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When in doubt, or, worse, in defeat, cry racism. Works like a charm among the rubes in the coastal backwaters....
In fact, of course, there are two distinct, though related, issues being conflated here: on the one hand, there's the "we don't need no stinkin' borders" position, which effectively undercuts the existence of any state. If a "border" has no more meaning than just a line on a map, then all the libertarian rectitude in the world will not avail when there's no longer any substantial way to distinguish between those whose rights a state must protect from those it cannot.
On the other hand, there's a simple issue of the rate of change of a culture (not, it's tiresome to have to add, a "race") -- regardless of the skin color of those currently occupying an area, there is a limit to the rate at which they'll accept fundamental change to their symbols, language, way of life, practices, values, etc. Those who routinely and mindlessly haul out the "racism" canard at every instance of this sort of resistance are merely displaying an unpleasant combination of ignorance and moral preening.
Appropos of nothing in particular, I was just over at Bloggingheads.tv, where I watched a most interesting program. It was the interview of a journalist named Eric Weiner who has just written a book about happiness. When pressed by his interlocutor to declare the happiest country on earth, he mentioned "Iceland" because, in part, (and I am quoting from memory here): it is small and ethnically-homogeneous. At that point, the interviewer made a lame attempt to change the subject (mustn't give the crypto-fascists any more ammunition, of course) but he made no effort to contradict the filthy, cross-burning nativist. Weiner also mentioned the importance of a strong native culture in the inclucation of happiness, a position which Wilkinson has, on this blog, denounced as veiled racism.
What was the matter? Didn't you feel like debating the gentleman?
p.s. "slightly liberalized immigration regime"
What happened to the dream of totally unindered travel of peoples, labour moving toward its highest value and all that jazz?
Larry, maybe you'd like to address the point of the post?
What I want is an argument about the point at which higher rates of immigration become counterproductive. Many of the commenters clearly think we are ALREADY past that point. I'm asking for evidence and providing a bit of my own.
p.s., see above... this post wasn't about the dream, it was about the point of diminishing returns from liberalizing immigration. I don't see a shred of evidence we're anywhere near that point. So there is no excuse for not liberalizing immigration. I prefer a large guest worker program that separates the right to live and work in the U.S. from other benefits of citizenship.
And then perhaps you could clarify "the point of the post" -- are you saying that, yes, there IS a point at which higher rates of immigration become counterproductive", but we're just not there yet? Or are you saying that there's no such thing as too high a rate of immigration? And are you saying that economic damage is the only measure of "counterproductivity"? Whatever happened to happiness? Last, but not least, are you really saying that a state's borders should be just a cartographic artifact, or are you just fooling around?
For the racism, try this one out.
You can call this blogger a racist. I don't think he'd mind at all. He also seems to be an anti-Semite. (A lot of racists are also anti-Semites.) Note that the author, while a racist, does indeed live in California. I suspect he is not the only racist in this notoriously racist state.
The racist South African blog South Africa Sucks is also a good source of racism. Don't miss the racist Death of Johannesburg photo galleries, linked on the left. It has many interesting racist comments from racist South African refugees, many of whom seem to be racists.
I'm not endorsing these racist sites. I'm just suggesting that they're a good way to calibrate your racist-o-meter. If SAS is a 10 out of 10, what is Steve Sailer? A 2? A 4? It's food for thought, that's for sure. If you don't mind thinking about racists.
Also try Google Books. They have most stuff before '22, and pretty much all the American history written between 1890 and 1940 was seriously racist. The racist professors William Archibald Dunning and John Burgess, of Columbia, were two of the great racist historians. Most of Dunning and Burgess is on GB, and I think you'll find their work quite interesting - if, of course, racism is your cup of tea. Or you can try racist Edgar Bowers' racist history of Reconstruction, the 1930s racist bestseller The Tragic Era.
But the original racist is of course Carlyle. If you feel it is appropriate to refer to anyone whose epidermis is darker than a soy macchiato as "Quashee," you are probably a racist, and you'll probably like Carlyle. An fascinating exercise for the aspiring antiracist might be to ask oneself which racist writer is the most racist - "The Big Effer," "The Uhuru Guru," or Carlyle? Perhaps you'll consider this in a future post.
I consider myself a reasonable person who is instinctively libertarian—both fiscally and socially—but is also sympathetic to nativist concerns and would very much like to see an honest, open debate on this subject. It’s my general impression that the reasonable nativist arguments will stress the following:
1) A decline in out-migration is hardly a ringing endorsement of a policy; perhaps it just means that things have more or less gotten as bad as they are going to. Besides, the general pattern of out-migration is precisely what nativists predict.
2) A very important statistic to look at will be income inequality in California. I believe that the most defensible nativist story will be that increasing Hispanic immigration leads to more Tiebout sorting and an increase in land prices; so the high land prices and large influx of immigration are very much linked. This story is entirely consistent with the notion that California is a nice place to live, given that you are rich enogh. Feudal Europe was a nice place to live, given that you were rich enough.
I also feel that if you’re going to call people racist, you ought to be willing to say specifically what propositions you consider to be racist. Do you think any propositions with the following forms are racist: 1) X% of the observed IQ differences between groups are caused by variations in gene frequencies (i.e. is there some number of X that causes 1 to become a racist proposition.) 2) Y% of the observed socioeconomic differences between group are caused variation in gene frequencies between groups.
I am generally sympathetic to pro-growth propositions, and have not yet heard the nativist’s put on a strong enough economic argument to convince me, but I also think that dismissing their concerns out of hand and calling them racists is intellectually dishonest.
To be slightly more serious, the main thing that’s happened to California is that it has (a) become bankrupt, and (b) become a one-party state. If you have a WSJ subscription, a fair summary of the latter is here.
Other than that, the changes are relatively minor, unless of course you live somewhere where the housing is cheap enough to attract non-Asian minorities. Then you have to flee. As Time, that notorious racist rag, puts it, “Los Angeles is in terrible shape - again.”
