Unaffordable Family Formation

A reader points me toward this CNN article from May:

Indianapolis was the leader among all major U.S. cities for housing affordability during the first quarter of 2006, according to the latest figures from the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo.

More than 90 percent of homes in the Indiana capital were affordable to families earning the median income for the area of about $65,100.

In Los Angeles, the least affordable big metro area, only 1.9 percent of the homes sold were within the reach of families earning a median income for the city of $56,200.

My reader goes on to cite definitive proof that expensive housing was not the case in LA before immigration cranked up. From 1971:

L.A.'s fine, the sun shines most the time
And the feeling is 'lay back'
Palm trees grow, and rents are low
But you know I keep thinkin' about
Making my way back

Good point, although I'm not sure if the famous chorus adds much to Neil Diamond's economic argument:

"I am," I said
To no one there
An no one heard at all
Not even the chair

As Dave Barry pointed out:

I realize that many of you are huge Neil Diamond fans, so let me stress that in matters of musical taste, everybody is entitled to an opinion, and yours is wrong, Consider the song "I Am, I Said," wherein Neil, with great emotion, sings:

I am, I said To no one there And no one heard at all Not even the chair.

What kind of line is that? Is Neil telling us that he's surprised that the chair didn't hear him? Maybe he expected the chair to say, "Whoa, I heard THAT." My guess is that Neil was really desperate to come up with something to rhyme with "there," and he had already rejected "So I ate a pear," "Like Smokey the Bear," and "There were nits in my hair."

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

Classic Fukuyama

In the Washington Post in "History's Against Him," Francis Fukuyama tries to stick some fingers in the leaking dyke of his End of History theory by explaining that the popularity of Hugo Chavez is a product of high oil prices. Good point, although that's something I noted last February:

Why are anti-American populists Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the news so much?

High oil prices. Populism is a winning political strategy when you have lots of windfall oil profits to spend on publicity stunts.

But what makes his long essay classic Fukuyama is that he tries to explain the upsurge of Latin American leftist populism without ever mentioning ... race. It's obvious just by looking at pictures of representatives of the the different sides in Latin America that the essential root of the conflict is that white people more or less own Latin America and dark people aren't happy about that fact. But Fukuyama is resolved to remain oblivious to the obvious.

As I wrote in VDARE in 2003 in my review of Amy Chua's World on Fire:

Francis Fukuyama famously announced at the end of the Cold War that humanity had reached "the end of history." Unfortunately, he forgot to tell history not to bother coming to work anymore.

Easy as it is to make fun of Fukuyama, where exactly did he go wrong?

Fukuyama's conception was formed by his expensive miseducation in the works of Hegel and other 19th Century German philosophers. History consists of the struggle to determine the proper ideology. Now there are no plausible alternatives to capitalist democracy. History, therefore, must be finished.

Lenin held a more realistic theory of what history is about: not ideology, but "Who? Whom?” (You can insert your own transitive verb between the two words.) History continues because the struggle to determine who will be the who rather than the whom will never end.

Fukuyama may be the only major nonwhite American intellectual who does not write primarily about race. This is admirable in many ways, but it's a fatal shortcoming in a thinker of such expansive ambitions. Race remains enormously relevant in this world.

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

Christopher Hitchens' Hero

On Tuesday, August 8th, BBC Radio 4 will broadcast a segment in their "Great Lives" series, in which prominent personalities are asked to offer a tribute to their heroes. Can you guess whom Christopher Hitchens, the prominent neocon and critic of Mel Gibson, chose? The BBC website promises

A fiery return for the biographical series in which Matthew Parris chooses the living, and the living choose the dead. Christopher Hitchens proposes Leon Trotsky, the hero of the Russian Revolution later assassinated with an ice pick in the skull. He sees him as the perfect combination of the man of ideas and man of action, and says Trotsky's writings still make the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Matthew Parris is joined by Professor Robert Service in resisting him all the way.

