[extropy-chat] Psychology of investments in infrastructure

[Russell Wallace]

On 7/6/06, spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> This discussion went off in a direction other than what I had in mind.  We
> are getting caught up in ethnic origin too much as evidenced by the terms
> Hispanics and whites.  The focus is on the primary language spoken in the
> home, regardless of the genetics.
>
> On the US west coast, we have a lot of immigration from Asia.  Mandarin
> and
> schezwan speakers are able to pick up Spanish much more easily than
> English
> I am told.  If it came to a vote, many may choose Spanish as a language of
> choice, for good reason.  As a native English speaker, even I can see that
> Spanish is relatively easy to learn.  It has a far smaller vocabulary, it
> is
> more consistent, the spelling mostly phonetic, fewer ambiguous words,
> easier
> to learn by osmosis.
>

It seems to me that what matters most is neither genetics nor language per
se, but continued progress. From what people have said here (which is
consistent with what I've seen from other sources), it seems scientific and
technological work is mainly done by non-Hispanic whites and Asians (in the
latter case, would I be correct in guessing that it doesn't greatly matter
whether they primarily speak Spanish or English?), who are comprising a
small and diminishing fraction of the next generation; that doesn't make for
a good prognosis.

Possible ways to improve matters, in no particular order, might be:

Persuade whites and Asians to have more children.

Obtain more immigrants from e.g. China. (A net win for humanity if the
immigrants have more opportunities to contribute in America or Europe than
they would have back home.)

Persuade other ethnic groups such as Hispanics to be more interested in
science and technology.

I'm not sure which of the above is the lowest-hanging fruit.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20060706/69e1e337/attachment.html>