I live in SF, not LA. I used to live in a gang-controlled area of the Mission - Norteños, I believe. The Mexican gangs in SF don’t really hate white people, for whatever reason, so it’s not that bad, as long as you don’t mind being surrounded by barbarism and mayhem. My gay roommate had a bottle thrown at his head once. But it missed.
Can you explain your Tiebout sorting point? I'd think the reason there is so much clustering around the border comes from the violation of the cost-free movement assumption.
If you're not familiar with the LA Weekly, I think it's LA's leading alternative racist tabloid. Perhaps comparable to the Jackson, Miss., Negro Crime Report, the Topeka White Times or the Vanilla Underground up in Seattle.
The basic nativist scenario seems to me to be that immigration and ethnic heterogeneity has the sorting effects of native out-migration and increased cost of access to public goods as natives cluster more densely into their own communities and seek to keep immigrants out (e.g. more natives bidding for immigrant-free land raises land prices; wanting to avoid admitting immigrants into native school districts leads to higher local taxes, etc.) Certainly, such barriers to entry into a region could lead to clustering around the border.
Well, Will, dense though I be, I think ethnic homogeneity might be a necessary, but not a sufficient, criterion for happiness. But let's discuss the cultural element further, since it was brought up and emphasized greatly by the impeccably cosmopolitan Eric Weiner. He emphasized the mistrust, atomism and the absence of a unifying culture as the important reasons for Molodova's notable unhappiness. Would even "slightly liberalised" immigration ameliorate or exacerbate these qualities in the United States? If you're perplexed, there's a kindly professor at Harvard named Putnam (formerly of Bob Jones U., no doubt) who has the answer.
"Economic growth (or lack thereof) is I think the best and least tendentious measure of counterproductivity."
Amazing how you can beg a question so completely whilst simultaneously proclaiming your lack of tendentiousness. If your attitude is: let the Heavens fall if it raise GDP 1%, then I pray to God you travel as far from the levers of power as the Orange Line will take you. Mass immigration has resulted in the infusion of people with higher incarceration rates, gang membership and violent crime rates, greater welfare dependency (especially beyond the first generation), higher drop-out rates, even (as though all that weren't enough) greater obesity. Have those trends irreparably damaged the fabric of American society in any way that can be quanitified to your satisfaction? I highly doubt it, but that has more to do with the standard you've selected than with the actual harm inflicted (none of them have helped the withering-away of the state you ostensibly crave).
Well, fine. Then it's a question of assessment or judgment, not principle, and then I think you really should apologize for calling people who have a different judgment racists. I don't, for example, agree with everything Mencius writes, but I don't see the sort of racial -- as opposed to cultural -- superiority you impute to him. If, as you assert, everything is just fine at present levels of immigration, both legal and illegal, then fine, Will -- you really are the White Hat arguing with bad people and phantoms. But perhaps we're not "miles from it" after all -- perhaps we're already at or approaching levels of cultural change that are not sustainable, within any culture or "race".
That LA Weekly article is curiously gloomy, as the CA violent crime rate has generally been trending lower for quite a while.. Murder rate in L.A. is lower now than it was when I was a kid in the 70s.
LOL.
I'm not saying you're wrong because of it, but here you're just spinning a stat which doesn't support your argument to make it seem like it does. Californians are leaving their state and have been for several years now. Thanks for the info Will.
Okay, when I asked, skeptically, for examples of actual racism here I hadn't seen this. And I'll agree that "calling RACISTS racist" is a good and honest thing to do. What's not so good or honest is to use them as blunt instruments with which to bash those who oppose the elimination of state borders, or those who make the crucial distinction between race and culture.
Will, if you want to brush up on your antiracist kung fu, I recommend working out on the moronic, foul-mouthed kids over at SAS. Try explaining to them why the breakdown in Anglo-European cultural hegemony, not to mention electrical hegemony, isn't so bad at all. Perhaps Cato can even be coaxed into springing for a field trip.
The thing about cultural hegemony is that someone always has it. While you're reading the racists, why not branch out a little and try a fascist or two? I can't think of a better starting point than Robert Michels.
Transnational progressivism is a culture, too. It's a set of values, beliefs and perspectives. As we see, it can't exactly be described as tolerant of contradictions. What culture is? And if it isn't "Anglo-European," what is? Where did all these ideas come from, Indonesia?
In fact, even "Anglo-European" is too narrow. Both our contending traditions are "Anglo," period - British and Protestant. The old war between liturgical and pietist Christianities is on again, with the racist replacing that old standby, the Papist. If you look at American fundamentalism as a sort of hick neo-Catholicism, the pattern of Anglophone history is quite unbroken. And certainly the connection between Puritan and progressive is undebatable.
What I find most interesting about this discussion is its extremely rarefied moral tone. Again, very Puritan. And very common among libertarians, who are always on about fundamental this or that. Humean oughts can no more be proved wrong than right, but the idea, perhaps shared by many of us outside the Beltway, that the purpose of government is just to create a safe, pleasant and open society in which ordinary people can live ordinary civilized lives, is perhaps too foreign to the Cotton Mather mentality. To which libertarianism owes more, I think, than it thinks.
LA is certainly open. As a resident of SF, there is not much of it I'd call pleasant. There are certainly large areas of it which are extraordinarily unsafe. The same is true of SF, although most of our nasty bits are safely on the other side of 101.
I do feel that a sovereign state with a $3T budget should at least be able to secure its cities and clear them of racist militias - "Anglo-European" or otherwise. Just a small request for our Potomac overlords. Do us this little favor, and we'll let you get right back to the vital moral imperative of invading and inviting the world - as Mr. Sailer so charmingly puts it.
Why not head over to John Hawks's and point that out to him? I'm sure he'd have no problem being described as a racist, or better yet, RACIST. Heck, perhaps Professor Hawks is the "Uhuru Guru" himself. You never know with these handles.
