The Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies

The decline of war: A reader points me toward Ohio State professor John Mueller, who occupies the manliest-sounding academic position I've ever heard of: the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies. (Woody was the famous Ohio St. football coach who got canned for punching too many people on the sidelines. One of my most cherished sports-watching memories is the live shot of Woody reacting, poorly, to his team's late turnover in the big game against Michigan. Woody noticed the cameraman recording his agony, turned, and, live on national TV, punched the cameraman in the face. The sight of Woody's fist heading for a point just next to the lens and then the TV camera woozily broadcasting a shot of the sky was totally great. I couldn't find the incident on YouTube, but I did find this later clip of Woody punching an opposing Clemson player, starting a riot, which is what finally got him fired.)

Anyway, Doc Mueller's presumably not some panzy-wanzy pacifist commie symp, at least by the standards of college professors. But, in these days of war fever (over Iran, is it now? Or Iraq? Irap? I can't keep straight which Ira_ country is supposed to be the next Nazi Germany this year...), he's a real spoil-sport. His 2004 book, The Remnants of War, argued:

"War is one of the great themes of human history and now, John Mueller believes, it is clearly declining. Developed nations have generally abandoned it as a way for conducting their relations with other countries, and most current warfare (though not all) is opportunistic predation waged by packs—often remarkably small ones—of criminals and bullies. Thus, argues Mueller, war has been substantially reduced to its remnants—or dregs—and thugs are the residual combatants."

Sailer's Dirt Theory of War: In the past, when thinking about whom to conquer, the key fact was that most of the value of the potential conquest was in the dirt acquired. You could use the ground to raise crops or mine for valuable minerals, which made up two large parts of the economy back in the good old days. War couldn't hurt dirt. Conquering California in the 1840s, for example, did almost zero damage to the place, which turned out, immediately afterwards, to have lots of gold in the ground.

Today, though, most of the asset value of a territory is in the buildings on top of the dirt, which are very easy to blow to smithereens during the course of modern war. And if you don't raze your enemy's cities, they provide formidable makeshift fortresses for conducting resistance to your invasion. So, you just can't win. The expected profit isn't worth your trouble. You might as well stay home.

(Slaves were also an incentive for war, but they aren't too fashionable these days. Who needs them? If you are rich enough to conquer some other country and enslave its people, you are also rich enough to pay the pittance more it would cost to get immigrant indentured servants from a place like Bangladesh. The radical increase in economic inequality in the world over the last couple of centuries has made slavery less profitable.)

Thus, most fighting around the world these days is conducted less like Grant vs. Lee and more like the Corleones rubbing out the rival families at the end of the The Godfather. It's less honorable, but less destructive and more profitable.

And in a new paper, Mueller puts forward:

Six Rather Unusual Propositions about Terrorism

1. Terrorism Generally Has Only Limited Direct Effects

2. The Costs of Terrorism Very Often Come Mostly from the Fear and Consequent Reaction (or Overreaction) It Characteristically Inspires

3. The Terrorism Industry Is a Major Part of the Terrorism Problem

4. Policies Designed to Deal With Terrorism Should Focus More on Reducing Fear and Anxiety as Inexpensively as Possible than on Objectively Reducing the Rather Limited Dangers Terrorism Is Likely Actually to Pose

5. Doing Nothing (or at Least Refraining from Overreacting) after a Terrorist Attack Is not Necessarily Unacceptable

6. Despite U.S. Overreaction, the Campaign against Terror Is Generally Going Rather Well

Now, I don't necessarily agree with everything Mueller says (I sound just like somebody writing about me!), but five years after 9/11, this sounds more and more worth considering.

There's a good reason, however, that people worry so much about violence. It's the same reason the New York Times has run so many more front page articles over the last decade about potential epidemics that haven't panned out -- Mad Cow disease, SARS, and avian flu -- than it has run about car crashes, which have killed lots more people. Unlike auto accidents, violence can be contagious.

We are right to worry about violence. One reason that warfare doesn't pay these days is because the U.S. maintains an amazingly vast military establishment (here's a picture of just part of the "Boneyard" at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, where the U.S. mothballs 4,000 disused warplanes, which probably cost tens of billions to build -- in 2006 dollars). We can establish air supremacy just about anywhere on earth, which pretty much means that nobody can conquer anybody without our say-so. Similarly, the 19th Century after Waterloo was more peaceful than people expected because the Britannia ruled the waves.

Eventually, new kinds of weapons may negate our advantage, but in the meantime, it can pay to take a few deep breaths before charging off to the latest war.

Uh oh, I've now noticed that Dr. Mueller has one of those "Germanic surnames" that Dana Milbank warned us about in the Washington Post yesterday, and, judging from Mueller's picture, might possibly be "blue-eyed" too. So forget I ever mentioned him. You can't be too careful these days.

In case you were wondering, "Sailer" is an old, uh, Andaman Islander name and my eyes aren't blue, they're ... cerulean, which is not at all the same thing.

See the prequel to this posting: "War! What is it good for?"

Also, see "Exactly Whom Is Iran Supposed to Invade?"

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

War! What is it good for?

Perhaps not absolutely nothing yet, but less and less these days. Civil war will be around for a long time, but invasion and conquest looks less and less sensible, even from a completely amoral national cost-benefit calculus.

Back in the good old days of James K. Polk, starting a cross-border war for lebensraum, minerals, and strategic harbors, such as the Mexican-American War, could be highly profitable, especially, as in the case of Mexican California, when the target was ridiculously underpopulated.

In the 21st Century, however, there just aren't that many such worthwhile targets laying around. Siberia, perhaps, but not too much else.

The lebensraum ("living room" -- yeah, I know, it sounds amusing, but it's not) rationale for war makes sense if you're using all your farmable land and your population is growing faster than the output per acre and you can't trade your manufactured goods for food. Japan fell into this trap when the Depression and rising tariffs choked off international trade, with the per capita consumption of calories by the Japanese falling during the 1930s toward dangerously low levels. Thus, Japan's horrific war in China. Fortunately, all those conditions are unlikely to apply these days.

