The Need For Sexenomics

Enlightenment thought created a study of economics regarding the exchange and distribution of wealth in large societies but the view that people were more or less interchangeable created a curious blindspot.  Never was there a similarly detailed inquiry into how the market of sexual exchange affects the destiny of a people.
Though DNA was only discovered in the 20th century, any caveman could easily observe heredity matters when it comes to humans and livestock. Now with the unraveling of traditional mating patterns, it’s no longer possible to ignore the study of sexenomics.

Living in complex civilizations of millions of strangers doesn’t come naturally to humans and only those selected for it can thrive.  We can see that one of the key pressures that decides the direction of a society is selection through arranged marriages.  Where men must accumulate wealth and prestige in order to breed, they are selected to achieve and explore. In less organized societies, where men just have to persuade ovulating women to have sex a couple times, they are selected to talk smooth, dance well, and beat up male rivals.
The weird thing about men bred to live in civilization is the majority of their energy goes into activities not directly related to their immediate reproductive success. At first glance it’s not biologically rational to spend time going to boring jobs, reading books, practicing hobbies, climbing mountains, making scientific discoveries, or being curious about anything that doesn’t produce a payoff.
One thing that’s readily observable about men from more “primitive” less organized backgrounds is they spend much, if not most of their surplus energy on courtship and mating. It’s one of the reasons why they become devastating defectors in a society of cooperators with lower testosterone and less focus on the mating market.
As we’ve discovered since the 1970s, in a sexual free market, the most aggressive men with the best courtship skills get rewarded with soft harems and plenty of babies while boring schlubs busy at their desk jobs get cut out of the game while they waste time they could have spent out courting.
The pressures of mass society have squeezed civilized men to compete by adopting elaborate bower-building behaviors like we see in birds. This formula works in a society with strict rules that mandate high reproductive investment, but in a sexual free market, a lower investment strategy is far more successful. A man can forgo the bower and secure 5 or 10 mates in the time it takes a career schlub to lock down just one who’s at the end of her reproductive years.

So we can see very quickly that what we call “civilization” depends on sexual market protectionism. When we return the sexual market to its primeval state, all the rest of society soon returns to its primeval state.
We have only to look at feral dogs to see that within a few generations, they revert to a uniform breed best suited to the area whether it’s the forest or city streets. Humans are no different. A few generations where thugs and sociopaths clean up and before long there’s lots of males predisposed towards aggressive sexual strategies. There’s nothing inherently special about European peoples, the qualities that got them ahead mostly resulted from certain breeding practices that have now been dismantled. The status quo of Black society is already emerging as the norm for the bottom 70% of whites. Before long all the awkward nerds are mercilessly scraped from the gene pool and society goes to hell as defectors battle each other for turf.
This of course is why whites first got ahead by being cooperators. The law of the jungle selects for the most formidable individuals but undermines the formation of large groups. So when there’s an alliance of millions of cooperator bower-builder males who free each other from relentless direct sexual competition, quarreling tribes get crushed effortlessly underfoot.

The problem with the civilization model though is that it is dependent on enough scarcity to act as a practical constraint on mating behaviors. Whenever a certain level of prosperity is achieved the constraints on mating relax. Once women no longer need to restrict their mating choice for fear of starvation and men can be reasonably sure his offspring will survive and breed without his help, the incentives re-align to those of a pre-civilized state. What follows is what we like to call “decadence” in the history books or in our own time “the sexual revolution.”
Within a few generations, the genetic wealth of nations is squandered and another Empire is left to crumble for future archaeologists.
While a new empire may soon rise on the ashes of the old, something seems to be lost each cycle. Those peoples that have been civilized longest tend to stagnate.
The genius we associate with China, India, and the Middle East mostly comes from ancient times when their civilizations were still young. Northern Europeans have been yet another young civilization to make brilliant advances but it now seems they may be nearing the point of stagnation reached by other civilized peoples.
So a couple of the biggest problems a study of sexenomics must address are to:
-prevent the fatal decadence caused by prosperity
-stop the slide into stagnant torpor that besets peoples who have been civilized for too long.

Finally, sexenomics provides the core concept that civilization requires sexual market interference by definition, legitimizing righteous rulers to take the necessary corrective measures.

