February 1, 2015
nobabies.net
John Micklethwait
c/o ECONOMIST
25 Saint James’s Street
London SW1A 1HG
letters@economist.com
Sir:
My congratulations upon retiring at the top of your field. I’m sure your job at Bloomberg will leave you busier and more tightly focused than ever before so there is no chance that you will drop everything and look into the issue I have, but the issue is of such importance and situation so dire that I shamelessly delude myself into thinking any day some hyper-capable journalist will pitch in, creating the delusion in hopes of keeping myself cheerful enough to function.
Your exit article suggests you think you have been in nobody’s pocket. Let’s examine that. The most important news event during your watch at the ECONOMIST was the revelations of the atrocities in Rotherham and other cities. It’s hard to put numbers on such things, but it is clear that at least in America a random murder is less horrible than the sexual abuse of a little girl: during the Vietnam War a mayor we rather liked was photographed using a pistol to blow the brains out of a captive. You know the picture; it is the template for the cover of your swan song issue. Nobody went to jail for owning a copy of that picture. But if you own a copy of a picture of a little girl being abused you face serious jail time. Considering that abuse is worse than murder and considering the ratio of the population of the UK to that of America, those scandals in Rotherham and elsewhere were a far bigger blow to the UK than the World Trade Center atrocity was to the US. It should receive more attention in a British publication. It does not get that attention; I suspect that fears of the charge of racism paralyze journalism.
As for the horror at the offices of “Charlie Hebdo,” any comparison is laughable. Get me not wrong; upon hearing of the attack I immediately put a sign in my car window that expressed the same sentiment as “Je suis Charlie,” and went for a drive as if to say, “If you want to attack people who support free speech, bring it on.” But really: a bunch of adults who know they are offending dangerous and psychopathic people and who have been attacked before get hurt doing their rightful but graceless business get hurt. That’s worse than Rotherham? So where are the million protestors, the world leaders marching with locked elbows, the media torrent for the real tragedy?
It’s about diversity, isn’t it? We are told – and the media had not reduced the idea to a laughing stock – that diversity is good for us, makes our culture “vibrant” or whatever. So we permit immigration to increase diversity. Now I know little enough about you other than your triumphs, and I know only one thing about editors in general: y’all are pretty good with words. And anybody of your caliber knows perfectly well that what we are told is dishonest. Immigration does not increase diversity; it destroys it. Objecting to Rotherham might interfere with the destruction of diversity while objecting to Hebdo greases the skids.
How did they get to you?
My own issue is fertility; I approach it as a doctor and a scientist. Journalism is far from my comfort zone. The short (and misleading of course but it’s my best shot) version is 1) If you marry a person more than 8th cousin out, your fertility will be cut in half. 2) It will continue to drop by a half every generation your descendants persist in this. 3) Fractional babies have no babies.
Here is a link to the somewhat longer version: you know, graphs and references and so forth.
http://www.nobabies.net/A%20January%20summary%20for%202015.html
Also I shall attach a brief summary of what has been done in the field; I wrote it at the invitation of a journal that then balked because it was far too general for their focus.
So let’s look at what happens when we seek vibrancy. 1) A bunch of people move from society A to society B. 2) Society A loses the contribution of those people, and they are probably more capable than average. 3) Society B loses babies in the medium run because the immigrants have relatively few cousins in society B but intermarry anyway. 4) The immigrants die out in a few generations, save a numerically trivial few who find their way into tight local communities.
Everybody loses. How many little girls are you willing to sit by and allow to be molested in the name of something that hurts everybody involved anyway?
Furthermore the weight of the evidence is that the world is now sufficiently rich and mobile so we are all on the doomed trajectory demonstrated by Calhoun and described in the attachment.
The science is quite clear. I have published one article and have high hopes that this year I shall have enough data for another scientific paper. But getting the word out? That would be the job of a journalist. You’re the best. What do you think?
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD
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