Minerals, other than oil, just aren't that important economically anymore. And we're spending 50% more on occupying Iraq each year than all the whole country's current oil production is worth at $70 per barrel even if we stole every drop.

Harbors and other strategic spots are still of some value, but the great natural harbor of San Francisco is, oddly enough, less busy these days than the artificial harbor of Los Angeles-Long Beach. Owning stuff like Gibraltar and the Panama Canal just isn't that important anymore.

If you are a high tariff country, it's economically advantageous to bring more territory within your tariff barriers, but tariffs are awfully low these days.

Also, most of the great empires are largely broken up. Most countries are ruled by somebody from, more or less, their own continent and race. Israel is seen as a European intrusion into the Middle East, so it's highly unpopular with its neighbors, but most of the other extra-continental outposts of white rule are gone, like Rhodesia and South Africa, or are dominant, like Canada and Australia.

Of course, there will continue to be fighting that will probably eventually break up some existing countries like Sudan, and there will continue to be civil wars over who controls the machinery of state, but the era of cross-border conquest is probably largely over, except in political and media vacuums like the Congo.

The perceived cost of holding a conquest has skyrocketed. There just aren't that many empty spots on the map anymore, the way the San Francisco Bay Area, perhaps the finest spot for human habitation on earth (and I'm from LA so that's not easy for me to say), was practically empty in 1845.

Moreover, the spread of the idea of nationalism from Europe to the rest of the world, replacing dynasticism as the reigning assumption, means that the kind of easy occupations that, say, the British enjoyed in India for so long just aren't feasible. If the masses assume that who rules them is none of their business, then it's pretty easy for an outsider to take over. But, nowadays, everybody believes that their rulers should be, more or less, from among them.

Further, countries that are advanced enough to enjoy the air supremacy that allows you to conquer another country are generally also so advanced that they don't have the stomach for a massive occupation of a foreign country that's not directly threatening them. To permanently crush a popular insurgency, you have to slaughter a lot of insurgents, and that's hard to do when the victims' relatives have video cameras to show the carnage on television around the world.

Of course, there will be plenty of opportunities to carry on the Great Game of States by other means. But the payoffs from war-by-other-means will be far less than in the days when a few hundred Conquistadors could conquer two empires.

Still, there will be plenty of men who will get very excited over every twist and turn in the Game of Nations, and bay for war to prevent any loss of the slightest advantage. As former war correspondent Fred Reed notes, after decades of following the sounds of guns it occurred to him that war, important as it seems at the time, is just something males do.

See the sequel to this: "Insights from the Woody Hays Chair of National Security Studies."

Also, see "Exactly Whom Is Iran Supposed to Invade?"

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Good grief, more on Ireland

A reader writes:

Another factor that you do not mention is membership of the EU/EEC and the transfer of funds to Ireland via this route.

Ireland joined the European Economic Community in 1973. For much of that time Ireland has received substantial funds from the EU/EEC. According to this article this amounted to 3% or 4% of GDP.

Naturally Mr Powell, as a member of The Cato Institute, does not believe that an extra 3% to 4% of GDP was the magic that propelled Ireland form rural backwater to Celtic Tiger. But I am certain that it helped. It is easy to make tax cuts if citizens of other countries are paying the taxes instead.

I know that I would not mind personally receiving a boost in my income from a richer neighbor down the road.

Oddly enough for much of that time the UK was the only net financial contributor to the EU/EEC. So Ireland was getting this money from the hated British.

My impression is that the first decade and a half of subsidies just subsidized Ireland's bad habits. Irish politics in Ireland were much like Irish politics in Boston and Chicago: corrupt, but not ideological and not brutal. Interestingly, the Irish boss who launched the free market drive in the late 1980s, Charles Haughey, was notoriously corrupt even by Irish standards, but I guess that's pretty common: see other free market reformers/thieves like Yeltsin in Russia and Salinas in Mexico.

And Angry Bear explains the tax dodge aspect of Ireland's implausibly large GDP per capita:

Well, the worst year of my life was spent at a Big X (at the time, X was equal to 6) accounting firm, doing transfer pricing. Transfer pricing often amounts to little more than highballing the amount of a company’s activity taking place in low tax jurisdictions and lowballing the amount that takes place in a high tax jurisdiction in order to reduce one's overall tax burden. It is often done creatively. Say company X transfers ownership of a logo to the subsidiary of company X in the Caymans. Then, every time company X sells a tennis shoe with that logo, it pays a royalty to its subsidiary in the Caymans. If taxes in the Caymans are lower in the US, X hires E&Y or PWC or whoever to argue that most of the value in the shoe sits in the logo (and therefore is income received by the Cayman subsidiary and thus taxable in the Caymans), and not in the shoe itself (which is income received by the parent company and taxable in the US).

So back to Ireland…. Say you’re a pharmaceutical company. You have hundreds of highly paid researchers scattered throughout the globe – in places like the US, Switzerland, Germany, etc. Because taxes are lower in Ireland than in the rest of these locations, when a blockbuster drug is discovered, it is advantageous to play up the contribution of the researchers in Ireland and play down the part of the researchers made elsewhere.

This has at least two obvious effects. The first is the direct artificial boost to Irish GDP (and an artificial reduction elsewhere). Since Ireland is relatively small, if a crumb is taken from the US, another crumb is taken from Switzerland, etc., the effect can be very large in Ireland. The second effect is indirect – in order to pull this stunt off, it is necessary to have at least some facilities in Ireland, leading to more hiring and building in Ireland as more companies get more heavily invested in playing the game. But its in nobody’s interest to say this is being as a tax dodge, so a mythology springs up (as it did in Argentina), and part of that mythology, at least, is self-sustaining.

This is not to say that Ireland hasn't made a lot of genuine economic progress, just that the statistics claiming it has a per capita GDP 35% higher than the UK aren't telling the whole story

By the way, I wonder how much high IQ labor is wasted annually trying to avoid corporate income taxes or lobbying to get Congress to give firms breaks?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

WaPo: Mearsheimer & Walt are "blue-eyed men with Germanic surnames"

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank, who recently denounced Senator Jeff Sessions for reading the Senate's immigration bill and said that he has "harsh twang of a country tough" (i.e., Sen. Sessions is a veritable Ku Klux Klanner) -- is now mad at the distinguished academics Mearsheimer & Walt for writing a paper about the power of the Israel Lobby in Washington. Milbank points out:

This line of argument could be considered a precarious one for two blue-eyed men with Germanic surnames.