Last year, Tom Piatak wrote in "The Purest Neocon" in The American Conservative:

Hitchens—now honored throughout the neoconservative Right—remains what he has been throughout his public life, a disciple of Leon Trotsky and a talented writer and polemicist—perhaps the most talented polemicist the Bolshevik tradition has produced in the West. [More]

It's important to realize that just because Trotsky lost out to Stalin, that doesn't mean Trotsky wasn't a comparably bloodthirsty creature. Indeed, Stalin's Ukrainian Holocaust was in pursuit of Trotsky's policy of collectivization of the farms. During the 1920s, Stalin had posed as a "moderate" in his struggles with the blatantly extremist Trotsky. Once he'd driven out Trotsky, though, lacking his own ideas, he quickly adopted Trotsky's economic policy of forced collectivization, with all the genocidal horrors that entailed.

Stalin and Trotsky did, however, genuinely differ on foreign policy, with Trotsky advocating global revolution, while the relatively less fanatical Stalin backed "socialism in one country" with only opportunistic expansion of Soviet power, such as after WWII or when, in early 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson stupidly left South Korea out of the list of Asian countries America would fight to defend. This degree of prudence on Stalin's part is why the many well-meaning people who claim that Stalin was just as bad as, or worse than, Hitler, are wrong. Hitler tried to conquer the world, and thus he unleashed the biggest slaughter of all time. Stalin's paranoia -- with all the bloodshed it inflicted on his own subjects -- made him less dangerous to the rest of the world. If Trotsky had outmaneuvered Stalin, however, he might well have rivaled or even surpassed Hitler as a cause of carnage.

A reader who was an old drinking buddy of Christopher Hitchens points out that Hitch regularly had his own Mel Gibson Moments after a dozen scotches:

When I knew him, he claimed to be the "world's biggest anti-Semite" and a great friend of the Palestinians. Then he "discovered" a Jewish great-aunt and began a reassessment of his antecedents, or just decided to give the flip-side a spin or two.

I wrote on my blog in 2005, commenting on an extraordinary dialogue between the long-estranged brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens over their infant rivalry:

I've pointed out that what might look like ideological clashes on the surface are often actually just rationalizations for ethnic clashes between extended families, but the Hitchens Brothers represent an interesting case of an ethnic clash between brothers within a nuclear family. [Tory] Peter was the favorite of their English father, [Trotskyite] Christopher of their [possibly] Jewish mother [who committed suicide]. Christopher is still an atheist, but as Paul Johnson pointed out in his "History of the Jews," it's been common down through the centuries for young atheist intellectuals to become more focused on Jewish ethnic interests as they age, without necessarily becoming theists. The conversion to the ideology of neoconism of Christopher, who, despite his hatred of religion, has taken to dropping in to synagogues as he travels to express his ethnic solidarity, is a good example of this venerable tendency toward gerontocratic ethnocentrism.

I suspect that Christopher Hitchens used to love Trotsky for being a Communist mass murderer, but now loves Trotsky more for being a Jewish mass murderer.

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

The Catastrophes of Small Talk

Mean Mr. Mustard recounts:

We went to arrange the service with the minister on Saturday. Michelle must've told him about the bar because the first thing he said after I met him was, "So how was the test?" I told him how I thought it was actually rather easy, compared to my expectations, and that I was pretty confident I passed. He then said, "My wife failed it 22 times." I of course immediately began to feel like a heel for going on about how manageable I found it.

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

Mini-WWIII

The WSJ had a front page article yesterday called "Why Hezbollah Is Proving So Tough On the Battlefield:"

As Israel ended its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, its army left behind part of a strategic outpost known as Karqom. Concerned they might damage an ancient synagogue nearby, soldiers hesitated to level the outpost, as they did the rest of their military infrastructure.

When Israel's military returned to Karqom during the fighting in recent weeks, what was left of the outpost was gone. In its place was a fortified, 5,000-square-foot Hezbollah military base with a radio tower, secure satellite communications and a unit of more than a dozen guards.

I had to read that number a couple of times to realize what they were talking about: "5,000-square-what?" I'm used to military bases like the Marines' Camp Pendleton, which occupies about 200 square miles of prime Southern California real estate stretching 17.5 miles along the Pacific Ocean between Greater Los Angeles and San Diego. That's well over five billion square feet. And Fort Hood in Texas is about 70% bigger.

