Most Kiwis take it for granted that they are much wealthier than the average Chinese. China is a place where people shit in the street, eat dogs and live in houses made of bamboo and polystyrene. The fact, however, is that China has made immense economic progress over the past 20 years, and if they continue at this rate they will soon catch up to New Zealand.
Most people vaguely understand that China has become richer recently. But most don’t appreciate how far this process has run. The general assumption is that China is no longer Africa poor, but is now Brazil poor. The reality is that the average Chinese is now wealthier than the average Argentinian and is getting wealthier fast.
Chinese wages have increased tenfold over the last 20 years. In 2000, the average Chinese wage was CNY9,371/year. By 2019, the average Chinese wage was CNY 93,383/year, which works out to $(NZD)20,910. The Chinese are well into the middle-income stage of development and are closing in fast on the rich world.
The average New Zealand wage is $33.37 per hour, and the average Kiwi works 1,762 hours per year. This gives an average Kiwi wage of $58,798. This means that Kiwi wages are, for now, 181% higher than Chinese ones. But the rate of increase of Chinese wages is much higher than that of Kiwi wages. Chinese wages will soon catch up.
As mentioned above, the average Chinese wage has increased from CNY9,371 in 2000 to CNY93,383 today, an increase of 997%. This is equivalent to a 12.2% increase every year since 2000, and means that Chinese wages double every six years or so.
The average Kiwi wage has increased from $17.50 in 2000 to $33.37 today, an increase of 91%. This is equivalent to a 3.3% increase every year since 2000. As this column has previously shown, this represents a drastic loss in living standards on account of that house prices have risen much faster than wages. But it’s set to get worse.
There is no guarantee that those rates of growth will maintain, but it’s apparent that the Law of Diminishing Returns has worked to increase Chinese wages much faster than Kiwi wages. Assuming that something like those rates of growth maintain, then it won’t be long before the average Chinese wage surpasses the average Kiwi one.
If we assume that Chinese wages increase at 10% hereafter, and Kiwi wages increase at 3% (the high growth model), then it will take no more than 16 years before Chinese wages are higher than Kiwi ones. At this point, both Chinese and Kiwi wages should be around $95,000.
If we assume that Chinese wages increase at 8% hereafter, and Kiwi wages increase at 2.5% (the medium growth model), then it will take around 20 years before Chinese wages are higher than Kiwi ones.
If we assume that Chinese wages increase at 6% hereafter, and Kiwi wages increase at 2% (the low growth model), then it will take around 27 years before Chinese wages are higher than Kiwi ones.
In any case, the maths suggest that it won’t be much more than one generation before the average wage-earner will earn more, in absolute terms, in China than in New Zealand. The average person reading this article should live to see a world in which Chinese wages are higher than New Zealand wages.
What that means for New Zealand is anyone’s guess. The real tricky questions will be faced by naturalised Chinese New Zealanders whose parents left China when there were much better opportunities in New Zealand. Some of those people might sit down, do the maths, and decide that there are now much better opportunities in China.
Most people think of medicine as the practice of alleviating human suffering, and doctors as people who act to alleviate human suffering. This may have been true before Clown World started, but the story today is something else.
In Clown World, medicine serves two primary objectives: profit, and conforming to political correctness. Of these two, profit is by far the most important. There’s nothing in the world more profitable than human suffering, and so Clown World medicine seeks to profit first and foremost.
The old days where you were given a medicine that cured your ailment is long gone. Today, the focus of medicine is on giving the patient a lifetime prescription that they have to keep coming back to fill. As Chris Rock said, the money isn’t in the cure. The money’s in the medicine.
Doctors in Clown World are more motivated by making profit than by anything else. If Medicine A is 90% effective and generates $10 profit, and Medicine B is 50% effective but generates $100 profit, then the patient will get Medicine B every single time.
This is why cannabis, which is understood by all informed people to be a medicinal plant, is still banned in most of the world. A medicine that can be grown at the patient’s home in a bucket is simply not profitable. So the various medical associations, influenced by Big Pharma, have not made the medicinal benefits of cannabis clear to their respective legal authorities, who have left it illegal.
This is also why it’s so hard to get treatment with psilocybin and MDMA. Although psilocybin therapy has been declared a “breakthrough therapy” by the American Food and Drug Administration, it’s still all but impossible to access. The problem is that psilocybin, like MDMA, offers the promise of a permanent cure – and there’s no profit in permanent cures.