Genomic surveys in humans identify a large amount of recent positive selection. Using the 3.9-million HapMap SNP dataset, we found that selection has accelerated greatly during the last 40,000 years. We tested the null hypothesis that the observed age distribution of recent positively selected linkage blocks is consistent with a constant rate of adaptive substitution during human evolution. We show that a constant rate high enough to explain the number of recently selected variants would predict (i) site heterozygosity at least 10-fold lower than is observed in humans, (ii) a strong relationship of heterozygosity and local recombination rate, which is not observed in humans, (iii) an implausibly high number of adaptive substitutions between humans and chimpanzees, and (iv) nearly 100 times the observed number of high-frequency linkage disequilibrium blocks. Larger populations generate more new selected mutations, and we show the consistency of the observed data with the historical pattern of human population growth. We consider human demographic growth to be linked with past changes in human cultures and ecologies. Both processes have contributed to the extraordinarily rapid recent genetic evolution of our species.
Is the good professor right? Perhaps he is and perhaps he isn't. In case you're confident of the latter, I'm sure all these universities have diversity offices, not to mention ethnic studies programs, which would be quite interested to hear that they are sponsoring scientific racism. Or you could even go straight to the SPLC. Why mess around? Just sue the bastards.
I know one thing, however, which is that Professor Hawks and his sheet-clad coauthors don't have a radio station called "93.3 The Race." Perhaps they are still trying to get funding for this.
In 1933, we faced the Jewish Question. Everyone in the world knew that we opposed the Jews. We discovered the disadvantages of anti-Semitism, but we also got the benefits. We had to accept the fact that we were slandered and attacked throughout the world. We also got the advantages — namely excluding the Jews from theater, film, public life, and the government. When we were later attacked as enemies of the Jews, we at least could say: It was worth it. We got something for it.
Joseph Goebbels 9/11/40
Saying we should get rid of illegal immigrants because they're here illegally makes some sense.
Saying we should get rid of them based on cost/benefit analysis is tougher, because nobody assigns the same costs and benefits to illegal immigration.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/...
And that's before closing the $15 billion budget deficit.
Indeed. Presumably, to paraphrase Larkin, murder in LA began in 1969. This would mean the first statistics were collected in '70. When time itself often seems to have begun. Bishop Ussher was a piker.
Saying that LA is doing well because its murder rate has declined since the brutal nadir of the American cultural revolution is like saying that Brezhnev was a great leader, because he didn't kill as many people as Stalin. In 1970, the process of ethnic cleansing that devastated America's cities and forced their old European communities to flee - perhaps nowhere better observed than Detroit, which in some places is actually returning to prairie - was still very much underway.
If you expand your frame slightly and draw the curve out all the way back to the unthinkably ancient year of, oh, I don't know, 1920, I think you'll see a slightly different picture.
Even better, let's settle on 1908. Who needs this Great War thing? My desire as a reactionary is to see the restoration of the belle epoque, easily conceived as an alternate timeline in which the young Woodrow Wilson choked on a chicken bone and died in horrible, gagging agony. In this alternate reality, would large sections of North America's great old cities be controlled by barbarian gangs? Who knows, but one can at least imagine it otherwise.
The conclusion this leads me to is that the process of decision-making by which Washington presently operates, and has operated since at least the New Deal, is no more effective than haruspication, oneiromancy or astrology. Rather, the "social scientists" and "journalists" and "public policy experts" and so on, to whom the Progressives have been funneling the ill-gotten perks of their power, are by and large quacks, liars and frauds. They should consider themselves lucky if they are simply allowed to resign their positions without paying a fine, serving time, or having their ears cropped.
I'm sure there are other ways to interpret the changes that have taken place in Los Angeles since 1908. I am confident that most Americans alive in 2008 would not agree with my interpretation. However, I am also confident that if you could show the Americans of 1908 the state of LA today and its history since, they would consider it blindingly, stunningly obvious.
Perhaps this is because they were on crack. But that doesn't mean you're not on crack, too. Clearly someone is. Why wouldn't it be you?
I think most of the "scientific racists" have already declared that East Asians are superior to them.
Speaking of Asians, they still combine with whites to form a majority. I don't know how many of the hispanics are first generation (who are less likely to vote and have other social pathologies than the later generations, though there are some improvements).
At any rate, your point that the outmigration was slowing down is funny because you admit that outmigration has continued from a state that used to be a great net importer of American citizens. You might also note that hispanic migration to California is also slowing as they move on to greener pastures.
As for when California will collapse into a third-world hellhole, it might just be a long slow slide. It's already got some of the worst performing schools. California is only a state rather than a country and the federal government has made the state governments increasingly irrelevant, so it's hard to compare to other countries, but you should remember how long it took for Zimbabwe (even with Mugabe in charge the whole time) to go from the breadbasket of Africa to the fastest-shrinking economy in the world or for the lights to go out in South Africa.
Because the constitution commands free trade between the states, there is a limit to how much a merely state government can muck things up.
Cross from San Diego to Tijuana, everything turns to shit. If the state government could control trade between the states, we would see people fleeing California the way they flee Mexico.
Indeed. But it's a metric you chose to highlight, not me. Your dismissal of the argument when it can no longer be effectively used to bludgeon the state is just as curious as the original alarmist link you posted.
Regarding outmigration, it's not clear that such a thing is necessarily a sign of impending doom. Claims of the slide of California into a third world hellhole are a bit difficult to take seriously, as
1. they're not new.
2. they're not reflected in reality. By any measure, it's still a very prosperous state and highly desirable place to live. Unless, of course, one has an aversion to folks who speak foreign tongues and/or have darker complexions.
It's clear that California has some serious problems. Claiming they have much to do with the breakdown of Anglo-European cultural hegemony is weak, bordering on pathology.
I have lived in California since 1992. How about you?
Our great state is large, and highly diverse. Some sections of California's surface area are highly desirable places to live. Some are agricultural land. Some are mountains, forests, etc. And some are Third World hellholes. Do you need me to go to Google Earth and pick out examples of each?