Come on, Dana, don't beat around the bush. Just look at them -- they have blue eyes. And Germanic surnames. We all know what that means.

While you are at it, Dana, I think you should hound out of public life the obvious anti-Semitic Nazi who wrote the following screed about the alleged clout of the so-called "Israel Lobby:"

How much clout does AIPAC have?

Well, consider that during the pro-Israel lobby's annual conference yesterday, a fleet of police cars, sirens wailing, blocked intersections and formed a motorcade to escort buses carrying its conventioneers -- to lunch.

The annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has long produced a massive show of bipartisan pandering, as lawmakers praise the well-financed and well-connected group. But this has been a rough year for AIPAC -- it has dismissed its policy director and another employee while the FBI examines whether they passed classified U.S. information to Israel -- and the organization is eager to show how big it is....

Another fact sheet announced that this is the "largest ever" conference, with its 5,000 participants attending "the largest annual seated dinner in Washington" joined by "more members of Congress than almost any other event, except for a joint session of Congress or a State of the Union address." The group added that its membership "has nearly doubled" over four years to 100,000 and that the National Journal calls it "one of the top four most effective lobbying organizations."

"More," "most," "largest," "top": The superlatives continued, and deliberately. In his speech Sunday, the group's executive director, Howard Kohr, said the "record attendance" at the conference would dispel questions about AIPAC raised by the FBI investigation.

"This is a test, a test of our collective resolve," Kohr said of the "unique challenge" presented by the FBI probe, "and your presence here today sends a message to every adversary of Israel, AIPAC and the Jewish community that we are here, and here to stay." (The official text has two exclamation points after that sentence.) Kohr, without mentioning the fired staffers, told participants that "neither AIPAC nor any of its current employees is or ever has been the target."

Dana Milbank

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Can Iran convert regional influence into higher oil prices?

A reader writes:

Even as much as peak oil fear mongers try to paint a picture of shortages, there are other sources of gasoline and diesel fuel and so the Middle-East has limited control over the price of petroleum. We use so much oil because it is so cheap and we use so much Middle-East petroleum because it is cheaper than fuel from other sources. As the price of petroleum rises more and more of the Canadian tar sands become more profitable, Gas-To-Liquid is already profitable (much of this is in the Middle East but Russia could also start producing GTL) then at a little higher price coal to liquids becomes profitable then at a still higher price bitumen from Latin America, then at a higher price than that shale oil can be used. There is also deep water drilling.

On the other side, for a few hundred bucks cars can be made to get better mileage. Then at some price for fuel people will drive smaller cars. Hybrids are already better, quieter cars but at some point they become economical. The mileage that long hall trucks get has doubled since the 1970’s (from 3.5 mpg to about 7mpg) and the technology exists to double it again to about 14 mpg.

Why do we in the west not have so little confidence that our system will continue to leave countries like Iran in the dust? Why do not believe that they will continue to fall behind as long as they pay people to not work? This is even if the petroleum prices rise? Sharp petroleum price rises can make them some gains but Amedinejad got elected by promising to give more of the petroleum revenue to the people, not to the people who pump the petroleum but to all the people. I would not worry about him.

BTW the Middle-East petroleum exporting countries need the petroleum revenue much more than the west needs the petroleum. Don’t let the politicians convince you that it is otherwise. And I quote:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

Leave the Iranians alone and they continue to fall behind. If they ever get a nuclear weapon and use it they will all be dead, and if they don’t, they will change or continue to fall behind.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

This blogging thing really not working out for Malcolm Gladwell:

The author of "Blink" gets paid, last I heard, $250,000 per year to write 40,000-50,000 words annually for The New Yorker, or $5 or $6 per word. So, it's a testament to the power of fashion that he has started his own blog. Sensibly, he doesn't update it often. But when he does, it's frequently because he is offended that somebody has dared to dispute any aspect of his latest New Yorker article. For displays of wounded amour propre, Gladwell's blog is getting awfully amusing. Here's his latest:

"Dependency Ratios: one last time

"One of my frustrations with the blogosphere--as those of you who read this blog know--is that I think that the immediacy of web publishing makes some people lazy. They type faster than they think; or they believe that a reaction is the same thing as an argument.

Speaking of "typing faster than they think," as you read what follows, see if don't you suspect Gladwell himself would have been better advised to take a few deep breaths and not click on "Post?" Maybe first sleep on it overnight? In the blogging business, you don't have all the editors and fact-checkers that make New Yorker writers look good. Gladwell goes on:

"Case in point. The blogger known as Jane Galt had the following criticisms of my "Risk Pool" piece:

'For starters, [Gladwell] attributes Ireland's success as the "Celtic Tiger" to falling birthrates, which (temporarily) reduced the dependancy ratio. He utterly ignores a more parsimonious explanation, which is that Ireland slashed its marginal tax rates in 1987, including a cut in the corporate income tax to 10%, which turned it into Europe's first outsourcing destination. If you look at the handy spreadsheet I have uploaded, containing data on Irish growth from 1980-2005 obtained from the invaluable Economist Intelligence Unit, you will see that this fits the Celtic Tiger period much better than a 1979 relaxation of birth control restrictions. Moreover, since there is much evidence that economic growth causes falling birthrates by raising the opportunity cost of childrearing, even if there were a correlation it would be hard to say which way it ran. This also applies to his arguments about Asia and Africa.'

"Where to start? Let's ignore, for the moment, the quaint right-wing affectation of assuming that marginal tax rates are the most "parsimonius" explanation for all variety of complex human behaviors. Instead, let me make two small points.