See also: Market Demand Must Be Regulated,
Smart People Are A Social Luxury,
The Three Keys To Anglo Success

Money Only Belongs To Its Masters

Holding a currency is like holding the one ring.  It still belongs to, and exerts the power of its master over you.
Hold the master’s money, the master exacts a price.  For the money is a piece of the master.
As children money seemed like a magic resource because our parents paid the bills.  As adults, money is always given us in the understanding most of it will be immediately returned in the form of rent and taxes.  A worker that lives from paycheck to paycheck lives as a slave in the sense their labor is effectively unpaid.  Only surplus is income.  Someone who earns less than they need to live is effectively lesser off than even a slave provided the basics.

The master protects the monopoly of its money jealously.  It’s no mistake that the same body that protects the lives of the leaders also protects the monopoly of its currency.
It is hard to challenge the master for power over its own ring.  It is just as hard to make one’s own ring of power.
To worship the money is to worship the master.

How convenient to shear the flock when everyone grows the same standardized wool.  Imagine the master having to send collectors to seize actual physical assets!  Would most people anymore even have physical tribute worth seizing?  It’s a lot easier when they can just sit back and watch electronic units of wealth rush to their waiting hands.  It was never easier to be king.
We are like a whole world full of Gollums obsessed with the power of the One Ring even as its master dominates and consumes us.

The Truth Behind Unemployment Numbers?

First,

Simplepolitiks discusses the 7.8% unemployment figure set forth in the presidential debate and tries to figure out how well official unemployment figures correlate with real unemployment.

Second,

10 Reasons Why The Latest Unemployment Numbers Are No Reason To Cheer addresses the numbers of people who have effectively dropped out from the officially recorded labor force, numbers for underemployment, and numbers of people who are employed but struggling with their bills on the wages they are making.

One finds people arriving at similar conclusions in Simplepolitik’s comment section and in the No Reason For Cheer article:

The unique conditions that resulted in a large American middle class have disappeared because American laborers are now in direct competition with people across the planet, many of whom can survive on much lesser wages because of their locally lower costs of living. Employers can be counted on to pay as little for labor as they possibly can.

The natural tendency will be towards an oligarchy of a few rich who control the money and the resources, the natural state of human history while 1945-1990s was a freakish exception to the norm.

I, however, see this as being at odds with all the new technologies that make abundant information and the means of production available to independent private citizens.
If jobs cease to be profitable or reliable for the average person, many will drop out of the game and turn to a gift economy of social favors with their immediate clan or turn to small scale grey market entrepeneurship.

As I discussed in a previous post, Southern Italy’s underworld was born as a reaction to incompetent rulers levying heavy taxation and today it also thrives as a reaction to a horrible economy and high taxes.
If the payoff becomes low enough or jobs are simply unattainable, grey and black markets can surge in importance.

Looking at present trends, I definitely do not see job numbers returning to any 90s status quo.
However, I also see a gradual reduction in the importance of the traditional “job” as people adapt by relying heavily on the internet, tribal support networks, and small businesses.
Jobs suck anyway, so I wonder if in the long term this might actually represent an improvement in overall quality of life for millions of people?

Is Sweden A False Utopia?

They used the Gini coefficient for wealth, not income in this case.

After all, even before the high-tax welfare state, Sweden was characterized by an even distribution of income, low poverty and long life spans, the same phenomena that today are said to be the result of high-tax welfare policies. In 1950, before the high-tax welfare state, Swedes lived 2.6 years longer than Americans. Today the difference is 2.7 years.

A more reasonable view of why Sweden performs well on many social metrics has its basis in history and sociology: Swedes have for hundreds of years benefited from sound low-level institutions, such as a strong work ethic and high levels of trust and cooperation.

These cultural phenomena do not disappear when Swedes cross the Atlantic to the supposedly inferior “cowboy” country. On the contrary, they appear to bloom fully. The 4.4 million Americans with Swedish origins are considerably richer than the average American. If Americans with Swedish ancestry would form their own country their per capita GDP would be $56,900, more than $10,000 above the earnings of the average American.

The old Sweden, in contrast, has not done as well in economic terms. In 1960 taxation stood at 30 percent of GDP, roughly where the US is today. As taxes rose, economic growth decreased, with Sweden dropping from being the 4th richest country in 1970 to being the 12th richest in 2008. Swedish GDP per capita is now $36,600, far below the $45,500 of the US, and even further behind the $56,900 of Swedes in America.