In 1908, there was nothing recognizable as a Third World hellhole anywhere on Earth, whether in California or in the Third World. Basically, if I can be pardoned for assuming that you are some kind of progressive, your assurance that progressive governments produce good results with preindustrial populations is one that I have to take with a serious grain of salt. Do you want me to go into detail on this subject? Perhaps I should be asking Will instead.
Read the new book by Sudhir Ventakesh. It was promoted in the New York Times. The author cannot conceivably be mistaken for Carleton Putnam, Earnest Hooton or Arthur Jensen. He is a protege of that Levitt wanker.
If anyone had taken Gang Leader for a Day into any political debate in 1908, with some supernatural assurance of its bona fides, it would have permanently and irrevocably discredited any political movement which could be conceivably associated with progressivism.
Probably the Americans of 1908 would have been so horrified by a naive, merely accurate state of their inner cities that, by near-overnight acclamation of all 50 states, they would have switched back over to the Confederate Constitution and swapped the flag for the Stars and Bars. They certainly would have associated the situation instantly with the country's experiences during Reconstruction, and Google Books can tell you what they thought of that.
I wasn't highlighting any comparison with 1970. I was saying that the present state of affairs is in the inner city is dreadful and alarming, and that this judgment, while inevitably subjective, is a reasonable outcome for any historical standard of government quality that can be applied fairly to all periods of Western history since Plato was a little boy.
The only reason this comparison is even slightly interesting or difficult is the tremendous improvement in mechanical technology since Plato's day. Many people seem to think, for no sane reason that I can determine, that the advance of technology has improved the quality of government.
In fact it has enabled our decline. Nothing like the present system of Western government has existed in the past, of course, though the maze of bureaucracy and ethnic tension that was the late Roman empire may come the closest. And the Soviet system, while more brutal, achieved essentially the same result: a de facto permanent government, that held power by managing the minds of its subjects.
But anything like Washington as it is today could never have existed in the ancient world. The reason is obvious: it would have collapsed into military mayhem long ago. A good government is small and strong. Ours is precisely the opposite.
I'm afraid that while I'd like it to be otherwise, the simplest explanation of the generational change in Mexicans that Epigone is seeing is just that different generations of Mexican immigrants are not homogeneous - regardless of their uniform "Hecho en Mexico" stamp, which is what I think our host was complaining about in the first place.
Contrary to the hilarious '30s-style race propaganda still current south of the border, Mexicans are by no means a single bronze race - "La Raza." As in any country, there are many coherent subpopulations, whose genomic structure can be expected to be diverse, and which may not arrive homogeneously across time.
Thus producing the effect that Epigone sees. The variable is not (and of course cannot be) controlled by the experimenters, so there is no way to gain any kind of confidence in its presence.
Have you actually read "Gang Leader for a Day"? I'd like to see a review. His "Underground Economy" sounds better though. Also, Levitt seems to be something of a genetic determinist who would get along fine with Jensen.
Yes, I have read "Gang Leader for a Day." It's appalling, often quite unintentionally so. Venkatesh's astounding naivete reacts with the evil world he is studying to create a brutal if inadvertent indictment of an entire society, certainly not sparing the academic system which could produce such a moral imbecile as Sudhir Venkatesh. And it's quite readable, too - Venkatesh is not really a good writer, but competent.
I haven't read his academic efflux and I don't care to. A PhD thesis may have its place in the world, but it is not a book. And some of us can tell the difference.
What is that?
"Now, if my fearful commenters aren’t simply making things up in their paranoid dreams..."
Brilliant commentary, but I suppose one should expect no more than that, considering the source graduated from, not one, but two crap universities.
Brown in the early '90s was really in the lead on this stuff. "No Person Is Illegal" had yet to make its appearance, but the sensitivity vibe was quite intense. Pretty similar, I think, to what you see at most schools today. Then there were the unisex bathrooms, but I think that was more of a leftover from the '70s. A red herring, as it were.
But if this report is to be believed, Yale has really surged ahead. If a regimen this thorough can't turn young Elis into neoracists, I'm really not sure what would.
When Germinal has come and passed, must Thermidor arrive at last? I sure hope we don't have to wait all the way to Brumaire.
Don't be too hard on Iowa State. They have an interdisciplinary program in Continental Philosophy and Animal Husbandry which is simply to die for. Considering the amount of intellectual dog-fucking WW does on this site, his preference was likely for the latter.
MM,
Good link. I particularly liked this bit: "The current freshman counselor program includes 90 residential counselors — who students call freshman counselors — and 13 ethnic counselors... With more boots on the ground..."
I sure hope God is on the side of the best shots and not of the big battalions.
Unfortunately though, only one of the schools you mentioned isn't crap (hint: it's not John-John's alma mater).
Then I went to the school that isn't crap, from which I was promptly expelled. Kids, don't go to grad school before you're old enough to drink. Or do drugs, for that matter.
I hope it's clear that the fact that WW is not only from the Midwest, but went to college there, only increases my (not inconsiderable) respect for him. Unfortunately, being initiated into the sanctum sanctorum is one of the easiest ways to learn that our emperor is not only naked, but tweaked on amyls and strapped to a huge black silicone erection. There are cheaper roads to disillusionment, but they are less direct.
I didn't realise it was still possible to be expelled from University. I do hope you'll elaborate in a future blog post.
I would have thought a brisk stroll through the streets of Washington, D.C. would be the quickest road to disillusionment with the present system (you're perhaps too hard on Woodrow Wilson: his policies vis-a-vis civil service staffing were unexceptionable). Of course, that walk could potentially cost you a great deal more than $120 grand in tuition.
I suppose it depends where in DC you walk. Does our host live in Anacostia, do you think? Does he find it at all unusual that, in history's most powerful superpower, large sections of the capital city are unsafe after dark, if not before? You really have to wonder.
Oh yeah? How about the Belgian Congo?
How do you figure there were any "returns" in the first place?