"1. "Gladwell" does not attribute Irish success to falling birth rates. David Bloom and David Canning do. Gladwell is a journalist. Bloom and Canning are two exceedingly prestigious economists at Harvard, who are considered world experts in the field of demography and economics. Gladwell was impressed by them. He talked to them. He read their work. He was convinced by them. But he didn't make this argument up on the back of his journalistic notepad. And to neglect the true source of this argument is to trivilize and demean it. This is not Gladwell v. Jane Galt; journalist v. blogger. It's world experts v. blogger. Just so we are clear on this. And acknowledging the origins of this idea means that you can't depose of the dependency ratio argument just by dismissing Gladwell. You may actually have to read Canning and Bloom.

Personally, I think he should refer to himself as "Mr. Gladwell" and issue annual lists of the Ten Worst-Dressed Bloggers.

"2. Galt says that Gladwell neglects a more parsimonious explanation: Ireland's tax cuts. As we've seen, Gladwell did no such thing, because Gladwell didn't do an analysis of Ireland's economic growth. What about Bloom and Canning? Did they neglect the larger economic picture? Well, actually, no. In the "Celtic Tiger" paper, they construct a complex mathematical model to try and tease out the various factors that led to the Celtic miracle. They think that the opening up of Ireland's economy in the 1970's was very important. But the data, they argue, also suggest that the country's demographic transition played an important role as well. Bloom and Canning, apparently, are of the view that sometimes things that happen in the world happen for more than one reason.

"All of this information is quite readily available in the "Celtic Tiger" paper, which is in turn quite readily available on a marvelous invention called the world wide web. The paper itself is just under twenty pages long. It can be read in under half an hour. It's not that hard. Trust Gladwell on this one.

Was Gladwell always so prone to go into a snit like this? Or is giving speeches for $60,000 a pop and having everybody tell you they read your book on the airplane and you're a genius bad for the soul?

To be accurate, Jane Galt (whose day job is reporter for The Economist) called him "Mr. Gladwell" the three times she mentioned his name in a long post (and presumably not in the Mr. Blackwell-sense that I suggest above), so I have no idea what set off this flurry of references to himself in the third person.

Galt responds in "Malcolm Gladwell hates me" that she did read the paper and disagrees with it for some cogent reasons that she makes at length.

Gladwell's article is 4,825 words long, which means he got paid about $25,000 for it. For that kind of money, yes, I expect him to read a 20 page academic paper. I also expect him to read more than one paper. I also expect him to run some reality checks on the original paper's theory, as I did for him a couple of days ago, rather than just credulously pass it on.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Iran as regional hegemon

A reader who knows a lot more about Middle Eastern foreign policy than I do writes:

Iran doesn't want and isn't planning to invade any country or even part of a country. It wants to become the regional "hegemon" in the Persian Gulf -- like the U.S. in this hemisphere or China in East Asia (which is China's long term goal) and Russia in the "near abroad" -- a role that a counterbalancing Iraq has prevented it from playing for many years.

Now thanks to the ousting of Saddam (and the Taliban in Afghanistan) Iran is able to reassert itself especially through the assistance of Shiite players in Iraq (and Afghanistan) and elsewhere. So we are not talking about the use of military power to occupy lands but more to affect decisionmaking in its neighborhood. Zbigniew Brzezinski described once what it means to be a "hegemon." It means that if the leaders of country X plan to pursue a certain policy the first question on their mind would be: How will the hegemon respond? I think that Iran, especially if it gains control of nuclear military power, will be able to achieve this goal and turn Iraq (or what's left of it), Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states into its satellites.

You seem to play down the power of the Shiite revival as a major political asset for the Iranians (See Vali Nasr's important article in Foreign Affairs.) You write: "The basic problem, as far as I can tell, is that Arab and Persian Shiites are Arabs and Persians. They speak different languages, have different cultures outside of religion, and have different relatives." Arab nationalism is dead and there is certainly no "Iraqi" nationalism. So as Nasr and others (including moi) have pointed out: Shiite identity has become now a powerful force that can strengthen Iran's hands (in the same way that Pan-Slavism was a major asset for the Russians). As Nasr documents, some top figures in the Iranian leadership are actually Iraqis and vice versa; some of the "Iraqi" leaders are actually Iranians.

So ... things looks quite good for Iran these days and they've been very smart and cautious in pursuing their diplomacy. In fact, their major mistake will be to use their military power to attack anyone in the region. Like China in East Asia they just have to wait for the Americans and their allies to continue making their mistakes.

Now... I'm not proposing that the U.S. should therefore attack Iran but that it should try to do a Nixon-goes-to-China with them based on Realpolitik considerations.

Thanks. The big question then is what are the costs to America of Iran being a regional hegemon. For example, can they use this influence to drive up the cost of oil on the global market? Can they then turn higher oil revenues into a perpetual motion machine where increased oil revenue is turned into weapons or less violent foreign influence, which drives up the price of oil higher?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Gladwell has a new article and I'm well glad

Gladwell has a new article and I'm well glad: There's nothing like a Malcolm Gladwell essay in The New Yorker to provide me with an easy punching bag. His latest takes the familiar concept of "dependency ratio" and tries to derive some vast new implications from it:

THE RISK POOL
What’s behind Ireland’s economic miracle—and G.M.’s financial crisis?
by MALCOLM GLADWELL

... This relation between the number of people who aren’t of working age and the number of people who are is captured in the dependency ratio. In Ireland during the sixties, when contraception was illegal, there were ten people who were too old or too young to work for every fourteen people in a position to earn a paycheck. That meant that the country was spending a large percentage of its resources on caring for the young and the old. Last year, Ireland’s dependency ratio hit an all-time low: for every ten dependents, it had twenty-two people of working age. That change coincides precisely with the country’s extraordinary economic surge.

So, that must explain why Ukraine, with a total fertility rate of 1.17 babies per woman, is so prosperous these days! Ukraine has a higher percentage of its population in the age 15-64 bracket (69.3% according to the CIA World Factbook) than Ireland (67.6%).Yet, Ukraine's per capita income is barely 1/6th of Ireland's.

Similarly, Tunisia's population is more clustered in the working years "sweet spot" (68.6%) than Ireland's, yet Tunisia is not an economic hot spot. It's per capita income is only 1/5th of Ireland's.

