pcnonpc

I answered the comment which used "extremely poor" and "subsistence farmers" so I used the international poverty line ($1.90). At $3.2 (World Bank's lower middle income poverty line), it was 12.1% or 160 million people, but that was 2013. The number dropped rapidly every year. It should be lower now.

http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/CHN

Purchasing parity is a good measure for living standards. You can buy a full meal for 10 yuan or $1.5 in rural China. It is not fair to measure their income with no adjustment. Cooking for a family may cost less than that. $1 in rural China is worth much more than $1 in the US.

Your quotes were from 2014. China is improving every year. You can Google for more recent statistics and quote them here if you disagree.

The current number of extremely poor people in China is less than 30 million, less than 2% of population.

From Google:

"According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms."

In 2017 there are around 600 million people in rural area. Their average monthly income is 3300 yuan or around 500 USD, more than $15 a day. Cost of living there is cheap and this is middle income, not poor.

US pension funds together are worth $22 trillion. This is 61% of global pension funds and much much larger than the Saudi funds. They should invest a small part into Vision Funds and other VCs!

If the drug is out of patent and it is very profitable, why doesn't anyone set up a company to manufacture and sell it cheaper in the US?

Same question with epipen.

Is it not possible to order a generic from India or another country? The drug should be out of patent a long while already?

If no competitor is available, why doesn't anyone set it up? It looks like a great startup opportunity.

The current statistics in 2017 is around 600 million in rural area. Their monthly income is 3300 yuan or around 500 USD, more than $15 a day. According to World Bank, a country with $6000 USD a year is upper-middle income.

If you count their rural areas as a nation, its GDP is $3.6 trillion around the same size as Germany, 4th largest in the world.

Economic growth is usually measured in percentage terms. There are good reasons for that. If they can keep the growth rate, the Chinese economy will be larger than the US in about 10 or 15 years.

China's is still a developing economy and they have a lot of ways to increase productivity compared to the US. They are also at a leading edge in many technologies of the future so they do not need to spend as much as other developing countries to purchase them from abroad.

China's growth rate may slow down but it will continue to be faster than the US rate for many years.

US Dollar is the world's reserve currency. If US dollar becomes less strong in the future, the size of US economy may not be as large in relative term anymore. The petrodollar system may not be as powerful when renewables are more important. Perhaps China also considers this when they push so hard for renewables.

Some populations practice having as many children as they can because their belief system calls for it. They believe they will get more brownie points from a supreme being for that.

So these groups will get more share of the basic income in the next generation and more in the next and so on and so on...

What does Italy have that China cannot produce itself? Brand name products, basic machines and chemicals which Italy exports are not important to their development.

Russia has oil, minerals and iron which China needs to grow.

China's shifting to domestic consumption and strong Yuan is better than weak Yuan. Strong currency will also reduce capital flight from the country and increase its financial powers to buy world resources such as mining rights and companies abroad.

They understand how the dollar status as reserve currency helps strengthen American power. Many Chinese leaders understand the power of finance. They have used it to develop export-oriented economy and they are now using it to expand their power abroad.

China is now confident it is strong enough and has resources and relationships to counter US pressure.

I don't think the religions preach what people want to hear. They built procreation into their belief system to make sure they will have bigger and bigger adherents. It works and many of those religions are much larger today than others without procreation preaching.

Several major religions in poor developing countries preach having more kids. They don't care about environmental impact or sustainability. They believe their God will provide.

How would we deal with that?

People care about many things. But if they get one good thing like intelligence without losing others, they will go for it.

In China, they do not have religious reasons against improving humans. And parents rely on kids to take care of them when they are old. Intelligence often predicts earnings. So if it's safe, they will do it.

Other powers have nukes too, so using it is out of the question. If nukes are not used, technology and economic capacity will determine the results.

Russia has a lot of good engineers and scientists but they don't have the industrial capacity to compete with the US. China's current capacity may already be double that of the US but its technology is still catching up (fast).

Winning wars requires intelligence not raw calculations. A nation with 10 extra IQ points on average would have many times more people with 130+ IQ needed to build and improve on advanced robots.