Racial, religious, and cultural diversity decrease cooperation, but even if we ignore that, immigration has a positive effect on per-capita production only if the immigrants are more productive than the native stock. And that's not the case.
But that's all beside the point. Your fundamental mistake is to assume that the country, or the economy, or some other inanimate object possesses the interests that immigration either serves or disserves. Instead, of course, the question for normal, healthy living things is whether immigration is good for them, and the answer for white and black Americans is no. Immigrants use resources that would otherwise be used by them and their posterity.
I went to Brown as a naive liberal, but my experience there allowed me to see "the man behind the curtain".
1) Reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of "The Brothers Karamazov";
2) Japanese TV game shows;
3) "Little Cream Soda" by The White Stripes;
4) Imad Mughniyeh being blown to bits;
5) Will Wilkinson's blog.
Will's recent posts on nationalism and immigration have been thought-provoking and interesting, especially to someone like me who favors less Mexican/Central American immigration (legal or illegal) and more skilled immigration from around the world.
Mencius says "In 1908, there was nothing recognizable as a Third World hellhole anywhere on Earth, whether in California or in the Third World."
G.M. Palmer says "The point is that there has been a great deal lost in the disaster that was the 20th century — and continuing to govern the world as we have done for the last ten decades or so is a grave mistake"
I think both have a bad case of looking at the glass half-empty instead of half-full. The gains in the 20th Century to individuals, including inner-city blacks and Hispanics, in material well-being and personal health have been enormous. To deny the statistics on this matter is intellectually dishonest or simply reflects plain ignorance. I would trade places in a second with a black family living in Cabrini Green (one of the few 'high-rise' housing projects left here in Chicago) today versus a black family living in some shack in Bronzeville (the famous 'Black Metropolis' of Chicago in the early 20th Century) in 1908. I wonder if even the crime rate, for which I'm sure the statistics for 1908 are hard to come by, would be worse now than in 1908.
But what immigration has to do with any of this analysis is beyond me. In fact, I'm sure Will would agree with most conservatives that to the extent the inner-city has problems, many of these problems stem from bad government policy (i.e. welfare state goofiness) and with better policy you'll get better life outcomes in even the worse inner-city neighborhoods. Will is on record saying that he thinks human intelligence and/or culture is malleable and influenced by environment. I'm less sanguine, but regardless of what you think about race and IQ, IQ is still a bell curve function and any system of government/economics that provides a "way out" for those of us on the right half of the bell curve (e.g. examine the black middle-class out-migration from places like Bronzeville and you have an example of an enormous gain in welfare for a not insignificant population of American citizens) is O.K. in my book.
It seems like most of the debate is over what the government should do with the population on the left side of the curve. Again, it seems to me that many traditional libertarian principles and policies would improve life-outcomes for these folks (i.e. reform the bad incentives currently in place).
Finally, in direct response to Will, I think you rig the rules of the game when you say "Economic growth (or lack thereof) is I think the best and least tendentious measure of counterproductivity." There is no doubt we have enjoyed high economic growth during the past 25+ years with correspondingly high rates of Mexican and Central American immigration. But when you look at things like how these immigrants are performing in school, how many are having births out of wedlock, how many escape from poverty, how many are joining gangs, etc. then it seems to me some of these trends should at least cause you some amount of concern. Wasn't it Milton Friedman who said you can have a welfare state or you can have free immigration but you can't have both?
I think the Milton Friedman slogan is a canard. It is possible to separate the right to live and work from the welfare entitlements and political rights of citizens. So you can have a welfare state for citizens, and free-ish immigration for everyone else.
On the issue of how immigrants are faring, I defer to Douglas Massey who knows the data far better than anyone else I know of.
http://sociology.princeton.edu/Faculty/Massey/
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/08/20/douglas-...
Why "or?" Can't I be dishonest and still be ignorant, too?
Actually, it reflects an attempt to factor out an extraneous variable: advances in science and engineering. The 20C state can no more take credit for these than it can for the sun coming up - all subsidies to its sun-priests notwithstanding.
Quality of government is not a matter of "statistics." This is scientism. Since it is impractical to perform controlled experiments in government, government is not a science. All assessments are subjective. I am sorry to have to break this to you.
However, we can link our subjective assessments to thought-experiments. An obvious way to assess the quality of 20C government, while ignoring the extraneous variable of technical advances, is to imagine that all the political events of the 20C had happened, and none of the technical advances had.
You can also imagine what would happen if the world of 2008 was reduced to the technical base of 1908. Or if the world of 1908 was suddenly given access to 2008 technology. Or if you reset them both to 1958. Etc.
After all, shouldn't a stable system of government work perfectly well at a constant level of technology? Improvements are certainly great, but must we be dependent on them?
Since you seem like a reasonable person, Arminius, I suspect you'll quickly come to the same conclusion as me: that the only reason that the 20C political system has even survived is that the rise of technology has allowed it to escape most of the consequences of its degeneration into patronage, bureaucracy and barbarism.
I think the Milton Friedman slogan is a canard. It is possible to separate the right to live and work from the welfare entitlements and political rights of citizens. So you can have a welfare state for citizens, and free-ish immigration for everyone else.
Yes. If "you" are an absolute dictator. Are you? How do you think we got to have a welfare state, anyway?
And are you prepared to come out against birthright citizenship? Why should the geographical coordinates of the maternity hospital determine the rights of the child? Or is it mandatory contraception for our "free-ish" immigrants?
I know you dislike compliments on your blog, so let me compliment you here: You rock.
(though I'm not of a single mind with you on the matter of anarcho-capitalism, which appears to be an important basis of your philosophical system)
He wrote "or" not "xor", so you can be both dishonest and ignorant.
Mencius, you can't separate technology and the state like that. The state has grown because of technology.
Like Will, I'd endorse a Lant Pritchett/Gulf State style separation of labor and citizenship. I just don't think that's going to happen though. Politicians like having them as citizens.