A Scandinavian economist once stated to Milton Friedman: “In Scandinavia we have no poverty.” Milton Friedman replied, “That’s interesting, because in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either.” Indeed, the poverty rate for Americans with Swedish ancestry is only 6.7%, half the U.S average. Economists Geranda Notten and Chris de Neubourg have calculated the poverty rate in Sweden using the American poverty threshold, finding it to be an identical 6.7%.

…

Instead of building capital, Swedes go into debt: 27 percent of Swedish households in fact have more debts than wealth, compared to between 16 and 19 percent in the US. With middle class wealth formation being held back by high taxes, Sweden has ironically developed a more unequal wealth distribution than the US. The Gini coefficient for ownership is almost 0.9 in Sweden, compared to slightly above 0.8 in the US.

Link

The Problem With The Israeli Economy

Officially, Israel’s unemployment rate is about 8%. But that doesn’t include Israeli citizens who are not trying to find work, either because they feel disenfranchised, such as many Arab Israelis, or because they’ve chosen a life of state-subsidized religious study, such as many ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Nearly 27% of Arab men and 65% of ultra-Orthodox Jews don’t work, government figures show. The non-employment rate for ultra-Orthodox men has tripled since 1970, Ben-David said. Link

Since it also has been traditional for most Haredi men not to work at making a living, but to devote themselves to religious studies, the political parties, often holding the balance of power in coalition governments, also became useful for extracting financial concessions from governments wanting to stay in power.

With a birthrate several times that of other Jewish Israelis, the Haredim have an average of 8.9 children per family and constitute more than 10 per cent of the population of seven million. Link

Youth gangs from the community of Sudanese and Eritrean refugees have in recent weeks been swamping Tel Aviv beaches and stealing bathers’ belongings, according to police. Most of the thefts have occurred on Tel Aviv’s major beaches. Authorities attribute the thefts to the increase in the number of refugees who have come to the city this year, and the lack of employment opportunities for them. Police say the stolen goods and money are sufficient for a day’s existence; they expect more such incidents to occur.

Eritrean and Sudanese refugees start arriving at the beach at noon, say police, especially to the strip between Jerusalem Beach and Mezizim/Peepers’ Beach. Some try to find day-labor jobs in the morning, but some who fail allegedly try to earn their daily keep by preying on beach-goers instead. Link h/t Aurini

Most ultra-Orthodox Jews lack the skills to work in a modern economy, having studied little or no math and science beyond primary school (their curriculum focuses almost entirely on religious texts such as the Torah and Talmud). As a result, more than 60 percent live below the poverty line, compared with 12 percent among non-Haredi Jews. Most also opt out of military service, which is compulsory for other Israelis. The net effect: as the Haredi community expands, the burden of both taxation and conscription falls on fewer and fewer Israelis.

…

According to pollsters, Haredim are consistently hawkish on the question of territorial compromise with the Palestinians, citing God’s covenant with Abraham granting Jews the land of Israel. Already the parties that represent them wield significant political power in Israel’s coalition-based system.

Link

History of Currency – Aztecs

In Aztec culture, trade was an important part of life. Yet, it was conducted somewhat differently than the “traditional” way. For one, the Aztecs had no metal money. They did have a currency, however. Cacao beans were treated as a precious substance by the Aztecs, who used them to make chocolate. Link

Quachtli was a standardized length of cloth that came in different grades. Its value was rated by how many cocoa beans it could be traded for. A small cape made of first-grade cloth with a fine, or tight, weave would bring the highest price: about 300 cocoa beans.

Used by all classes in Aztec society, tajaderas, or hoe money, was made of thin copper and had a standard weight and size

A man could sell his child for up to 600 cocoa beans. Girls drew the highest price and were usually sold as sexual slaves. Boys were bought as field workers or slaves; the average purchase price for a boy was 100 cocoa beans.
Link

Seasteading

The Seasteading Institute wishes to enable the creation of ocean city-states in order to advance humanity through innovative startup governments. We believe that competition in government will lead to better government for the whole planet. Governments are ultimately the stewards of institutions, which are more or less the “rules of the game.” Looking around the world, it is easy to see that some countries have better rules than others. Good or bad, however, rules can become entrenched in the absence of competition from new market entrants. Currently no new governments can peacefully enter the “governance market,” but with seasteading, experimentation with new rules is possible. Link

http://www.seasteading.org/research/engineering/