A heartless thought Who wants to wager that the spate of AIDS cases in India aren't primarily in the low IQ castes? Not me...

India will be the hardest hit by the dreaded disease AIDS by the year 2010, according to the latest projections prepared by the National Intelligence Council of the United States. The US Consul General in the city, George N Sibley, quoting the report said that AIDS will reduce economic growth of countries by one per cent of the GDP, adding that national governments will be forced to spend a major amount of their budgets towards healthcare due to this incidence.

What this prediction omits is that the ones afflicted by AIDS in India will not be the ones central to India's economy. Even if the AIDS rate is high among some groups, the programmers, scientists, and businessmen will generally be unscathed by the disease. They're the ones with the money and the clout, and are often indifferent or worse to the plight of the lower castes. (This hard-heartedness is a necessary quality when you regularly pass shanty towns on the way to work at your software park.) This indifference combined with the puritanical strain of Hinduism promulgated by the ruling right-wing BJP will translate into a reluctance to pass laws calling for socialized AIDS treatment. In other words, the wealthy/high IQ will probably not care enough to spend a "major amount of their budgets" cleaning up after the poor decisions of their low IQ countrymen. This sort of thing plays out often in India, because the caste system has saddled/gifted the country with perhaps the highest IQ variance/inborn inequality in the world. The pattern of endogamous intermarriage has effects that reach beyond the maintenance and promotion of inequality. Unlike (say) Finland or Sweden, the lack of relative genetic uniformity means that there's less "brotherly caring" between groups. And if one is not expected to be one's "brother's keeper", one can't expect to be an unrelated-low IQ-AIDS infected-individual's keeper... Razib comments: I'm not as sanguine on this issue. Africans don't have a well developed welfare state either, but HIV/AIDS has affected their economies considerably. Certainly wandering unsocialized orphans in the countryside serve as a drag on social development as people have to spend more money on security and won't venture into certain areas. Also, ethnic differentials do occur in Africa as well. The Zulu have a much higher proportion of HIV infected than the Xhosa or whites (circumcision among the Xhosa and Afrikaaners certainly contribute to this) in South Africa, while the Luo in Kenya have much higher rates than other groups (again, circumcision is said to be the primary reason for this difference). In addition, from what I have read of Indian society, high caste males do exploit low caste women sexually. Over the past few years I have also encountered stories of closeted males having sex with many men but still remaining married. Though I suspect that the frequency of sexual encounters is probably lower in Indian men, this sort of furtiveness does not bode well [1]. Overall, I think that the issue is whether India follows the Thai or African pattern. I suspect India will follow the Thai pattern, with HIV rates staying below 5%, and therefore not dragging the economy that much as most of the effect will be on marginal members of society, rather than whole cross-sections like parts of Africa. [1] Unlike Africa, India has a long tradition of valuing the power of celibacy, Vajpayee for instance is a celibate bachelor due to a vow he took as a young man.