A military base of less than 1/8th of an acre? You could fit two of them on a run of the mill quarter-acre suburban lot. It's less than one-millionth the size of Camp Pendleton.

I keep harping on the miniature scale of the current war in Lebanon to counteract the "WWIII" hysteria. For example, here's a listing from today's National Review Online:

AT WAR: MIDEAST

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: It’s the 1930s all over again. “The Brink of Madness”

The Brink of Madness, indeed.

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

Christopher Hitchens: A man of deep, deep faith

A reader translates an interview with Christopher Hitchens in Brazil's Veja:

Veja: So, your ideal or utopia today is a totally secular society?

CH: Yes. My next book, which I already finished but which hasn't been published yet, will have the title God Is Not Great. The title openly contradicts a well-known principle of Islamic faith, but the book is not just a criticism of Islam. It is against belief in God. I belief that someone who considers himself a radical today has to defend and disseminate scientific discoveries in such areas as cosmology and genetics, for two reasons. The first is to combat racism. We already had the moral abolition of racism, and the discoveries of genetics now brought us its scientific abolition.

Christopher Hitchens apparently has a transcendent belief in the miracle that somehow the random processes of Darwinian selection ended up making every every race exactly equal in everything. That would be like flipping a coin 100 times and having it wind up on its edge every time.

Hitchens is a classic example of Glaivester's great line that a lot of people assume:

"I thought the whole point of evolution was just to deny God. I didn't think it was actually supposed to tell us anything."

As I wrote in Toronto's National Post in 1999 in "Darwin's Enemies on the Left:"

The equal worth of all human souls has been one of the most popular, influential, and beneficial of all Christian beliefs. It inspired many of the great humanitarian achievements in Western history, such as the abolition of the slave trade. Science can neither prove nor disprove spiritual equality -- a defect in a scientific theory, but a blessing in a religious doctrine. By contrast, the literal interpretation of Genesis that the world was created in 4004 BC was eminently refutable, as Darwin demonstrated.

Although the Darwinian demolition of Old Testament fundamentalism was logically irrelevant to the question of whether all souls are of equal value to God, it made the whole of Christianity seem outdated. Thereafter the prestige of evolutionary biology encouraged egalitarians to discard that corny creed of spiritual equality - and to adopt the shiny new scientific hypotheses that humans are physically and mentally uniform. And that eventually put Darwinian science on a collision course with progressive egalitarians.

For Darwinism requires hereditary inequalities...

Darwin did not dream up the Theory of Evolution. Many earlier thinkers, like his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and the great French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, had proposed various schemes of gradual changes in organisms. Darwin's great contribution was the precise engine of evolution: selection. Lamarck, for example, had believed that giraffes possess long necks because their ancestors had stretched their necks to reach higher leaves. This stretching somehow caused their offspring to be born with longer necks. Darwin, however, argued that the proto-giraffes who happened to be born with longer necks could eat more and thus left behind more of their longer-necked children than the proto-giraffes unlucky enough to be born with shorter necks.

And what selection selects are genetic differences. In "The Descent of Man," Darwin wrote, "Variability is the necessary basis for the action of selection."

Consider the full title of Darwin's epochal book: "The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." It is hard to imagine two words that could get a scholar in worse trouble today than "Favoured Races." But that term is not some deplorable Dead White European Maleism that we can scrape away to get down to its multiculturally sensitive core. Not at all: "Favoured Races" is Darwin's Big Idea. For if we didn't differ genetically, selection could not act upon us.

And the flood of data pouring in since then from genetic studies like the HapMap -- in which Bob Moyzis found 1,800 genes that differ sizably among the major races -- only confirms this logic.

As I wrote six years ago in "Seven Dumb Ideas about Race:"

Much of the Race Does Not Exist cant stems from the following logic (if you can call it logic): “If there really are different racial groups, then one must be The Master Race, which means -- oh my God – that Hitler Was Right! Therefore, we must promote whatever ideas most confuse the public about race. Otherwise, they will learn the horrible truth and they'll all vote Nazi.”