The horrifying reality is that there’s no money in resetting a person’s mind and realigning them with the secrets of Nature and the Will of God. Although such a measure might completely restructure the mind so that it doesn’t suffer, there’s more profit in getting a person to take a daily antidepressant or antipsychotic. The result is such pharmaceuticals being pushed.
Profit is also the reason for sex-change surgery, which is the most grotesque form of Frankenscience since electroshock therapy. The total yearly market for sex-change surgery in America has been estimated at over a billion dollars. Fees for surgery for one person can run into six figures.
Clown World medicine has reached its most ridiculous expression in America. Despite the fact that America spends more money on healthcare per capita than any other country on Earth, the American life expectancy at birth is no higher than that of Cuba or Lebanon. Where other countries have universal healthcare, Americans regularly get financially wiped out by medical expenses. Some two-thirds of their personal bankruptcies are tied to unpayable medical bills.
The American population also suffers from an opioid crisis. If Clown World began at the turn of the century, American deaths by opioid overdose have increased six times since then, from some 8,000 a year to near 50,000 a year. One of the most popular of the medicinal opioids is OxyContin. This painkiller has made billions of dollars in profits for the Sackler family that control Purdue Pharma, its pharmaceutical manufacturer.
Ironically, medicine, when correctly practiced, destroys political correctness. It’s extremely difficult for mixed-race bone marrow transplant patients to find a matching donor. This is proof that race is a real thing and that it has a biological basis, contradicting the social justice warrior position that there are no genetic differences between races.
On top of soulless profit-seeking and social justice logic is simple incompetence. This has also reached an apogee during Clown World. The worst of it happens to people who need mental health care.
The American suicide rate increased 24% between 1999 and 2014. This is mostly because the pressures of Clown World have led to widespread despair. For many Westerners, the future seems grim, if not hopeless – but Clown World mental health care is based around prescribing people the most expensive (and profitable) sedative possible. Any patient sedated to the point where they stop complaining is declared cured.
Assuaging the suffering of the soul is not considered important. All Clown World doctors are educated to believe that the brain generates consciousness, and therefore that the death of the brain means the extinction of consciousness. This is of less than no help to the many residents of Clown World who are threatened with deaths of despair. But medicine in Clown World only sometimes serves to alleviate human suffering.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, everything in Clown World is now political. Like a toxic gas, the political world has seeped into every pore of every realm of being. The scientific world has not escaped this phenomenon. Clown World science is very far from a sober examination of reality.
In theory, the beauty of science is that it is apolitical. The archetypal scientific mind is one that has no fear for the truth, nor any fear of worldly terrors. As such, the true scientist is not influenced by political concerns. They have no desire for the world to be a particular way; they only wish to discover the world as it is, in all its florid, multivariate glory.
Unfortunately, true scientists are extremely rare in this phase of the political cycle. They’re even more rare in the university system, because the maverick mentality that makes a true scientist gets ostracised by the politically correct groupthink of the academy. This has led to a scientific establishment which is extremely easily influenced by the political fashions of the day.
In Clown World, science is subordinate to politics. What science says is one thing, but what politics says that science says is another. This is mostly because of cancel culture. In Clown World science, many topics of scientific study are taboo. Any scientist who speaks honestly about them risks having their entire lives destroyed by social pressure mobs.
The greatest taboo in Clown World relates to the science of human biodiversity. Although Nature is replete with diversity, with life flowing into every possible niche, the Clown World dogma is that all human groups are precisely the same when it comes to genetic intellectual potential. Anything one human group can achieve can be achieved by any other.
Indeed, experts believe that 45% of the variance in socioeconomic status can be explained by intelligence alone. Once one factors in things like conscientiousness, drive and luck, there is very little room left over for structural discrimination to explain variance in socioeconomic status between races.
However, this line of reasoning is forbidden in Clown World. This is because the scientific facts about race and IQ demonstrate a major flaw of neoliberalism. If intelligence is mostly hereditary, then it isn’t possible to simply import cheap labour from overseas and have their offspring grow up to behave indistinguishably from the natives.
The offspring of immigrants will behave as their genes induce them to behave, with a small amount of variation due to environmental influence. This means that immigrants from low-IQ countries will tend to have children with low IQs, and being low IQ they are likely to end up criminal and poor. This, in turn, means that immigration from low-IQ countries ought to be opposed – but this belief is a threat to the powers that profit from it.
