February 12, 2014

Post: No diversity at Winter Olympics

From the Washington Post:
Whiter than ‘Downton’ 
Mike Wise 
COLUMN | No matter where he finishes, U.S. speedskater Shani Davis remains an unfortunate exception at the Games.
SOCHI, Russia — COLUMN | Don’t listen to your friends back home saying the Winter Olympics are just for white people who like the cold and vacation in Aspen. This is the most inclusive Winter Games ever. Why, there are Caucasians here from almost 88 different nations. 

East Asians are Caucasians, diversitywise.
Bada-bing! I’ll be here all week. 
Actually, I will be here the next 10 days. And in that time, I will encounter no more than a dozen people of African American descent. They are the same ones I see over and over. 
Speedskater Shani Davis, Lolo Jones and the U.S. women’s bobsled team, NBC correspondent Lewis Johnson and about three other black journalists ... 
Maybe it’s because I lived in the District for eight years. Maybe it’s because I spent my formative years in a real melting pot: rural Oahu, Hawaii, where diversity in ethnicity and culture are part of island life. Maybe I’m just used to seeing and feeling comfortable being around a variety of people, many of whom don’t look like me. 
Whatever, this place is whiter than an episode of “Downton Abbey.” ...
Sochi is one of the most multinational cities in Russia. There are ethnic Russians, about 70 percent of the population, Armenians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Greeks, Circassians, Belorussians, Tatars and Jews — which create roughly a, oh, 100 percent Caucasian stew. 
Now, you are reading this and thinking one of two things: What’s with the white guilt, son? Or, What does race have to do with the greatest athletes in the world competing in their chosen disciplines, most of which just happen to be contested against other Caucasians? 
Look, I don’t care about the color of the competitors. And I don’t think the paucity of black or Hispanic athletes should cheapen any gold medal, as if somehow this were a cold-war Olympics that didn’t include some of the greatest sporting nations. 
The fact is, despite Vonetta Flowers becoming the first black person to become a Winter Olympic gold medalist as a bobsledder in 2002, despite Davis becoming the first male African American to win individual gold in 2006, there hasn’t been a whole lot of carryover. 
Like golf waiting forever for the Tiger Woods Factor to kick in, the USOC and other nations are still waiting for that next wave of racial diversity in the Winter Games. 
I do wonder what an athlete like Davis thinks when he shows up at the Games. It’s one thing to understand your chosen sport has international competitions in Norway and the Netherlands and that almost all of your competitors will be white. It’s another thing to show up on the world stage and see that hardly anyone in any sport looks like you. 
Aside from the large contingent of Asian athletes

But they don't count.
and a smattering of Jamaican bobsledders and Tongans, the Opening Ceremonies’ Parade of Nations is as white as a von Trapp family reunion. ...
Is it more troubling for the Winter Games to be the province of the white or of the rich? 
Winter sports are on the average much more expensive than outdoor American stick-and-ball sports. But one of the greatest misconceptions about any of these competitions is that the athletes by and large came from affluent, privileged backgrounds. 
I’ve seen and heard too many stories of financial struggle and hardship to buy that. Without benefactors and major sponsorship, most U.S. athletes aren’t here. 
But speaking from a purely egalitarian view

In contrast, the racial make-up of the Super Bowl champs is an example of diversity and egalitarianism and all those good things.
it would be nice to see a country like the United States have its Winter Olympic team someday more accurately represent the diversity of its population — if only because more people would care, watch, read and give someone such as Shani Davis the attention and love he and his sport deserve. 
Otherwise, these Games are going to continue to resemble the inside of a giant snow globe, forever powdery white.

Forever hideously powdery white -- Fixed that for ya.

By the way, in 1913 Russian newspapers discovered that there was a village of 500 black Africans living near Batumi in Russian Abkhazia, a couple of hundred miles south of Sochi.

Here's the Wikipedia page on Afro-Abkhazians.
   

The ultimate Slate headline

From Slate

Why is Belgium so bad at the Olympics?

One of the oddities of Olympic history is how little Belgium cares. Not having ski mountains, it's not too surprising that they don't do well at the Winter Olympics. But, fellow lowcountry neighbor Netherlands (which as about 50% more people) is quite good, especially at the Hans Brinker sports:

Belgium: Winter Olympics: 5 medals
Netherlands: Winter Olympics: 96 medals

The Summer Games medal totals aren't all that different:

Belgium: Summer Olympics: 142 medals
Netherlands: Summer Olympics: 266 medals

But the Belgians won 36 of those medals at the 1920 Antwerp Summer Olympics. 

From 2000 onward, Netherlands has completely outdone them:

Belgium: 21st Century Winter Olympics: 0 medals *
Netherlands: 21st Century Winter Olympics: 35 medals

Belgium: 21st Century Summer Olympics: 7 medals
Netherlands: 21st Century Winter Olympics: 83 medals

* This may or may not include medals Belgium has won at the current Winter Olympics (if any): nobody seems to have updated Belgium's Olympic medals Wikipedia page. But that's sort of my point.

There are no doubt a lot of reasons for this, but I suspect (off the top of my head) that a big one is that Belgium isn't a nation. It emerged as a Catholic agglomeration and was formalized in 1839 by the Great Powers to be an intentionally weak neutral country on the boundary between Romance-speaking and Germanic-speaking Europe.

Many of Britain's most famous battles in history (e.g., Waterloo) have been fought in Belgium or very nearby (Agincourt, the Somme).

That's why pan-European institutions like the E.U are so often headquartered in Brussels. 

It's been a rich place for a thousand years -- the rivers of northwestern Europe provide excellent soil and transport. But the Flemish-speakers and the French-speakers don't get all that excited by the nationalism of the Olympics. With the decline in religious identity, there's not much to hold Belgium together except that foreign elites want it to exist.
   

Up to a point, Lord Saakashvili

From the New York Times:
Czar Vladimir's Illusions 
By MIKHEIL SAAKASHVILI FEB. 12, 2014

NEW YORK — As the Winter Olympics begin in Sochi, a close Russian ally in Ukraine is suppressing and shooting pro-democracy protesters. 
One could be forgiven for thinking that the hour of triumph for autocrats and the retreat of democrats is at hand as the world gathers to celebrate the shining rule of Czar Vladimir. 
But do the Sochi Olympics really prove that President Vladimir V. Putin’s model of oil-fueled authoritarianism is the only one that can bring happiness and prosperity to Russia and the region?

Though my country, Georgia, has almost no oil, it might hold the answer....
When Russia was bidding to be host of the Olympics, it had enthusiastic Georgian support, as we believed holding the Games in Sochi would enhance chances for peace and improve relations. Instead, several months after the Kremlin won its bid to host the Olympics, Russia invaded Georgia. 

Up to a point, Lord Saakashvili. You started the 2008 war, in the fundamental sense of sending your tanks in a sneak invasion across the de facto boundary, after which you were promptly whomped by the surprised Russians.

You could argue that since the South Ossetian territory you invaded was part of the Republic of Georgia under the USSR, that you had the right to do that. But that would be like Anwar Sadat arguing that when he started the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 by crossing the Suez Canal and invading the Sinai, which Israel had occupied in 1967, he was being invaded by Israel. Instead, Sadat's view was, "Hell, yes, we started this war. We're proud of it."

Of course, the big difference was that Egypt's feat of arms in winning the first battle of the Yom Kippur War -- getting across the heavily fortified Suez Canal and destroying hundreds of Israeli tanks -- really was an impressive feat of arms. The national pride that beating the Israelis in one battle engendered in Egypt, even if it the war went badly for them after that, gave Sadat psychological space to make a deal with the Israelis at Camp David and get the whole Sinai back.

