The Genetic Reason Europe Keeps Failing

Europe’s decline isn’t primarily from immigration—it’s from self-inflicted genetic and cultural degradation via the World Wars and long-term dysgenic trends. In this eye-opening Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive into new research on how WWI military deaths in Britain crushed long-term innovation (especially breakthrough patents), with effects persisting for decades. They extrapolate to France, Germany, and Russia (far worse casualty rates) and argue Europe’s population has already lost much of its vital, risk-taking stock—long before recent migration waves.

Topics include:

* Why Europe’s “white” populations created weak, anti-innovation cultures and laws themselves

* Genetic/cultural long-tail effects: small average shifts devastate extreme outliers (inventors, risk-takers)

* Immigrant selection filters: why U.S. Latin American immigrants differ from Europe’s current inflows

* Frontier mindset (Scots-Irish, Silicon Valley types) vs. stagnant European vitalism

* Geopolitical realism: viewing decaying Europe as opportunity territory in a techno-feudal future

* Why weakness repels strong allies—and why America increasingly sees Europe as irrelevant

If you’re into pronatalism, human biodiversity, innovation economics, or unfiltered takes on Western decline, this episode challenges mainstream narratives hard.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be with you today.

Today we are going to be talking about. New data that has come out, which shows how Europe has genetically degraded and changed due to the two world wars. Mm-hmm. And it’ll, I think, highlight for people when they say to me, Malcolm, as an American, you know, you must feel some ethnic kinship with, and, and cultural kinship with the European peoples.

If you look at like, well, immigration may not be as big an issue in the United States as it is in Europe because mm-hmm. We mostly import Latin Americans and Latin Americans are really just southern Europeans. They’re like 20% Native American when, when they are Native American. So it’s, it’s always been very weird to me that we consider them like so different of people.

We’ll get to that in a second, but was Europe, they’re importing lots of, you [00:01:00] know, people from the Middle East who are culturally and, and ethnically, very different than them that have differentially higher fertility rates in them. And that you, you’re already be to see parts of their society.

Buckle to this, you know, norms and stuff like this. There’s places you can go to in London that are nothing like what they are culturally speaking. You know, 20, 30 years ago. And they say, oh, you must be so sad about this. And I’m like, I’m really quite indifferent. Like it’s, it’s not the best.

But, but Europe has already in part, been destroyed by not immigrants, but white Europeans and what the, the, what became of the white European culture. Mm-hmm. And their genetic stock has already been significantly degraded to the point where I just don’t know if there’s much of utility there. Like it wasn’t the immigrants that took away Germany’s nuclear factories.

It wasn’t the immigrants that are making the laws in the uk, which caused people to get arrested for insulting anyone, anything [00:02:00] like the, the guy in Scotland arrested for writing Islam can be questioned on a wall.

Simone Collins: No, it can’t.

Malcolm Collins: No, it cannot. Well, but no, it wasn’t the Muslims who made those laws, who enforce those laws.

That was. The Scottish, right? Yeah. And you

Simone Collins: know, really it’s the ultimate condemnation. Like they deserve this because they made it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. They, they made their cultures weak, but, but why, why did they behave at a genetic level so differently from people who appear to be closely related to them in the United States?

And that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this episode because we have more data on that now. So this is a post about a study. So it’s a, a tweet by economist Luca Reto announcing a new paper titled Human Capital and Shocks and Innovation Evidence from Britain’s Lost Generation. And I’ll, I’ll go straight into what he says about it right here because it’s, it’s just a [00:03:00] fascinating study.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: So what are the effects of large human capital shocks on innovation? In a new paper, we study how World War II military deaths

across British communities affected local invention Over the next decades, we find that places that lost more young men, became persistently less innovative. World War II caused a massive loss of young men in Britain, over 750,000 military deaths, heavily concentrated among young, young cohorts.

Because the war was fought abroad, Britain experienced large human capital losses without domestic physical destruction. So basically it creates an instance where we can see what happens if you just remove a portion of the type of men who go to war without affecting the actual capital infrastructure of a location.

Hmm. This provides a great setting [00:04:00] to study a central question in economics. What happens to innovation when communities lose a large share of their young and skilled population? Do label shortages spur innovation or does the loss of human capital reduce it? To study this, we built a new data set linking World War I, military records and death records, the universe of British patents \ 1895 to 1979.

Mm-hmm. In winter identities and locations. And this allows us to track innovation across 10,000 communities over eight decades.

Simone Collins: Ooh. See, that’s a lot of data that’s Come on guys. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When compared to places with higher versus lower World War I mortality within the same country the main results, communities that lost more soldiers became less likely to produce patents in the decades after the war.

Hmm. Quantitatively, a 10% increase in World War I deaths reduces the probability that a parish produces any patent by about [00:05:00] 0.09 to 0.12 percentage points, Hmm. This effect appears during the war, but persists for decades. Up until modern times the effects are even stronger. For high impact innovations, exposure to World War I Mortality reduces the probability of producing breakthrough patents roughly three times more than the probability of producing any patent.

So, I’m gonna read that again. Okay. Exposure to World War I mortality reduces the probability of producing breakthrough patents more than three times the probability of producing than it hits producing any patent. So basically, not only do you see a reduction in innovation, but you specifically see an outsized reduction in extreme levels of innovation.

Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Presumably because the most valiant, brave risk takers are also. More likely to go out and get themselves killed in war?

Malcolm Collins: Oh no. This is actually a long tail situation. That’s where all of this is coming from. [00:06:00] But what it means is that when you affect a central statistic, you affect the long tails the most.

Oh, sure.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: That makes sense. Yeah. Effects on a population reduce, like if, if you’re talking about a, a small reduction, like let’s say you move the average person to be like,

Simone Collins: you’re more likely to have exceptional outliers in a sample size of 1000