In Clown World, a scientist cannot publicly state the facts about race and IQ without their reputation getting destroyed. This even happened to no less a luminary than the discoverer of DNA himself, James Watson. Watson was stripped of honourary titles because he stated that genes caused a difference in IQ test results between blacks and whites.
Not even winning a Nobel Prize is sufficient to make you a scientific authority in a subject if your opinions contradict the political fashions. Anyone with an interest in race and IQ is a racist, and therefore the findings of that entire field of science can be dismissed (and replaced with political dogma).
Sex differences between men and women also are another taboo subject where the science is denied. Clown World scientists talk about something called the Gender Equality Paradox. This refers to the observation that the proportion of women in STEM subjects is lower in countries where women are more free (such as Scandinavia) than in countries where women are less free (such as the Islamic ones).
Clown World dogma holds that women have been unfairly excluded from scientific communities because of the prejudices of men. Men wanted to subjugate women and keep them in the kitchen, and so women were not allowed in. This dogma contrasts sharply with the observed reality that free women tend not to study STEM subjects.
The reality is that women don’t think the same way that men do, and so they don’t value the same things. In all species, the female is the gatekeeper of sex. As such, the male must strive to distinguish himself from the other males if he wants to reproduce. So the male is generally much more motivated than the female to strive for high status: this is true of nearly every species.
Women in free countries choose not to study STEM because women in general are interested in other subjects. There is no paradox. When a woman is free to study what she likes, without the pressure to earn prestige for her family that exists in less free societies, she will study what’s in her nature to study. Usually that isn’t STEM.
The rulers of Clown World don’t want to admit that the different sexes are motivated by different things, because they want cheap female workers in the labour force, and not at home raising children. The real threat, too dangerous to be spoken, is that if women were given absolute freedom most of them would prefer homemaking to the pointless stress of the Clown World workplace. This would drastically reduce the supply of labour and cause wage costs to spike.
In Clown World, even mathematics gets decolonised. The rise of the concept of ethnomathematics represents the absolute pollution of scientific space with political influence. The true absurdity is that the politically correct deny that human subgroups are different when it comes to IQ, but also assert that those populations are different enough that each one has its own mathematics.
The push to diversify everything has led to a promise from NASA to put a woman on the Moon by 2024. It can be predicted with confidence that, once this is achieved, the next mission will be to put a black man on the Moon, and then a gay man, and so on down the list until every minority group is ticked off.
Science is now pozzed root and branch. Today, many science departments are more worried about diversity than about making original contributions to human knowledge. Clown World logic insists that, because all human groups are perfectly equal in all measures, any proportional under-representation of any group must be because of exclusionary prejudice. Therefore, diversification is an end unto itself.
Because diversity is now prized above merit, scientific journals are flooded with garbage articles about ludicrous concepts like stereotype threat. This concept, invented to excuse away lower black academic performance, has now come under suspicion on account of that it could not be replicated. Unfortunately, so much of social psychology has failed replication that the reputation of the science is now in tatters.
Clown World science is everything science shouldn’t be, which is coming up with a desired conclusion first and then finding evidence that fits it. The reason for this is, as mentioned above, politics. The desire of people to force the world to conform to their political conceptions is stronger than their desire to discover the truth. Many people enter the scientific world with the intent of winning the political battle for their team. These people do not advance science.
In fact, it has now been argued that scientific progress is slowing down. Even worse, scientific literacy is decreasing, which means that we’re going backwards by at least one major measure. In Clown World, scientific activity destroys knowledge as often as it uncovers it.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.
In The Republic, Plato laid down the facts about the political cycle. The political cycle begins with the introduction of an aristocracy by a class of educated philosopher-kings, then degrades into timocracy, then degrades into oligarchy, then degrades into democracy, which finally degrades into tyranny. It is at the junction between democracy and tyranny that we find ourselves in Clown World.
By 2020, the enlightened aristocracy is long gone. The timocracy ended with the World Wars. Oligarchy reigned for some decades, perhaps up until the 1990s, and since then we’ve been firmly in democracy. With the intensification of Clown World after the Global Financial Crisis, we’re arguably now in a state of tyranny.
Tyranny is when the rulers work to enrich themselves instead of working to enhance the common good. This state is characterised by an absence of reason among the ruling class. Not being reasonable, the rulers make decisions based on crude lusts and impulses. Usually these relate to gratifying their egos in some way, often at the expense of others.