In contrast, the initial Georgian invasion against the small South Ossetian militia and a couple of dozen Russian "peacekeepers" was unimpressive and failed to achieve all its objectives. The subsequent flight back home when the real Russian army arrived through the Roki Tunnel under the Cacausus was humiliating. [I go over the underlying geographic realities behind this war in my new Taki's column.)

... As a result, Mr. Putin’s fate might well be decided in the cold streets of Kiev rather than on the balmy slopes of Sochi. 
Mikheil Saakashvili was president of Georgia from 2004 to 2013. He is now senior statesman at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Meet the new liberal theory on race

Same as the old liberal theory on race ...

In Slate, an extremely self-confident youngish white guy named Tanner Colby is writing a long series about how he started to reading up on race a few years ago and had the revelation that everything his fellow liberals know about race is wrong, and all that's leading up to him revealing his New Solution to the Race Problem in a future article. 

For example, Colby explains, affirmative action is bad for blacks because it was started in 1969 by Richard Nixon who assume -- Can you believe it? -- that blacks tend to be good at sports and Asians good at math.
The Massive Liberal Failure on Race

Part 2: Affirmative action doesn’t work. It never did. It’s time for a new solution. 
By Tanner Colby  
In 2009, I attended the NAACP’s 100th annual convention at the Midtown Hilton in New York. Not just the centenary celebration for the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, this was also the group’s first convention under our newly inaugurated black president. The theme of the week’s events was to pay homage to the great civil rights victories of the past while at the same time defining a new mission for the next century. But on the night NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous took the stage for his big speech, when the subject turned to affirmative action, he didn’t sound like he was charting a new course so much as doubling down on the orthodoxy of the past. “The only question about affirmative action,” Jealous declared, “isn’t whether or not we need the hammer. The only question is whether or not the hammer is big enough!” 
The line was met with thunderous applause. At the time, this didn’t really stand out to me, because, like a lot of well-intentioned but minimally informed white liberals, I believed in affirmative action. I didn’t have terribly strong convictions about it, but given America’s history it generally seemed like “the right thing to do.” That was five years ago. Then, in the course of writing a book about the history of the color line and our efforts to erase it, I took a closer look at the origins of affirmative action, and its results. Having done so, I’m a believer no more. 
In part because of recent Supreme Court cases like Fisher v. Texas, the current national conversation about affirmative action has focused mostly on its use in college admissions, but my focus here will be on affirmative action in the white-collar workplace, the failure of which I observed up close during my years in the advertising industry. Race-conscious policies in college admissions and corporate hiring are different creatures, with different pros and cons, but I came to see that they also share some common, troubling flaws. 
When I think back now to the rousing applause affirmative action earned at that Hilton ballroom, I can’t help but wonder why, 45 years down the line, liberals like Jealous are still so fervently devoted to a program so plainly inadequate and ill-conceived from the start. Having botched the effort to integrate American schools through the overzealous misuse of an otherwise valuable instrument, the school bus, the left’s second great blunder on race was pinning the economic fortunes of black America on affirmative action. 
... That Richard Nixon was racist is well beyond dispute—he believed that, moral objections to abortion aside, the practice was justified in the case of mixed-race pregnancies. When giving instructions to the aide who scheduled his appointments and photo ops, Nixon said the Oval Office calendar should have “just enough blacks to show that we care”—setting a precedent for Republican racial engagement that stands to this day. But Nixon wasn’t just racist in the sense of thinking blacks inferior; he was racist in the sense that he subscribed to an actual taxonomy and hierarchy of race—the idea that different groups possess inherent qualities. Asians are smart and industrious. Jews are crafty but lack moral fiber, and so on. When the first wave of studies were published purporting to show that blacks have lower IQs than whites, Nixon, in a conversation with domestic aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan,

What Colby is fumblingly referring to is not the first test results showing racial differences in IQs, but UC Berkeley professor Arthur Jensen's 79-page metanalysis "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" of tests and intervention programs designed to Narrow the Gap in Harvard Education Review. Nixon thought this topic so central to understanding how America works that he assigned his top domestic aide, the famous Democratic social scientist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to keep him updated on the science in the debate.
said he “couldn’t agree more” with the findings. The president was quite generous on the subject of what black people were good at: “Athletics isn’t a bad achievement. You look at the World Series. What would Pittsburgh [presumably, the 1971 team with an outfield of Willie Stargell, Al Oliver, and Roberto Clemente] be without a hell of a lot of blacks?” But he was far less charitable when it came to black talent in other areas: “… when you get to some of the more shall we say profound, rigid disciplines, basically, they have a hell of a time makin’ it. … In terms of good lawyers, even though a lot of them go to law schools, I mean, it is not really their dish of tea.”
.... But to judge from the rhetoric that still surrounds the issue, most progressives are nowhere near ready to admit the truth: that the liberal establishment pinned the economic hopes of the civil rights revolution on a program set up by a president whose racial philosophy was based on the idea that blacks make great athletes and Asians are good at math.

Whereas in 2014, we are so much better informed than Nixon, Moynihan, and Jensen were over 40 years ago. We've had 45 years of experience that proves them wrong, wrong, wrong. For example, here's a picture showing the many the Asians who play on the 2014 Super Bowl-winning Seattle Seahawks defensive unit:
Seriously, Tanner is just the latest in a common pattern. Some youngish white person gets interested in the topic of race and quickly decides that All Those Idiots in the Past got it wrong and he can come up with a much better policy solution (which Tanner promises to unveil Real Soon Now). Maybe he really will come up with a brilliant breakthrough.

But it's hardly encouraging that he can't even imagine questioning the conventional wisdom's strongest roadblock to thinking constructively about race policy: the underlying assumption that it can't possibly be true that blacks tend to be better at athletics and Asians better at math.
 

February 11, 2014

Sailer: The Borders of Empire

The notch is La Brèche de Roland, a 9,199 foot pass in the Pyrenees
From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
I was wondering why Russia chose to hold its Winter Olympics in the Black Sea beach resort of Sochi, which is almost as far south as you can get in that notoriously northern land. 
And that got me thinking about borders in general. African governments are always complaining that they inherited unnaturally straight national boundaries from colonial administrators who didn’t take into account the complicated ethnic realities on the ground. But does anybody know the ideal way to draw borders to maximize peace and prosperity? 
It turns out that the locations for the Winter Olympics offer some insights into this long-standing question.

Read the whole thing there.

I've always been a topography nerd, but I'm becoming even more of one as Americans become more oblivious to the influence that the shape of the land has had upon them. The Founding Fathers, especially Washington who was a surveyor and real estate developer, were obsessed with geography.
   

The return of the homer press

From the comments:
NOTA said... 
The anti-Russia PR campaign in the prestige media reminds me a great deal of the anti-France campaign around and right after the Iraq invasion. Remember cheese eating surrender monkeys, freedom fries, and "rifle for sale, never fired, only dropped once?" 
The pattern here appears to be that countries that resist our foreign policy adventures then become a kind of acceptable target in various bits of our media. I'm sure this isn't overtly coordinated anywhere, but media people are presumably pretty good at inferring which way the wind is blowing....

This represents a major change in my lifetime. From, say, the Tet Offensive of 1968 to Iran-Contra sputtering out in the summer of 1987, oppositionalism to American foreign policy was always somewhere between the avant-garde and the default position for the American media. For example, constantly in the early 1980s, Time would have Strobe Talbott thunder about how Reagan was going to blow up the world if he didn't start being nicer to the Soviets. 