It'll be hard to be back home in America, surrounded by all these atavistic white America-uber-alles guys with their vulgar tastes who are so racist; although their vulgar tastes are forgiven. I mean, it's the perfect proof of how the market civilizes the barbarians.
“Actually, it reflects an attempt to factor out an extraneous variable: advances in science and engineering. The 20C state can no more take credit for these than it can for the sun coming up - all subsidies to its sun-priests notwithstanding.”
We’ll have to agree to disagree about where to place credit for those advances in science and engineering. In my analysis, there is much government can do to promote the flourishing of both science and engineering (provide property rights, including intellectual property; provide funding for research, e.g. ARPANET; provide the infrastructure for economic growth, e.g. roads, bridges, sewers; provide education, etc.) It can also discourage scientists and engineers if it fails to provide all these public goods. So while I don’t want to take anything away from Henry Ford, Jonas Salk and Steve Jobs, I do think they owe a debt of gratitude to their native country and its government.
But even ignoring the fact that I think government can take some credit for “advances in science and engineering” I still don’t find your argument convincing. To wit, you go on to say:
“Quality of government is not a matter of “statistics.”…All assessments are subjective. I am sorry to have to break this to you.”
Gee, I sort of thought that an assessment of the “quality of government”, while definitely subjective, can be intelligently informed by statistics. For example, if you believe that the quality of government depends on how well the government protects its citizens from criminals, then you’d want to know the statistics on crime, the effectiveness of the gendarmerie, etc. So when you say that our political system has used technology to avoid the “consequences of its degeneration into patronage, bureaucracy and barbarism”, I immediately want to know what are your metrics for these qualities of the political system and do the statistics back up your assessment? In other words, is there really more “barbarism” in 2008 government than there was in 1908? More patronage? I would agree there is more bureaucracy, which can be measured quite easily using statistics on government spending and regulation, but does this increase in bureaucracy justify using the language you used earlier (i.e. “In 1908, there was nothing recognizable as a Third World hellhole anywhere on Earth, whether in California or in the Third World.”)? That language doesn’t sound like someone who is interested in honestly assessing the quality of government in 1908 versus 2008.
Will –
I just saw that clip from “bloggingheads.tv” you linked to and it is priceless! Despite the fact that I’m married to a wonderful wife and I have two children, I have a crush on Megan. Is this normal?
Back when I was a student at the Harris School of Public Policy, I was lucky enough to meet both Doug Massey and William Julius Wilson (WJW), who were both teaching there at the time. I was responsible for getting WJW really mad when I asked him a question about Massey’s data on segregation – he and Massey didn’t exactly see eye to eye on the problems of the inner city poor and apparently I hit a sore spot with the question.
Anyway, personal anecdotes aside, I read the link you provided to the CATO Unbound and I must say my original concerns about how Mexican/Central American “immigrants are performing in school, how many are having births out of wedlock, how many escape from poverty, how many are joining gangs, etc.” are not alleviated. Massey doesn’t really talk about any of these trends directly – all he says is that Mexican immigrants (presumably both legal and illegal) is that they consume social services (their “service usage rates”) are “well below those of other immigrant groups and have fallen sharply since the mid-1990s.” This obscures more than illuminates: is he talking about all generations of immigrants? Does it include the costs of bi-lingual education (which he later mentions as part of “public services” which he claims “are consumed at rates well below what one would expect [by Mexican immigrants] given their socioeconomic characteristics”)? What about the costs of policing immigrant communities? And what about the recent data on Hispanic out-of-wedlock births, which may not cost much now, but represent potentially serious social costs for the future?
I think Massey is a top-flight scholar and I’m glad he makes his data available to the public, so perhaps with further research I can answer some of these questions myself. But again, when I read stories like these in "City Journal":
1)http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_blacks_and_immigration.html
2)http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_mexifornia.html
3)http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_4_hispanic_family_values.html
I remain concerned that when Massey says “Mexican immigration is not a tidal wave” he may be right in the sense of a dramtic and upcoming destructive force; but I worry that VDH is also right in using a different aquatic metaphor, flood, which may not be as dramatic, but still portends an ominous future for at least some American communities.
Which do you think is harder? Running a restaurant, or running a government? Which do you think is easier to assess in quantitative metrics? The quality of a meal, or the quality of government?
Yet imagine a publication in which food reviewers - or movie reviewers, or literary critics, or anyone concerned with the quality of solutions to any problem a million times more trivial than government - had to use the tools of "public policy analysts" to assess results. It would strike you as the most boneheaded nonsense in the world.
When I assess the quality of government in 2008 by 1908 standards, I use the methods that the writers of 1908 used. Namely: taste, judgment, two eyes and a brain. That these methods are no longer fashionable would not strike those who once practiced them as evidence of progress.
If you are not familiar with these techniques, Google has made a vast supply of pre-1922 writing available. I recommend starting with the Liberal Republican Mugwump types, who were the distant ancestors of the "public policy" experts of today.
Charles Francis Adams Jr., for example, is a great start. If you want to get a little more aggro, go for the Brits: W.E.H. Lecky, Henry Maine, James Fitzjames Stephen, and the like. I think you'll find that there are many things under heaven and earth that are not taught at Chicago - at least not at present.
Or simply look at the track record of quantitative sociology across the 20th century. Googling "Sidney Webb" ought to keep you busy for quite some time.
(And everyone who even considers using the word "science" should have to read this.)
Given this track record, Occam's razor suggests a simple reason for the continued success of objective methodologies in public policy: they are an effective way to camouflage the struggle for money and power which government, at all times and in all places, has consisted of.
Steve Burton over at WWWTW has described your writing as "half-brilliant and half-unhinged" and while I initially thought this was a good description, I'm finding it harder to agree with the "half-brilliant" part.
To wit, you say the following in defense of your "taste, judgment, two eyes and a brain" methodology:
"Yet imagine a publication in which food reviewers - or movie reviewers, or literary critics, or anyone concerned with the quality of solutions to any problem a million times more trivial than government - had to use the tools of “public policy analysts” to assess results. It would strike you as the most boneheaded nonsense in the world."