Contraceptives were legalized in Ireland in 1979. (Ireland's birthrate was not all that high before then, though, due to its extraordinarily high first marriage ages: 31 for men and 26 for women. Because of the sexual shenanigans of the Kennedy clan, we Americans forget the old and valid stereotype of Irish sexual restraint). But when I visited Ireland in 1987, it was still economically stagnant. When I came back in 1994, it was not yet noticeably wealthier. No, it was the economic reforms of the 1990s, more than anything else, that liberated Ireland from its traditional poverty.

(Keep in mind, however, that Ireland's current lofty per capita GDP -- now as high as America's on paper -- is exaggerated by its low corporate income taxes, which induce multinational corporations to contort their accounting in order to take their profits in little Ireland. Still, Ireland is truly much better off than in the past, and that should be a source of satisfaction.)

Gladwell goes on:

"The introduction of demographics has reduced the need for the argument that there was something exceptional about East Asia or idiosyncratic to Africa,” Bloom and Canning write, in their study of the Irish economic miracle. “Once age-structure dynamics are introduced into an economic growth model, these regions are much closer to obeying common principles of economic growth.”

This is an important point. People have talked endlessly of Africa’s political and social and economic shortcomings and simultaneously of some magical cultural ingredient possessed by South Korea and Japan and Taiwan that has brought them success. But the truth is that sub-Saharan Africa has been mired in a debilitating 1-to-1 ratio for decades, and that proportion of dependency would frustrate and complicate economic development anywhere. Asia, meanwhile, has seen its demographic load lighten overwhelmingly in the past thirty years.

This is a good example of missing the point. If you go down to Wal-Mart or Costco and pick out the most sophisticated product made in China, you'd probably find, say, a laptop computer. And if you picked out the most sophisticated product in the store made in West Africa, you'd probably find, say, a shirt. That the worker's income from making the shirt has to be spread over more dependents than the income from making the laptop computer is, indeed, a problem for African economies relative to China's economy, as Gladwell points out, but it's hardly the main problem. The big problem is that while China is now internationally competitive in the same products that Japan was competitive in during the 1990s, West African countries are now competitive only in the same manufactured products that England was globally competitive in during the 1770s.

Furthermore, which one is cause and which one is effect? Other parts of the world unmired themselves from huge birthrates by improving their agricultural productivity. Africa hasn't lowered its birthrate all that much (although it is falling) because it remains mired in poverty. Because African farm productivity is low, they need young girls to hoe the fields, so the girls can't go to school beyond a certain age, so they don't go through the demographic transition to lower birthrates.

If you are looking for a more insightful dependency ratio-related explanation for African poverty, you'd be better off looking at the lack of work effort put out by African men. African feminists complain not that men won't let women work, but that men won't work. One African feminist claimed in the Washington Post recently that women do 80% of the work in Africa. Unfortunately, that remains one of the many taboo topics in American discourse, so glib pseudo-explanations of African poverty like Gladwell's remain rampant.

Dependency ratios are useful within a country for discussing matters like the future solvency of Social Security. Between countries, however, while they are worth a look now and then, the truth is that the productivity of the workers differs more than, and far more importantly, than the ratio of workers to dependents.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Around the Web

Glaivester blogs:

Sorry for Light Posting: With a job, I have been a little more tired recently.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: Work is the curse of the blogging class.

At Mahalanobis, HedgeFundGuy considers the paradox of the poverty rate staying flat for over 30 years, while poor people have accumulated a remarkable amount of stuff.

The problem with being poor today is not so much that you don't own enough goods but that you have to live around other poor people.

Yes, the new edition of "Survivor" will have four teams composed of separate ethnic groups: blacks, whites, Asians, and Hispanics. Many high-minded people are upset, yet they are the same folks who want our public life to consist of competition among La Raza, the NAACP, the ADL, CAIR, and so forth.

With Jim Antle's help, Michael Brendan Dougherty comes up with the three words you can append to the end of any neocon foreign policy statement that will explain the idea's basic appeal to them.

For sheer ability to deliver truckloads of hits to my website just by listing one of my blog postings by name, Justin Raimondo's AntiWar.com is almost in a class by itself.

Pat Buchanan kindly sent me a copy of his new #1 bestseller on immigration, State of Emergency, with post-its marking the half-dozen pages where he quoted me. Mr. Buchanan now has a blog to promote his book.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Who exactly will Iran invade?

"Spengler" has been claiming for some time that because of Iran's rapidly falling birthrate (the number of babies per woman in Iran is now lower than in the U.S.), Iran must lash out at its neighbors in a string of conquests to secure its prosperity before it runs out of cannon fodder. (Of course, that raises the questions of why the mullahs began promoting birth control in the early 1990s if they were planning on a campaign of conquest, but never mind that for now ...)

I've been pointing out, however, that Iran doesn't seem to be doing much of anything to prepare itself for the military offensives that Spengler sees in its future. Instead, it's devoting itself to strengthening its defensive capabilities, which is what you would do too if your east and west neighbors had both been conquered in the last half decade.

Maybe I'm wrong and Spengler is right. But who exactly would Iran conquer?

It shares a border with nuclear-armed Pakistan, but the only reason for fighting a war over the Baluchi Desert would be to force the loser to take more of it. West Asia is full of horrible places, but Baluchistan, I hear, is special even in that league. And that's just the landscape, climate, and scorpions. The Baluchis themselves are worse.

Iran has a long border with Afghanistan, but, folks, while the Iranians might be crazy, they aren't so crazy that they want to try to occupy that place. Afghanistan is a fun setting for a few of your less-housebroken countrymen to wage the Great Game, as Kipling called the British-Russian rivalry centered over Afghanistan, but there's nothing worth the cost of occupying the godforsaken place. Afghanistan appears to be the last foreign country that a Persian Army went deep into, but that was over 150 years ago, and they may have been invited in.

And then there's Turkmenistan. Verily, it is written: "The nation that rules Turkmenistan shall rule the world!" Verily, it is wrong.

Moving counterclockwise along Iran's borders, we come to little Azerbaijan, which has oil. It also has a nasty post-Communist hereditary dictatorship, so I guess the Iranians could announce that they were invading to spread democracy to Azerbaijan. But big oil brings big friends, like the U.S., and the Iranians remember what happened to the last guy in the region who invaded a small oil country.

