doctoral programs. Urban areas have long since decayed into crime-ridden hell zones with broken infrastructure neglected by kleptocratic governments. Public debt has exploded into the stratosphere with nothing tangible to account for it but the endless money pits of social entitlement programs feeding an ever-growing dependent class. Mass immigration from the third world – the denizens of which are morally equal to Europeans in every way, meaning that there are no moral grounds to prefer a country maintain its numbers with its own babies rather than someone else’s – threatens to displace white people from dominance in every single white country. I could go on. I don’t think I have to.

Some believe that the answer to this is simply to force society to accept the overwhelming evidence of human biodiversity. Once it is generally acknowledged that there are real, measurable, and significant differences in behavioural inclinations and cognitive capacity between ancestral population groups, we can implement colour-blind meritocracy, in which individuals will be free to rise to whatever station their specific talents suit them to, while everyone accepts as a matter of course that this means that certain groups will be over-represented at certain levels of society – in practice, blacks at the bottom, Hispanics and low-caste Indians in the middle, and whites, Asians, and high-caste Indians at the top. Don’t pretend you don’t know that that’s how it would shake out. We all know. Even the equalists know.