Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts

May 20, 2008

Response to Crotty's lactose tolerant-centric theory of world history

A friend responds to my posting last week on Irish economist-farmer Raymond Crotty's lactose tolerantcentric theory of world history:

Raymond Crotty 's sweeping review of history (Histories in Collision, mentioned by Steve Sailer on his blog) is maybe sometimes a little too sweeping, but interesting all the same. One of the things that is going on in the book is Crotty 's attempt to explain why his own folks, the Irish, look relatively feckless compared to various other groups in Northern Europe, who seem from early in their history to be diligently beavering away, saving and accumulating property in proto-capitalist fashion. (Clark 's recent Farewell to Alms would support this for the English.)

To explore this issue, Crotty takes us from generic early Indo-European society (where, he argues, the ability to digest lactose in milk is a key adaptation) to later socio-economic evolution in Northern Europe. Crotty argues that the rural economy of Northern Europe from the Middle Ages on encouraged the development of private property and bourgeois virtues. Keeping cattle (with milk a major part of the diet) in this ecological zone ran into the problem of limited winter forage. Once populations grew past the point that cattle could be turned loose to graze on their own in winter, people needed to make major investments in barns, and in growing and storing hay, to keep a lot of their herds going through the winter.

Ireland, according to Crotty, with a relatively mild oceanic climate, didn 't have this problem, and stayed closer to early Indo-European traditions (which show some convergence with East African pastoralism, including independent evolution of lactose tolerance). In contrast, most of Northern Europe was protocapitalist well before the Industrial Revolution. This seems plausible.

On the other hand, maybe just as important is the way state formation, and the attendant decline in tribal social structure, and tribal kinship, set in on the borders of the Roman Empire, while Ireland and the remoter Slavic world lagged behind.

He's referring to Peter Turchin's theory that state-formation was strongest on "meta-ethnic frontiers," which I discussed here.

I do get an impression (no more than an impression -- it would be nice to see numbers) that Northern Europe in the last millennium was relatively capital intensive and East Asia relatively labor intensive. In the former, you really needed a well-built house, and shelter for livestock, and supply of firewood, feed, and food, and other capital stock to make it through the winter. There were times in the agricultural calendar when work loads were incredibly intense -- so much so that you needed draft animals to do a lot of the work -- and other times where there wasn 't a lot more to do than sit around the stove in the dark. On the other hand, East Asian agriculture (especially South China) seems to have involved more year round endless toil (double or even triple cropping) but maybe less in the way of capital requirements to survive. Probably both the Northern European obsession with capital accumulation at the expense of sharing with kin, and the extreme East Asian work ethic look pretty demented from an earlier tribal perspective.

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

May 13, 2008

A Theory of the History of Everything

I'm a fan of ultra-ambitious History of Everything books that try to explain the whole world in terms of the author's pet ideas, such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, Michael H. Hart's Understanding Human History, and Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms.

So, I was surprised to stumble upon one such book that I'd never heard of: Raymond D. Crotty's When Histories Collide: The Development and Impact of Individualistic Capitalism. The lesson appears to be: don't die before your book tour. Crotty died in 1994 with the manuscript unfinished, and it took his son until 2001 to get it published. It was barely reviewed anywhere and doesn't appear to have been released in the U.S.

Still, the fragments that are available through Google Books are thought provoking, to say the least. Crotty presents in the early chapters what could be called a lactose tolerance theory of why capitalism arose in Europe.

Is he correct? Beats me, but from what little I've seen of the book, it stands comparison to Jared Diamond's huge bestseller.

Crotty was an Irish farmer in the 1940s and 1950s, who then became an economist. He's best known in the Republic of Ireland for having filed a landmark lawsuit as a private citizen protesting the Irish legislature's assumption that it could vote to join and further give up sovereignty to the EU without referendums. The Irish supreme court agreed with Crotty's case, and ordered that referendums be held on EU treaties.

As a historical theorist, Crotty resembles Victor Davis Hanson, whose experience as a warm-weather farmer in California gave him important insights into the development of warfare among Ancient Greek farmer-soldiers. Crotty's similar troubles making a living as a cool weather farmer in Europe gave him insight into the development of Northwestern Europe's unique historical accomplishments. After all, most people down through history have been farmers, but not many recent books have been written by farmers.

As an economist, Crotty's experience as a farmer made him a fan of Henry George, the late 19th century American economist whom contemporary economists seem to assume has been decisively refuted, but nobody can ever remember just how George was debunked. Crotty tried to bring capital intensive farming to rural Ireland, but he never seemed to make any more money, despite working twice as hard, as his neighbors, who just let some cows graze on the fields while they saved their money to buy more land. To "encourage agriculture," the Irish government taxed everything except land. So, as Henry George would have pointed out, it didn't pay to invest in your land. It just paid to buy more of it. And, as real estate salesmen point out, they ain't making anymore land, so aligning all the incentives to encourage buying land didn't create more of it, it just meant the Irish economy stagnated decade after decade.

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

March 19, 2008

When was the last good battle?

Last year I visited the Gettysburg Battlefield for the first time. The only other famous battlefield I've been to is Waterloo.

This got me to thinking how few classic battles have been fought around the world in recent decades, with two armies engaging bravely and competently at a fairly defined location. Much recent warfare has either been a one-sided fiasco, like the first Gulf War, or something, such as in the Balkans in the 1990s, more similar to gang warfare carried out by bullies who like preying on civilians but make themselves scarce when confronted by disciplined troops.

So, when was the last battle in the Gettysburg / Waterloo mode where both armies fought well and the decision hung in the balance until near the end?

It seems like it has become ever more difficult to get two roughly equal armies to show up on a battlefield with both of them primed to fight.

The Egyptian - Israeli fighting in 1973 of 35 years ago probably qualifies as a battle where both sides could look back with some pride, although the Egyptians didn't really have a plan for winning the war. They just wanted to get across the Suez Canal to prove they could do it. But they did it so well that the Israelis, with the exception of Ariel Sharon, were psychologically traumatized. Sharon improvised furiously and turned the tide.

But what would compare since then? Any suggestions?

Some aspects of the Falklands War might compare, but the Argentinean performance (outside of the Air Force) was mediocre at best.

The War Nerd enthuses over Eritrean-Ethiopian battles in the 1990s. The Chechen defeat of the Russian tanks in 1994 was impressive, but this seems like another example of fiasco on one side.