This is not to say that oppositionalism was uniform or monolithic. (For example, Henry Kissinger was highly glamorized, but partly that was, as Kissinger writes in his memoirs, a media calculation that making Kissinger look better made it easier to overthrow the hated Nixon because the public could be reassured it would still have Dr. K's deft hand on the foreign affairs tiller to provide continuity.)

But having been 9 years old in 1968 and 28 in 1987, it's been pretty surprising for me that the American media has pretty much gone back to the way it was in 1942-1967 when the press looked to the government for what line to take on foreign policy. But that's probably the natural state of affairs and what needs explanation is the skeptical, oppositional perspective that I grew up assuming was the automatic order of things.

Instead, the natural state of affairs is that people who are good with words write the kind of things that people with large budgets want them to write.
   

What if there is terrorism at the Olympics?

You can sense an almost palpable hope among many influential Americans for a terrorist incident at the Winter Olympics to ruin the Russkies' fun. Let's try to game plan what would happen next.

1. If there is a terrorist attack, then Twitter would probably explode with Americans saying, "Ha-ha, Russians, you had it coming!"

2. Russians will hear about the most offensive American comments and take offense.

3. Within a few days, it will emerge that the terrorists had a few-degrees-of-separation connections with the CIA or the National Endowment for Democracy or the like, and/or NATO candidate Georgia, and/or shadowy Russian government agencies. Or all three.

For instance, the Winter Olympics are taking place very close to what's officially the territory of Georgia, but has been ruled by the Russian-supported breakaway Abkhazians for a couple of decades. 

If you think I'm crazy that a little Internet searching would probably find some kind of link between terrorists and government officials of at least one country, consider the Boston Marathon bombing of last March. It turned out that the Bomb Brothers are in this country as refugees more or less because their Uncle Ruslan used to be married to Samantha Ankara Fuller, the daughter of the former top CIA troublemaker in the region, Graham Fuller. And then the FBI shot dead Ibragim Todashev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev's purported accomplice in an alleged earlier terrorist triple murder on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. But it turned out that Todashev was granted refugee status in the U.S. even though his father is a high official in Putin's puppet government in Ramzan Kadyrov's Chechnya.

What does it all mean? Probably ... just Chechens acting Checheny. 

But then I'm the kind of horrible unAmerican stereotyper who thinks racistly that just because Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn were fascinated by the brave craziness of the Chechens, that young male Chechens really do feel some sort of cultural influence to act crazily brave.

4. Many Russians would then interpret these kind of weird connections to the Sochi terrorists as evidence of an American conspiracy, perhaps related to the on-going American conspiracy in Ukraine, which Victoria Nuland says the U.S. has spent $5 billion upon since 1991. (It's statistically likely that spending that kind of money over that many years on the fringes of Russia buys America a little bit of contact with whoever turns out to be, say, a brother-in-law's uncle of just about anybody who might blow up the Olympics.)

5. Americans, who are well trained to reject the entire concept of conspiracies, will interpret Russian interest in these links as proof of Russia's innately malignant conspiracy-theorizing transphobic whateverism that's doomed by the inevitable scientific workings of History to be overwhelmed by the triumph of democracy and gay rights, just as 31 consecutive state referendums voting against gay marriage were eventually overwhelmed by Democracy! So, many Americans will explain on Twitter, maybe we ought to bomb the Russkies just on general principles.

6. War actually won't break out. These days, war is so costly that it's stupid. Like Robert Gates in 2008 when Georgia invaded Russian-supported territory, Chuck Hagel doesn't want a war with Russia on his watch.

7. Other countries will observe these events with intense interest. Consider the nearby Turks, who, being Turks, are unlikely to conclude that any such events were just random bad luck. 

I would imagine that Imam Gulen in the Poconos will argue to his enigmatic cabal of followers in the Turkish police that engineering this black eye for Putin just proves that the Americans are the puppetmasters, so we Gulenists are right to accept the support of Uncle Ruslan's ex-father-in-law and other elements in the American deep state while we establish our networks inside Turkey's security forces and America's charter schools. 

But what will Prime Minister Erdogan think? He may conclude that this shows he better get even more with the program with Washington. Or it may convince him that he needs to ally with Iran and Russia against the insolent hyperpower. Who knows?

8. In the long run, police investigation would probably prove that the terrorist attacks really were mostly due to random young male hormones; but by then the world will have ratcheted over one more notch toward a lousier future.

So, my fellow Americans, can we just tone down the Russia-hatred a bit for two weeks?

A plea for peace

Eric S. Margolis writes:
Day by day, we see growing rancor between the US and Russia. Most of it is unfair criticism and childish spats, but the overall effect is creating the basis for war fever. The same bickering, cheap criticism and manufactured anger created the psychological basis in Britain for the utterly catastrophic World War I. Three years later, it was repeated in the United States to whip up anti-German fever. 
The US media is barraging Russia and Putin with a drumfire of negative stories. The Sochi Olympics have come in for relentless, petty attacks and low-minded carping. 
Anyone who knows Russia should be in awe that the normally bumbling, disorganized Ruskis managed to get their Olympic sites finished more or less on time – and that they still remain standing. Russians usually lose a lot of early battles, but they usually end up winning wars. 

Considering the Russian track record of stuff happening, I was very pleased that during the opening ceremony they didn't drop that little girl they had flying on wires around the stadium.

But, artistically, when your country can lead off its performance with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, well, respect. (Here's an opera lover's website of videos and critiques of all opening ceremonies, but not yet Sochi.)
So what if Russia spent billions on the Sochi Olympics. Who is Washington to criticize Moscow after pouring over $2 trillion into the stupid wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now Syria, with nothing to show but huge debts, armies of refugees, and graveyards? 
America’s national security establishment – what used to be known in Britain as imperialists – is now turning its guns on Russia, aided by the US corporate media. Vlad Putin’s Russia has re-emerged as America’s number one enemy. 
Muslims are out. At times, the Cold War seems to be inching back. The US narrowly escaped a dangerous military clash over President Barack Obama’s intemperate rush to war over Syria. 
Nuclear powers must not indulge in such school-yard squabbles. World War I, whose 100th anniversary comes this fall, began just this way. 
Putin’s Russia is no Utopia, but do we really want angry, expansionist Russians again on our eastern borders? Better they focus on Olympic games and shopping sprees. Unlike us, they have not started any wars lately.
   

February 10, 2014

The Seinfeld - David - Baron Cohen axis of comedy

In Britain, much of television consists of panels of comedians joking about some topic. From Jezebel:
BBC Bans All-Male Panel Shows, But Will That Help Female Comedians?

Meanwhile, in the U.S., from Autoblog:
... funnyman Jerry Seinfeld hosts a web series called Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. As you might not know, white men have been the guests on 20 of the 24 episodes that have aired so far: Seinfeld has made the java run with female comedians Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman and black comedians Mario Joyner and Chris Rock. The question is: does it matter? And if it does matter, why? 
During an interview on BuzzFeed Brews, host Peter Lauria asked Seinfeld about the predominance of white male guests on the show, having noted the Internet commentary about it and been asked by his Twitter followers to pose the question. Seinfeld responded first with a softball, "People think it's the census or something, that it's got to represent the actual pie chart of America - who cares? Funny is the world that I live in." Then he went further, saying, "I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that," and that he feels the positions of those who have watched his show and commented on the race and gender breakdown of his guests are "anti comedy" and "more about PC nonsense than 'Are you making us laugh or not?'"