When the ruling class gratifies their egos at the expense of the common man, the common man comes to feel as if he lives in a Clown World. He can’t find a job that pays enough to buy a house and raise a family, but political discussions in the mainstream media ignore such issues, focusing instead of trivialities. It all seems so callously absurd.
Callous absurdity is the hallmark of tyrannies throughout history, and that’s exactly what Clown World is – a kind of tyranny.
As Plato anticipated in his famous Analogy of the Cave, people who figure out that it’s Clown World are treated with violent contempt by those who think that it’s Normal World. Anyone who has a problem with the current order of things is marginalised. Although the numbers of the marginalised are growing, the Normies are still in control.
The general rule of Clown World politics is that everything is either the opposite of how it should be or a grossly corrupted form of it. Politics may have always been corrupt, but only in Clown World has it reached such a shameless, venal and shallow intensity.
In Clown World, we’re led by the worst of us. The American Presidential Election of 2020 will be contested by two very old men, both of who are very much past it. The challenger, Joe Biden, was the Vice President during the Barack Obama era, and so helped to oversee the destruction of Libya. This unprovoked war led to the murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the deaths of 100,000 Libyans and the reintroduction of slave markets to the Libyan capital – and Biden is painted as the good guy in this election.
In Clown World, politicians no longer have to know what they’re talking about. Obama constantly read from a teleprompter, relying on it so much that if it broke down he didn’t know what to say. Clown World politicians in general are barely better informed than the population they’re ruling over – and are frequently worse informed. They are no longer orators, performing feats of wit and memory. Instead they speak in soundbites aimed at the lizard brain.
Because Clown World politicians don’t work towards the greater good, they have no philosophical grounding, and therefore no principles. As such, they are whores who will jump into bed with whoever’s paying. This has led to some exceptionally strange alliances.
One such strange alliance is the one between fundamentalist religious Muslims and left-wing social justice warriors. The social justice warriors are strong supporters of homosexual rights, but the Muslims are strong supporters of homosexuals being thrown off rooftops. They appear to have allied on the basis of having a common grudge against middle-class white men.
Another strange alliance is between Antifa and the corporate elite. Antifa’s great enemies are the Nazis that supposedly lurk around every corner, and their strongest ideological point of difference relates to immigration. Antifa believe that the working class is international and should not be restricted by borders – but the corporate elite have exactly the same opinion. They love to be able to import cheap labour without restriction.
Yet another strange alliance is between feminists and the so-called transphobic. In Clown World, it’s possible to have your cock and balls chopped off and then play for a woman’s sports team. Many right-wingers are disgusted by trans culture, and in getting accused of transphobia they find themselves on the same side as the devotedly left-wing feminists, who want to keep trans people out of women’s spaces.
Perhaps the weirdest of all is the alliance between the fundamentalist religious who want to ban cannabis and the criminal gangs who currently supply the black market with it in the places where it is illegal. Fundamentalist Abrahamists, in particular, are against cannabis because it is a spiritual sacrament, and here they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the criminal gangs who need it to be illegal to profit from it.
It can be observed, as Plato did so many centuries ago, that democracy leads to widespread bickering and resentment. Eventually this gets so bad that people come to support a tyrant in the hope that unlimited power will make it possible to clean away all the filth. Clown World is at the stage where people might support a charismatic dictator, should one arise. Our political situation is a tinderbox.
Unfortunately there’s no easy solution. A revolution of philosopher-kings seems unlikely owing to the fact that there’s no widespread agreement as to who the philosopher-kings would be. Although Plato described the philosopher-king as being motivated primarily by the love of wisdom, people don’t agree on what constitutes wisdom.
In Clown World, life has become so deeply politicised that every philosophical or scientific question is now divided by political camps. If a person identifies with the left, it can be confidently predicted that they agree with the climate change science but deny the human biodiversity science. If a person identifies with the right, the exact opposite is true. So every question of philosophical wisdom or the nature of reality is corrupted by political influence.
The only solution to the political problems of Clown World might be waiting for it all to collapse.
Politics is now total war, permeating every level of society. No-one can escape the new social justice Inquisition, which scours everyone’s mind for any sign of wrongthinking. Everyone must maintain a state of high alertness and watch over their every word, lest they inadvertently give their political enemies a boost. This anxiety can’t last forever – and it won’t – but it will last as long as Clown World does.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.