Btw, have you checked the list of top supercomputers in the world? The top two are in China. The top one has 4-5 times the power of the top American machine, which is #4. It also uses Chinese built microprocessors.

https://www.top500.org/lists/2017/06/

With a large number of DNA sequences, the genetic cause can be separated from environmental. That's why embryo selection is possible.

Getting parent's DNAs sequenced might be needed but it's affordable now. See gwern's answers and link for more info.

Modern advanced society already requires a high minimum intelligence for people to function in especially to hold a respectable job or be a respectable member of a community. The minimum is increasing when more automation is used for most kinds of automation.

If someone's children will likely have a lower than this minimum intelligence, which you can infer from parent's IQ and other measures, will you encourage or prohibit them to use either embryo selection or genetic engineering? What are the impact on the child's life for each option? Is the 'distaste' more important than giving a better opportunity for the newborns?

Also, what can you do? You cannot put regulations on China or other countries. On this issue, they will not agree on international agreement either. And there will be rich people who fly to other countries to have the procedures done. This will cause even more inequality than allowing it domestically.

Jordan Peterson IQ and Job Market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0

To relate this to the news about CTE in American Football, I wonder how much American mental potential has been lost to CTE.

One thing for sure, very few East Asian and few Asian American parents who are aware of the news will allow their kids to play the sport. What about the reactions from other American parents?

"Symptoms of CTE, which occur in four stages, generally appear 8 to 10 years after an athlete experiences repetitive mild traumatic brain injury."

There were about 1,100,000 million high school players in 2014. This is approximately 7% of US high school students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopat...

To flesh out a large range of implications will take at least an effort worthy of a PhD dissertation.

With successful embryo selection, at least we can keep up with the increasingly higher minimum IQ needed to function well in advanced society and avoid a large underclass of unemployable people.

Jordan Peterson - IQ and The Job Market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0

The interview was mainly about embryo selection, not genetic engineering.

Source? or calculation? The guy giving the figure is an evolutionary psychologist.

Or they could build billions of robots with thousands of variations to make everyone live like a king.

And they will have high enough IQ to maintain and improve them as they wish. Without say IQ of 100 or more maintenance of advanced robots could be problematic.

The East Asian culture strongly values intelligence and education. The parents there WILL act on embryo selection and genetic engineering when it is available and safe.

From the piece, it shouldn't take very long to put it to use.

"When do you think the embryo analysis might be implemented on a large scale?

Actual use of the technology to do embryo screening might take five to ten years, but it could be just a few years. It depends on how motivated they are."

"Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

...."

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838

" Q: Could it develop into something more sinister?

A: That same research does open up the door potentially to genetic engineering in the future. But that would take a lot longer to make practical.

===

Q: When do you think the embryo analysis might be implemented on a large scale?

A: Actual use of the technology to do embryo screening might take five to ten years, but it could be just a few years. It depends on how motivated they are.

......"

From an interview with Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist:

"Q: What does that mean in human language? A: Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple would be able to produce if they had 100 kids. It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes, it’s the genes that couples already have.

Q: And over the course of several generations you’re able to exponentially multiply the population’s intelligence. A: Right. Even if it only boosts the average kid by five IQ points, that’s a huge difference in terms of economic productivity, the competitiveness of the country, how many patents they get, how their businesses are run, and how innovative their economy is.

Q: How does Western research in genetics compare to China’s? A: We’re pretty far behind. We have the same technical capabilities, the same statistical capabilities to analyze the data, but they’re collecting the data on a much larger scale and seem to be capable of transforming the scientific findings into government policy and consumer genetic testing much more easily than we are. Technically and scientifically we could be doing this, but we’re not.

Q: Why not? A: We have ideological biases that say, “Well, this could be troubling, we shouldn’t be meddling with nature, we shouldn’t be meddling with God.” I just attended a debate in New York a few weeks ago about whether or not we should outlaw genetic engineering in babies and the audience was pretty split. In China, 95 percent of an audience would say, “Obviously you should make babies genetically healthier, happier, and brighter!” There’s a big cultural difference.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gw8vn/chinas-taking-over...