AI's False Dawn: Self-Control, Not Intelligence, Drives Economies
AI Can Never Compensate for Mass Delinquency from Imported, Uncultured Demographics
In an era where tech titans pour trillions into artificial intelligence, promising a utopia of effortless prosperity, the real story unfolds not in silicon valleys but in crumbling civic norms. This essay argues that economic vitality hinges less on raw intellect – whether human or algorithmic – and more on collective self-control: the quiet discipline to labor steadily, respect shared spaces, and curb impulses that erode trust.
Economies depend on millions of ordinary people showing up on time, paying their fares, refraining from petty theft, and accepting unpleasant but necessary work. When large segments of a population lose these habits, no amount of computing power can prevent decline. The evidence—from long-term psychological studies, economic history, and current fiscal data—consistently places self-control above cognitive ability as the primary predictor of individual and national prosperity.
The Economic Evidence: AI Spending Is Masking, Not Creating, Growth
Capital expenditure on AI infrastructure has become one of the few bright spots in otherwise weak economies. In the United States, the large technology companies are on track to spend more than $600 billion in 2025 alone on data centers and chips. This spending has kept headline GDP numbers respectable and supported a narrow band of suppliers. Remove those expenditures, however, and the broader economy shows clear signs of weakness: flat or declining non-tech business investment, stagnant real disposable incomes, and shrinking earnings for all but the largest firms.
Europe presents an even starker picture. Despite repeated political summits and promises of an “AI continent,” the European Union is investing less than one-tenth of what the United States spends annually. Heavy regulation, fragmented capital markets, and risk-averse public funding have prevented European companies from reaching the scale required for competitive AI development. The result is growing technological dependence on American and Chinese providers rather than genuine economic renewal.
Self-Control, Not IQ, Predicts Life Outcomes
Decades of longitudinal research have tested the relative importance of intelligence and self-control. The most authoritative evidence comes from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, which has followed more than 1,000 New Zealanders from birth to middle age. Children rated as having poor self-control at ages 3–11 (by teachers, parents, and observers) ended up, as adults, with worse health, lower earnings, higher rates of crime, and greater dependence on welfare—regardless of their IQ or family socioeconomic background.1
A separate line of research has repeatedly shown that measures of conscientiousness and impulse control explain more variance in academic grades, job performance, and accumulated wealth than IQ does. In direct statistical comparisons, self-control typically accounts for 20–40 percent more of the differences in outcomes than cognitive ability alone.2 These findings have been replicated across countries, age groups, and socioeconomic strata.
How Low-Level Disorder Becomes Systemic Collapse
Small violations of public order—fare evasion, shoplifting, littering, and vandalism—appear trivial in isolation. In aggregate, however, they impose large economic costs and, more importantly, erode the social norms that make complex economies possible.
When a critical mass of people stops paying train fares, transit authorities must either raise prices for everyone else or cut service; ridership falls further, and the spiral continues. When retail theft is tolerated, stores close or install expensive security measures, reducing taxable commerce and employment. The National Retail Federation estimates that organized retail crime alone now costs American merchants more than $100 billion a year.
Psychological research on norm violation shows that visible rule-breaking is contagious. Once a subset of the population gains immediate advantages from minor infractions and suffers no consequences, others quickly abandon their own restraint. The result is a rapid, self-reinforcing decline in civic behavior that no technology can offset.
Diminishing Returns and the Limits of Complexity
Economist and energy analyst Gail Tverberg has documented how modern economies face steadily diminishing returns on additional complexity. Each new layer of technology, regulation, or infrastructure requires disproportionately large inputs of energy and materials while delivering smaller marginal benefits.3 Artificial intelligence fits this pattern: training the largest models already consumes electricity equivalent to that of midsize countries, and the physical limits of chip manufacturing are approaching known engineering barriers.
A society that maintains high average self-control can push further along the complexity curve before returns turn negative. A society that loses behavioral discipline hits the wall sooner, because more resources must be diverted to security, insurance, and remediation rather than productive investment.
Immigration and the Transmission of Behavioral Norms
Large-scale immigration from regions with different cultural norms regarding punctuality, rule-following, and public order can significantly affect a host country’s average level of self-control. Economic studies of second-generation outcomes in Europe consistently find that behavioral assimilation lags far behind language acquisition or formal education. Children of immigrants often retain crime rates and welfare-dependency patterns closer to those of their parents’ countries of origin than to native averages.
The fiscal consequences are measurable. Peer-reviewed estimates for several European countries place the lifetime net fiscal cost of low-skilled immigration between 0.5 and 1 percent of GDP per year. These costs arise not from any inherent inability, but from persistently lower employment rates and higher involvement with criminal justice and social services—patterns that correlate strongly with differences in impulse control and future orientation.
The Educational Failure: Teaching Self-Expression Instead of Self-Mastery
Modern Western education has largely abandoned the explicit teaching of posture, politeness, punctuality, and personal responsibility in favor of self-expression and emotional validation. Longitudinal data show that students in permissive environments develop lower conscientiousness scores and higher dropout rates than peers in structured settings.
Employers now routinely report that recent graduates lack basic workplace discipline: they resist unpleasant tasks, arrive late, and prioritize personal comfort over collective deadlines. These are not intelligence deficits; they are failures of character formation that no algorithm can correct.
Conclusion: No Technological Substitute for Civic Discipline
Artificial intelligence can optimize processes, reduce certain forms of labor, and create new industries. It cannot make people show up on time, pay their debts, or refrain from stealing when they believe they will not be caught. Economies are ultimately networks of trust and reciprocity, sustained by millions of daily acts of self-restraint.
As long as policymakers and investors continue to treat intelligence as the binding constraint on prosperity while ignoring the erosion of self-control, the current wave of AI investment will prove to be another expensive detour rather than a genuine renewal. History suggests that societies which lose the bourgeois virtues of order, diligence, and civility decline long before their technological capabilities peak.
Moffitt et al., “A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety,” *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* 108, no. 7 (2011): 2693–2698.
Duckworth & Seligman, “Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents,” *Psychological Science* 16, no. 12 (2005): 939–944.
Gail Tverberg, “Why growth can’t continue: Diminishing returns,” *Our Finite World*, various posts 2018–2025 (e.g., May 31, 2025 summary).