First of all, in what sense is a food reviewer, movie reviewer or literary critic concerned with the "quality of solutions"? I thought they were trying to give the reader an intelligent analysis for why a particular restaurant, movie or book is/isn't worthwhile. This seems to me a very different exercise than trying to argue the government of 1908 did a better job of keeping its citizens safe, or providing clean water, or delivering the mail, etc., etc. than the government of 2008. In the later case I'd want data to back up your "taste, judgement, two eyes and a brain". After all, the data for the restaurant critic, movie reviewer, and literary critic are readily accessible to the reader if he wants to go find out what he thinks of the restaurant, movie or book.
You are suggesting that rather than establish some metrics and look for data, I'd be better off in making the 1908/2008 government comparison by reading the subjective thoughts of folks who lived back in 1908 and comparing these thoughts with...well, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to compare the thoughts with from 2008. The latest Pat Buchanan screed? That seems to be stacking the deck a bit, not to mention the fact that these writers back in 1908 must have had access to their own data which should be analyzed just as you should analyze Pat in 2008 quoting some study that he thinks proves something that probably doesn't prove what Pat thinks it does.
So I guess I'll ask you again: what was it about the government of 1908 that is so much better than the government of 2008?
Let me put this more simply. If I tell you that Gigli is a cinematic disaster and Blade Runner is a work of genius, will you ask me what data supports my conclusion? If so, you are really beyond hope.
No, you probably will want to talk about the box office returns. Anything so long as it's a number. The fact remains that, in my judgment, even if neither film had had a box-office release, Gigli would be shite and Blade Runner would be great. Reality exists.
I just read a book by an English anthropologist who travelled through French and British West Africa in the 1930s. My father was posted to the US Embassy in Lagos in the late '90s. The comparison is quite illustrative.
Could I quantify the difference in the quality of government between the two? I could dig up all kinds of numbers. I'm sure that numbers could be dug up to support any such comparison - in either direction. Again, look at all the numbers Sidney and Beatrice Webb produced for their "new civilization," Soviet Russia. It was all shite.
I am suggesting that you understand how people in 1908 thought. They were just as smart as you, and they understood many things that you do not. Charles Francis Adams Jr., for example, was a general in the Union Army, a scion of the Adams political dynasty, a leading railroad executive, and chairman of the American Historical Association. There is no way to resurrect him and understand what his perspective of 2008 would be, but I would exchange the exercise for all the social statistics in the world.
Another fun game is to apply hindsight to the political debates of the period. Do you think the Fabians who made modern Britain what it is believed that their New Jerusalem would turn out as it has? "Oh, yes, we'll lose the Empire, our cities will be filthy, dangerous, and colonized by truculent foreigners, and there'll be about fifty times as much crime. But on the upside, we get council housing, Sir Paul McCartney, and a National Health Service."
It is difficult to pin you down because your prose is full of questionable assumptions, you mix your metaphors, you make broad generalizations (which don't relate to my own personal experience), etc., etc.
I finally got you to give me some data though, and for that I'm grateful.
Before we get to the British crime rate increase (I thought we were talking about the U.S.?) over the 20th Century, you pose a question for me:
“If I tell you that Gigli is a cinematic disaster and Blade Runner* is a work of genius, will you ask me what data supports my conclusion?”
No, I’ll ask you why you came to your conclusion and you’ll say something like: “Ben Afleck can’t act and he is awful in Gigli”, to which I might say “I always liked Afleck’s work when he finds a good script, so do you think the script was bad?” and then you’ll either say something like “Anyone who thinks Ben Afleck’s acting was ever passable is beyond hope” or maybe if you are feeling more charitable “Yes definitely, the script was horrible, nothing the characters said was believable to me…” etc., etc. I might also ask you what you mean by the notion of “cinematic disaster” because I remain interested in the financial success of the movie industry and find it fascinating when a movie I think is “shite” does well at the box office.
So when I ask you how you came to your conclusions, you provide me with reasons and clarifications of your terms, supported by the data at hand: namely the movie you just saw, other movies (to use as reference points), your personal experiences, your aesthetic tastes, etc.
Similarly with the comparison between the quality of government in1908 and 2008: all I was trying to understand was the basis for your comparisons and the data you used to come to your conclusion. So when I read in your prose a statement like the following, which is what you imagine the goofy Webbs (who were using data that was false…which means it is important to get your data correct, not that data is meaningless) would say when confronted with 2008 Britain:
“our cities will be filthy, dangerous, and colonized by truculent foreigners”
I remain baffled because as bad as certain parts of British cities may be (and I read a lot of Theodore Dalrymple, so I know there is much to be concerned about) my own experience of London (I lived there for a year while studying at the LSE) was that it was clean, safe, and enlivened by the presence of hard-working foreigners. And furthermore, it is strange that you refuse to acknowledge the fact that there were plenty of places in 1908 Britain that were filthy and dangerous (not as many foreigners around, I’ll give you that). But what about the crime, Arminius, what about the crime? Well, in short, the report you linked to acknowledges that their data from 1908 wasn’t as good as the data from 2008 so that explains some of the rise in crime. In addition, you had all sorts of young men roaming the world in service of HMG defending the Empire, which I’m sure helped keep crime lower at home (scroll down in the report a little further and you come to the 16,895 soldiers killed in the 2nd Boer War, which doesn’t include all the dead South Africans…if you want to talk about barbarism). There are other factors that I’m sure explain this dramatic rise and yes, I’m willing to concede that it is possible one factor might be the government was better at keeping the peace in 1908 than it was in 2008. But “better at keeping the peace” also might mean more innocent people were locked up and/or killed in the course of routine police work in 1908 than 2008, so what do your value more, absolute safety or basic civil liberties (i.e. Saudi cities, from what I understand, are quite safe, assuming you are a Muslim man taking a stroll down to the local mosque). So even your case against 2008 using crime statistics is hardly a slam-dunk. Furthermore, I’m in broad agreement with many of the libertarian critiques of modern day government policies, which I concede have mucked things up for the urban poor in Britain and the U.S.