I bring this up just to make the obvious point that Seinfeld and, even more so, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm are, in identity politics terms, right of center shows. In today's world, where the biggest sin is Noticing Things, it's almost tautological that masters of "observational comedy" are going to be inveterate Noticers.

Seinfeld and David represent the center-right of American Jewish culture, while the much misinterpreted Sacha Baron Cohen brings some of the crude ferocity of Israel's increasingly right-trending culture to global humor. (He's British but his grandmother lives in Israel.)

Initially, Baron Cohen was of course assumed to be a nice liberal merely making fun of dumb Bush voters in 2006's Borat, but 2009's Bruno and 2012's The Dictator unsettled the commentariat. The Dictator was not well-received during a year of elite worries that "Islamophobia" might derail the re-election of Barack Hussein Obama.

Something I've only vaguely been aware of before is how much behind the scenes overlap there is between Seinfeld / Curb Your Enthusiasm and Baron Cohen's movies. 
These scenes from a 2012 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm are clearly a riff on Baron Cohen's gay Nazi Bruno in a pint-sized American child version. The message is the same, too: Fashion Is Flamingly Fascist. (There's a lot of historical evidence for that, by the way.)

One obvious connection is that the director of Bruno, as well as Borat and The Dictator, is Larry Charles, who was a major writer-producer during Seinfeld's formative years, and played a similar role on Curb

Similarly, the team of Jeff Schaffer, David Mandel, and Alec Berg have written for Seinfeld and Curb, and co-wrote The Dictator with Baron Cohen, and Schaffer had a writing credit on Bruno. (Schaffer's sit-com The League about a fantasy football league is pretty funny, too.)
       

Swiss citizenism v. American racialism

The Swiss popular vote to end its half-decade experiment with allowing unlimited immigration from European Union countries (of which Switzerland is not a member) had multiple causes. One is that the EU has kept expanding eastward into low wage countries. On January 1, residents of Romania and Bulgaria became eligible to move to any EU country (and therefore Switzerland, too). 

Romania and Bulgaria are home to a lot of poor people, most of them not particularly troublesome except from the usual impact of driving down wages and raising housing costs. 

But some -- the Roma -- are unwelcome anywhere they go. If you were a Romanian official, wouldn't you want to put on a slideshow for your Gypsy residents (whose neighborhoods resemble Borat's hometown -- it was filmed in a Romanian Gypsy village) about the glories of life in gleaming Switzerland?

And now the E.U. is, under pressure from the U.S., gesturing toward letting in 45 million very low wage Ukrainians. The E.U. doesn't really want to do that, but Davos Man is angry and emotional right now, and is looking to pick a fight with Russia over Ukraine, so Washington and NATO might pressure the E.U. into doing something very stupid.

More generally, Switzerland is probably the most famously beautiful country in the world, so its residents aren't happy with the steadily rising population. Of course, in America, we know that Switzerland would look much better if it were transformed into the set from "Her" or "Elysium." If you don’t believe me, just ask Matthew Yglesias or Ed Glaeser. Admit it: unless you grew up in barn, all those cows are just creepy. And those peasants with pitchforks … 

Many in America can't understand why the Swiss aren't as enthusiastic about importing their co-ethnics to better battle for ethnic domination within Switzerland as American minorities are said to be. For example, the largest number of non-Swiss in Switzerland are Italians, but the Italian-speaking canton voted strongly to crack down on immigration from Italy.

Here in the U.S., Marco Rubio and Luis Gutierrez are celebrated in the media for agitating for more Hispanic immigration. In 21st Century America, race/ethnic loyalty is held to trump ties of citizenship (unless the race is white and the ethnicity is pre-Ellis Island, in which case race/ethnic loyalty is unspeakable).

The Swiss, in contrast, put much value on what I call Citizenism. A Swiss Italian is expected to value the welfare of his fellow Swiss citizens more highly than his fellow Italian co-ethnics. And they do. In contrast to the U.S. where the federal government constantly absorbs powers allotted under the Constitution to the states, the Swiss keep much of government power at the level of the cantons, which are mostly monolingual. 

This lowers the urge to wage Elect a New People campaigns. If Italian citizens pour into Italian-speaking Ticino the way Mexicans pour into California, it doesn't give Italian ethnic Swiss all that much more power nationally the way it it perceived as giving Hispanic ethnic (although non-Mexican) politicians such as Rubio more power.

But Swiss voters are highly nationalistic about a few important policies.

Moreover, Swiss voters understand the law of supply and demand well. More immigration from Italy into Italian-speaking Ticino drives down wages for Italian speakers and drives up land prices. Why is that good Swiss Italian citizens and their children?
  

Huge News

Huge news from the NYT:
LeanIn.org and Getty Aim to Change Women’s Portrayal in Stock Photos 
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER FEB. 9, 2014

SAN FRANCISCO — There is the businesswoman, wearing a suit and glasses and holding a briefcase. There is the mother, smiling as she pours milk into her children’s cereal bowls at the breakfast table. There is the multitasker, holding a laptop in one hand and a baby in the other. 
These stock images are familiar to anyone who has seen an advertisement or flipped through a magazine or brochure illustrating working women and families. And their ubiquity is hurting girls and women by feeding into old-fashioned stereotypes, says Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive who has become an advocate for women achieving leadership roles. 
To try to remedy the problem, Ms. Sandberg’s nonprofit organization, LeanIn.org, is to announce on Monday a partnership with Getty Images, one of the biggest providers of stock photography, to offer a special collection of images that it says represent women and families in more empowering ways. 
RECENT COMMENTS 
Nancy M 2 hours ago 
Now THIS is how to change the status quo!!! Get the big guys with a platform to lead the way and in images no less. Brava. If women realized...

Bryan Caplan: "What the Swiss Vote Really Shows"

From EconLog:
What the Swiss Vote Really Shows 
Bryan Caplan 
The Swiss just passed a referendum to restrict immigration from the EU.  Tyler thinks this shows that open borders is a hopeless cause.  When immigration gets too high, public opinion naturally turns against immigration. ...
But there's a major problem with Tyler's story: Swiss anti-immigration voting was highest in the places with the least immigrants!  This is no fluke.  In the U.S., anti-immigration sentiment is highest in the states with the least immigration - even if you assume that 100% of immigrants are pro-immigration. 
The natural inference to draw, then, is the opposite of Tyler's: The main hurdle to further immigration is insufficient immigration.  If countries could just get over the hump of status quo bias, anti-immigration attitudes would become as socially unacceptable as domestic racism.  Instead of coddling nativism with gradualism, we can, should, and must peacefully destroy nativism with abolitionism.

And, you’ll notice, not only are the Swiss having second thoughts about Inviting the World, for centuries they have failed to shoulder any of the burden of Invading the World. 

I say, this unacceptable Swiss majority vote just proves that it's time to put Victoria Nuland and the rest of the Kagans in charge of having the National Endowment of Democracy pay for a Color Revolution in Switzerland. There are probably some bored soccer hooligans in Switzerland who wouldn't mind a grant to camp out downtown for the Swiss Spring and battle the riot police in the name of Democracy.

And if that doesn’t work, well we tried to destroy nativism peacefully, but there are limits to our patience. So, let the drone strikes begin.