A commenter once suggested that the Rwandan Tutsi army's adventures in the Congo in the 1990s deserved to go down in legend. They sounded kind of like the great escape pulled off by Greek mercenaries trapped deep inside the Persian Empire, as described in Xenophon's book. But I don't know if they ever ran into a worthy opponent.

John Mueller argues that the human race is becoming less warlike. He may have a point.

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

February 13, 2008

Nobody Knows Nothin'

All these discussions of the important but mysterious topic of what kind of President Barack Obama would turn out to be remind me of how hard it is to forecast anything about the intersection of politics and personalities.

For example, I just stumbled upon this extraordinary example of how the leading men of the age can't see even months into the future. It's a 1910 book review from the New York Times of a biography of Porfirio Diaz, the 80-year-old dictator of Mexico, who had ruled it most of the time since the 1870s, during which period Mexico enjoyed civil stability and technological progress. It features a symposium of 200 leading men of America and Canada praising Diaz to the skies.
PORFIRIO DIAZ OF MEXICO; The Life and Work of the Master -- Builder of a Great Commonwealth Set Forth in an Entertaining New Volume by Jose F. Godoy.

March 19, 1910, Saturday

Section: The New York Times SATURDAY REVIEW OF BOOKS, Page BR1, 1504 words

PORFIRIO DIAZ, President of the Mexican Republic, should be a very happy man, for he not only enjoys the ardent admiration of the civilized world but knows he has fairly earned, it. No public servant ever had more perfect reward, than his, and no public servant ever was more deserving. It would be hard to exaggerate his deserts, so great and wonderful have been the results of his life's work for his country. ... The well-informed person knows that nobody can write about Diaz with praising him in generous phrases.

For example, Elihu Root, Teddy Roosevelt's Secretary of State and winner of the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize, said:
"It has seemed to me that of all the men now living, President Porfirio Diaz was best worth seeing ... I look to Porfirio Diaz, the President of Mexico, as one of the greatest men to be held up for the hero worship of mankind."

The book review continues:
That is the common view of those who have contributed to Mr. Godoy's symposium, and undoubtedly that is the view the world taes of the great Mexican. Mr [Andrew] Carnegie [steelman and philanthropist] thinks Diaz is perhaps the greatest of all those who stand as the heads of nations, 'for,' he remarks, 'he is at once the Moses and Joshua of his people.' ...

He has held the office continuously since [1884], and if nothing unforeseen takes place will be re-elected for a term of six years in the coming July. ... Mr. Godoy believes the republic is now in such a state of prosperity and enlightenment that there need to be no fear of its backsliding. He is confident the days of revolution and civil war will never return.

The punchline is that later that same year, 1910, the Mexican Revolution broke out after Diaz cheated to win re-election and jailed his opponent. The next year, Diaz fled to exile in France. The Revolution raged for most of the decade and killed between one and two million people.

Perhaps a general rule can be extracted from this, however: Presidents-for-Life should try not to live too long.

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

February 7, 2008

Most important Americans

So, who should be the most famous Americans?

The most disinterested and careful attempt to measure the scholarly consensus regarding the most important individuals in history in the arts and sciences is Charles Murray's 2003 book Human Accomplishment. His methodology is described in my review in The American Conservative and in my interview with Murray, but basically he's measuring how much attention is paid each name in the leading scholarly reference works in each field.

There's an obvious high culture / academic orientation to the lists, but what scholars are basically interested in is how much somebody influenced subsequent major figures in his field.

To be eligible, you have to have been born by 1910 or died by 1950. Everybody is ranked relative to the immortal who ranks highest in his field. Murray stays away from ranking political and religious figures.

Murray kindly sent me a copy of his database. (And, no, I won't post it on the web without his permission.) I'll put up the most important Americans in science, math, and technology another day. (Briefly, the most impressive American figures in the lists are Thomas Edison, who ties with James Watt for the top ranking in Technology, and Benjamin Franklin, who is the only American on three lists: he's a major figure in Physics and Technology, and a minor eminence in Western Literature.)

I will start with the softer side and come back later to the sciences. Here are the top American names in each category:

Western Literature (Shakespeare = 100)

Name Birth Index
Poe, Edgar 1809 25
Whitman, Walt 1819 23
Faulkner, William 1897 15
Hemingway, Ernest 1898 15
Melville, Herman 1819 14
Twain, Mark (Clemens) 1835 12
Pound, Ezra 1885 12
Emerson, Ralph 1803 12
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1804 10
Dreiser, Theodore 1871 10
Dos Passos, John 1896 8
Cooper, James 1789 8
O’Neill, Eugene 1888 8
Auden, W.H. 1907 6
Longfellow, Henry 1807 6
Irving, Washington 1783 6
Dickinson, Emily 1830 6
Steinbeck, John 1902 6
Thoreau, Henry 1817 6
Lewis, Sinclair 1885 6
Frost, Robert 1874 6

Americans account for 58 of the 835 writers who made the grade in Western Literature, or 7%.

Poe seems to be that rarity who reads better in translation (especially in French). Auden is classed as an American because he spent the majority of his career in America, while T.S. Eliot is grouped with the Brits.

Western Painting and Sculpture (Michelangelo = 100)

Name Birth Index
Rothko, Mark 1903 11
De Kooning, Willem 1904 10
Copley, John 1738 9
Newman, Barnett 1905 8
Ray, Man 1890 7
Calder, Alexander 1898 7
Smith, David 1906 7
Eakins, Thomas 1844 7
Gorky, Arshile 1904 6
Kline, Franz 1910 6
Cole, Thomas 1801 5
Bingham, George 1811 5
Homer, Winslow 1836 5
Muybridge, Eadweard 1830 5
Hopper, Edward 1882 5

Overall, Americans account for 29 of the 479 Western Artists, or 6%.

This list does not include architecture, so Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright are not eligible, nor decorative arts, so Louis Comfort Tiffany isn't either.

I suspect, in the long run, that Eakins will emerge at the top of American painters.

Western Classical Composers: (Mozart and Beethoven tied at 100)

Ives, Charles 1874 8
Copland, Aaron 1900 7
Gershwin, George 1898 6
Sessions, Roger 1896 4
Carter, Elliott 1908 4
Barber, Samuel 1910 4
Cowell, Henry 1897 4

Americans account for 21 of 522 Western Music composers, or 4%. I would imagine Americans do better in Murray's lists of writers than composers because there's not as much of a classical-pop division among writers, so Edgar Allan Poe could do very well in Murray's system, but Cole Porter can't.

Gershwin would no doubt rank in the top 10 popular composers as well.

Western Philosophers (Aristotle = 100)

James, William 1842 10
Dewey, John 1859 10
Pierce, Charles 1839 8
Quine, Willard 1908 2
Emerson, Ralph 1803 2
Santayana, George 1863 2

Americans account for 6 out of 155 Western philosophers, or 4%.

Americans aren't terribly philosophically inclined, but that's not a bad little bunch.

Overall, of the 115 Americans in these four categories, seven are women, with Emily Dickinson highest ranked. There are two blacks, Richard Wright and Duke Ellington.

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

Demographics of The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans list

In The Atlantic's recent list of 100 most influential Americans, which was voted on mostly by historians who have written for The Atlantic, Ross Douthat does the math:

Still, certain patterns are evident. The list tells us, for instance, that though we may be a nation of immigrants, it’s the native-born who are likely to shake things up the most: just seven of the final 100 were born outside the continental United States. It tells us that the East Coast states have made the most of their head start: sixty-three of the 100 were born in the original thirteen colonies, and twenty-six in New England alone. It tells would-be influentials not to be afraid of family commitments: ninety-one of the 100 were married at least once, and two—Joseph Smith and Brigham Young—had more than fifty wives between them. The list also suggests that contemporaries are sometimes good judges of whose influence will last: nine of Time magazine’s “People of the Year” show up on the historians’ list.

A political career (or a legal one) is the surest ticket to a historical legacy (twenty-six of the 100 held a judgeship or high political office). Aspiring influentials might also consider trying to invent something (like the lightbulb, or the airplane, or the atomic bomb), or discover something (the polio vaccine, the double helix)—though Gordon S. Wood remarked, after the list was finished, “We put too much emphasis on inventors. Someone sooner or later would have come up with the cotton gin … the lure of profits was too great. The same was true with the airplane and the telephone.”

Founding a religion landed Joseph Smith and Brigham Young on the list, as well as Christian Science’s Mary Baker Eddy (86). Fomenting a revolution also leaves an impression, whether you succeed, as the Founders did, or fail, but with long-lasting repercussions, as Nat Turner and John Brown (78) did. And we at The Atlantic were pleased to see that twenty-one of the figures in the Top 100 are especially famous for their writing, from Walt Whitman (22) to Margaret Mead (81)—and that more than thirty (!) of the figures on the list have been published in this magazine.

The final 100 also suggests that men still rule, at least in many historians’ eyes—oh, and make that white men. Ten women are on the list (the highest-ranked is the feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at No. 30), and eight African Americans, but the Top 100 is heavily WASPish. Martin Luther King Jr. (8) was among the top vote getters, but there isn’t another African American on the list until Jackie Robinson (35). And there are no Hispanics, Asian Americans, or Native Americans.

“It’s fun and challenging,” Ellen Fitzpatrick said of the exercise, but she called the rank order “an exercise in absurdity.” Noting that Walt Disney (26) finished ahead of Stanton in the balloting, she wondered: “Does a cartoonist deserve a place above someone who most powerfully advanced the case that half the people deserved equality before the law?” [Yes.] Or again, “Are we to conclude that not a single Native American Indian influenced our past?”

By the way, James D. Watson was #68 on the list, which didn't keep him from getting Watsoned for heresy.

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

Harriet Tubmania!

Vanishing American pointed me toward this USA Today story:
Here's a quiz: Get a pencil and paper and jot down the 10 most famous Americans in history. No presidents or first ladies allowed.

Who tops your list?

Ask teenagers, and they overwhelmingly choose African-Americans and women, a study shows. It suggests that the "cultural curriculum" that most kids — and by extension, their parents — experience in school increasingly emphasizes the stories of Americans who are not necessarily dead, white or male.

Researchers gave blank paper and pencils to a diverse group of 2,000 high school juniors and seniors in all 50 states and told them: "Starting from Columbus to the present day, jot down the names of the most famous Americans in history."

Topping the list: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. Three of the top five — and six of the top 10 — are women.

Sam Wineburg, the Stanford University education and history professor who led the study along with Chauncey Monte-Sano of the University of Maryland, says the prominence of black Americans signals "a profound change" in how we see history.

"Over the course of about 44 years, we've had a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story," Wineburg says.

"There's a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights," he says.

Yes, but how does he explain No. 7: Oprah Winfrey?

She has "a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin," Wineburg says. "These are people who have a kind of popularity and recognition because they're distinguished in so many venues."

Indeed. After all, both Ben Franklin and Oprah Winfrey were the world's leading physicists for a decade or so in the middle of their careers. And while Oprah hasn't yet carried out the most important diplomatic mission in America's history, maybe President Obama will appoint her Secretary of State.

Here's the list chosen by 2000 juniors and seniors, no Presidents allowed:

1. Martin Luther King Jr.: 67%

2. Rosa Parks: 60%

3. Harriet Tubman: 44%

4. Susan B. Anthony: 34%

5.Benjamin Franklin: 29%

6. Amelia Earhart: 25%

7. Oprah Winfrey: 22%

8. Marilyn Monroe: 19%

9. Thomas Edison: 18%

10. Albert Einstein: 16%

All I have to say is that Sojourner Truth must be feeling pretty ripped off not to make the list.

Seriously, the absence of Jackie Robinson on this list shows how feminized schools have gotten, which explains a lot about the much higher dropout rate among boys.

This list also might explain a bit about why Hispanics and Asians aren't getting excited over Obama's candidacy. They must be asking, "Black this and black that. Why aren't we getting our fair share of our own pseudo-heroes pounded into the brains of children?"

About 20 years ago, E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy survey revealed that more high school students could identify Harriet Tubman than Stalin or Churchill. I recall William F. Buckley wondering who in the world Harriet Tubman could be. If she was more important than Stalin, how could he have gone his whole life without ever hearing of her? And if she wasn't important, why was she famous?

How naive we all were back then!

I first heard about Harriet Tubman in my elementary school reader around 1969 or 1970. I was fascinated by the concept of her Underground Railroad and couldn't wait for the part where the slaves tunnel their way from the South to Canada, although, as I recall, the story turned out to be disappointingly lacking in detail about how they built the locomotives and laid the track.

In contrast, here's The Atlantic Monthly's recent list of "100 Most Influential Americans," as chosen by various experts in a survey overseen, I believe, by Ross Douthat. The top Americans who weren't Presidents on The Atlantic's list were:

5 Alexander Hamilton
6 Benjamin Franklin
7 John Marshall
8 Martin Luther King Jr.
9 Thomas Edison
11 John D. Rockefeller
14 Henry Ford
16 Mark Twain
19 Thomas Paine
20 Andrew Carnegie

So, three overlaps (Ben, MLK, and Thomas Alva) in the top 10 but only 2 more (Einstein and Susan B. Dollar) of the students' list showed up anywhere on The Atlantic's top 100.

On The Atlantic's list, there were 8 blacks and 10 women, but no black women, in contrast to the 3 in the high school students' top 10. White males fill 82 of the top 100 slots, and 28 of the top 29.

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

January 4, 2008

Marginal Decisionmaking

Are you ever in a situation, such as when shopping, where it's about time to finally make a decision, like between buying the GyroXdisk 6800 or the MutantBlaster 970, and so you announce, "I choose the ...," but then you are immediately surprised at what came out of your mouth? As the salesman is ringing up your new MutantBlaster 970, you're thinking, "How the heck did that happen? I was sure I was going to say 'GyroXdisk 6800.'"

But pretty soon the relief of having made a decision, any decision, even if you can't tell why you made it, overcomes your dismay, and soon you're home blasting mutants without a care in the world. It's not like you sputtered, "I'll buy that big bag of mulch over in the Gardening Dept. instead of one of these electronic gizmos. And I live in an apartment so mulch makes no sense at all." No, you knew you wanted some kind of gizmo and so you were standing in the gizmo aisle talking to the gizmo salesman, so which precise gizmo you wound up with is moderately random. But it's not at all random that you bought a gizmo instead of a bag of mulch.

This happens to me all the time. I'm probably just the world's worst decision maker and this never happens to you, but maybe it gives a hint of something important in understanding history.

I started thinking about this again because Freeman Dyson, who is one of the last surviving physicists to have done war work during WWII (although John Archibald Wheeler, who worked on the Manhattan Project at Hanford is now 97), says that he's changed his mind and now no longer believes that the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan didn't end the war:

1. Members of the Supreme Council, which customarily met with the Emperor to take important decisions, learned of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. Although Foreign Minister Togo asked for a meeting, no meeting was held for three days.

2. A surviving diary records a conversation of Navy Minister Yonai, who was a member of the Supreme Council, with his deputy on August 8. The Hiroshima bombing is mentioned only incidentally. More attention is given to the fact that the rice ration in Tokyo is to be reduced by ten percent.

3. On the morning of August 9, Soviet troops invaded Manchuria. Six hours after hearing this news, the Supreme Council was in session. News of the Nagasaki bombing, which happened the same morning, only reached the Council after the session started.

4. The August 9 session of the Supreme Council resulted in the decision to surrender.

I don't see this timeline as undermining my long-held assumption that the 1-2-3 punch of Hiroshima, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, and Nagasaki -- three cataclysms in four days -- was what finally broke the ferocious will of the Japanese militarists after endless arguing.

I don't know much about the Japanese decision-making process, but I can imagine what it would be like if I had been emperor on August 9, 1945. The Supreme War Council would turn to me and say they were hopelessly divided, "Your Divine Imperialness, we need you to break the deadlock. Shall we fight until we are all dead ... or surrender?"

They'd all look at me. I'd go, "Uh, uh, uh ... surrender!" And I'd immediately think, "Oh, crap, why did I say that? I meant 'Fight on!' Where'd that 'Surrender' come from? I'd better tell them I didn't mean it. ... But, that wouldn't look very divinely imperial -- now would it? -- to admit I just blurted out the most important decision in Japanese history at random. Maybe it's best just to keep my mouth shut and see what happens? In fact, yes, 'Surrender' is what I intended all along. It's becoming very clear to me now. Indeed, there was never really any doubt."

I'm sure it didn't actually happen that way (just that it would have happened that way if I was the Emperor of Japan).

Why did the Japanese surrender when they did? What weight did the two atomic bombs have in their decision? (Sure, surrender made all the sense in the world, but nothing the Japanese militarists had done since 1941 made much strategic sense.)

Who knows?

In contrast, nobody debates why Zanzibar surrendered 38 minutes into its 1896 war with the British Empire. Of course, they surrendered -- they were Zanzibar. What, they were going to do: beat the Royal Navy? It's just not very interesting because it's an obvious decision: Zanzibar was getting its butt kicked. Randomness didn't play much of a role.

My point is that the most interesting decisions in history, the ones that historians argue over endlessly about why they were made, are the virtually 50-50 tossups that could have gone either way. Those are the most interesting questions, but they are also the least likely to be fully explicated by historians.

The other decisions that are most argued over by historians are the ones that are the most over-determined.

That makes the Japanese decision of 1945 perhaps the ultimate in endless arguability. The Japanese leadership had many good reasons to surrender, each one perfectly adequate, and no reason to fight on other than to save their own necks from war crimes trials, but all the assassinations by the Army of non-insane statesmen before the war had bequeathed an atmosphere of militarist hysteria, so it was also a very close run thing -- overdetermined but also a toss-up.

This is relevant to the distinction between history and social science. I define social science (perhaps idiosyncratically) as fields where statistics are crucial.

Much of history is driven by unique personnel decisions that often didn't necessarily get a lot of reflection at the time -- e.g., the Bush dynasty is due to Ronald Reagan rejecting at the last moment at the 1980 GOP convention the popular idea of Gerald Ford for VP and picking George H.W. Bush. If something else had happened, George W. Bush never would have become President.

Now, Reagan probably put more thought into choosing a VP in 1980 than the average Iowa Caucus voter put into his or her choice, but the results are less random because thousands of semi-random individuals decisions were aggregated. So, the rise of the Bush Dynasty is the reserve of history, while elections are both history and political science.

Much the same is true about forecasting. The forecasts that interest us most are those where the chance of being wrong is highest. If you predict that NAM high school dropout rates will be higher than white and Asian drop outrates 30 years from now, nobody cares, even though it's clearly an important and highly plausible prediction, because it's boring and depressing. But tell me who is going to win the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament and I'm all ears, even though your chance of being wrong is probably at least 90%.

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

December 29, 2007

My review of "Lawrence of Arabia"

Because no good movies get released in late August, I took the opportunity to review a classic DVD:

When your television dies, a trip to the home entertainment showroom, with its massed ranks of the latest monitors all displaying the same glorious nature documentary for convenient comparison shopping, will quickly convince you that your initial plan of buying a modestly larger replacement tube for $299 was a naïve delusion. How could you ever be satisfied with a pathetic 32" CRT, when the gazelles gamboling on the Serengeti are so luminous on a plasma set, so detailed on an HDTV, and so humongous on a 56" screen?

But when you bring your technological breakthrough home, you notice that you seldom actually watch nature documentaries. You mostly just watch people talking, and the thousands of dollars you spent isn't making David Letterman's interview of Richard Simmons any less depressing.

To postpone disillusionment, TV buyers should also pick up a grand movie on DVD. And what better than the two-disk version of "Lawrence of Arabia?" Unlike just about every other film you might buy rather than rent, you could watch "Lawrence" a second time.

Approaching its 45th anniversary, "Lawrence's" place in the pantheon is secure. Director David Lean, cinematographer Freddie Young, and composer Maurice Jarre complement a tremendous cast, especially Alec Guinness as astute Prince Feisal, the future king of Iraq, and Anthony Quinn as choleric Auda, the prototypical Big Man.

Often extolled as the film that must be seen in the theatre, "Lawrence" is actually better from your couch, because you can then pause it to look up whether Medina is north of Mecca or vice versa. (Inexplicably, there are no maps in the 217-minute war movie).

Moreover, but don't mention this to your cinephile friends, you can fast-forward through the second dozen times Peter O'Toole, as WWI archaeologist-warrior T.E. Lawrence, gallops his camel through the stark desert scenery he found so much more "clean" than damp and overgrown England. (Perhaps the British were better at empire than Americans have proven so far because it gave some of their best men the chance for fun in the sun that our West furnishes domestically?)

Movie critics today are obsessed with sniffing out the political implications of the latest releases, such as the suspicion that the sex comedy "Knocked Up" was insufficiently pro-abortion or that the Xbox mannerist Spartans of "300" were ancient Republicans.

Few attempt, however, to draw lessons from the handful of classic films that would reward serious analysis. Among its numerous virtues, "Lawrence" provides insight into America's quandary in Iraq by offering a vivid primer on what William S. Lind calls "asymmetrical" war.

In "Lawrence," regular warfare, with its drilling and decisive battles, is exemplified by the stolid Turkish infantry, while irregular warfare, with its interminable raids and retreats, is embodied in the mercurial Arab camel cavalry.

In the famous screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, the British high command wants Lawrence to trick the Bedouin Arabs into enlisting as cannon fodder in the grinding British attack on the Ottomans at Gaza. Lawrence insubordinately devises a more culturally appropriate strategy for the nomads: "'The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped' and on this ocean the Bedu go where they please and strike where they please." They will harass the Turkish railway to Medina with hit-and-run attacks, avoiding the pitched battles, for which the tribesmen, no fools, wouldn't even show up.

In 1917, in the first two-thirds of the movie, Lawrence's insight works wonderfully. In the 1918 conclusion, however, though the British and Arabs win, the failures of irregularity become clearer. The victorious but still fractious clans can't competently manage the hospitals and waterworks of Damascus. Even before then, there are hints that irregular desert warfare is doomed by the new age of mechanized mobility. When the Turks can get their hands on enough German armored cars and airplanes, they negate the traditional Bedouin advantage in mobility and elusiveness.

Subsequently, it turned out that cultures that were good at regular warfare, like the Israelis and Americans, were also better at building and maintaining the tanks and planes that gave regular militaries the mobility of irregular warriors.

But history never ends; losers adapt. As Lawrence tells Omar Sharif's Sherif Ali, "Nothing is written." Now, after two easy victories in open country over Iraq's derisible regular army, America has bogged down in Iraq's urban jungles fighting countless irregular units that disappear into the alleys as Lawrence's mounted warriors vanished into the dunes.

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

Why America fell apart on 11/22/1963

One of the enduring mysteries of American history is why the The Sixties! didn't begin until the decade was almost 40% over. The general flavor of 1960-1963 was similar to 1954-1959, but then everything quickly changed. Many people who lived through that time have observed that the turning point was John F. Kennedy's assassination, but few have offered a cogent explanation of the precise mechanism.

In the new January 14, 2008 issue of The American Conservative, John O'Sullivan, who wrote about the failed 1981-1984 assassinations attempts on Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher in his 2006 book The President, The Pope, and the Prime Minister, reviews James Pierseon's new book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. The review isn't online, but I'll quote from it:

"Piereson's first original (and brilliant) insight is his recognition that what transformed American politics was not the assassination itself but how it was interpreted.

"Kennedy was slain by a devout communist, one-time defector to the Soviet Union, and admirer or Fidel Castro who had kept in touch with Soviet diplomats after returning home from the USSR and was trying to re-defect to Cuba. A common-sense interpretation of the crime would have portrayed Kennedy as an anti-communist martyr of the conservative cause in the Cold War. Such a view would have made the Cold War -- rather than civil rights -- the central issue in U.S. politics... But such an account would have also been contrary to the emerging "spirit of the age," which dictated to commentators a very different analysis.

"Before anyone knew the identity of Kennedy's assassin, his death was at once and widely attributed in media speculations to 'extremists' and 'bigots' on the Right. ... But that conviction hardly changed once it became known that the assassin was a communist. To be sure, the newspapers dug into Oswald's career as a defector very thoroughly. But the editorials and opinion columns, their television equivalents, and the comments of the liberal and cultural leaders repeatedly and passionately blamed the assassination on something called 'extremism,' which was disconnected from America in general and to the radical Right in particular. ... It soon became conventional wisdom that all Americans bore a share of the blame for the bigotry, intolerance, and hate that had struck down the president. John F. Kennedy in death became a martyr for the cause of civil rights -- a cause to which in life he had shown a prudent political coolness. ...

"Piereson's second great contribution is to establish that Mrs. Kennedy herself, in the very depths of her grief, was signally responsible for inventing and spreading this misinterpretation and lifting it to the level of myth.

... These questions were answered when Mrs. Kennedy learned that the lone Oswald had killed her husband. She tehn complained, "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist. It even robs his death of any meaning."

"Even before the misinterpretation had become current, she had intuitively grasped both its main features and the unfortunate fact that reality did not quite measure up to them. In her arrangements for the funeral and her selection of those speaking at the various memorial services, she ensured that the misinterpretation would be the dominant theme. Finally, by dictating to Theodore White the story that Kennedy had often ended his day listening to songs from his favorite musical, "Camelot," and by insisting that it must remain in White's article over the skepticism of his editors at Life magazine, she lifted the misinterpretation to the level of myth...

"Extended to the present, these trends have produced a cultural atmosphere in which the 20th-century political figures most admired by readers of Vogue and Vanity Fair would probably be Che Guevara and Martin Luther King. Observers attentive to purely political signs -- votes, laws, opinion polls -- were inevitably late to notice this cultural shift. But a woman of fashion, who was also politically knowledgeable, was able to sense it from the surrounding atmosphere. ...

"To their surprise, however, as the radicals [in the late 1960s] rushed forward with their battering rams, the liberals opened the gates and surrendered. How could they resist? If America had killed Kennedy, the liberalism was merely a smiley face painted on a System of racist and sexist oppression. ... For a decade or so after November 1963, liberalism and its institutions were convulsed by disputes, entering the maelstrom as pragmatic, patriotic, and problem-solving bodies, and emerging from it as perfectionist, utopian, anti-American ones, secretly anxious to punish the American majority for its sins rather than solve its problems."

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

November 15, 2007

George Koval and Joe McCarthy

Just this weekend, we poor dumb Americans finally learned for the first time about one of the most important Soviet atomic bomb spies: George Koval, a GRU-trained agent who penetrated the Oak Ridge and Dayton atomic bomb manufacturing plants, then fled back to the Soviet Union in, apparently, 1948.

The U.S. government interviewed people who knew him, but then swore them to secrecy. In other words, there was a U.S. government cover-up of this horrific breach of security that lasted for over half a century until this month, according to the NYT:

"On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir V. Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb."

And, it seems highly likely that Koval's handler or handlers within our government are still being covered up for. So, is it time to rewrite the history of the McCarthy Era as well?

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

November 13, 2007

What Jacques Barzun has learned over the last 100 years

Cultural historian Jacques Barzun will turn 100 on November 30, 2007 at his home in San Antonio, Texas. His parents ran a salon in pre-War (that's pre-Great War) Paris where, according to Arthur Krystal's New Yorker essay
many of Europe’s leading avant-garde artists and writers gathered: Varèse played the piano, Ozenfant and Delaunay debated, Cocteau told lies, and Apollinaire declaimed. Brancusi often stopped by, as did Léger, Kandinsky, Jules Romains, Duchamp, and Pound.

Artistically, Barzun feels, it's been pretty much all downhill since the Archduke was assassinated, back when precocious little Jacques was six, and who am I to say he is wrong?

In his 2000 bestseller From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, published when he was 92, Barzun suddenly stopped on p. 654-656 to briefly discuss what he's learned from a lifetime of learning:
"... history cannot be a science; it is the very opposite, in that its interest resides in the particulars."
Still, he goes on to list a dozen "generalities" to show "how scanning the last five centuries in the West impresses on the mind certain types of order." Here are five of them (I'll leave it to you to fill in examples):

- An age (a shorter span within an era) is unified by one or to pressing needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide.

- A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy; that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom.

- "An Age of --" (fill in: Reason, Faith, Science, Absolutism, Democracy, Anxiety, Communication) is always a misnomer because insufficient, except perhaps "An Age of Troubles," which fits every age in varying degrees.

- The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occasionally an estimate of their relevant strength.

- The potent writings that helped to reshape minds and institutions in the West have done so through a formula or two, not always consistent with the text. Partisans and scholars start to read the book with care after it has done its work.

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

How the writers' strike of 1919 led to Hollywood's liberal monoculture

Intellectual property rights are a snooze-inducing topic for everybody except, apparently, rabid libertarians who hate to pay for their entertainment, but they can have far-reaching consequences. Here's an excerpt from my 2005 American Conservative article on "Hollywood's Skin-Deep Leftism:"

Keep in mind that Hollywood's relationship with the outside world is tenuous. It's a self-absorbed community and its politics are skin-deep, serving functions within the industry that aren't always obvious to outsiders. Today's liberal monoculture is in large part an outgrowth of the compromise resolution to the ancient struggle between studio executives and screenwriters that culminated in the endlessly discussed but little understood blacklist of Marxists in the 1950s.

One of the blacklist's main roots has disappeared down the memory hole because it doesn't the burnish the heroic image created to flatter the Communist victims.

A 1919 theatre strike won the playwrights of the Dramatists Guild the right to retain copyright in their works. To this day, dramatists own their plays and merely license them to producers. Further, they have the right to approve or reject the cast, director, and any proposed changes in the dialogue. Contractually, a playwright is a rugged individualist, an Ayn Rand hero.

With the introduction of the talkies in 1927, Hollywood began importing trainloads of New York dramatists. Salaries were generous and the climate superb, but the dramatists found the collaborative nature of moviemaking frustrating, even demeaning. Screenwriters were employees in a vast factory, which owned their creations. The studios could, and generally would, have other hired hacks radically rewrite each script, all under the intrusive supervision of some mogul's half-literate brother-in-law.

In the 1930s, Hollywood's Communist Party, under the command of its charismatic commissar, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, improbably but enthusiastically championed the intellectual property rights of script-writers. The ink-stained wretches found the Marxist concept of "alienation" described their plight. They felt just like the once psychologically fulfilled hand-craftsmen forced into becoming dispossessed factory drones who cannot recognize their creativity in their employer's output.

Insanely ironic as it seems now, many screenwriters became Communists because they despised the movie business' need for cooperation. How turning command of the entire economy over to a dictatorship would restore the unfettered joys of individual craftsmanship was a little fuzzy, but, hey, if you couldn't trust Stalin, whom could you trust?

The possibility of studios blacklisting writers first surfaced in the 1930s when the moguls' cartel turned aside the leftist screenwriters' push to align themselves with the Dramatists Guild by threatening to fire union supporters. "It wouldn't be a blacklist because it would all be done over the telephone," Jack Warner explained.

Decades later, after the formal Blacklist era, this labor-management conflict was eventually resolved by a tacit compromise. The blacklisted writers were elevated in the collective memory to the role of martyrs. Their leftism (but not their Stalinism, which was conveniently forgotten) was enshrined as the appropriate ideology of all respectable movie folk.

In return, the producers damn well hung on to their property rights in screenplays.

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

November 12, 2007

It's time to rewrite the history books

From the New York Times:

A Spy’s Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor

He had all-American cover: born in Iowa, college in Manhattan, Army buddies with whom he played baseball.

George Koval also had a secret. During World War II, he was a top Soviet spy, code named Delmar and trained by Stalin’s ruthless bureau of military intelligence.

Atomic spies are old stuff. But historians say Dr. Koval, who died in his 90s last year in Moscow and whose name is just coming to light publicly, was probably one of the most important spies of the 20th century.

On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir V. Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.

The announcement hailed Dr. Koval as “the only Soviet intelligence officer” to infiltrate the project’s secret plants, saying his work “helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”

Since then, historians, scientists, federal officials and old friends have raced to tell Dr. Koval’s story — the athlete, the guy everyone liked, the genius at technical studies. American intelligence agencies have known of his betrayal at least since the early 1950s, when investigators interviewed his fellow scientists and swore them to secrecy.

The spy’s success hinged on an unusual family history of migration from Russia to Iowa and back. That gave him a strong commitment to Communism, a relaxed familiarity with American mores and no foreign accent. ...

Over the years, scholars and federal agents have identified a half-dozen individuals who spied on the bomb project for the Soviets, especially at Los Alamos in New Mexico. All were “walk ins,” spies by impulse and sympathetic leaning rather than rigorous training.

By contrast, Dr. Koval was a mole groomed in the Soviet Union by the feared G.R.U., the military intelligence agency. Moreover, he gained wide access to America’s atomic plants, a feat unknown for any other Soviet spy. Nuclear experts say the secrets of bomb manufacturing can be more important than those of design.

Los Alamos devised the bomb, while its parts and fuel were made at secret plants in such places as Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Dayton, Ohio — sites Dr. Koval not only penetrated, but also assessed as an Army sergeant with wide responsibilities and authority.

“He had access to everything,” said Dr. Kramish, who worked with Dr. Koval at Oak Ridge and now lives in Reston, Va. “He had his own Jeep. Very few of us had our own Jeeps. He was clever. He was a trained G.R.U. spy.” That status, he added, made Dr. Koval unique in the history of atomic espionage, a judgment historians echo.

Washington has known about Dr. Koval’s spying since he fled the United States shortly after the war but kept it secret.

“It would have been highly embarrassing for the U.S. government to have had this divulged,” said Robert S. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb,” a biography of the project’s military leader. ...

George Koval was born in 1913 to Abraham and Ethel Koval in Sioux City, Iowa, which had a large Jewish community and a half-dozen synagogues. In 1932, during the Great Depression, his family emigrated to Birobidzhan, a Siberian city that Stalin promoted as a secular Jewish homeland.

Henry Srebrnik, a Canadian historian at the University of Prince Edward Island who is studying the Kovals for a project on American Jewish Communists, said the family belonged to a popular front organization, as did most American Jews who emigrated to Birobidzhan.

The organization, he said, was ICOR, a Yiddish acronym for the Association for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union. He added that Dr. Koval’s father served its Sioux City branch as secretary.

By 1934, Dr. Koval was in Moscow, excelling in difficult studies at the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology. Upon graduating with honors, he was recruited and trained by the G.R.U. and was sent back to the United States for nearly a decade of scientific espionage, from roughly 1940 to 1948.

How he communicated with his controllers is unknown, as is what specifically he gave the Soviets in terms of atomic secrets. However, it is clear that Moscow mastered the atom very quickly compared with all subsequent nuclear powers.

In the United States under a false name, Dr. Koval initially gathered information about new toxins that might find use in chemical arms. Then his G.R.U. controllers took a gamble and had him work under his own name. Dr. Koval was drafted into the Army, and by chance found himself moving toward the bomb project, then in its infancy.

The Army judged him smart and by 1943 sent him for special wartime training at City College in Manhattan. Considered a Harvard for the poor, it was famous for brilliant students, Communists and, after the war, Julius Rosenberg, who was executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for the Soviets. ...

Something else about him stood out, Dr. Kramish said — he was a decade older than his peers, making everybody wonder “why he was in this program.”

Meanwhile, the Manhattan Project was suffering severe manpower shortages and asked the Army for technically adept recruits. In 1944, Dr. Koval and Dr. Kramish headed to Oak Ridge, where the main job was to make bomb fuel, considered the hardest part of the atomic endeavor.

Dr. Koval gained wide access to the sprawling complex, Dr. Kramish said, because “he was assigned to health safety” and drove from building to building making sure no stray radiation harmed workers.

In June 1945, Dr. Koval’s duties expanded to include top-secret plants near Dayton, said John C. Shewairy, an Oak Ridge spokesman. The factories refined polonium 210, a highly radioactive material used in initiators to help start the bomb’s chain reaction.

In July 1945, the United States tested its first atomic device, and a month later it dropped two bombs on Japan.

After the war, Dr. Koval fled the United States when American counterintelligence agents found Soviet literature hailing the Koval family as happy immigrants from the United States, said a Nov. 3 article in Rossiiskaia Gazeta, a Russian publication.

In 1949, Moscow detonated its first bomb, surprising Washington at the quick loss of what had been an atomic monopoly.

But in a comment on the article, NYT reader James Haygood writes:

This is a fascinating article, to be sure. But it strikes me as what Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman would have called a "modified limited hangout."

We are asked to believe that George Koval, one of over ten million World War II draftees, "by chance found himself moving toward the bomb project." Then, despite being "a decade older than his peers, making everybody wonder why he was in the program,” Koval somehow received top secret security clearance. How could the background check have failed to reveal the eight-year gap in his resume while he was studying in the Soviet Union, and the fact that his parents were living in Siberia?

Koval's access to multiple bomb plants as a safety inspector was an obvious breach of compartmentalization, in which links between secret plants should have been restricted to top brass. A final preposterous fillip is that a G.R.U.-groomed, top-level Soviet spy would have been outed by "Soviet literature hailing the Koval family as happy immigrants from the United States" ... and that U.S. authorities who failed to detect this during the issuance of his security clearance suddenly woke up and exclaimed, "Oh, right, that's George's folks!"

This fanciful chain of one-in-a-million coincidences points to one logical explanation: namely, one or more Soviet operatives placed in the Army command to steer Koval into the atomic bomb project, despite his obvious security disqualifications. Let us hope that William J. Broad goes on to reveal the full picture behind this entertaining but hardly credible official cover story, which had to be concocted in a hurry after the Russians went public.

Broad's deadpan delivery of this highly-decorated confabulation seems to conceal a big Cosmic Wink.

— James Haygood, Nanuet, NY

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

October 31, 2007

Larry Auster on Michael Hart's "Understanding Human History"

Larry Auster has a long review of a book I reviewed over the summer, Michael A. Hart's Understanding Human History. Here's an interesting section:

The reason for Hart's low opinion of India become evident from his similarly (and unfashionably) low opinion of ancient Egypt. Egypt, he tells us, was not nearly as important a civilization as everyone thinks. This is because Egypt was relatively poor in the sorts of inventions and innovations that are influential and useful for other civilizations. In other words, Hart's criterion of the worth of a civilization is its material contributions to general human progress. Which means that the internal structure and inner life of a society, what it is subjectively for its own members, is of no interest to him. Because the Egyptians did not add a great deal to civilizational advance, ... they are of no importance to him, even though, as many other observers and students of Egypt have seen it, the Egyptian society achieved a kind of perfection. The Egyptians experienced their earthly life as so beautiful, pleasant, harmonious, and stable (as one can glean from their paintings), that their idea of the afterlife was to continue in that experience forever. Once we understand this, the Egyptian cult of the afterworld, with its mummies and monumental tombs and pyramids, starts to make sense in terms of the Egyptians' own experience of life and of eternity. Seen from this perspective, the pyramids are not just very large and very impressive structures, they are representations of the cosmos. Of course this Egyptian culture with its focus on eternity was not as innovative as, say, fifth century Athens; indeed, it led to a static conception of society with little room for human freedom and creativity. But at the same time it represents an awe-inspiring human achievement, which explains Egypt's continuing hold over men's imagination.

In other words, Hart misses the Egyptians' experience of order. Every society and civilization is an attempt to create order, an orientation of men's lives toward nature, society, and the divine, which will be different in each society. But to grasp a civilization's order, we must attempt to see the civilization whole, and this is impossible if we reduce its meaning to a comparative list of its material and even its intellectual achievements. What was most remarkable about the Egyptians--and what still draws us to them today, even if we can't explain the nature of the pull--was not this or that achievement, but the underlying vision of order that each of those achievements expressed. A materialist will have little interest in all this. It doesn't come within his ken. He wants solid, useful accomplishment and that's that.

With the obvious caveat that this assessment of Egyptian civilization applies more to the Egyptian on top of the social pyramid than to the poor bastard down at the bottom, this is a good point. But I also admire Hart's reductionism. With history, you can profitably move in both directions.

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

October 14, 2007

Conclusion of my review of "Farewell to Alms" by Gregory Clark

Last week, VDARE.com ran the first portion of my review of Gregory Clark's "Brief Economic History of the World," in which I considered Clark's initial topic: why did the Industrial Revolution start in England. Today, I consider the second, and more important subject of his book: why has the Industrial Revolution spread to some countries but not to others?

A Farewell To Alms Part II: Why Have Some Countries Profited From The Industrial Revolution?

By Steve Sailer

[See also last week's A Farewell To Alms: Why Did The Industrial Revolution Happen Where It Did?]

In A Farewell to Alms, economic historian Gregory Clark asks: Why has the Industrial Revolution of the last two centuries caused a Great Divergence, making some nations so rich, while others have stayed so poor.

This is a social scientist's question, not a historian's, because there are enough separate countries in the world that general patterns can be perceived that can be reasonably well explained by a limited number of factors.

There are a lot of data to work with, folks.

A quick survey of the globe shows, for example, that countries tend to be poorer when they are ruled by crazed ideologies (e.g., North Korea vs. South Korea) or are far inland (e.g., Paraguay vs. Uruguay).

But another factor is so obvious that we aren't supposed to mention it.

If you rank the 156 countries with populations of one million or more in order of per capita GDP, the top 23 are made up of one Arab oil country (the United Arab Emirates), four Northeast Asian countries—and 18 countries with populations primarily of European origin.

Number 24 is Israel, where Europeans make up a little less than half the population, but dominate the economy. Not until 33rd place do we find a non-oil country without a predominant European or Northeast Asian population: Trinidad and Tobago, which is 40 percent South Asian and 38 percent black.

The poorest European country is Serbia, which is still ahead of 66 others.

As of 2006, the 43 countries with majority European populations average $22,000 each, the eight Northeast Asian countries $21,000, and the 105 other countries $5,225.

Economists, however, have intellectually disarmed themselves from tackling this second question. Clark complains:

"Although the disparities in performance across countries remained unchanged, the ‘labor quality’ explanation disappeared from the economics literature after WWII. … Unskilled labor is assumed to be of the same quality everywhere."

[MORE]

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

October 12, 2007

Why Thatcher won

The old British Labour Party suffered a fundamental conflict of interest as a governing party:

- As the Government, it was supposed to run the nationalized industries in the interest of the nation;

- But as the Parliamentary representative of the labour unions, including the huge unions at the bloated and money-losing nationalized industries, it was supposed to help unions extort as much in wages and goldbricking as possible from management (i.e., the Labour Government) and shareholders (i.e., theoretically, the British people).

The result was economic chaos: inflation, strikes, blackouts, garbage heaped up in the streets, bodies left unburied, etc.

By privatizing many nationalized industries and by taming union power in the battle with Stalinist union boss Arthur Scargill's coal miners in the mid 1980s, Thatcher made possible Tony Blair's New Labour Party that, freed from this fatal contradiction, has done so well for itself with the voters.

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