Iran has a 20 mile border with Armenia, which has an important natural resource: Armenians. For poorly understood reasons, Armenians can make money anywhere in the world ... except Armenia (although Armenia's economy is finally taking off, and Armenia should soon reach half of Mexico's per capita income).

Iran borders Turkey, but, trust me, Iran will not invade Turkey. (See the Mel Gibson movie "Gallipoli" for details.)

Then there's Iraq, where Iran has close ties with influential members of the Shi'ite majority that was recently installed in power, to the joy of the Iranian mullahs, by ... America.

Iraq has oil, but it is also full of American troops, who would much more enjoy a mission of obliterating an Iranian tank assault than their current mission. I'm not sure quite what the current mission is, but it's definitely less fun than would be squaring off in open country against a shooting gallery full of Shah-era tanks and planes.

Finally, beyond Sunni-dominated and American-garrisoned Kuwait, there's a real prize: the oil field region of Saudi Arabia, which is heavily populated by Shi'ites.

One advantage of being an old coot like me is that when the latest worries come along, after awhile you remember that you already worried about it long ago ... and got bored. Folks, I was worrying about Iran taking over the Shi'ite oil zone of Saudi Arabia in 1979. Despite all the complex theories I constructed at the time about how this was about to happen, it didn't. And it didn't happen over the last 27 years. Will it happen over the next 27 years?

The basic problem, as far as I can tell, is that Arab and Persian Shi'ites are Arabs and Persians. They speak different languages, have different cultures outside of religion, and have different relatives.

Then there's the changing economics of oil.

Obviously, the best thing is to own the oil, because then you can be rich, like President Bongo of oil-exporting Gabon, plus enjoy other perks, like renaming your hometown Bongoville, which would be fun to do even if you were not named Bongo.

If you grabbed ownership of an oil country, you could, presumably, use the proceeds to buy weapons to take over another country, and so on. That's what we theorized Saddam was intending in 1990 after seizing Kuwait (although I haven't seen much evidence merge recently that he really intended to keep going on a chain of conquests).

From America's economic standpoint, however, it doesn't particularly matter who owns the oil because oil is fairly fungible and the price is determined, more or less, by the global balance of supply and demand.

However, we don't want any one government owning too large a fraction of the oil because that makes monopoly price hikes more feasible. Saudi Arabia's huge share of the world's reserves and low population made OPEC's oil price rise feasible in the 1970s -- OPEC was less a true cartel than Saudi Arabia and a bunch of hanger-ons. If Saudi Arabia was willing to cut production radically, the world price went up, even if Iran and other countries pumped more than they agreed. Likewise, Saudi Arabia could singlehandedly cut the price of oil to $10 in 1986 at the Reagan Administration's behest to strangle the Soviet economy.

Theoretically, you wouldn't need ownership to exercise this kind of pumping restraint to drive up prices -- if Tehran could put the word out to the new Shi'ite oil regimes that they were all going to cut back, a Shi'ite consortium might be able to have sufficient market power to boost prices.

But, that all seems terribly theoretical. I strongly doubt that separate Shi'ite states could or would coordinate that much, sacrificing their own sales because they trust the others to cut back too. There are good reasons people in that part of the world aren't very trusting.

Of course, the most likely outcome of instability in the Gulf is simply more chaos, more vandalism and corruption, fewer repairs, and lower production for all concerned, as we've seen in Iraq.

This could drive the world price of oil into 3 digits, but as a strategic or economic weapon, an oil boycott, in these days of large populations in the OPEC countries, is akin to holding their breath until they turn blue.

A reader writes:

You wrote that American GDP is about 20 times higher than Iranian GDP. This is true if we use purchasing power parity, but if we use exchange rates, then the American GDP is about 68 times bigger, 12300 billion / 180 billion. The question is, what should we use for comparing military spending? GDP at PPP or GDP at exchange rates? Iran's military spending, being 3.3% of GDP, would be 6 billion if we use exchange rates and 18.5 billion if we use PPP.

I suggest that we use the average of the two. Military spending consists of personnel costs and hardware purchases. Iran's personnel costs are determined by Iran's wages, which are low, but Iran's weapons expenditures have to made at international prices. If we assume that personnel costs are about half of Iran's budget, then using the average of miltary spending at PPPand that at exchange rates makes sense. Anyway, the average of the figures is about 12 billion, which is less than 3% of American military spending. Obviously, the neo-con warmongers have cause to be worried.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Why baseball fans are more rational than foreign policy mavens

In these days during the apparent run-up to a war with Iran, foreign policy commentary appears to be largely the obsession of men with the irrational emotional instincts of baseball fans. So, why aren't they spending their time thinking about baseball rather than promoting war? It appears they are just too innumerate to be baseball fans. For example, anti-NY Yankee baseball fans rightly feared George Steinbrenner's acquisition of Bobby Abreu, which has helped spark the Yankees' surge into first place. They knew roughly how much money Steinbrenner can spend due to the Yankee's enormous market, and they knew Abreu's impressive career on-base percentage (he's one of the newer generation of Latin ballplayers who show excellent plate discipline and get a lot of walks).

In contrast, most of the Iranian fear-mongering takes place in a mental world devoid of numbers. That Iran's GDP is about 1/20th of ours, that their installed base of post-1978 aircraft and tanks is paltry, that they have virtually no offensive capability to seize territory where the local population doesn't support them, and that they have been spending a no higher percentage of that paltry sum on their military than we spend, and they probably spend a lower percentage, suggests Iran is not a major threat to conquer the Middle East. This is as if bored New York sportswriters, following, say, a collapse by the large market Boston Red Sox, got into a frenzy over the long term threat to Yankee dominance posed by the small-market Kansas City Royals. Well, it wouldn't happen on the sports pages, because baseball fans know the numbers and the pundits would get laughed at by their own readers.

Much of what we read these days about the Iran threat is is driven by boredom because of a lack of more credible challenges. The tedious truth is that the Great Game of nations is going through a dull patch of relative global peace right now because American military dominance (about 49% of the human race's military spending) is so overwhelming that there isn't too much organized slaughter going on right now by historical standards. So, a lot of foreign policy pundits are puffing up Iran as a threat to America with all the zeal and imagination that Don King brought to puffing up Chuck Wepner, a full liquor time salesman and part time boxer known as "The Bayonne Bleeder," as a threat to Muhammad Ali in their 1975 fight.