P.S., in the comments at Marginal Revolution, Paolo explains:
You are forgetting how small Switzerland is. Nearly the entire country is in commuting distance of the main centres Zurich, Basel, Geneva, or the secondary centres St.Gallen, Winterthur, Berne, Lausanne, Lugano, Neuenburg. 
That Yes vote regions are where people are living who were pushed ever further away from the centres due to huge rise in housing costs. A lot of those rural-semi rural areas have had very high population growth rates in the last 10 years due to the influx of commuters looking for affordable housing space. Both the expansion of the rail net and the real estate price inflation in the centres have been big drivers of this trend. 
The yes vote in those regions are both disgruntled commuters unhappy with being priced out of the centres and locals unhappy with the flood outsiders. 
As to the No vote of the centres, that’s no surprise. How can afford to live in the centres these days? Either people living in (subsidised) social housing or people earning enough to pay 4000+ CHF in rent or a million+ CHF to buy a flat. The first group aren’t really feeling the price pressure and tend to follow the Social Party and Union paroles, while the latter by definition belong to the winners of the current situation who can afford to pay those prices. 
 

"How Single Motherhood Hurts Kids"

Kay S. Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute presents some common sense in the NYT:
How Single Motherhood Hurts Kids 
By KAY S. HYMOWITZ 
The last few weeks have brought an unusual convergence of voices from both the center and the left about a topic that is typically part of conservative rhetorical territory: poverty and single-parent families. Just as some conservatives have started talking seriously about rising inequality and stagnant incomes, some liberals have finally begun to admit that our stubbornly high rates of poverty and social and economic immobility are closely entwined with the rise of single motherhood.

But that’s where agreement ends. Consistent with its belief in self-sufficiency, the right wants to see more married-couple families. For the left, widespread single motherhood is a fact of modern life that has to be met with vigorously expanded government support. Liberals point out, correctly, that poverty rates for single-parent households are lower in most other advanced economies, where the welfare state is more generous.  
That argument ignores a troubling truth: Single-parent families are not the same in the United States as elsewhere. Simply put, unmarried parents here are more likely to enter into parenthood in ways guaranteed to create turmoil in their children’s lives.

Fifty years ago, American liberals noticed that high welfare payments and low public criticism of unmarried parental couples weren't immediately destroying Stockholm, so they figured it would make perfect sense in Milwaukee.
The typical American single mother is younger than her counterpart in other developed nations. She is also more likely to live in a community where single motherhood is the norm rather than an alternative life choice. 
The sociologist Kathryn Edin has shown that unlike their more educated peers, these younger, low-income women tend to stop using contraception several weeks or months after starting a sexual relationship. The pregnancy — not lasting affection and mutual decision-making — that often follows is the impetus for announcing that they are a couple.

Guys, do not trust your girlfriend to take care of the contraception. She has her own agenda.

I wonder what percentage of these "unplanned" pregnancies have to do with women getting tired of dieting to look hot. Okay, I've got a guy interested in me, kind of, but now I'm hungry all the time. If I go off my diet, he'll probably dump me for that skinny skank Amber. But nobody can blame me for eating for two if I'm pregnant. So I'll kill two birds with one stone: I'll permanently reel him in by having him be my babydaddy and I can get off this diet. So stuff happens, you know? The Miracle of Life.
Unsurprisingly, by the time the thrill of sleepless nights and colicky days has worn off, two relative strangers who have drifted into becoming parents together notice they’re just not that into each other. Hence, the high breakup rates among low-income couples: Only a third of unmarried parents are still together by the time their children reach age 5. 
Also complicating low-income single parenthood in America is what the experts call “multipartner fertility.” Both divorced and never-married Americans are more likely to repartner and start “second families” than Europeans, but the trend is far more common among unmarried parents. According to data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study at Princeton and Columbia Universities, over 60 percent of low-income babies will have at least one half sibling when they are born; by the time they are 5, the proportion will have climbed to over 70 percent. 

Obviously, this data should be broken out by race. My guess is, however, that working class whites are slowly drifting toward black norms as criticizing anything associated by disparate impact logic with blackness becomes increasingly unspeakable.
All of this would be of merely passing interest if it weren’t for the evidence that this kind of domestic churn is really bad news for kids. The more “transitions” experienced by a child — the arrival of a stepparent, a parental boyfriend or girlfriend, or a step- or half sibling — the more children are likely to have either emotional or academic problems, or both. (My own research indicates that boys, especially, suffer from these transitions.) 
Part of the problem is that a nonresident father tends to fade out of his children’s lives if there’s a new man in his ex’s house or if he has children with a new partner. For logistical, emotional and financial reasons, his loyalty to his previous children slackens once he has a child with a new girlfriend or wife.

New girlfriends/wives show remarkably little female solidarity toward the idea of their man turning over a big chunk of his paycheck to ex-girlfriends/wives.
Nor is it likely, from the overlooked child’s point of view, that a mother’s new boyfriend or husband can fill the gap. There’s substantial research showing that stepfathers are sometimes worse than none at all. 
These realities help explain the meager results of government marriage promotion programs. It doesn’t make much sense to encourage, much less pressure, a couple with no shared history, interests or deep affection to marry. At any rate, given the prevalence of multipartner fertility it’s not clear, as one scholar asked in a paper, “who should marry whom.” 
But those same realities raise serious doubts about the accept-and-prop-up response to single-parent families. Increasing government largess could actually incentivize, or at least enable, parental choices that everyone admits are damaging to kids.

Universal pre-K, for example, offers a sort of taxpayer-subsidized nap time for welfare moms to rest up so they can hit the clubs harder in the evening and create more little net tax consumers / Democratic voters.
So where does that leave us, policy-wise? Liberal critics of marriage promotion are probably correct that there are only limited steps government can take to change the way low-income couples meet and mate. But that doesn’t mean the status quo is the way things have to be. Not so long ago, the rise of teenage motherhood seemed unstoppable. Instead, over the past two decades adolescent births have declined to record lows.

And abortion rates have dropped as well.
Researchers believe the decline was caused by a combination of better contraceptive use and delayed sexual activity. Both were grounded in a growing consensus — including by the policy makers, educators, the public and teenagers themselves — that having a baby when you are 16 is just a really bad idea.

As I've been saying for years, you can see just in reading government statistical reports that the government is out to get teen pregnancy (even if the teen is a married 19-year-old high school graduate) but is completely neutral on post-teen out-of-wedlock births.
It’s not impossible that Americans could reach a similarly robust consensus about having children outside of a committed relationship, which in the United States, at least, tends to mean marriage. But despite the growing list of center-left writers willing to admit that single motherhood is complicit in our high levels of poverty and inequality, that consensus still seems a long way off.

Single motherhood generates Democratic votes, now and in the next generation. See "Life of Julia."
Kay S. Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal, is the author of “Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.”

February 9, 2014

American Deep State

From Mondoweiss in 2011:
No problem– Obama’s State Dep’t spokesperson is married to Romney’s neocon foreign policy adviser 
Philip Weiss on October 12, 2011 
Here is a crazy story no one is talking about that is evidence of the Israel lobby’s role in our politics. Last week, Mitt Romney announced a foreign policy team that includes Robert Kagan, a neocon who pushed for the Iraq war. 
But Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, who is a spokesperson for the State Department.

Nuland is now in charge of -- in effect -- overthrowing the elected government of Ukraine * and replacing it with the opposition figure of her choice, all in the name of the E.U., of course.
Laurie Bennett notes the strangeness of this conjunction:
Victoria Nuland’s role as spokesperson for the State Department, deemed strange by some who remember her tenure as principal deputy national security adviser to then Vice President Dick Cheney, has become stranger yet. 
Her husband, Robert Kagan, has joined Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign as a foreign policy adviser. 
Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also advised the McCain campaign in 2008.