But I remain skeptical that you can simply say, on the basis of our screwed up welfare policies (or maybe even our lax immigration policies) that the quality of government in 1908 was higher than 2008 because I remain convinced that the government of 1908 was screwing up in many different ways unique to that time and place. And furthermore, I remain totally unconvinced, based on the rise in 20th century British crime, that the governments in the West, including the U.S., in 2008 have degenerated “into patronage, bureaucracy and barbarism.” I will, however, check out what Charles Francis Adams Jr. has to say as he sounds like a fascinating man.
*Did you see last year's "Sunshine"? A minor masterpiece and one of the best science fiction films I have seen in a long time.
You make my point for me. Faced with statistics that you don't like, it's very easy to wriggle around them - as you just have. Faced with statistics that you do like, it's very easy to propound them uncritically as absolute proof of one's hypothesis - as I did earlier.
For a comparison across centuries, that British crime rate number (indictable offences per capita known to the police) is incredibly solid. (Although I am skeptical about that drop in the '90s.) It is compiled by a single continuous agency, it is presented to us by an authority that would have every interest in concealing rather than revealing the data, etc, etc, etc.
And you know what? You're right. It is still shite. It proves nothing.
Neither history nor government is a science. They are both arts. The former is the art of narrative interpretation, the latter is the art of sovereign management.
Because there are no controlled experiments in government, it is impossible to reliably verify any connection between policies and results. I think that the breakdown of the African-American family and the policies of the Great Society had something to do with each other. Whereas I know the atomic weight of hydrogen. I can convince you irrefutably of the latter. No one can convince anyone irrefutably of the former.
The connection between policies and results, like the quality of Gigli, must remain a matter of opinion. You seem like a basically sensible person, and I'm not at all surprised that your opinions are the same as mine. Sensible people can think. Reason works. The scientific method is only one special case of it.
The trouble is that when explaining why I think that much (certainly not all) of the world has gone to hell since 1908, I am trying to explain why Gigli is shite to someone who has not only never seen Gigli, but has never seen any movies at all, and who doesn't trust my opinion in the slightest.
You have been trained, I gather, to understand the past through numbers. Even many historians are trained this way these days. It is essentially a rejection of history, just as 20C economics is a rejection of the discipline practiced by Ricardo, Mill, and Smith. Ever so much easier and more effective than just making these dangerous professions illegal.
I am not saying that just because Charles Francis Adams would be appalled by the state of government today, he is right. Just because he's a dead white man, or something. What I'm saying is that there is no a priori reason to consider the methods and practices of public policy in 2008 superior to those of 1908, and there are indeed quite a few reasons to believe that the methods of 1908 (or, for that matter, 1808) got better results with much less powerful tools.
At least according to one biographer, the Duke of Wellington felt that all the problems of modern urban government could be solved with one simple phrase: "pour la canaille, la mitraille." If the late Mr. Wellesley could observe the world as it is today, do you feel that he would consider himself disproved by mere observation? If not, what would you say to convince him?
Or try this piece by George Bancroft. Is Bancroft simply out to lunch? Has he gone around the bend? And if so, how would you explain it to him?
No, the world of 2008 has not been overrun by barbarians. At least not yet. What is worrying, however, is that it seems to have lost the ability it once had to extend the limes and convert barbarism back to civilization. If you go to Google News and search for "poisoned arrows," the result is not encouraging.
Bancroft is indeed, simply out to lunch. I would point to the economic success of the U.S. in the 20th Century and the mass prosperity enjoyed by millions, and I would tell him that statements like this: "A fluctuating currency is bad for all but the speculative, who are but a handful among millions" is disproved by the actual experience of the 20th Century. Of course, if Ron Paul is right, our eventual doom is just around the corner, but I would also characterize Mr. Paul as "out to lunch" (although I'm not so quick to dismiss Paul mainly because I have such high respect for John Derbyshire, who is something of a Ronulan himself).
Ironically, I agree with the good Duke when it comes to crime in urban America -- this shouldn't be surprising since I consider myself a neocon and think that Rudy's achievement in NYC with respect to the crime rate is a public policy achievement worthy of the good Duke himself.
But I fear our little back and forth is hijacking Will's wonderful blog, so I promise to suck it up and begin checking you out over at "Unqualified Reservations" on a regular basis and perhaps we will meet again on your home turf.
And remember: la mitraille is grapeshot, not the machinegun, which is la mitrailleuse. I'm sure the Iron Duke would have giggled like a six-year-old at the invention of actual automatic weapons. "People power?" he would have said. "What is this people power? We have the Maxim-gun, and they have not."
Regards, and thanks for an entertaining conversation...
;-)
Maybe because there's zero incentive to move to a place full of unhappy people? The more interesting question is whether places like Korea, Japan, and Iceland, which have very little ethnic diversity, are happier for their having achieved a comfortable standard living without diversity than with.
If the idea is that the U.S. will inevitably slide toward second-world status if the whole place comes to look a lot more like California and Arizona demographically
I think the argument is more that if you replace the natives with Latin Americans from dystopian hellholes, then your country will turn into something rather like a dystopian Latin American hellhole, rather than the comparatively pleasant place it may be at the moment. There's nothing magic about the borders of the US, after all. Political culture is about people, not borders. Now, whether it's necessarily true that switching out the populations leads directly to that result is debateable. Perhaps the country's institutions are strong enough that they'll leave their imprint on foreign peoples as much as natives. But it's silly to pretend that the other possibility simply doesn't exist.
The other issue, of course, is that the country belongs to the natives, and while it might please us to govern their country otherwise, it is, when it comes right down to it, their country and no one else's. And one ought to respect that. If we don't like it, we can go elsewhere. They, for the most part, can't -- they've only got the one homeland.