Look, this is one big non sequitur: Of course, there are different racial groups. And of course their members tend to inherit certain different genes, on average, than the members of other racial groups. And that means racial groups will differ, on average, in various innate capabilities. But that also means that no group can be supreme at all jobs. To be excellent at one skill frequently implies being worse at something else. So, there can't be a Master Race. Sports fans can cite countless examples. Men of West African descent monopolize the Olympic 100m dash, but their explosive musculature, which is so helpful in sprinting, weighs them down in distance running, where they are also-rans. Similarly, there are far more Samoans in the National Football League than Chinese, simply because Samoans tend to be much, much bigger. But precisely because Samoans are so huge, they'll never do as well as the Chinese in gymnastics.

It's not a good idea for members of the faith-based community like Hitchens to proclaim things like: Science proves we're all genetically equal, so therefore you shouldn't be beastly toward people of other races. The obvious flaw in this strategy is that eventually people will figure out that you are lying about what the science of genetics says, and therefore, by your own logic, that discredits the perfectly valid second half of your assertion.

By the way, does Hitchens know anything about the history of cosmology in the 20th Century? Two of the most important breakthroughs were extensions of classic proofs for the existence of God -- Father Lemaitre's Big Bang idea is reflective of the Aristotle-Aquinas Prime Mover argument and Brandon Carter's Anthropic Principle builds on the Rev. Paley's Argument from Design -- as I pointed out in "Darwin's Enemies on the Right?"

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

If Shi'ites with ties to Iran

are the most dangerous people in the world, as the neocons are saying this week, then why did the neocons three years ago want to invade Iraq in order to put in as President of Iraq a Shi'ite who frequently vacations at his villa in Tehran: Ahmad Chalabi?

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

More on bribery

A reader writes:

Bribery has been used very effectively in the past to keep potential enemies tame. In World War 2 there was a British-American scheme to buy off General Franco's military advisers to keep Spain neutral, according to this New York Times book review of Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets:

And the research is at its most impressive when Stafford reconstructs a byzantine British-American scheme to bribe the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and his military command to keep Spain out of the war. That scheme involved $10 million, an infamous international financier, the United States Treasury and Churchill's man in Madrid. And it seems to have worked.

It only cost $10 million, which even in 1940s money seems like a bargain to eliminate Spain from the War.

I hadn't heard that before and I can't confirm it elsewhere yet.

Certainly Franco's lack of enthusiasm for the Axis cause, despite German and Italian aid to the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, was strategically important.

After the Americans and the British landed in northwest Africa in November 1942, the U.S. was scared that Franco would let the German army move through Spain and fall on the green American troops from the rear. (The OSS gave the two-fisted physical anthropologist Carleton Coon the mission, in that eventuality, of becoming the "Lawrence of Morocco:" he was to disappear into the Atlas mountains and organize the wild Berber tribes that he had long studied into a guerilla resistance.) Fortunately, Franco ungratefully kept the Germans at arm's length.

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

Time to cut out the middleman

To influence the Middle East, why buy influence in Washington, when it's even cheaper to buy it directly in the Middle East?

One of the anomalies of modern history is how cheap it is to buy long term influence in Washington. America is a vastly wealthy country, but only a tiny fraction of its rich men bother to pay for the kind of institutions that can have long term effects on the direction of American policy.

The Exile ran a story pointing out how an ultra-corrupt American politician like Rep. Rep. Duke Cunningham is a penny ante thief, stealing a few million. Rep. Jefferson was found with $90,000 in his freezer. Hoo-boy. In contrast, quite a few Russian politicians, despite a tiny economy to leech from, have ended up with hundreds of millions or even billions.

But you can be a perfectly honest donor and buy influence legitimately by paying for a think tank or a magazine. Public policy intellectuals are cheap. I've visited the offices of the think tank with perhaps the most influence on global events in this decade, and, let me tell you, it looked pretty non-descript compared to the average third tier corporate law firm's office.