To carry on the baseball analogy, the current foreign policy punditry situation would be as if the New York sportswriters spent half their time writing not about the Yankees but about how their beloved San Francisco Giants are in danger from the San Diego Padres now that the Giants' Barry Bonds has returned to mortal human statistics, and how the Yankees ought to forfeit their own American League games so they can instead fly down to San Diego and beat the Padres for the Giants in the National League.

By the way, having somehow survived the May Day Day-Without-a-Mexican threat, Dennis Dale at Untethered Live-Blogged the August 22nd Iranian Apocalypse.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Iranian War Machine

I did some Google searches for "Iran" and "military build-up" and found lots of documents ... almost all from the mid-1990s.

If Iran is really out to conquer the region, it would need tanks, lots and lots of tanks, plus air cover, since tank armadas are dead ducks in the open desert. So, is Iran building up its tank fleet and air force preparatory to its upcoming blitzkriegs? Here's what the Center for Strategic and International Studies says about Iran:

"Most of Iran's military equipment is aging or second rate and much of it is worn. Iran lost some 50-60% of its land order of battle in the climatic battles of the Iran-Iraq War, and it has never had large-scale access to the modern weapons and military technology necessary to replace them. It also has lacked the ability to find a stable source of parts and supplies for most of its Western-supplied equipment, and has not have access to upgrades and modernization programs since the fall of the Shah in 1979."

Here is Iran's tank fleet, according to a site called MILNET:

Tank Type	Count	Manufacturer
M-47/48	150	U.S. (*)
M-60A1	150-160	U.S. (*)
Chieftain Mark 3/5s	100	U.K. (*)
T-54/55	250	Russia/Soviet
T-59	150-250 (35-?)	Russia/Soviet
T-72/S	480	Russia/Soviet
T-69II	150-250 ?	Russia/Soviet
Zulfiqar	100	Iranian made from T-72 and M48 pieces
Total Estimate	1600
* delivered prior to the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979

A reader comments:

I believe the name of the Iranian-made main battle tank, the Zuliqfar, literally means "burning torment" and is perhaps best rendered colloquially as "flaming coffin" or "death trap."

And here are other regional powers:

Country	Main Battle Tanks	Comments
Israel	4300	Modernized, well maintained
Egypt	4300	Fairly Modernized, maintained
Syria	4600	Fair maintained but much older technology
Iran	1565 (1000) *	Mostly older technology, maybe one to three full divisions of modern equipped
Jordan	1217	Fair maintenance, old technology
Saudi Arabia	1055	Well Maintained, modernized regularly
Lebanon	315 (100)*	Well aged, poorly maintained, single battle ready only

So, it looks like Iran would match up pretty well with mighty Jordan.

And then there's the Iranian Air Force, which resembles the raw materials for a nostalgic air show more than a war-winning military arm:

Aircraft	Made in	Count	Mission	Comments
F-14	U.S.	50	Air Defense	Poorly maintained, Little/no AAM, gun only
MiG-29	Russia	6	Air Defense	Highly capable, heavy maintenance costs, fuel hungry
F-7M	China	35	Air Defense	Fairly modern and capable
F-4D/E	U.S.	260	Attack/Defense	Very poorly maintained, parts not available to Iran some in ME market
F-5E/FII	U.S.	260	Attack/Defense	Very poorly maintained, parts not available from U.S., some in ME market
Su-24	Soviet	30	Attack	Some parts purchases with Russia have taken place, these may be the best maintained of all Iranian aircraft
Su-25K	Soviet	7	Attack	Seized during Gulf War (Iraq inexplicably flew them out) May be operational but doubtful
Mir F-1	France	24	Attack/Defense	Seized during Gulf War (Iraq inexplicably flew them out) May be operational but doubtful

The theoretical bulk of the Iranian air force (520 planes) is made up of F4s, which first flew in 1958, and F5s, which first flew in 1959. If any are still flying, the rest must be used as sources for the cannibalizing of of parts.

As for the F-14s, which were the pride of the Shah's air force:

"One report suggested that the IRIAF can get no more than seven F-14s airborne at any one time"

So they've got 6 good MiG-29s, 30 Soviet Su-24s, and 35 pretty good Chinese planes.

In contrast, Israel, for example, has "555 combat aircraft (90 probably stored)."

And, of course, Iran is missing most of the components of post-1979 air supremacy, such as AWACS-style flying command posts and stealth planes.

Look, Iran was deterred, fairly successfully, by Saddam Hussein's post-1991 House of Cards regime. That's one of the reasons the President's better-informed father and the younger, more sensible Dick Cheney left it stand in 1991.

What the Iranians have been investing in are, intelligently enough, missiles and, presumably, nuclear weapons development, which makes a lot of sense if their military strategy is to deter attack. Iran hasn't started a war with anybody since, at least, the middle of the 19th Century.

Or, as many theorize, they might be intending to attack the world so suicidally that they get nuked so they can get their hands on those 72 virgins faster. I wouldn't know.

Why baseball fans are more rational than foreign policy mavens: In these days during the apparent run-up to a war with Iran, foreign policy commentary appears to be largely the obsession of men with the irrational team-loving emotional instincts of baseball fans. So, why aren't they spending their time thinking about baseball rather than promoting war? It appears they are just too innumerate to be baseball fans.

For example, anti-NY Yankee baseball fans rightly feared George Steinbrenner's acquisition of Bobby Abreu, which has helped spark the Yankees' surge into first place. They knew roughly how much money Steinbrenner can spend due to the Yankee's enormous market, and they knew Abreu's impressive career on-base percentage.