Ordinarily this would cause a lot of strain. Nuland would be under pressure. Chris Matthews would be asking what the heck she’s doing in a political job at State when her husband is preparing the opposition. 
But in fact, Nuland’s Cheney resume and her marriage to Kagan are actually credentials in the Democratic Party: they demonstrate Obama’s sensitivity to the Israel lobby. And party bosses are happy to have these playing cards now that Obama is under siege from his own party about Israel. 

Robert is only one of four Kagans who are currently esteemed foreign policy intellectuals: his father Donald, brother Fred, and sister-in-law Kimberly.

The Kagan-Nuland ascendancy seems strange, but it's hardly unprecedented. I recently read Gore Vidal's 1987 historical novel Empire about Washington DC from 1898 to 1905. The central character is the Secretary of State, John Hay, who got his start when his next door neighbor, Abe Lincoln, was elected president in 1860 and needed a second secretary. Although a smalltown Midwestern boy, Hay was a charming, witty fellow more like a British than an American statesman.

Hay's best friend was historian Henry Adams, great-grandson of the second President. Henry's younger brother Brooks Adams is portrayed as Teddy Roosevelt's idea man: along with Admiral Mahan, Brooks is the chief theoretician of the spasm of American imperialism that garnered the U.S. the Philippines and Puerto Rico (for whatever they're worth). Hay and Henry Adams laugh at the bumptiousness of Teddy and Brooks Adams, but tend to wind up going along with them.
In whatever [Brooks Adams] wrote he showed a gift for generalization with a tendency to carry it beyond reasonable bounds.

Brooks' ultimate goal is America gaining control of the coal of northern China. Vidal has some fun with Brooks' intensity and steampunk strategizing: The nation that controls the coal of northern China will control the world! Still, Vidal, speaking through the annoyed but often agreeing Henry Adams, can't really make up his mind whether Brooks Adams was a dangerous loon or a prophet or both. True, the coal of northern China isn't all that important in 1987, but the oil of the Persian Gulf turned out to be, so maybe Brooks was prescient after all. Or maybe it wasn't worth it. Perhaps it's too soon to tell.

So, in 1901 if you asked who made up the American deep state, you'd probably start with the Adams brothers: the president is listening to Brooks and the secretary of state to Henry.

Influential foreign policy intellectuals and operatives tend to come from a pretty limited set of elite families, and they get a lot done by having access. And if they screw up, well, blood is thicker than competence. These relatives don't always get along with each other, but it's hard to tell what's going on without keeping track of families.

Neocons tend to be particularly inbred. In the comments at Mondoweiss, Sean McBride lists some examples (I'll cut out redundant ones):
2. Andrew Rosenthal is the son of A.M. Rosenthal.
4. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is the son of Arthur Sulzberger.
5. Barbara Amiel is the wife of Conrad Black.
6. Barbara Ledeen is the mother of Simone Ledeen who is the daughter of Michael Ledeen.
8. Benjamin Netanyahu is the son of Benzion Netanyahu.
11. Dalck Feith is the father of Douglas Feith.
14. Daniel Feith is the brother of David Feith.
15. Daniel Feith is the grandson of Dalck Feith.
17. Daniel Pipes is the son of Richard Pipes.
21. David Wurmser is the husband of Meyrav Wurmser.
22. Dick Cheney is the father of Liz Cheney who is the daughter of Lynne Cheney.
24. Donald Kagan is the father-in-law of Victoria Nuland and Kimberly Kagan
25. Donald Kagan is the father of Frederick and Robert Kagan.
26. Donald Kagan is the father of Robert Kagan.
31. Elliott Abrams is the son-in-law of Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, and brother-in-law of John Podhoretz.
38. Gertrude Himmelfarb is the wife of Irving Kristol and the mother of William Kristol.
45. Jonah Goldberg is the son of Lucianne Goldberg.

Neoconservatism: it's a real family business.
---------------
* Note: Ukraine's government isn't a very honest or competent one, or even a very strong one, and the leader doesn't seem to have much confidence in his mandate so he's always trying to make compromises with the opposition.

CI: the Cromartie Index

A commenter suggests a new social science measure: the Cromartie Index, named after New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie, who has 12 children by 8 babymamas and a reputed Wonderlic IQ test score of 12 (where 21 is the mean).

(12 + 8) / 12 = 1.67

Just take the sum of children and mothers and divide it by his Wonderlic score.

Has anybody in NFL history reached a CI of 2.0 yet? *
On July 25, 2006, Cromartie signed a 5-year, $13.5 million contract with $7.35 million guaranteed with the Chargers. ... Cromartie has fathered 12 children with eight different women.[17] In March 2010, the Jets provided Cromartie with a $500,000 advance so he could make outstanding child support payments.[18]

By the way, there are a lot more Cromarties where this one came from:
He is a cousin of Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie of the Denver Broncos, who was an All-American cornerback at Tennessee State University, and was drafted by the Arizona Cardinals with the 16th pick in the 2008 NFL Draft. He has two other cousins, Da'Mon Cromartie-Smith, who is a safety with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Marcus Cromartie, who is a cornerback for the San Diego Chargers.
     
----------
* Yes. See the comments for details.
 

Swiss voters fail to heed Swiss bankers

From the NYT:
Swiss Voters Narrowly Approve Curbs on Immigration 
By MELISSA EDDY FEB. 9, 2014

BERLIN — A narrow majority of voters in Switzerland on Sunday approved proposals that would reintroduce restrictions on the number of foreigners who are allowed to live and work in the country, a move that could have far-reaching implications for Switzerland’s relations with the European Union. 
The referendum on the changes to the country’s liberal immigration law was a rebuke to the Swiss government, the banking industry and business leaders who had lobbied against the restrictions, warning that such a move could endanger Switzerland’s prosperity.

Obviously, Swiss bankers are our ethical exemplars. What kind of crazy lunacy is this where Swiss voters reject the moral advice of Swiss bankers? Has the world gone mad?
... The Swiss agreed in 2008 to participate in the Pan-European accord known as the Schengen Agreement, which led to the dismantling of patrols at its borders and the free movement of its citizens to European Union nations. 
... The Swiss initiative foresees annual quotas on the number of immigrants allowed to work in the country, as well as limits for specific sectors. It would also require preference be given to Swiss applicants for open positions. 
... In Brussels, the European Commission issued a statement saying that it was “disappointed” that the initiative had passed, adding that it would have to study the vote’s implications on relations between the European Union and Switzerland. 

Switzerland, by the way, isn't part of the EU, the voters having rejected the first step toward EU membership in 1992. You know how with the EU you can check out but you can never leave? Well, the EU thinks that you can never leave even if you've never checked in.
The outcome on Sunday seemed to reflect a disconnect between the government and industry and voters, who approved the introduction of curbs on excessive salaries for business executives two years ago. “We always thought the argument about jobs would win people over,” Urs Schwaller, a lawmaker with the centrist Christian People’s Party, said in an interview with the Swiss television channel SRF. “Clearly, that wasn’t enough.”

Australia, Norway, Switzerland all voting against immigration recently. Shouldn't the National Endowment for Democracy fund some protests in these countries against the spreading tide of anti-democracy? By the way, it's been hundreds of years since Switzerland invaded another country, so shouldn't we bomb them or something? Why are we pussy-footing around regarding the Swiss Menace? Are we running out Kagans?
 

"'Marriage promotion' is a destructive cargo cult"

Steve Randy Waldman writes:
“Marriage promotion” is a destructive cargo cult

... The case for marriage promotion begins with some perfectly real correlations. Across a variety of measures — household income, self-reported life satisfaction, childrearing outcomes — married couples seem to do better than pairs of singles (and much better than single parents), particularly in populations towards the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. So it is natural to imagine that, if somehow poor people could be persuaded to marry more, they too would enjoy those improvements in household income, life satisfaction, and childrearing. Let them eat wedding cake! 
But neither wedding cake nor the marriages they celebrate cause observed “marriage premia” any more than dances on tarmacs caused airplanes to land on Melanesian islands. In fact, for the most part, the evidence we have suggests that marriage is an effect of other things that facilitate good social outcomes rather than a cause on its own. In particular, for poor women, the availability of suitable mates is a binding constraint on marriage behavior.

Perhaps the availability of suitable progenitors should also be a binding constraint on breeding behavior? Or should we just switch over wholly to a Big Man system in which NFL star Antonio Cromartie fathers most of the children in America?
People in actually observed marriages do well because they are the lucky ones to find scarce good mates, not because marriage would be a good thing for everyone else too. Marrying badly, that is marriage followed by subsequent divorce, increases the poverty rate among poor women compared to never marrying at all. Married biological parents who stay together may be good for child rearing, but kids of mothers who marry anyone other than their biological father do no better than children of mothers who never marry at all.

Perhaps then it's not such a hot idea to have a child out of wedlock and then expect some other man to support it?
... Let’s stop with the litany of citations for a minute and just think like humans. Marriage is a big deal. The stylized fact that the great preponderance of grown-ups with kids who seem economically and socially successful are married is known to everybody, rich and poor, black and white. Yes, the traditional family is not uncontested. There are, in our culture, valorizations of single-parenthood as statements of feminist independence, valorizations of male liberty and libertinism, aspirational valorizations of nontraditional families by until-recently-excluded gay people, etc. But, despite the outsized role played by Kurt on Glee, these alternative visions are numerically marginal, and probably especially marginal among the poor. Single motherhood is the alternative family structure that matters from a social welfare (rather than culture-war) perspective. The problem marriage promotion could solve, if it could solve any problem at all, would be to increase the well-being of the people who currently become single mothers and of their children. 
But why do single women choose to become single mothers? It does not, in any numerically significant way, seem to have much to do with purposeful rebellion against traditional family norms. No, marriage of poor women seems constrained by the availability of promising mates. And why might that be? 
Charles Murray recently wrote a wonderful, terrible, book called “Coming Apart“. The book is wonderful, because it identifies and very sharply observes the core social problem of our time, the Great Segregation (sorry Tyler), or more accurately, the Great Secession of the rich from the rest, and especially from the poor. The book is terrible, because it then analyzes the problems of the poor as though they come from nowhere, as though phenomena Murray characterizes as declines in industriousness, religiosity, and devotion to marriage among the poor have nothing to do with the evacuation of the rich into dream enclaves. There are obvious connections that Murray doesn’t make because, I think, he simply doesn’t wish to make them. Let’s make some. We were talking about marriage. 
Murray does a wonderful job of describing the homogamy of our socioeconomic elites. The people who, at marriageable age, seem poised to succeed economically and socially, tend to marry one another. Johnnie doesn’t marry the girl next door, who might have been a plumber’s daughter while Daddy was a bank manager. 
Johnnie doesn’t marry anyone at all he met in high school, but holds out for someone who got into the same sort of selective college he got into. The children of the rich marry children of the rich, with notable allowances made for children of the nonrich who have accumulated credentials that signal a high likelihood of present or future affluence. Of course, love knows no boundaries. 
As a matter of simple arithmetic, increasing homogamy among the elite and successful implies a reduced probability that a person who cannot lay claim to that benighted group will be able to “marry up”, as it were. Once upon a time, in the halcyon days that Murray contrasts to the present, the courting would not have been so crass. There were many fewer markers of social class and future affluence.

Alert Jane Austen!

It's important to remember that the social conditions of America in 1946-1964 were not some sort of universal Old Days, but a historic high point of affordable family formation, as shown by an extremely young age of first marriage for women. The average age of first marriage for Englishwomen from 1200 to 1800 was around 25. In more affordable America from 1890-1940, it was 23 (before dropping to 20.4 in 1950).

Yet, we didn't have 40% illegitimacy rates in 1925 or 1880 or whenever.
The best and brightest were not so institutionally, geographically, and culturally segregated from the rest.

This news would have come as a surprise to Edith Wharton and Henry James. In 1900, for instance, a very large fraction of the wealthiest heiresses in the United States spent their summers at Newport, Rhode Island. We should not let our assumptions of what The Past was like be based solely upon watching Happy Days and Back to the Future.
(That is, within the community of white Americans. For black Americans, all of this is old hat.) The risk of “mismarrying”, for a male, was not so great, as he would be the primary breadwinner anyway, and her family, while perhaps poorer than his own, was unlikely to be in desperate straits. Men could choose whom they liked, in a personal, sexual, and romantic sense without great cost. 
Women from poor-ish backgrounds had a decent chance at landing a solid breadwinner, if not the next President. Very much like an insurance pool, a large and mixed pool of potential spouses renders marriage on average a pretty good deal for everyone. Really bad future husbands existed then as now, and then as now women were wise to do all they could to avoid marrying them. But the quality of a marriage is never revealed until well after you are in it. In a middle-class society, it was reasonable for a woman to guess that a nice guy she could fall in love with would be able to be a good husband and father too. 
Flash-forward to the present. We now live in a socially and economically stratified society. By the time we marry, we can ascertain with reasonable confidence what kind of job, income, neighborhood, and friends a potential mate is likely to come with. The stakes are much higher than they used to be. Our lifestyle norms are based on two-earner households, so men as well as women need to think hard about the earning prospects of potential mates.

But that also means that women would need to think less hard about whom to marry because the financial risk of picking a guy who turns out to not claw his way to the top is mitigated by her earning power.
Increasing economic dispersion — inequality — means that it is quite possible that a potential mate’s family faces circumstances vastly more difficult than ones own, if one is near the top of the distribution. It is unfashionable to say this in individualistic America, but it is as true now as it was for Romeo and Juliette that a marriage binds not only two people, but two families. If you have a good marriage, you will love your spouse. If you love your spouse and then her uninsured mother is diagnosed with cancer, those medical bills will to some perhaps large degree become your liability. More prosaically, if the inlaws can’t keep the heat on, do you wash your hands of it and let them shiver through the winter? In a very unequal society, the costs and risks of “marrying down” are large.

And this wasn't even truer in the past when people tended to have more in-laws and more of them tended to be close to the edge of actual physical suffering?

Waldman is sort of on to something here, but the lack of understanding of the concept of affordable family formation blurs his understanding. These days we're supposed to talk about Income Inequality and the One Percent, but what's really relevant here is not the One Percent but the supply and demand of housing and schooling free of the children of single mothers relative to wages, since Americans expect marriage to go with owning a home with a yard. The One Percent don't actually use up that much residential land and their swarming masses of children don't overwhelm public schools.

If they insisted in living Downton Abbeys surrounded by miles of scenic sightlines, yeah, sure. But what really uses up the supply of metropolitan land and tuition dollars is getting away from poor people, especially getting your children away from bastards. But all the Nice People tell us that it's very, very important to import more poor people from the third world to bring us the blessings of diversity.
As with an insurance pool, too much knowledge can poison the marriage pool, and reduce aggregate welfare by preventing distributive arrangements that everyone would rationally prefer in the absence of information, but which become the subject of conflict when information is known in advance.

Let me try to explain the math of where Waldman is coming from and why it isn't all the relevant to working class people. If Waldman's sister (who may be novelist Adelle Waldman, but probably isn't novelist Ayelet Waldman who is married to bestselling novelist Michael Chabon) is at, say, the 98th percentile of society and she's considering a man who is only at the 91st percentile, that 7-point gap is a big deal. You have to subtract the numbers from 100%: 9/2 is 4.5. That's really marrying down.

(I had to do this math once to convince a small town student's family to have her take the ACT a second time. She had scored at the 88th percentile the one time she took the test, which seemed pretty good to them. But then after I badgered her father into getting her to study up and retake the test, she scored at the 95th percentile. That meant she leapfrogged over 7/12ths of the people in her way, which is a lot.)

On the other hand, if you are talking about some woman who is at the 44th percentile of society and her beau is at the 37th percentile, well that's not really a big deal. But that's hard for somebody who writes long blog posts about what Charles Murray overlooked to grasp.
Because the stakes are now very high and the information very solid, good marriage prospects (in a crass socioeconomic sense) hold out for other good marriage prospects.

There is a lot of projection going on here of from the top few percent where people obsess over brand name colleges to the rest of society.
The pool that’s left over, once all the people capable of signaling their membership in the socioeconomic elite have been “creamed” away, may often be, objectively, a bad one. Marriage has a fat lower tail.

Which is why European ancestors insisted upon a harem system. Oh, wait, no, they found a one husband - one wife system worked better than African style one husband-many wives systems. Of course, that big mistake is why Europeans were conquered by Africans: polygamy just makes better societies.
When you marry, you risk physical abuse,

Fortunately, all these young women who don't marry join convents where these bad marriage prospects can't get at them to beat them up.

Oh, wait, no, they're actually sleeping with, getting impregnated by, and getting smacked around by these guys.
you risk appropriation of your wealth and income, you risk mistreatment of the children you hope someday to have, you risk the Sartre-ish hell of being bound eternally to someone whose company is intolerable.

Whereas having a couple of kids by a couple of guys you didn't marry ushers you into a social world where all your beaus are as decent and supportive as Mitt Romney.
More commonly, you risk forming a household that is unable to get along reasonably in an economic sense, causing conflicts and crises and miseries even among well-intentioned and decent people. It is quite rational to demand a lot of evidence that a potential mate sits well above the fat left tail, but the ex ante uncertainty is always high. When the right-hand side of the desirability distribution is truncated away, marriage may simply be a bad risk.

Whereas motherhood before marriage is a safe bet.
If you are at all libertarian, what the behavior of the poor tells you is that it is a bad risk.

Whereas being a welfare mom is the quintessence of playing it safe.
After all, marriage is not subject to a Bryan-Caplan-esque critique of politics, where people make bad choices in the voting booth that they would not make in the supermarket because they don’t own the costs of a bad vote. The consequences of a decision to marry or not to marry or who to marry are internalized very deeply by the people who make them. Humans, rich and poor, have strong incentives to try to make those choices well. Both common sense, social science, and revealed preference suggest that marriage rates among the poor have declined because the value of the contingent claim upon the future represented by the words “I do” has also declined within the affected population.
Promoting marriage among this population is not merely ineffective. It is at best ineffective. If the marriage-promoters persuade people to marry despite circumstances that render it likely they will marry poorly, the do-gooders will have done outright harm.

Or maybe they can persuade the person that having a child before marriage is not such a hot idea?
Pacific Islanders no doubt bore some cost to build their wooden planes, lashed to a mistaken theory of causality. But lives were not destroyed. Overcoming peoples’ well-founded misgivings about the quality of potential mates with moral exhortations and clipboards of superficial social science might well destroy lives. It would create plenty of success stories for marriage promoters, sure, because even bad bets turn out well now and again. But it would create more tragedies than successes, tragedies that very likely would be blamed on personal deficiencies of the unhappy couple while the successes would be victories for marriage itself in some insane ideological version of the fundamental attribution error.

I'm really not clear on the math here. Waldman seems to think it would be catastrophic for many women to be persuaded to have children only by their own personal Loser. But the real world alternative is having children by several losers. How does that work out better?
... But what about the children? One variant of marriage-centric social theory refrains from pushing marriage so hard, and simply asks that people delay childrearing until the marriage comes. (See e.g. Reihan Salam for some discussion.) If a woman is likely to find a good spouse at a reasonable age, then it might make sense to suggest she delay childbearing until the happy couple is stable and married, since kids reared by married biological parents seem to do better than other kids. Even that is subject to a causality concern: Perhaps childrearing is best performed by the kind of mother capable of finding a good mate, and at a time some unobservable factor renders her both ready to raise a child well and likely to take a husband.

E.g., she finally notices the older she gets the sexier she ain't.

A huge fraction of modern marketing is aimed at convincing women that they can get sexier in the future. All I Have to Do is buy the right makeup, lose the baby weight, get a new wardrobe, get a gym membership, eat at the right restaurants, and I'll be sexier than I am now. Would Oprah lie to me? So why should I throw away my sexytabulous future and settle for some guy who likes me now? You see, I need to lose a few pounds. Sure, I'll have a baby with him now, but then I'll lose all the baby weight and have a giant wedding. With him or maybe with somebody better. But exactly who is going to be the groom is not the point. The point is I'm going to have a giant wedding and be the star, so I can't have a crummy wedding now just because I'm kind of in the mood to have a baby. I can make a baby for free, but weddings cost money. So, if my mom wins the Lotto, or if my dad ever turns up, then somebody will pay for my amazing wedding (but not until after I lose the baby weight).
This would create a spurious correlation between the presence of biological fathers and good kid outcomes. We can’t rule that out, sure. But we have no reason to think it’s so, and lots of common sense reasons to think a biological father in a stable marriage improves outcomes by contributing to better parenting. So, I’d agree that women likely to find great marriage partners should by all means delay children until they have actually found one. 
But women likely to find great marriage partners already do exactly that. Single motherhood is not a frequent occurrence among women who expect to marry happily and soon. The relevant question is whether we should discourage from having children women who reasonably expect they may not find a good spouse at all, at least not while they are in their youth.

Because while it's apparently hard to find a man Good Enough to Be My Husband, it's evidently easy to find a man Good Enough to Be the Father of My Child.
That is to say, should we tell women who have been segregated into the bad marriage market, who on average have lowish incomes and unruly neighbors and live near bad schools, that motherhood is just not for them, probably ever? 

Yes.
We could bring back norms of shame surrounding single motherhood, or create other kinds of incentives to reduce the nonadoption birth rate of people statistically likely to raise difficult kids. It is possible. 

Indeed.
I think it would be monstrous.

It would be monstrous if the taxpayers chose to subsidize less lavishly the breeding of more Democrats.
I believe that, as a society, we should commit ourselves to creating circumstances in which the fundamentally human experience of parenthood is available to all, not barred from those we’ve left behind on our way to good schools and walkable neighborhoods. Women unlikely to marry who wish to have children by all means should. The shame is ours, not theirs.

We're up to 40% bastards now. Why not 80%?
It belongs to those of us who call ourselves “elite”, who are so proud of our “achievements” that we walk away without a care from the majority of our fellow citizens and fellow humans, from people who in other circumstances, even in the not so distant past, would have been our friends and coworkers, lovers and spouses. It’s on us to join together what we have put asunder.

You know, what married parents are spending huge amounts of money to do is to get their children away from the ever-increasing numbers of bastards in the schools. How is having even more bastards in the schools going to lessen the economic pressures to get your kids into schools with few bastards?