But, even leasing wonks to agitate to get the U.S. is to do what you want in the Middle East seems pretty expensive compared to going to the source. Right now, tens of millions of dollars are being spent in Washington to persuade the U.S. into a war with Iran or Syria to deal with the problem that Hezbollah is causing Israel. Such a war would no doubt cost the American taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars, So, the return on investment to the investors would be pretty high.

But the nutty thing is that the annual Iranian subsidy of Hezbollah, which we are constantly told is a world-historical crisis, turns out to be about $100 million.

For 28 years, the U.S. has paid Egypt $2 billion annually not to blunder into another war with Israel. This has been a good deal for all concerned, but it's pretty expensive because it's public. I would imagine you could rent most of the important people in Egypt for a lot less, if you did it surreptitiously with deposits in the right Swiss bank accounts.

Lebanon is a tiny country compared to Egypt with less than $4 million, which is why Iran's $100 million seems so vast to them.

Surely, the friends of Israel could outbid Iran for influence in Lebanon? There's always the problem of making sure the VIPs you buy stay bought, but the people who have the money to spend on this problem are often geniuses at structuring deals, so that doesn't seem insurmountable.

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

A thought on "nation building"

The last two administrations have devoted a lot of effort to nation building abroad, but there is a fundamental problem with the idea: historically, nations are primarily built by war, especially against invading Great Powers. United Germany, for example, was built mostly by war with the French, especially defeat by Napoleon and victory over Napoleon III.

The United States most definitely did not "build" the nations of West Germany and Japan after WWII. Instead, we took two supremely united nations that had been forged into terrible instruments of war and defanged them. The Occupations, the transformations of these two militarist nation-states into good neighbors, were perhaps the greatest triumph of American New Dealers, much more impressive in many ways than the New Deal itself.

In contrast, despite all the big talk about Islamofascism, Iraq is the anti-Germany. The sinister fact is that the only plausible way that we could facilitate the nation building of Iraq is by losing to some upstart Iraqi insurgent, as modern Turkey was forged by Ataturk in his victories over the British and French would-be colonialists after WWI. So far, no general of genius has emerged in the Iraqi insurgency, but it might still happen.

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

The Bad News and the Good News about "4th Generation Warfare:"

The U.S. has shown itself in Iran poorly equipped to fight guerillas who use civilians as shields. We're too humane to use the old Roman method -- kill 'em all, civilian and militant, and let the gods sort them out -- and too ignorant about Iraq to eliminate the bad guys retail.

We'll know fairly soon whether the Israelis have some better way to handle underground fighters. It would be nice if they did, because asymmetrical warfare is a major nuisance, and weaponry is only going to get smaller and more easily hidden. Right now, the Hezbollah guerrillas' rockets are mostly of the kind that Francis Scott Key would vaguely recognize -- they fired 200 rockets into Israel yesterday, their biggest barrage yet, and killed one Israeli civilian. So far, while trying not to hurt civilians, the Israeli Air Force has killed vastly more civilians than Hezbollah has while trying to kill civilians. But we can't assume that happy state of affairs will last for too many more years or decades. In the future they might someday have enough guidance or nasty enough weapons to cause real trouble.

On the other hand, the good news is that not too many ambitious men want to live like guerilla chieftains for the rest of their lives, sleeping in caves or a different safe house every night. So the problem is somewhat self-limiting.

Say the Hezbollah leader comes out of this fracas much strengthened and eventually he succeeds in modernizing the 1932 Lebanese census gerrymander that restricts the Shi'ites to the lowly Speaker of the House role, and under the new principle of one-man one-vote he gets elected President of Lebanon. His followers then take control of the big government ministries and he moves into a beautiful presidential mansion in Beirut overlooking the sea, preaching blood and thunder from his majestic presidential balcony.

That's the end of the world, right? Well, actually, no. If that happened, the Israeli air force, which has complete air supremacy, can then credibly deter him by threatening to blow up the physical emblems of his triumph, along with him personally in his magnificent presidential bed, just as they've deterred their other neighbors for a generation.

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