In contrast, most of the Iranian fear-mongering takes place in a mental world devoid of numbers. That Iran's GDP is about 1/20th of ours, that their installed base of post-1978 aircraft and tanks is paltry, that they have virtually no offensive capability to seize territory where the local population doesn't support them, and that they have been spending a no higher percentage of their limited GDP on their military than we spend (and possibly less), suggests Iran is not a major threat to conquer the Middle East. This is as if bored New York sportswriters, following, say, a collapse by the large market Boston Red Sox, got into a frenzy over the long term threat to Yankee dominance posed by the small-market Kansas City Royals. Well, it wouldn't happen on the sports pages, because baseball fans know the numbers and the pundits would get laughed at by their own readers.

Much of what we read these days about the Iran threat is is driven by boredom because of a lack of more credible challenges. The tedious truth is that the Great Game of nations is going through a dull patch of relative global peace right now because American military dominance (about 49% of the human race's military spending) is so overwhelming, and most of the great empires are gone, that there isn't too much organized slaughter going on right now by historical standards. So, a lot of foreign policy pundits are puffing up Iran as a threat to America with all the zeal and imagination that Don King brought to puffing up Chuck Wepner, a full liquor time salesman and part time boxer known as "The Bayonne Bleeder," as a threat to Muhammad Ali in their 1975 fight.

To carry on the baseball analogy, the current foreign policy punditry situation would be as if the New York sportswriters spent half their time writing not about the Yankees but about how their beloved San Francisco Giants are in danger from the San Diego Padres now that the Giants' Barry Bonds has returned to mortal human statistics, and how the Yankees ought to forfeit their own American League games so they can instead fly down to San Diego and beat the Padres for the Giants in the National League.

Also by Steve Sailer:

The Middle-Eastern Powder Thimble

The Decline in the Need for Global Force Projection

Why doesn't the Kurdish "state-within-a-state" justify war too?

The Logic of Nuclear Genocide

Hezbollah's Schmutzkrieg!

War: The Human Race Just Isn't Trying Very Hard Anymore

How many aircraft carriers does the Islamic World have?

The small size of the Iranian economy and military

By the way, having somehow survived the May Day Day-Without-a-Mexican threat, Dennis Dale at Untethered Live-Blogged the August 22nd Iranian Apocalypse.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Interesting new book out this week

Breeding Between the Lines: Why Interracial People are Healthier and More Attractive

by Alon Ziv

Book Description This book combines sex, race, health and genetics in a daring new theory. Written with accessible, direct prose, anecdotes, analogies, and examples from human and animal studies, it is sure to spark debate in a massive way.

Jay Phelan, Author of Mean Genes: Breeding Between the Lines is that rare book that is insightful and revolutionary, while remaining compulsively readable and downright fun.

And here's Zvi's website on the book

By the way, Zvi tells me he's probably not related to Sabbetai Zevi, much as he would enjoy being related to a self-proclaimed messiah.

I've read it and it's an extremely lively book. Plus, it's got a great quote from me, and my influence is evident on a lot of pages.

On the other hand, I'm not fully convinced by the evidence for much additional hybrid vigor from marrying intercontinentally. Clearly, if all your ancestors came from one little valley up in the mountains, you'd be well advised to marry somebody from outside the valley. Still, it's not clear that marrying somebody from the other side of the ocean adds much hybrid vigor over marrying somebody from a couple of valleys away. Interracial marriage is a sure way to eliminate inbreeding in your offspring, but I'm not sure that significant inbred depression is much of a problem in American life these days.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Uh, I think you are forgetting something, Professor

In the Wall Street Journal today, Professor Arthur C. Brooks of Syracuse writes:

The Fertility Gap
Liberal politics will prove fruitless as long as liberals refuse to multiply.

Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%--explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

So far, so good. But then, he writes:

Alarmingly for the Democrats, the gap is widening at a bit more than half a percentage point per year, meaning that today's problem is nothing compared to what the future will most likely hold. Consider future presidential elections in a swing state (like Ohio), and assume that the current patterns in fertility continue. A state that was split 50-50 between left and right in 2004 will tilt right by 2012, 54% to 46%. By 2020, it will be certifiably right-wing, 59% to 41%. A state that is currently 55-45 in favor of liberals (like California) will be 54-46 in favor of conservatives by 2020--and all for no other reason than babies.

No, California will not tip dramatically conservative for demographic reasons over the next 14 years. That's because there is a huge number of immigrants and their children who are in the pipeline to become voters. In California, Hispanics and Asians vote about 70-30 Democratic. Furthermore, GOP family values issues won't pay off in California because not enough young people can afford to have a family.

I've explained all this in my essays on "Affordable Family Formation."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Dread 22nd of August

Well, I guess Iran hasn't dropped a Nova Bomb into the Sun today, or whatever impossible-to-deter apocalyptic terrorist plot it was that Professor Bernard Lewis claimed in the WSJ that they were going to perpetrate on August 22 for obscure Shi'ite religious reasons.

Remind me again, who exactly are the dangerous lunatics?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Five Billion, Updated

I pointed out last summer that almost five billion people (4,976,000,000) live in countries with lower per capita GDPs (purchasing power parity) than Mexico. That has implications for immigration that almost nobody is thinking about as of yet.

In the long run, the OTM (Other-than Mexican) immigration problem will dwarf the Mexican immigration problem.

I reran the numbers using the latest figures on the CIA World Factbook, and this year the total population of people living in countries poorer than Mexico is up to 5,043,000,000. That's 77% of the world's 6,525,000,000 population.

Almost three billion people (2,965,000,000), or 45% of the world, live in countries with less than half of Mexico's $10,000 per capita GDP.

An extraordinary 85% of the world's children ages 0-14 live in countries poorer than Mexico (1,528,000,000 out of 1,789,000).

Compared to Mexico's 33 million children ages 0-14, countries poorer than Mexico have 47 times as many children.

India has ten times as many children, China eight times as many, and Pakistan three times as many. Indonesia has almost twice as many children, Nigeria 1.7 times as many, and Bangladesh and Brazil 1.7 times as many. Ethiopia, the Congo, and the Philippines have almost exactly the same number as Mexico.

It's likely that you have to be fairly close to as rich as Mexico to get a big flow of illegal immigrants going, as Brazil has begun recently. Of course, if the Senate's guest worker program passes, we'll start seeing a big influx from places like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, followed by illegal immigrants coming to stay with their legal relatives.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer