February 6, 2011

"The Great Stagnation" by Tyler Cowen

At VDARE, I review the new E-book by Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation:
The economist offers three main reasons for this stagnation, all three of which I’ve been discussing for years. Cowen sums them up in a single concept:
“All of these problems have a single, little noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least 300 years. Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there.”

According to Cowen, America benefited in the past from three main kinds of “low-hanging fruit:”
* “Free land”
* “Technological breakthroughs”      
* “Smart, uneducated kids”

Sound familiar?

Read the whole thing there.

145 comments:

Tino said...

One of your best posts.

Dutch Boy said...

What's up with these idiot economists? Those jobs aren't going away,they are being done elsewhere (e.g., China). Export the jobs, bring in people to compete for what's left and you'll have a mess.

Bruce Charlton said...

It's not stagnation - it is decline.

And why? Because people *aren't even trying*.

And why? Because they oscillate between amusing themselves to death with short-termist hedonism; and sensible, miserable, grinding, guilt-ridden bureaucratic pseudo-altruism.

And why? Because people believe in nothing. Reality is denied. Truth, beauty and virtue are seen as merely relativistic, underpinned by nothing real.

As the inertia of earlier Christian generations is overcome, we are left living-out Nietzsche's predictions, Dostoevsky's predictions: modernity is underpinned by nothing; by nihilism - by empty assertions and empty distractions.

None of the problems of modernity will be fixed because nobody is even trying to fix them, because nobody believes in anything - amazingly, people don't even believe consistently in the importance of their own comfort and happiness. (They may say they do, but their actions clearly show they don't.)

The troubles are deep: much deeper than economics, politics and science (and art, and law, and so on). The basic secular modern public self-understanding of the human condition is grossly incoherent - which is the reason why the problems exist and the reason why the problems are not acknowledged and the reason why the problems are not being fixed; and (I fear) why the problems will not ever be *fixed* but simply swept-away.

Anonymous said...

Tyler is exactly like one of the countless mid-level Soviet apparatchiks I used to know. He has his sinecure job guaranteed for life and paid for by the public. The job does not produce any value and is in fact slightly harmful. Like them, he knows the truth but dares not speak of it.

Anonymous said...

Wow, definitely your best article to date--a true tour-de-force!

BRAVO!!!

Luke Lea said...

Those things are all true. Still, our economy continues to grow because capital grows when it is invested and reinvested. Capital is what makes labor productive. The problem is that various factors -- trade, immigration, labor-saving technologies -- are skewing the division of our economic pie. If a way could be found to fairly and efficiently transfer income from capital to labor -- without destroying the incentives to save and invest -- then all could be made well.

There is such a way. It is called a graduated expenditure tax. Irving Fisher wrote about it back at the beginning of World War II.

Descartes said...

If there seems to be a fundamental mismatch with unqualified immigrants and the evolving economy, why shouldn't qualified immigrants be imported in mass numbers?

They apparently can handle the type of work needed. The only question against them is from nationalist and "posterity" sentiments.

I always held the fundamental belief that Sayer's law will prove right, granted they aren't disabled. That is to say that while the average worker will have a lower income than otherwise, the economy as a whole will still be larger.

Whiskey said...

A great column.

Let me add that all across the world, the same basic phenomena is happening: low cost labor that is foreign brought in to make the elites happy in electing a new people causes great strife as the newcomers attempt to either take over and/or the natives fight back.

agnostic said...

I just took a stab at quantifying the rate of tech invention, and it does show a steady downturn after 1985, and a plateau-ing of the long-term upward trend from the start of the industrial revolution until about 1900:

Stagnation in inventions

Anonymous said...

The way I've read it described is that the "power revolution" was the chief driver of growth between the first Industrial Revolution and the mid-Twentieth Century. Increases in the cheapness and available power were the primary driver for growth. However, this eventually stalled out.

Growth has since been maintained by a new primary driver, the "computing revolution" - rapidly increasing computer power, but this does not seem to lead to the same kind of real growth.

Simon in London said...

America overall still has a lot of land, so I think it's more the low quality of the post-65 immigration wave than their filling up the country that is the big problem. The lack of community cohesion due to the attack on the Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-Celtic leitkultur is another related factor which hits the median-earning middle class hard, as you explain.

Re technology; the Wave of Speed that peaked 1900-1945 is clearly over, but the Internet is a big change that has not been worked through yet; eg there are much greater possibilities for remote/home working than we have yet seen.

Simon in London said...

BTW Americans should understand that their leadership class isn't just bringing in immigrants for economic reasons; they also want to "rub your noses in Diversity", just like our British elites.

Anonymous said...

Steve,
Cowen fails to mention probably the biggest cause of them all - the twin oil shocks of 1973 and '81 and the deflationary policies thereafter adopted by western governments to deal with the crisis.
Basically, the stagnation engendered by the deflationary policies knocked the stuffing out of Europe and America for a generation.The previous years had been an era of optimism 'onwards and upwards' in which people genuinely felt everything was possible and rising prosperity was guaranteed - the oil crisis brought them back to earth witha bump.
Also consider China.Nearly 40 years after the oil shocks, the economies of thewest areas bombed out as ever, but this time demographic factors (a lack of the young in Europe, poor quality young in the USA), have set this in stone - the downward spiral is inescapable.All the world's growth omes from China, the ridiculous prices of commodities (eg copper), proved Ehrlich right after the fact despite the oil shock bollixing his calculations.The irony is that America pushed so hard to open up China, because the elites thought it would be in America's best interest, the idea was that a mass amrket of 1.3 billion peasants and eager seamstresses would be a boost for hi-tech, high-value added highly engineered US product, but the 'lifesaver' didn't quite pan out that way.Instead Germany and Japan took all this plum business.
Also relevant are the hollowing out of US industry, massive uncontrolled low quality immigration and bad government.

Simon in London said...

BTW, stagnation since 1973 is an American thing. Thanks to Thatcher, the average Brit is definitely more comfortably off now. There was a big leap in living standards in the second half of the 1990s as we came out of the early '90s recession and reaped the rewards of her smashing the unions.

There has been stagnation since 2000 as New Labour reaped the Thatcherite harvest into a massively expanded State-sector, pumped money into the NHS with no regard for output/service quality, brought in millions of parasite immigrants (plus the Poles, who actually work), and generally set us up for the current hard times.

Anonymous said...

sailer writes: "Cowen shies away from mentioning immigration much in his book."

Yes, steve, he sure does. But WHY does he do that? Oh, you may reply that nobody in 'polite society' feels comfortable talking about it. But why, Steve? Why?


You may say that there is cultural pressure and a taboo around the subject. Correct, Steve. But why does that taboo exist at all?

Cui bono?

-cryofan

Anonymous said...

BCG, I suspect you have the same problem I have with Steve here: His analysis is hyper materialist. Any resilient civilisation should be able to abide longer than a decade or two in the economic 'sweet spot'. The golden years in California was at the tail end of the 'austerity period' in Britain, yet, for all their poverty and lack of Earthly prospects, people did not behave ... well... the way they do now.
Gilbert Pinfold.

Difference Maker said...

If there seems to be a fundamental mismatch with unqualified immigrants and the evolving economy, why shouldn't qualified immigrants be imported in mass numbers?

They apparently can handle the type of work needed. The only question against them is from nationalist and "posterity" sentiments.

I always held the fundamental belief that Sayer's law will prove right, granted they aren't disabled. That is to say that while the average worker will have a lower income than otherwise, the economy as a whole will still be larger.


We have (had) among the best human capital here, there's no need to go about helping others steal our jobs.

Earth has a bigger economy than the United States; I'm sure you'll be satisfied with the per capita income.

RKU said...

Well, it's pretty clear that most of the social problems diagnosed seem to be classic symptoms of a significant parasitic infestation.

When some poor cow tends to eat and eat, but still grow thinner and sicklier, there's a pretty good chance that the ingested calories are being diverted by macro-parasites (such as tapeworms) or micro-parasites (such as hoof-and-mouth disease).

Similarly, when lots of people in a society work diligently at productive jobs, but get poorer and poorer, it's useful to consider where the generated value is ending up and in whose pockets. It's pretty obvious that a very substantial portion of the (white collar) employees in America don't really produce anything of value, and often these are among the highest paid professions (and No, I'm not referring to the odd Facebook or YouTube founder). The late, unlamented USSR had very similar problems with massive economic parasitism by its Nomanklatura, and it wouldn't surprise me if we're headed for the same fate. Unfortunately, once the parasites have seized control of the host's central nervous system, cognitive, and control functions---the media, the academy, and the government---rooting them out becomes increasingly difficult.

But it's *awfully* silly to link this serious problem with immigration, since the overwhelmingly majority of immigrants are concentrated in the productive sectors of the economy, especially the blue collar professions where something is actually produced, and are massively under-represented in the governmental sectors, among the greatest locus of obvious parasitism. Construction workers, nurses, and small shopkeepers just aren't parasites in any meaningful sense.

Here's another point to consider. A couple of days ago the NYT had a chart showing the horrific social problems in various Mid Eastern countries, notably the massive disparity of wealth between rich and poor, leading to the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. For comparison, the chart also included America, and anyone who looked at the numbers noticed that America's social situation was actually worse than nearly any of those Third World despotisms.

There was a seemingly reputable study that as of a few years ago, the top 1% of American households possessed roughly the same net wealth as the bottom 85-90%. Now except for the wealthiest individuals, the bulk of household wealth is represented by home equity, and given the subsequent collapse of the Housing Bubble (plus the rebound in the stock market), I'd guess that the numbers today are far more extreme. Societies in which the top 1% own as much as perhaps the bottom 95% are dynamically unstable, especially if a good fraction of that 95% are in a state of permanent debt-peonage from underwater home mortgages, heavy credit-card debt, and huge student loans. To the extent that the government itself is meanwhile borrowing well over a trillion dollars each year to keep afloat, the situation seems dire indeed. Frankly, I doubt even most Third World countries are in this relative situation.

Another Anon said...

"BTW, stagnation since 1973 is an American thing. Thanks to Thatcher, the average Brit is definitely more comfortably off now."

OK, but Britain was starting from a nadir in 1973 unlike anything Americans have experienced since the Great Depression.

"Similarly, when lots of people in a society work diligently at productive jobs, but get poorer and poorer, it's useful to consider where the generated value is ending up and in whose pockets. It's pretty obvious that a very substantial portion of the (white collar) employees in America don't really produce anything of value, and often these are among the highest paid professions"

You sound like Half Sigma with his "value transference" nonsense. That's the kind of thinking that led to communism in the first place. The communists thought they were getting rid of value transference but they were actually getting rid of value creation.

Anonymous said...

Simon in London,
Actually the era before 1973, especially the 50s and 60s, were, for working class Brits the most prosperous years they had ever known or ever likely to know.They were the 'never had it so good years'.Wages rose year on year, good jobs were abundant, housing affordable.The peak year was probably 1968.
The phenomenom of mass unemployment and the existence of a permanent nasty undercalss were a concomitant of Thatcher.Briatin lost most of its productive industry in her reign resulting in massive, permanent trade deficits (the 2nd biggest in the world after the USA). She though that banking would replace productive industry - and we all know where that got us.

From a fellow Tootingnite, whose well disposed towards you, probably passed you in the street, but is definitely NOT a Thatcherite.

carol said...

"America pushed so hard to open up China, because the elites thought it would be in America's best interest"

Hahaha, the Open Door swung both ways. How condescending we were, to think it couldn't happen. Has much been written on the process? I remember when business execs were traveling to China was supposed to be a big breakthrough, because they were assumed to be so conservative. LOL.

slumber_j said...

Steve Sailer writes, "The Great Stagflation an electronic file somewhere in length between a magazine article and a real book."

Okay: do we not have a word in English for the non-fiction equivalent of a novella? I can't think of one. "Treatise" doesn't quite get there, does it? Odd.

Anonymous said...

As Jerry Pournelle says, if you have cheap power you can do a lot.

Gas keeps going up. Windmill power plant numbers are fake. We don't build nuke plants.

We don't have cheap power any more. There is a lot we can't do.

wwwww said...

for a employer to hire a blue collar worker he will be taxed ,regulated and sued by the the govt.high corporate taxes, disparate impact suits and our federal regulations are a downer.you be taxed at the 20 percent level working for a hedge fund imagine if cap and trade passes goldman sachs will own the air. culture idealism. 22 year old harvard grads do not want to create 16 dollar an hour jobs for the 20 something, they want to do teach for america.our corporate ,education govt do not wish to help the left side of the bell curve.too low class.they pretend education solves everything.we can all be computer designers. to help the left side;protectionism,low immigration,low corporate tax,legal and bureaucratic rulings 1968 levels , no student loan debt govt pays for technical training and our financial loans go to manufacturing not maintaining bad bank loans.

Harry Baldwin said...

Cowen’s second contention is that technological progress, outside of electronics, has slowed dramatically from its peak in roughly 1880-1940, which saw the introduction of electricity and automobiles.

It seems to me that the great technological advance of the last 15 years, the internet, has done a great deal to hollow out the middle class and increase the disparity of wealth. all of the art supply stores in my area have gone out of business as customers buy cheaper on-line. small book stores too are disappearing. On-line news and Craig's List killed the local newspaper.

I am an illustrator for advertising and the internet is critical to my work now. But it also makes it easier for clients to cast out a large net when soliciting bids on a job, putting great downward pressure on prices.

There are other aspect of technology that are job-killing, such as ATM machines or the on-line purchase of postage. Nearly half the lanes at the supermarket are now devoted to checking out your own groceries. Supermarket clerks are going the way of the pump jockeys that worked at gas stations until the 1970s. What happens to all the people who used to do these kinds of jobs?

Simon in London said...

Ron:
"...the overwhelmingly majority of immigrants are concentrated in the productive sectors of the economy..."

Not here, they're not!

Even in the US, while most low-skill immigrants work, they can still be a net drain due to all the welfare programs that service them, the little or no tax they pay, and the vast numbers of "unproductive white collar workers" who staff those welfare programs.

In a pure Libertarian utopia they would be a net asset, BUT in the USA they have votes, and they vote for their self-interest - they vote for welfare. So they take much more than they give.

Evil Sandmich said...

Unmentioned in relation to the stagnation since the mid-seventies is the high level of debt issuance at every level of our economy. We found it much easier to promise to work tomorrow for a hamburger today, but unfortunately the servicing of all that debt is sponging up the private capital required for growth.

Anonymous said...

RKU,
Economics 101, as long as vast majority of immigrants to America have productivity lower than the average US worker - which is undeniably true - then there presence on US soil makes the average American poorer not richer.
No amount of sophistry or clever use of words can obscure this mathematical axiom.

Anonymous said...

Another point.
America is locked into, and has been for decades now, an era of permanent, massive and apparently intractable balance of payments deficits.
So long as this continues, by the iron laws of economics, a permanent crimp is placed on US growth potential.
The problem's not a lack of new inventions, but the inability of American industry to exploit new inventions for the export trade - this must, in the fianl analysis be linked to human biodiversity and IQ.

Anonymous said...

>The basic secular modern public self-understanding of the human condition is grossly incoherent - which is the reason why the problems exist<

True, so far. But it isn't secularism so much as Boasianism. "We're free spirits under the skin, nature is oppressive and must not be acknowledged."

>As the inertia of earlier Christian generations is overcome, we are left living-out Nietzsche's predictions, Dostoevsky's predictions: modernity is underpinned by nothing; by nihilism<

Uh-huh, we must return to Holy Church. It worked so well until it didn't.

I will turn to religion, sir, per your implicit recommendation, and follow Jesus.

Jesus has put it on my heart to move Hmung into your neighborhood.

All men are brothers. Turn the other cheek. Resist not evil. Love not hate. He came to save sinners, the rich can stayed fouled up in the eye of the needle.

What's that, you say? Your Jesus would turn away immigrants? Because Viennese resisted Arab invaders in the 1600s? Well, they resisted, but Jesus has little to do with it; the Jesus of the Bible, I mean.

You'd better make room in your heart and elsewhere for those Hmung.

It's so fulfilling to have a solid belief system. Too bad mere millions of people in the United States have yours.

Anonymous said...

The person who says"while the average worker will have a lower income" misses a major point. I don't want a lower income, and nobody else I know wants one either. Is that such a difficult concept to understand?

SF said...

Land isn't the only limited resource. US production of oil peaked in 1971. Not even the development of the Alaska pipleline brought production back up to earlier levels.

Anonymous said...

Steve,

You and Cowen talk of stagnation, and, perhaps, for median wages this is true. But don't confuse wage stagnation with economic stagnation.

Following on what Luke Lea mentioned, the US economy hasn't stagnated. Real per capita GDP was $23,200 in 2005 dollars in 1973 - when the oil shocks hit - and was $42,517 in 2010. Now that's not a doubling of real per capita GDP in a generation, which certainly has happened often enough in the US, but it's not chopped liver either. It's 1.65% annual real growth, which ain't bad and certainly should lead to a much high standard of living. (Remember, Einstein called the compound interest one of the most powerful forces in the universe.)

So the US economy hasn't stagnated over the past generation. Slowed perhaps, but that's not too shocking for a very mature economy.

No, what's occurred is a shift in who's getting what share of the growing pie. Immigration, a more service-oriented and more technical economy, globalization and probably a couple of other things that I can't hope to figure out have held back wages for the bottom half or so of workers.

Whether that's a good thing or bad thing, or whether it can be (or should be) stopped is are open questions. (Cutting off immigration from low IQ countries seems a no-brainer in the sense that it would help no matter what the answer to those questions turns out to be.) But what we're not talking about is economic stagnation. We're talking about wage stagnation and that's a different matter.

Anonymous said...

unfortunately suburbanizing farmland is a major industry in the US - as James Kunslter points out- to soften the impact of declining manufacturing. Obviously dumb, obviously short term strategy.

Also, if you take out the monetization of things that were previously thought of as reserve or philanthropic - the monetization of education or the commercialization of museums, for example, our economic growth has been negligible.

Richard A. said...

"But we do know how to curb mass immigration. It ain't that complicated. Elites just haven't wanted to fix this problem—because it's not their problem; it's the average American's problem."

The elites are actually benefiting from current immigration policy. Business interests can get away with lower wages. Politicians receive campaign money, reporters honoraria, and the MSM advertising dollars from these same anti-labor interests.

Anonymous said...

Tyler Cowen: Smart, uneducated kids

bgc: ...modernity is underpinned by nothing; by nihilism - by empty assertions and empty distractions...

agnostic: I just took a stab at quantifying the rate of tech invention, and it does show a steady downturn after 1985...


Fertility in the USA peaked about 1960:


Statistical handbook on the American family
D1-6 Total Fertility Rate and Instrinsic Rate of Natural Increase
books.google.com

TOTAL FERTILITY RATE, White

1960-1964: 3.326
1965-1969: 2.512
1970: 2.385
1971: 2.161
1972: 1.907
1973: 1.783
1974: 1.749
1975: 1.686
1976: 1.652


2010 Statistical Abstract of the United States
Section 1, Population
Table 9. Resident Population by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Age: 2000 and 2008
pop.pdf

Not Hispanic White alone, 2008

45 to 49 years: 15,964K
40 to 44 years: 14,085K
35 to 39 years: 12,981K
30 to 34 years: 11,456K
25 to 29 years: 12,740K
20 to 24 years: 12,949K
15 to 19 years: 12,903K
10 to 14 years: 11,660K
05 to 09 years: 11,222K
00 to 04 years: 11,065K



The children born in 1960 would have come of age about 1985, when they were finishing up grad school & professional school and entering the workplace [no longer "smart & uneducated", but instead "smart & educated"].

Thereafter, however, the nihilism of the 1960s and the 1970s takes hold, the fertility rate collapses, and a quarter century later, the size of the talent pool for "knowledge" workers falls off the edge of a cliff.

You simply cannot lose 30% of your talent and expect to maintain your rate of innovation - it just can't happen.

PS: Believe it or not, the situation in the USA [owing to bible-thumping gun-toting GOP Red State fertility] is actually vastly better than anywhere else in the civilized world - fertility is so low in the Pacific Rim and in Europe that they are already effectively extinct.

travis said...

The big issue from the fundamental point of view: the cost of sustaining your family into future generations. That’s the cost of middle class respectability. That word “respectability” sounds trivial and old-fashioned. But it means something very important and enduring: the ability to marry.

William Faulkner: It's [respectability] the—the curse of the times . . . It may be there's a three or four color printing of advertisements have—have been too seductive, or a picture of a fine big car in two colors with a handsome young woman by it, so that you almost think the woman comes with the new car when you make the starter payments. Money is—there's so much pressure to conform, to—to be respectable.

Interviewer: More than in the Victorian?

William Faulkner: I think so, yes. In the Victorian, they tried to—to force you to be respectable to save your soul. Now, they compel you to be respectable to be rich.

Mercer said...

There is not free land in the US but outside of the west coast and the north east corridor there is a lot of low priced land. The rust belt from Detroit to Rochester is declining. The Plains also has a lot of dying towns.

Richard A. said...

Here is an example of a reporter benefiting by defending the elites on immigration.
http://cis.org/kammer/kondracke-immigration-industrial-complex

RKU said...

Anonymous: Economics 101, as long as vast majority of immigrants to America have productivity lower than the average US worker - which is undeniably true - then there presence on US soil makes the average American poorer not richer.
No amount of sophistry or clever use of words can obscure this mathematical axiom.


Well, I'll admit I never took Economics 101 or any other course in that subject, but here's naive question for those who did. Consider two individuals in a society. One, the "low productivity" fellow produces value of $30,000 per year and is paid $25,000 per year. The other "high productivity" guy produces value of $60,000 per year and is paid $75,000 per year. Now obviously the second individual is twice as productive as the first. But which of the two is actually making society as a whole wealthier and which is making society poorer?

And don't forget the much more egregious and all too common case of someone who produces -$150,000 of value per year but is paid $150,000 per year...

Ray Sawhill said...

Slumber_j writes:

"Okay: do we not have a word in English for the non-fiction equivalent of a novella? I can't think of one. "Treatise" doesn't quite get there, does it? Odd."

"Pamphlet" can be pretty useful.

One thing the new world of e-publishing is going to result in is lots of published material that falls in length between a traditional article and a traditional book. And yay to that. Too many articles aren't quite enough; too many books are 'way too long. Now a piece of writing can be as long as it needs to be, yet can be published (and charged-for). That's a most-excellent thing, IMHO.

Anonymous said...

Steve, rather OT, but:

http://tinyurl.com/http-www-sovereignman-com-ex
http://tinyurl.com/67pg882

" Last week, Lee made some remarks about immigration and Singapore’s aging population, indicating that in order to avoid a disastrous population decline, Singapore needs to attract young immigrants to save the economy in the long run:

“At these low birth rates, we will rapidly age and shrink… So we need young immigrants. Otherwise our economy will slow down, like the Japanese economy…. [Young immigrants] will increase our population and talent pool. Singapore will be vibrant and prosperous, not declining and ageing.” "


Even Lee Kuan Yew, a man supposedly au fait with the truths of HBD... I wonder if he actually means it, or it's just standard political boilerplate and lies. Then again, they're just a city state, so maybe I'm interpreting him incorrectly as it's viable for them to have mass immigration relative to their size without being unselective.

The media, and everyone really, really are going for the Japs more and more these days - trying to "open them" like some latter day Commodore Perry. I hope they stay stubborn and strong and don't buy it.

greenrivervalleyman said...

Steve,

I know it's easy to downplay the significance of the information technology revolution by boiling it down to Youtube and Facebook, but it probably has significantly increased the wealth and productivity of society. Before the arrival of online news, consider how much paper and fuel was consumed in printing newspapers and then delivering them to millions of homes just so dad could get his sports scores.

Also, while we may no longer have a sizable pool of smart but uneducated talent to harvest, the smart and educated portion of society can now become super-educated through online reference and educational materials like Wikipedia at the low-end and arXiv at the high. Do not underestimate the innovation that may be coming to fruit as a result of specialists browsing developments in foreign, but related disciplines and having a brainstorm.

Finally, I'll take advances in medicine and biology over affordable trips to the moon. At a certain age Viagra will seem a lot more important to quality of life for most of the people on this board than a teleportation device.

Anonymous said...

American incomes have stagnated for 40 odd years, which in modern industrial times, is awfully long.Incomes might have stagnated but expenses (particularly health and education assuredly have not).
The so-called 'Brezhnev stagnation' that bedevilled the USSR in the 1970s was oft-mocked.
Qualitatively, was it any worse than the 'Great American Stagnation'?

Truth said...

Mr. Anon, Kudzu Bob, YOUR GREATEST DREAM HAS COME TRUE!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBm8ogwnpG0&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1

Truth said...

"low cost labor that is foreign brought in to make the elites happy in electing a new people causes great strife as the newcomers attempt to either take over and/or the natives fight back."

Yeah, you're fighting back hard, what, complaining 4-5 times aday on a WN website. And I thought WWII veterans made sacrifices for the cause!

Severn said...

This slowdown in growth since 1973 for the typical family has been hugely costly. Median income is currently around $54,000, but, Cowen says, “… if median income had continued to grow at its earlier postwar rate, the median family income today would be over $90,000.”



One of the peculiar things about the discussion of economic matters in America is this obsession with family income - the income of all the people in the family who work - rather than individual income.

Looking at things from the family income perspective makes us seem much better off than we actually are. Starting around 1972 individual incomes stagnated, and the median individual male worker today earns almost exactly what he would have back when Nixon was in power. (in inflated adjusted dollars)

Family income has increased significantly since 1972, due to more and more women entering the workforce, and more and more of those women working as doctors and lawyers rather than waitresses and supermarket check-out girls. But all this has done is mask the underlying problem - for the first time in American history, individual male wages have been stagnant for forty years.

The process by which family incomes have been rising is one which cannot continue much longer. Womens incomes at present at about as high as they can get. So we're already at the point where family incomes are going to start tracking individual males incomes and that means they will stay the same for generations.

Anonymous said...

"As Jerry Pournelle says, if you have cheap power you can do a lot.

Gas keeps going up. Windmill power plant numbers are fake. We don't build nuke plants.

We don't have cheap power any more. There is a lot we can't do."

There's more we can do, though. Small, relatively maintenance free nuclear reactors can be built to power small cities.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos

Instead of compacting ever larger numbers of people into coastal megalopolises, perhaps the economy and society could be transformed into a more distributed process linked by slow rail and fast internet.

Severn said...

That is to say that while the average worker will have a lower income than otherwise, the economy as a whole will still be larger


Why should any of us give a rats ass about whether the "economy as a whole" is larger or not?

The logic of this position is that you'd prefer to be a citizen of a country with a big GDP even if it meant you yourself would have a lower income. In other words, you'd prefer to an average citizen in China rather than in Luxembourg. But would you, really?

Severn said...

Construction workers, nurses, and small shopkeepers just aren't parasites in any meaningful sense.


They are if they're illegal immigrants who both work (off the books) and draw government subsidies at the same time. And that describes a significant chunk of the illegal immigrant population.

Poor people in America are in fact "parasites" in the economic sense. They take more out of the system than they put into it. And the low-skilled and low-IQ illegal immigrants from Latin America are and must remain poor people. And, therefore, "parasites".

Anonymous said...

Whenever you have these posts the same "Libertarian" and open-border dullards show up to prove black is white, up is down, and no matter how bad open-borders has been for the vast majority of Americans its still somehow been good.

Generally, they repeat the same arguments.

A. Mass Immigration seems bad but its really good if only (1) we'd get rid of the welfare state or (2) or kept out all the "wrong kind" of immigrants.

B. Mass immigration is needed because we need to massively grow the population. 300 million isn't enough.

C. Mass Immigration is needed because Americans are lazy and won't do certain jobs.

D. If only we'd export more we wouldn't have a trade deficit. It's all our own fault.

E. We're too impatient. Give mass immigration time, in 25 years you'll see its a good thing.

F. Someone has done some incredibly convoluted economic analysis which shows immigration and free trade are always good - case closed.

G. We need to compete in the Global economy, we need mass immigration to do it.

H. We need to stop being provincial. Sure the average American gets hurt, but look at all the foreigners it helps.

I. Yeah so the average American gets hurt, so what? I've got mine buddy, screw you.

J. Yeah the Average American gets hurt, but mass immigration helps Business and keeps profits and dividends high.

Whiskey said...

In 1979, the journalist James Burke hosted a BBC series called "Connections" on the history of technology innovation.

Over and over again, what happened was someone created something, that went nowhere for a while, and then someone else picked it up twenty or fifty years later, and combined it with something else to make a totally new product. Cannon boring machines to bore cylinders for Newcomen engines to create more efficient steam engines to pump out mines. Which then were used to power ships and trains.

That sort of thing. And to DO THAT, you need a population friendly to change. That means, counterintuitively:

1. A SMALL population, so there are no entrenched groups that are powerful enough to block change, like say carriage manufacturers or stage coach drivers unions.

2. Rule of law, stability, the nuclear family to promote people who are capable of driving change. Peasants and illiterate street rabble do poorly in this.

3. Enough social fluidity that people can move upwards a notch. From lower to middling class and from middling class to upper class, based on leveraging change.

4. A social willingness to embrace change because society is desperate, facing enemies or challenges that require constant innovation.

China, hampered by a huge population, is not driving change. No innovation comes out of China. They merely copy and produce cheaper, foreign technology.

For example, the first nation to produce reliable and cheap space planes able to supply a space station can leverage that station to produce in zero G, new materials unable to be produced on Earth. Perhaps cars five times as strong and ten times as light. Or airplanes. Power to weight ratio.

Innovation is rarely a dramatic, one-man impact of something out of whole cloth. Its taking things already just laying around unused and putting them together with other things to create a game-changing new system that produces huge competitive advantages.

This requires a small population among all other things. America got too big. Mostly from immigrants.

dearieme said...

They are odd people, economists. I've just read Tim Harford's "The Undercover Economist". It's generally rather good - lively and intelligent. But consider his sentence "Migration is controversial for other reasons; generally xenophobia and selfishness." I could object to it because it's loutish and libellous, but in truth I object more to it because it's so stupid.

Steven Luotto said...

Bgc,

I prefer your approach as well. The better answer will come by reading another Californian: Eugene Rose (Br. Seraphim) and his little book entitled Nihilism. Life. Vita. Truth. Goodness. Beauty have been Duchamped and Jackson Pollocked.

The most expensive piece of modern art, fetching 140 million at Sotheby's was done by a pampered drunk in a wild frenzy. From such values only a desert can issue - regardless of whether rich or poor.

As usual we talk dollars and IQ and populations, because they are measurable... and that is supposedly the last bastion of truth. But the downfall was propitiated and its leading exponent has been the United States of America and her love of the almighty dollar to the detriment of her own people, her children and even sanity.

Who took the store-bought Duchamp Urinal and treated it like a Rembrandt? Not the ones with the lower IQs... but the most brilliant among us.

Time to be honest and speak of evil. Truth died and multiculturalism stepped it. Now the supposedly sane madly clutch biology and speak of inferior peoples. Truth would have naturally maintained the only proper societal hierarchies, based on something sharable by all.

Hey but, America gave personhood to corporations. She's a culture where a divorce is actually better for the economy: two refrigerators, two cars, two couches, two TVs and lots of TV with commercials instead of loving parents... both of whom must now work.

Limey Oik said...

Simon in London said...

BTW, stagnation since 1973 is an American thing.

Really?

Thanks to Thatcher, the average Brit is definitely more comfortably off now.

Can you show me the numbers?

There was a big leap in living standards in the second half of the 1990s as we came out of the early '90s recession and reaped the rewards of her smashing the unions.

The 2nd half of the nineties was quite a boom. Certainly in IT and telecoms. But I'm not sure what that had to do with Thatcher smashing the unions. The privatisation of BT may have something to with it and that was her Government, but I'm mystified how all those still unemployed miners, shipbuilders, steelworkers and factory workers who were fired in the eighties contributed to that.

I seem to remember the American ambassador said to Margaret Thatcher: "Margaret, a country can't make a living taking in eachothers washing".

I'm a regular reader here and I've read a lot of your posts and normally I don't find anything to object to, but Thanks to Thatcher etc.. You've got to be kidding!

We're in s similar situation to our American friends because most of our industry and services are in China, India and Poland. Whilst at the same time our glorious leaders felt it was a good idea to fill the country with Somalis, Afghans, Nigerians, Kurds, Iraqis etc.

Apparently this is something we should all be celebrating.

Although, to pinch a line from Ed West that made me smile, I wouldn’t “celebrate” the fact, unless you call smashing an empty whisky bottle across the room while listening to Joy Division at 2 in the morning “celebrating”.

Simon in Tooting said...

"Simon in London,
Actually the era before 1973, especially the 50s and 60s, were, for working class Brits the most prosperous years they had ever known or ever likely to know.They were the 'never had it so good years'.Wages rose year on year, good jobs were abundant, housing affordable.The peak year was probably 1968.
The phenomenom of mass unemployment and the existence of a permanent nasty undercalss were a concomitant of Thatcher.Briatin lost most of its productive industry in her reign resulting in massive, permanent trade deficits (the 2nd biggest in the world after the USA). She though that banking would replace productive industry - and we all know where that got us.

From a fellow Tootingnite, whose well disposed towards you, probably passed you in the street, but is definitely NOT a Thatcherite."
____

'Freedom for Tooting!' Or as we say these days:

"KHAAAAN!" ;)

I partly agree - I'm not much of a Thatcherite - but the unions really were killing British industry, in conjunction with a massively, pathetically dysfunctional management class. Better management and a more corporatist model along German lines would have been better, but neither side were interested.

I would have preferred a policy that did not see the working classes as expendable and that sought to retain much more of an industrial base.

Growing up as an Ulster Unionist in Northern Ireland though, it was hard to have a high opinion of the Labour-voting English working class. They seemed to love shooting themselves repeatedly in both feet.

C. Van Carter said...

"Nevertheless, losing a lot of arguments has slowly pushed Cowen toward a somewhat more pragmatic, more Sailerian perspective."

Cracked me up. Cowen's such a pseud.

Anonymous said...

But it's *awfully* silly to link this serious problem with immigration, since the overwhelmingly majority of immigrants are concentrated in the productive sectors of the economy, especially the blue collar professions where something is actually produced, and are massively under-represented in the governmental sectors, among the greatest locus of obvious parasitism. Construction workers, nurses, and small shopkeepers just aren't parasites in any meaningful sense.

You're right that the heavy parasite load on the economy and body politic is the problem. But you're wrong to suggest that this parasitism has no connection to immigration. The rent-seeking parasitism of the "private" sector in parasite heavy sectors such as the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector and of the public sector benefit from immigration and facilitate, aid, abet, etc. it.

Simon in London said...

Limey Oik:
"I'm a regular reader here and I've read a lot of your posts and normally I don't find anything to object to, but Thanks to Thatcher etc.. You've got to be kidding!"

Funny thing, I have reason to hate Thatcher. Her pals in P&O drowned two of my cousins and the fiance of the elder in the Zeebrugge disaster, and the Tories gave them political cover. I was once grabbed from behind by Mrs Thatcer at the memorial service, then she scuttled off. Liberal leader David Steel gave me a limp handshake. Labour leader Neil Kinnock with his wife Glenys talked to my family for ages, gave them advice and put them in touch with left-wing journalist Paul Foot, who helped them and began a campaign on P&O's unsafe practices and how badly the families of the bereaved were being treated.

Neil Kinnock was a good man. I'd still rather have had Thatcher running the country though.

RKU said...

Unfortunately, the stupid Blogger software split my negative sign from the dollar amount following it, making the sentence look peculiar. I obviously meant to say:

"And don't forget the much more egregious and all too common case of someone who produces negative $150,000 of value per year but is paid positive $150,000 per year..."

Felix said...

I can't believe more emphasis was not placed on "free trade" either by Steve or the rest of the commentators. I'd say free trade with Asia has done far more to destroy the economic prospects of the average American than even immigration. Free trade also means that no amount of innovation will help the United States economically. Any new gizmo we invent will just turn into yet one more piece of crap we import from China and add to our balance of payments deficit.

Anonymous said...

Great post on vdare. I don't buy the "low hanging fruit" theory. I think we had a great white European culture for 300 years and decided we should also invite the rest of the world to the party via the 1965 Immigration Act.

I just wish vdare would focus more time educating people to become advocates for a repeal of the 1965 Immigration Act.
They have to give readers a "call to action" to write their Senators/Representatives. There's no time better than now to get a repeal of the 1965 Immigration Act going what with the Tea Party movement and high unemployment.

slumber_j said...

@Ray Sawhill:

Thanks for responding to my comment. And I completely agree with you about the Internet's having made intermediate-length manuscripts publishable.

I did consider "pamphlet," but it *sounds* lightweight, even if it's not, technically: in spite of the works of Tom Paine and many others, "pamphlet" makes me think of ephemera. Don't we need a word that more definitely indicates something mid-length-yet-weighty? Maybe I'm not thinking about this right, or the word's not occurring to me.

RKU said...

Severn: Looking at things from the family income perspective makes us seem much better off than we actually are. Starting around 1972 individual incomes stagnated, and the median individual male worker today earns almost exactly what he would have back when Nixon was in power. (in inflated adjusted dollars)

Yes, this is exactly correct. There's a great YouTube lecture by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren on exactly this sort of thing.

Also, as someone else indicated, a certain amount of the alleged rise in GDP is really just accounting gimmickry. For example, if two mothers stay at home and look after their own children (as was generally the case in the 1950s), it doesn't contribute to the GDP. But if these days they decide to swap and look after each other's children instead, suddenly there's a huge boost to the national wealth, which is pretty silly.

And although I think there's a reasonable analogy with the stagnation of the Brezhnev Era USSR, there are also significant differences. Basically, under Brezhnev most of the Soviet leaders were just sleepy and corrupt. Meanwhile, our own leaders are indeed massively corrupt, but also contain a heavy sprinkling of madmen and national traitors...

David said...

‘" Last week, Lee made some remarks about immigration and Singapore’s aging population, indicating that in order to avoid a disastrous population decline, Singapore needs to attract young immigrants to save the economy in the long run:

“At these low birth rates, we will rapidly age and shrink… So we need young immigrants. Otherwise our economy will slow down, like the Japanese economy…. [Young immigrants] will increase our population and talent pool. Singapore will be vibrant and prosperous, not declining and ageing.” "

"Even Lee Kuan Yew, a man supposedly au fait with the truths of HBD... I wonder if he actually means it, or it's just standard political boilerplate and lies. Then again, they're just a city state, so maybe I'm interpreting him incorrectly as it's viable for them to have mass immigration relative to their size without being unselective.”



- I think you are making a mistake of viewing the situation as analogous to the one in the West. For Singapore, a Southeast Asian country, their “vibrant” immigrants are not the low IQ/ ‘higher-crime-than-the-natives’ immigrants that we are flooded with in the US (and Europe), but instead, overwhelmingly mainland Chinese immigrants. Lee is very aware of HBD, but the immigrant flood to Singapore is more talented than to the US. Native Singaporeans do complain about the influx of immigrants, but don’t seem to mind as much as we do here in the US, as it fattens their wallets instead of robs them, and the people brought in are ethnically similar to the majority (Singapore is roughly 3/4 ethnic Chinese). I guess the analogous situation would be when the US brought in all of those Europeans in its earlier days.

Difference Maker said...

Well, I'll admit I never took Economics 101 or any other course in that subject, but here's naive question for those who did. Consider two individuals in a society. One, the "low productivity" fellow produces value of $30,000 per year and is paid $25,000 per year. The other "high productivity" guy produces value of $60,000 per year and is paid $75,000 per year. Now obviously the second individual is twice as productive as the first. But which of the two is actually making society as a whole wealthier and which is making society poorer

The problem with this is that it is predicated on creating a large underclass, thereby degrading the gene pool. Not everyone benefits from a strong culture of endogamy like the Jews (and even they have not been wholly successful) which means over time the rot will creep up the classes, the entire population will be affected, and the rulers will be as dullards compared to the potential of their illustrious ancestors.

But who knows, maybe the ruling classes will reproduce, and a strict 100% segregation maintained

Also, the middle class will be enslaved and destroyed.  As you know.  Perhaps reconstituted as a military, warrior class.  I'm down with that

We are already in the process in this country, what with taxes going to welfare payments and the like, besides the stripping of native industries and the open border.  

Eric said...

China, hampered by a huge population, is not driving change. No innovation comes out of China. They merely copy and produce cheaper, foreign technology.

Bull. I remember people saying the same thing about Japan. "They're all just drones. Never had an original thought. They'll never be able to make better cars or electronics."

When you're trying to catch up to a technologically superior nation or company you copy, because that's the cheapest route to equality. Once you've caught up you innovate. That's what the Japanese did and that's what the Chinese will do as well.

Man for man the Chinese are more intelligent and more educated than people in the US. If not for the one child policy this really would be the "Chinese Century".

The Wobbly Guy said...

David, I'm right here in Singapore, and I can tell you that your conclusions about the feelings of locals towards the immigrants (either temp or permanent) are premature.

We might all be ethnically chinese, but there're also clear differences that rubs the locals the wrong way. An interesting example of evolved cultural differences overriding ethnic allegiances.

And of course, the displacement of local blue AND white collar workers by foreigners for jobs is, I think, the most politically significant consequence of importing workers.

There is real anger in the ground nowadays. You see it all over the blogs. Most of it attacking, attacking, attacking the foreigners, almost none of it defending their ability to contribute, even though they do contribute a lot.

Our upcoming parliamentary elections may be a real watershed moment.

Anonymous said...

"Gas keeps going up. Windmill power plant numbers are fake. We don't build nuke plants.

We don't have cheap power any more. There is a lot we can't do."


Check out Ivan Illich's books Toward a History of Needs and Tools for Conviviality. You might find them interesting. In a nutshell we consume too much energy and places like Africa consume too little. We also consume too much education.

Anonymous said...

"There is real anger in the ground nowadays. You see it all over the blogs. Most of it attacking, attacking, attacking the foreigners, almost none of it defending their ability to contribute, even though they do contribute a lot.

Our upcoming parliamentary elections may be a real watershed moment.'

Too bad most people don't complain here except on Blogs like this. Are most Americans living living in a fog? I know I used to.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of the Oil Shock of 1973, can we put the negative financial effects of that event into the "aid for Israel" column? Adding the $100 billion-plus in direct aid, the free trade agreement and discounted weapons, the effects of the oil shock start to add up to real money.

RKU said...

The Wobbly Guy: We might all be ethnically chinese, but there're also clear differences that rubs the locals the wrong way. An interesting example of evolved cultural differences overriding ethnic allegiances.

This is a very good point, and leads to a much broader evolutionary issue which lots of WNs and others seem to get totally confused. As a tiny group of disorganized "rebels" opposing the massive Establishment, they often miss certain obvious things, and since the Establishment is meanwhile spouting absolute nonsense in a completely different direction, it would never correct them.

First, it's obviously true that evolution has generally shaped organisms, certainly including people, to act in behalf of their "EGI" (Extended Genetic Interests). However, evolution is a completely blind process that takes the shortest distance between two points, namely the most cost-effective mechanism for implementation. Therefore, the approach human behavior takes in support of its EGI isn't based on SNP scanners---which wasn't easily found in Cro-Magnon caves---but instead usually relies upon crude empirical proxies for genetic similarity. Basically, people who tend to look, speak, act, and behave like you, and seem to share most of your customs, are probably your near-relatives, and naturally trigger the "in-group" response. People who tend to look, speak, act, and behave differently, probably aren't your close relatives, and evoke different responses. An important semi-exception are your actual immediate family members, who grew up with you, and register as immediate family even absent strong external cues (though obviously these are almost always present as well). Meanwhile, a vast super-structure of religion, ideology, and culture has built up on top of this, usually reinforcing these innate traits.

However, these innate cues and triggers which govern human psychological responses are just rough proxies for genetic similarity, rather than the things itself. But the cues and triggers are what people feel, while EGI is merely the ultimate evolutionary cause, and probably has almost nothing to do with actual human behavior, except for a tiny sliver of marginal ideologues. And don't forget that triggers can easily behave in ways not intended by the Selfish Genes that produced them. For example, the main reason dogs get along so well with people is that they've been bred to automatically regard people as the alpha-male-wolves of their local pack, whom they follow and obey, even though people clearly aren't pack-wolves, alpha or otherwise.

RKU said...

(continued)

The practical consequences of this simple insight are pretty clear. For example, it's obvious that a central reason members of sports teams or armies wear distinctive uniforms is so that these "fool" the individual into subconsciously assuming that all team-members are close-relatives, and respond accordingly. A teammate's hair color or skin color may be a slightly different shade, but that tiny patch of difference is swamped by the huge amount of green or red or gold telling your stupid hind-brain that he's your close-clansman.

Similarly, people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds may look a bit different in appearance or height and perhaps be somewhat different in behavorial response. But these differences are absolutely negligible compared to the huge assortive impacts of language, culture, clothing styles, and national totems or taboos, including religious ones. Basically, the overwhelming majority of the "genetic cues" your brain is constantly processing have absolutely nothing to do with genetics, but are entirely cultural, and these are what tend to trigger natural emotive responses.

Now certainly EGI ideologues might be angry or unhappy that 99.5% of human brains work that way, but that's just what evolution has given us, take it or leave it. One could certainly build an artificial ideological structure based on "strict EGI," but it would be almost as unnatural as Marxism, and probably not very successful. Offhand, except for perhaps the tiniest and most primitive tribes, I can't think of any human society which was ever EGI-based. In fact, the reverse is more common: people tend to be closed in EGI to their immediate neighbors, but these are also usually the sharpest rivals for resources, and therefore often the bitterest enemies, given tit-for-tat feuding. Through all history, people have probably most hated and most often killed those genetically closest to themselves.

RKU said...

(continued)

What does this mean in the current social context? Well, consider two Americans of roughly similar socio-economic status and professional and educational attainment. Assume also that they have grown up in the same regional and cultural mileau, speak with approximately similar accents, and have sports/entertainment/religious/political interests that are not totally different, with behavorial tendencies that are also not to dissimilar. Now whether or not these two individuals are genetically very close or genetically very distant, the odds seem awfully high that the automatic response of their brains when they meet and interact will be "fellow clansman." By constrast, such a response would be much less likely between two individuals who very genetically very close but whose other outward markers were very different in a few of these areas. WNs might not like this reality, but they'll just have to take their complaints to human DNA, not me.

This also relates to another silly mistake WNs are always making, regarding East Asians. There seems an enormous amount of evidence that East Asians tend to skew on the "socially-conforming" end of the behavorial spectrum, and I'd think a good deal of this tendency is innate. But that obviously means they tend to "conform" to whatever culture they're raised in, and this would certainly include American culture. If current American culture says Do This, Don't Do That, Like This, Hate That, East Asians, more than most, will probably tend to follow those rules, even if they're not particularly suited to East Asian tendencies and don't further East Asian interests. If American society says "Worship Martin Luther King and Hate Hitler," Asian-Americans will probably do just that, even though neither MLK nor Hitler really had much to do with Asia.

Now to the extent that WNs are very dissatisfied with much of current American society, it's perfectly reasonable for them to grumble that East Asians are even less likely to rebel against PC-orthodoxy than the "white lemmings" they're always complaining about. But that's an very different argument than saying that Asians are likely to be an anti-American Fifth Column or fanatic anti-White activists or Yellow Supremacists or nonsense like that. Basically, Japanese raised to worship the Emperor, worshipped the Emperor, while Japanese raised to worship MLK, worship MLK. It's perhaps not such a great thing that Asians have such strong "lemming" tendencies, but it seems to me they're not entirely unique in that regard...

Anonymous said...

RKU wrote: Consider two individuals in a society. One, the "low productivity" fellow produces value of $30,000 per year and is paid $25,000 per year. The other "high productivity" guy produces value of $60,000 per year and is paid $75,000 per year.

Given your previous posts in support of illegal immigration, I am assuming that the guy making $25K in your example is an immigrant, maybe even illegal. If that's the case, then you really need to factor in the amount of taxes diverted by the native making $75K per year to support Mr. Immigrant, his wife and their four kids.

TGGP said...

"Our upcoming parliamentary elections may be a real watershed moment."
In Singapore?

Anonymous said...

Simon, tell me this.... From what I hear, black-white relations in the United Kingdom are pretty good. Whites and blacks (Jamaicans particularly) marry, live in the same areas, and are quite chummy. The white Brits tend to have a much worse relationship with the "Asians" (Indians, Pakistanis), in particular Muslim Asians. There seems to be a lot of brawling and street violence between chavs (lower class British whites) and "Pakis". The residential and social segregation is pretty high as well. In many ways, Pakis are seen as the thugs and viewed with disdain, while blacks are well accepted.

What is it about the British that makes them so warm towards blacks, but the opposite with the Pakis? I just ask you this because, as an American, I'd say that blacks seem to be more accepted in Britain than here in the US.... but Pakis are way, way more resented by you guys.

Anonymous said...

China doesn't have a higher level of education than the U.S. Higher Chinese mean IQ is questionable too and it's not even a relevant factor - US companies don't outsource jobs because Chinese factories have better workers. Cost, fewer regulations, and access to a growing market are the motivating factors.

The Japanese have been innovative for a pretty long time. Toyota, which was founded in the 1930s, employed some very impressive manufacturing techniques and technologies to build itself into a global brand. Sony and Nintendo have been pretty innovative for a long time too.

Japan did produce a lot of crap in the post-WWII era, but Japanese products improved steadily and gained a solid reputation for good quality by the 1970s. They did this turn around in just 3 decades. China, which opened itself up back in the 1979, has not demonstrated this same type of leap. Maybe it will eventually, but so far not so much.

Anonymous said...

"But that's an very different argument than saying that Asians are likely to be an anti-American Fifth Column or fanatic anti-White activists or Yellow Supremacists or nonsense like that."

I took a logic course in college too.

To the point: Asians and their worshipers have left many comments on iSteve that can't be interpreted other than in terms of supremacism. There also is a faction, if not all of the inner circle here and on Vdare, wanting to establish a multicult elite with a layer of middle class whites to act as buffer between them and the blacks and mestizos who are presumably the majority of the lower classes.

More importantly, I don't think Asians are assimilating to mainstream culture in the US. So, ambitious Asians will conform to and dogmatically defend the more liberal views of college professors because that's what gains approval in higher education. Part of conformity is looking to emulate authority rather than culture.

P.S. This is the second instance of very convoluted reasoning I've read in so many days. Are you guys hitting the Starbucks a little too often? Or did you really think the verbiage would be too confusing to refute?

Anonymous said...

In many ways, Pakis are seen as the thugs and viewed with disdain, while blacks are well accepted.

Not Simon, but:

No, just, no. Blacks are well accepted, but Pakis are not viewed as the thugs. Black people are just much more assimilated than Pakistanis - mainly, I believe because Jamaica absorbed a lot of British culture. No one is in denial that they are the thugs and badmashs. They're just more accepted even still (with variations - young Whites probably have the difference between their level of affection for Blacks and Pakis, older Whites like them about equally and not much).

When I say absorbed more culture I don't mean they behave as British people are expected to, but they mouth the same platitudes a lot of the time, refer to the same popular culture references, don't have explicitly formal foreign breeding structures - the weird mating and single motherhood patterns look like a failure of the flesh to meet British standards (which are themselves in modern doubt) to which the spirit is willing (not as they truly are, a profoundly foreign and different way of marrying and raising families, and a huge break with British history, ultimately derived from an African base that is far more alien than that of the South Asians). All this counts for a lot.

Plus, Black integration is assisted by media fawning over them by tolerance romantics as the gold standard for the UK being a tolerant country. Aided by the desire of British elites to be a mini-America, rather than looking out to the wide world and the wide range of possible countries to take as models. So if America has a Black population and a Black people to integrate, then by golly, Britain must have a Black population and must integrate and it must be a great trimuph for our society, blah blah blah legacies of slavery blah blah, blah blah "generations of discrimination" blah blah, this country was built by slaves blah blah, if we do!

...

I actually think the idea of Pakis being viewed as the thugs in the UK, that Americans periodically spout, is one of these "You Yuropeans and your Mooslem problem!" things that Americans have - as far as the American media is concerned the minority that's causing trouble for Europeans is the Muslims, so it causes problems for the script to point out that the comparatively culturally well assimilated Blacks (Europe wide, not just in the UK) are more violent, criminal and have similar problems in unemployment.

This is particularly as issue for American tolerance romantics and assimilation romantics, especially those on the Conservative side of the American discourse - a la Whiskey.

Matt said...

I think you are making a mistake of viewing the situation as analogous to the one in the West. For Singapore, a Southeast Asian country, their “vibrant” immigrants are not the low IQ/ ‘higher-crime-than-the-natives’ immigrants that we are flooded with in the US (and Europe), but instead, overwhelmingly mainland Chinese immigrants.

This is a good point. I did consider it somewhat (though in the form of very, very elite migration from all nations, not Chinese immigration), but I actually think my kneejerk reaction to the use of the word "vibrant" led me astray. I do tend to think about the Chinese population as have being "had" already, used up, transferred into the rich conditions from which it is hard to convince modern Europeans to migrate and move and work demanding hard hours in stressful areas, but there are still vast reserves of relatively young, poor people with high actual or potential IQs and high potential to live in urbanized, modernized society.

Thinking about it this way actually even makes large scale immigration to Japan viable, and not necessarily the disaster that's already killing the West that it might seem to me on first blush, if they're willing to accept some degree of Sinization of their culture (which of course they aren't, but probably overestimate). An analogy to the European colonization of North America is good.

Anonymous said...

"I just wish vdare would focus more time educating people to become advocates for a repeal of the 1965 Immigration Act."

Actually, that's what VDare does.

There is a quickly rising consciousness in the US white middle class that burgeoning alien populations are impoverishing and disenfranchising them. Everywhere they bear witness to how rapid demographic change resulting from the haphazard importation of alien peoples causes criminal harm, social dislocation, and unemployment -- not to mention government oppression as myriad ethnic lobbies, appealing directly to political elites, carve out special rights, affirmative action benefits, and protected status for themselves at the expense of whites, whose children are instructed in government schools that they do not deserve equal respect or protection.

But this immigration driven process of Who?Whom? is happening so quickly, and assaulting our society on so many fronts, that it's nearly impossible to appreciate its full extent. VDare provides a well researched account of this process in all its malignant complexity using material ripped out of the daily headlines.

Across the social scale Americans are suffering. Low skill welfare subsidized Latins have effectively destroyed wages in the manual trades, and importation of alien elites limit opportunities for America's smart kids to succeed. Moreover, control of our economy, culture, foreign policy, and media seems to have been turned over to globalists, who believe we should all now work much, much harder for an increasingly degraded standard of living because, after all, there is an inexhaustible supply of third world people willing to take all our jobs. VDare documents it all.

Why not use the ample evidence and arguments provided by VDare to write your congressman or senator a letter pointing out the harms of mass immigration and demand it be put to an end?

Anonymous said...

"Japan did produce a lot of crap in the post-WWII era, but Japanese products improved steadily and gained a solid reputation for good quality by the 1970s. They did this turn around in just 3 decades. China, which opened itself up back in the 1979, has not demonstrated this same type of leap. Maybe it will eventually, but so far not so much."

Good point - and as anyone who knows anything about world history will no doubt already realize, Chinese civilization has been totally fallow and unproductive for the past three millenia as well.

Seriously dude.

Anonymous said...

RKU said:

"There seems an enormous amount of evidence that East Asians tend to skew on the "socially-conforming" end of the behavorial spectrum, and I'd think a good deal of this tendency is innate."

I call total bullshit on this. Most of the assertions about greater conformity amongst East Asians seem to be made by insular, clueless Westerners who know nothing about the region. I would say the Chinese I've known have been amongst the least conformist individuals I've met.

Matt said...

For example, it's obvious that a central reason members of sports teams or armies wear distinctive uniforms is so that these "fool" the individual into subconsciously assuming that all team-members are close-relatives, and respond accordingly. A teammate's hair color or skin color may be a slightly different shade, but that tiny patch of difference is swamped by the huge amount of green or red or gold telling your stupid hind-brain that he's your close-clansman.

I would say this is wrong - its so they consciously know that they are on the same team very quickly, it's not some subconscious trick.

I agree with your statement that to the extent EGI work, they aren't based on some neutral array of SNPs but on visible phenotypical changes that loosely track SNPs. I would not be surprised if this was at least part of the story behind humans relatively astonishing (from an interspecies context) facial recognition capabilities.

I do, however, think that you are wrong about uniforms and behaviours hijacking centres designed to recognise kin. These centres are likely highly specifc modules which work through facial recognition - to the extent there is processing of uniforms, makeup and other ingroup signifiers, I think its likely to be entirely de novo and an extension of generalised cognitive abilities, not a jury rig of classical kin identification modules. Of course, I'm not sure what a good test of this would be.

But that obviously means they tend to "conform" to whatever culture they're raised in, and this would certainly include American culture.

Or whatever Chinese burbclave or phyle (figuratively speaking) they're living in.

Anonymous said...

RKU,
The bottom line is that workers are paid according to their productivity, wages are a proxy of productivity levels.That's why skilled craftsmen get paid a damn sight more than laborers do.
If someone (ie immigrants) are paid pathetically little, then it's a sure-fire sign that the value of their labor is of very little account regarding the economy as a whole, and that they are more or less expendable.
It's harsh - but the labor market is eminently rational.

Anonymous said...

For example, if two mothers stay at home and look after their own children (as was generally the case in the 1950s), it doesn't contribute to the GDP. But if these days they decide to swap and look after each other's children instead, suddenly there's a huge boost to the national wealth, which is pretty silly.

Or as a corporate analogy - "I'll lend money to you and you'll lend money to me, and even though neither of us will have any more net wealth, because financial services are included in GDP and debt isn't, GDP will increase".

Which of course does not just occur intranationally but internationally. And of course, neither of the hypothetical companies have to be real companies, rather than shell organisations and subsidiaries.

Severn said...

Man for man the Chinese are more intelligent and more educated than people in the US.

That's just factually wrong.

Simon in London said...

Anon:
"More importantly, I don't think Asians are assimilating to mainstream culture in the US. So, ambitious Asians will conform to and dogmatically defend the more liberal views of college professors because that's what gains approval in higher education. Part of conformity is looking to emulate authority rather than culture."

Yes, they will outwardly adhere to PC to the extent it's the leitkultur, but they don't internalise it the way SWPLers do. There's no fire in their bellies.

Severn said...

Well, I'll admit I never took Economics 101 or any other course in that subject, but here's naive question for those who did. Consider two individuals in a society. One, the "low productivity" fellow produces value of $30,000 per year and is paid $25,000 per year. The other "high productivity" guy produces value of $60,000 per year and is paid $75,000 per year. Now obviously the second individual is twice as productive as the first. But which of the two is actually making society as a whole wealthier and which is making society poorer?

Since you admit that you never took any economics I suppose you ca be excused for making this basic mistake. In our welfare state, how much people get paid has nothing to do with how much they actually cost. A person getting paid zero dollars still costs society as a whole money. And more to the point, a person getting paid $25,000 per year is not paying enough in taxes to cover what he consumes in services.

This is true regardless of whether the person in question is an immigrant or not. People on the lower end of the income scale are net tax consumers. Note that this does not mean that the cost their employers money - their employers certainly do make a profit from these workers. But they make a profit by hiring workers who are subsidized to an extent by other, better paid workers.

As for the guy who gets paid $75,000 per year for producing $60,000 per year, he can only exist in government or one of the so-called "private industries" which are really semi-state bodies. The solution there is to pay government workers less.

Simon in London said...

Anon:
"Simon, tell me this.... From what I hear, black-white relations in the United Kingdom are pretty good. Whites and blacks (Jamaicans particularly) marry, live in the same areas, and are quite chummy. The white Brits tend to have a much worse relationship with the "Asians" (Indians, Pakistanis), in particular Muslim Asians. There seems to be a lot of brawling and street violence between chavs (lower class British whites) and "Pakis". The residential and social segregation is pretty high as well. In many ways, Pakis are seen as the thugs and viewed with disdain, while blacks are well accepted.

What is it about the British that makes them so warm towards blacks, but the opposite with the Pakis? I just ask you this because, as an American, I'd say that blacks seem to be more accepted in Britain than here in the US.... but Pakis are way, way more resented by you guys."

This is an accurate description of British working class culture, yes. I haven't heard a white be racist against blacks for 15 years.

I'm not working class - I was raised in academia; though my mother's working class origins
meant we got a very distorted view of what it meant to be middle-class. So I don't really have the internal aspect in this. But I did notice back in 1998 when I was in the Territorial Army that apart from policemen, the whites had no ill feeling towards blacks, but hated 'Pakis'.

I think it's because the Caribbean blacks are half British to start with and generally seek to assimilate to British norms, while the Pakistanis refuse to assimilate and aggressively take control of ever-expanding territories.

My experiences in Tooting include running a black home invader out of my house, but also seeing a black man in Kentucky Fried Chicken hurt himself instantly leaping to save my white infant son from what would have been a nasty fall. I don't think that would have happened in Washington DC.

No Pakistanis* have ever broken into my house, but they sometimes spit on the ground as I walk past, and their Islamic Centre and local Salafist school are huge and brutal impositions on the neighbourhood.

*A neighbour was hospitalised by Somali home invaders, though.

Severn said...

At these low birth rates, we will rapidly age and shrink… So we need young immigrants. Otherwise our economy will slow down, like the Japanese economy…. [Young immigrants] will increase our population and talent pool. Singapore will be vibrant and prosperous, not declining and ageing.


A lot of confusion there. The proper measure of whether an economy is "slowing down" or not is GDP per capita, or median wage. And that is not affected by the size of the population, it's affected by the productivity of the population.

The most stupid myth currently in the minds of the worlds ruling classes is the one which says that prosperity can be increased simply by increasing the number of people. In reality these is probably a mildly inverse relationship between the quantity of people in a country and their quality.

Of course, the prosperity of the rulers really is increased by increasing the numbers of people as they only care about aggregate GDP rather than per capita, so perhaps they're not so stupid after all. But the rest of us are stupid if we mistake their interests for our own.

Anonymous said...

But that's an very different argument than saying that Asians are likely to be an anti-American Fifth Column or fanatic anti-White activists or Yellow Supremacists or nonsense like that
look at the number of Chinese "americans" who have turned over tech to China. Look at the thousands who poured out in support of China during the olympics when some SWPL people wanted to protest opression in Tibet. Look how Colin Powel jumped ship from Repubs who lauded over him as soon as one of his own came along.

The point:: Orientals might 'assimulate' when in small numbers, but no more as Sailer has often pointed out, reverse assimilation is occurring. Once Orientals reach a critical mass (won't take much, 10% maybe? ) they will start acting in their own group interests. The dumb dumb dumb white people including cognitive elitists and oriental woman fetishists, who don't see this are delusional.

Anonymous said...

But that's an very different argument than saying that Asians are likely to be an anti-American Fifth Column or fanatic anti-White activists or Yellow Supremacists or nonsense like that.


Asian-American lawmakers demand Limbaugh apology
By: JUDY LIN
01/28/11 2:33 AM
sfexaminer.com

Rush Limbaugh's mock imitation of the Chinese language has stirred a backlash among Asian-American lawmakers at the state and federal level.

California state Sen. Leland Yee, a Democrat from San Francisco, is leading a fight in demanding an apology from Limbaugh.

In recent days, the state lawmaker has rallied civil rights groups in a boycott of companies like Pro Flowers, Sleep Train and Domino's Pizza that advertise on Limbaugh's talk show.

During a Jan. 19 program, Limbaugh said there was no translation of President Hu Jintao's speech during a visit to the White House. He launched into a 20-second-long imitation of the Chinese leader's dialect...

Anonymous said...

I don't know how you keep your sanity with lesser minds always stealing your analysis, Steve. Keep up the good work.

Kylie said...

"This is the second instance of very convoluted reasoning I've read in so many days. Are you guys hitting the Starbucks a little too often? Or did you really think the verbiage would be too confusing to refute?"

RKU was trying to argue by stealth, leading us from one neutral point to one slightly less neutral and so on until suddenly we're in his camp, saying, "Whoa, I don't know how you got me here but I'm here so you must be right."

If he can't even fool a drop-out housewife in a small town in a flyover state, he really needs to go back to Logic 101.

He's one who thinks 100 gallons of paint, 66% of which is white and 34% red, should be called called white because to admit it's pink would only stir up the natives (WNs).

Anonymous said...

RKU: just another guy trying to get me to close my eyes and believe that things will be better if a billion _____ (fill in the blank)come into my country and replace myself and my distant relatives.

I haven't heard that one before... yawn!!

Anonymous said...

"For example, it's obvious that a central reason members of sports teams or armies wear distinctive uniforms is so that these "fool" the individual into subconsciously assuming that all team-members are close-relatives, and respond accordingly."

Oh? I thought the point of a uniform was to avoid getting shot in the head by your own platoon or tackled on the field by your own team member.

Anonymous said...

RKU: I have a plan too! Why don't we open up China's borders and let the elitists of the world take over the newspapers, financials, governing, etc. Then we can all sit around - in our identical-colored uniforms - and laugh at those Chinese redneck suckers working for us. Only crazy CNs could possibly oppose that brilliant plan!! Yes, yes.. I love it!! And thank god the CN's arguments are so out-dated and backward that the sheer weight or our post-modern intellectual vigor will sweep them away. And we will just laugh... in our uniforms... all the same color... the other stuff just illusions... now head off to China and sell it there...

Anonymous said...

The notion that the 'stock of technological breakthroughs' ahs some how dried up is pure BS.
Apparently in the 1890s a official at the US patent offie aid that it should shut up shop as 'everything that can be invented has been invented'.
The fact is, never before at any time in human history have so many dedicated researchers and research teams have been funded to come up with original research - and this is not to mention amateurs.
The point is that, rest assured, there IS a massive game-changing new technology 'just around the corner'.But what that gamechanger is, what form it will take, what it will do - and who will make money from it, I can't tell you.Also, rest assured, that game changer will be as poweful as the IC engine or the transistor.

Svigor said...

All men are brothers. Turn the other cheek. Resist not evil. Love not hate. He came to save sinners, the rich can stayed fouled up in the eye of the needle.

What's that, you say? Your Jesus would turn away immigrants?


Maybe not, but his daddy ordered a string of blatantly racist genocides so maybe there's a middle ground somewhere.

Btw, Jesus was a racist. Read the bit about scraps from the master's table carefully. Hell, read the good Samaritan carefully.

Svigor said...

Whenever you have these posts the same "Libertarian" and open-border dullards show up to prove black is white, up is down, and no matter how bad open-borders has been for the vast majority of Americans its still somehow been good.

In my experience, libertarians are full of shit. That's not to say one can't crib some useful stuff from them (I do this a lot), but on the whole, ideology EASILY trumps common sense for libertarians.

They are odd people, economists.

Bought-and-paid-for scribblers.

Don't we need a word that more definitely indicates something mid-length-yet-weighty?

Tract? Essay? Treatise?

Svigor said...

Now certainly EGI ideologues might be angry or unhappy that 99.5% of human brains work that way, but that's just what evolution has given us, take it or leave it. One could certainly build an artificial ideological structure based on "strict EGI," but it would be almost as unnatural as Marxism, and probably not very successful.

Your post was great, right up until your conclusion, where you screwed the pooch. As you say, all these things are proxies for EGI, so organizing an ideology around EGI is going to the source, as it were, and therefore exactly opposite Marxism on the "unnatural" meter.

And then you take a step back and you get my position, which is not necessarily to champion an EGI-ideology, but to smash obstacles to freedom erected by precisely those people whose goal is to prevent an EGI-ideology from taking hold.

In fact, the reverse is more common: people tend to be closed in EGI to their immediate neighbors, but these are also usually the sharpest rivals for resources, and therefore often the bitterest enemies, given tit-for-tat feuding. Through all history, people have probably most hated and most often killed those genetically closest to themselves.

Nonsense. Sibling rivalries do not "bitterest enemies" make. Enmity is a function of proximity, and tends to correlate with relatedness, yes, but that's not really what you said.

Assume also that they have grown up in the same regional and cultural mileau, speak with approximately similar accents, and have sports/entertainment/religious/political interests that are not totally different, with behavorial tendencies that are also not to dissimilar. Now whether or not these two individuals are genetically very close or genetically very distant, the odds seem awfully high that the automatic response of their brains when they meet and interact will be "fellow clansman."

Assume you have a can-opener...

In the presence of coercion, Communism is "popular." Even in the presence of massive social pressure, groups self-segregate insofar as they can. Remove the coercion and pressure, and watch what happens.

The way to cut through to the heart of questions like this is ceteris paribus; all else being equal, would people choose diversity, or homogeneity?

Now to the extent that WNs are very dissatisfied with much of current American society, it's perfectly reasonable for them to grumble that East Asians are even less likely to rebel against PC-orthodoxy than the "white lemmings" they're always complaining about. But that's an very different argument than saying that Asians are likely to be an anti-American Fifth Column or fanatic anti-White activists or Yellow Supremacists or nonsense like that. Basically, Japanese raised to worship the Emperor, worshipped the Emperor, while Japanese raised to worship MLK, worship MLK. It's perhaps not such a great thing that Asians have such strong "lemming" tendencies, but it seems to me they're not entirely unique in that regard...

True, until you get to the "China is here" point, and then they'll start assimilating to their own norms again. And even before that, clearly, the tendency will be toward yellows pursuing their own EGI, not ours.

I'm curious; since you're criticizing WNs as a group, who's your model for HBD-awareness? Setting the bar kinda high, aren't you?

Anonymous said...

What is it about the British that makes them so warm towards blacks, but the opposite with the Pakis? I just ask you this because, as an American, I'd say that blacks seem to be more accepted in Britain than here in the US.... but Pakis are way, way more resented by you guys.

Some ideas -

1. Blacks play soccer, and other sports, and are good at it, with the glory reflected onto the black community.
2. Blacks are Christian, or soccer fans, giving them a cultural platform to share with British middle or working class.
3. Our blacks may be relatively high-performing, more likely to aspire to and achieve middle class life, compared to American blacks.
4. Blacks have a Hollywood and American society glamour to them. We don't live in America so we don't realise this is a f-ked up aspect of yoru society. SWPL liberals want to be friends with a black person so they are predisposed to a positive attitude.
5. Blacks are charismatic - it's difficult to dislike them. Whereas Pakistanis make it easier, perceived to be arrogant, which could come from their religion.
6. Blacks are more likely to be as passionate about "Britain" as much as the country they emigrated from, and happily wear the label Black British. Whereas Pakistanis are fanatical about the Pakistani cricket team, and obsess about India, and don't care for the label "British", calling themselves "Pakistani" - perhaps so people don't confuse them with Indians.

Anonymous said...

Steve,
The other day I read that China's next 5 year plan plans to increase hydro-electricity production by the enormous amount of 200 Gigawatts.Somewhere else I read that Chinese scientists have determined that ALL of the electriity demand can be met by wind power, hypothetically at least.Not to mention China's ambition in nuclear energy and development of HTGR reactors.
In a time of peak oil,domestic sources of abundant low cost energy might prove to be the decisive factor in the battle for industrial supremacy , not to mention the fact that energy is the real constraining factor in the quest for rising productivity and thus wealth.
- And some people claim that 'innovation is drying up'?

Anonymous said...

I think Sailer underestimates the economic impact of something like facebook. Facebook may only hire a few thousand, but it can increase economic activity by spreading information. I got to find out about some books thanks to facebook posts by 'friends', which led me to order them. Also, stuff like facebook and twitter gets more people interested in buying ipads and such stuff to be connected all the time.


And rise in productivity and cheaper prices due to globalism did make things cheaper for everyone. If you watch WALL STREET, billionaire guys have these huge clunky portable phones. Today, even Africans have cellphones.

Also, expansion of government services and programs have provided people with all sorts of saftey nets, and that's a form of income too.

Anonymous said...

One thing I noticed. I started college in the mid 80s, and a good number of kids had their own cars but most didn't. When I finally left in the early 90s, it's like the vast majority had their own cars. The college parking lots were packed. In the mid 80s, the lots were only half-full.

Simon in London said...

Anon:
"the weird mating and single motherhood patterns look like a failure of the flesh to meet British standards..."

And when you see the older Afro-Caribbean women on their dignified way to church in their hats and Sunday Best, it's hard not to see them as "us", and as better than a lot of "us".

I think Afro-Caribbean religiosity - Protestant - is a major factor in their acceptance by native Brits, something which isn't discussed much. It's mostly the women, of course. While they primarily attend their own churches, these lack the racialism of some US black churches. And many attend mixed race churches like my local CoE.

Simon in London said...

anon:
"SWPL liberals want to be friends with a black person so they are predisposed to a positive attitude."

SWPLs get on ok with middle-class blacks, very much like Londattos (London cockney/Black Caribbean cross) who are weirdly good-looking, and are scared of black criminals. None of that is too surprising. Nor is the police dislike of black criminality, driven underground by the destructive MacPerson Report. I think the generally mutually good relations between the white and black working classes is notable though; neither the cultural Marxist attempts to stir up black hatred of whites, nor the older NF/BNP attempts to stir up white hatred of blacks, met with any real success.

One thing that helped and is helping black-white relations is the relative lack of Affirmative Action here compared to the UK. White people tend to interact professionally and socially with blacks of similar IQ, not 1 SD or more lower as in the US.

RKU said...

Anonymous: I call total bullshit on this. Most of the assertions about greater conformity amongst East Asians seem to be made by insular, clueless Westerners who know nothing about the region. I would say the Chinese I've known have been amongst the least conformist individuals I've met.

Well, here's a simple question. Many millions of East Asians currently live in the U.S., and they tend to be disproportionately affluent and well-educated, which gives them both the time and ability to engage in "extracurricular" pursuits, rather than just desparately working 24/7/365 to keep food on the table. Now exactly how many prominent East Asian-American political agitators, noisy activists, or major social rebels can you name? Offhand, I can't think of a single name. As I said, it's not entirely clear how much of this lack of "rebelliousness" is due to culture vs. genes, but I personally suspect the latter is an important piece. This same pattern of "social orderliness" would certainly hold true for most Americans of Germanic or Scandinavian origins, and I'd think that genes play the same sort of significant role there as well. Contrast this with the huge level of "social agitation" coming from other groups, such as Jews or Irish.


Matt: I would say this is wrong - its so they consciously know that they are on the same team very quickly, it's not some subconscious trick.

Well certainly the need for "membership visibility" is a very important role for uniforms as well, so that you don't pass the ball or shoot the wrong fellow. But both military and sports uniforms are massively over-complex if that were the only goal. A simple solid color would be perfect for conscious identification at a distance, but instead there's a huge amount of detailed trimming, multiple colors, patterns, and symbols, most of which aren't even fully visible except at close range. None of this helps with simple ID, but it does provide exactly the sort of complex visual texture that would (in nature) scream "family resemblance," and probably triggers those mental modules. (I'd bet that if people had evolved from dogs, "uniforms" would consist of very complex overlays and mixtures of different scents.) This really isn't that original an insight---for example, 18th and 19th century European armies tended to have very complex and colorful uniforms partly because these were believed to help inspire an "esprit de corps," which really just what I'm saying.

Interestingly enough, the totally unrelated discussion about the relative acceptance of blacks versus South Indians in Britain seems almost a perfect empirical illustration of the theoretical argument I'm making. I'm not an expert on current British society, but both the factual claims made and the analysis of the reasons behind them seem very plausible to me.

RKU said...

Anonymous: The point:: Orientals might 'assimulate' when in small numbers, but no more as Sailer has often pointed out, reverse assimilation is occurring. Once Orientals reach a critical mass (won't take much, 10% maybe? ) they will start acting in their own group interests.

Well, consider the case of Hawaii, which has been majority-Asian for generations. Furthermore, until the advent of modern electronic communications, thousands of miles of distance almost left it an isolate country, socially cut off from the mainland. Offhand, I've never heard too much about Hawaii's Asians being fanatically group-oriented, or brutally oppressing the white minority. Now admittedly, politics in Hawaii does sometimes have a racial/ethnic tinge, but I doubt it's nearly as strong as the white-ethnic politics practiced for generations in lots of the big East Coast cities.

Anyway, most of the traditional hostility of Asians has been (quite naturally) aimed at other Asians, since being neighbors, they tend to be feuding rivals. So the Koreans and Chinese are angry at the Japanese, the Vietnamese resent the Chinese, the Japanese have contempt for the Koreans, the Taiwanese Chinese and Mainland Chinese argue about who should be part of what, etc. I'd guess that 90% of East Asian political agitation in America over the last 50 years have been entirely along these lines, or even just exile-politics. Since the American government tells them they all officially a single group called "Asians," the younger generations have gradually started to think that way, but that's an extremely recent development with no natural roots. The notion of America's Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese suddenly all merging to become "Pan-Asian Racial Supremicists" seems awfully unlikely to me.


Svigor: As you say, all these things are proxies for EGI, so organizing an ideology around EGI is going to the source, as it were, and therefore exactly opposite Marxism on the "unnatural" meter.

Well, overriding natural human responses to "go to the source" of the evolutionary factors behind them sometimes isn't all that easy in practice. For example, it's pretty clear that the reason most people aren't too attracted to individuals whose faces are hideously scarred or otherwise deformed is because their brains are saying "massive, crippling genetic mutation---avoid at all cost!" Now obviously, that shouldn't apply to all the people whose physical condition is due to non-genetic factors, such as severe burns or thalidomide-induced birth-defects. But it would be a tall order to get them to win beauty contests, though I suppose the PC activists are currently doing their absolute best in that regard.

If you look at the hundred or whatever distinct ethnic groups in Europe, the lack of amalgamation was almost always based on barriers of language, religion, or nationality. Now people living in America generally speak English, religion doesn't play as strong a social role as it once did, and people are mostly immersed in the same national culture and wear the same types of clothes. Therefore, it's pretty common for the "similarity triggers" to fire even when people are from distant genetic backgrounds, and the pretty high rate of inter-marriage across ethnic and even racial lines---which many WNs are often complaining about---isn't too surprising. After all, when two Americans talk together on the phone about various things, except for new immigrants and a portion of the black population, it's often pretty difficult to even guess ethnicity or race, with even geographical region or social class being easier. So if these outward clues aren't even enough for people to consciously determine genetic proximity, it's pretty unlikely the crude subconscious brain-modules we have will do any better.

Anonymous said...

"Yes, they will outwardly adhere to PC to the extent it's the leitkultur, but they don't internalise it the way SWPLers do. There's no fire in their bellies."

I am told that when Chinese immigrants speak to each other in Mandarin, they are refreshingly honest and not at all PC. It is only when they speak English to (or in the presence of) Westerners that they adhere to PC conventions.

In a way this must give them a tremendous sense of freedom that monolingual English speakers can never experience in public.

Anonymous said...

The notion of America's Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese suddenly all merging to become "Pan-Asian Racial Supremicists" seems awfully unlikely to me.

What we have here is a textbook case of projection. Race obsessed white nationalists automatically assume that everyone else is obsessed with race as well. What they fail to realize is that most East Asian Americans and East Asians in general tend to identity with their own nationality, i.e. the Chinese don't see themselves as being part of the East Asian race, they see themselves as being Chinese, likewise for the Japanese and the Koreans.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous Wrote:
""I just wish vdare would focus more time educating people to become advocates for a repeal of the 1965 Immigration Act."

Actually, that's what VDare does."

VDare is an awesome website but I don't think vdare "educates people to become advocates." I think it's great at raising consciousness and educating people. I just wish it did more advocacy and call to action stuff like progressives do.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous wrote:
"Why not use the ample evidence and arguments provided by VDare to write your congressman or senator a letter pointing out the harms of mass immigration and demand it be put to an end?"

Great Point. I'm a white guy and will advocate for things anonymously online but wouldn't in a million years write to my Senator/Congressman to repeal the 1965 Immigration Act. Why? Self-censorship to protect my career. So I salute Steve and everyone at VDare for what they do.

BTW, when my consciousness first started being raised I visited vdare at my Fortune 50 company and got a huge "Blocked Access - Hate Website". And I was like "Ahhhh...". A little while later I got laid off. Probably not connected but nonetheless perturbing.

Anonymous said...

"BTW, when my consciousness first started being raised I visited vdare at my Fortune 50 company and got a huge "Blocked Access - Hate Website". And I was like "Ahhhh...". A little while later I got laid off. Probably not connected but nonetheless perturbing."

As Nicholas Stix once wrote, "You may not be interested in the race war, but the race war is interested in you."

Anonymous said...

The Japanese went from crap in the 1950s to quality and innovation by the 1970s. If China is the next Japan, we should expect something similar to happen very soon.

I don't know why Japan would be the logical comparison with China. Both countries have very different histories and population substructures. Similarities exist, but China isn't nearly as homogeous as Japan. It has also relied far more on outside investment and technology transfers.

Charlie said...

While I understand that a Californian would be inclined to see immigration as one of the main problems here, I have to say that for most of America it is hard to believe immigration is more than a side issue vis a vis wage stagnation.

The fact that California seems to be going broke much faster than the rest of the country does suggest immigration makes things worse, but since low-immigration states are still going broke, more slowly, it is probably not one of the main causes.

I think a change in technological innovation is the most important factor. Capitalist economies have to grow, and innovate, or die, almost by definition. Without innovation the idea of "risk capital" is a joke; its owner is just extracting rents, and soon, one way or another, you have a stable oligarchy - the normal political and economic arrangement of Man - and not "capitalism".

That's why you see the label of "innovative" tagged onto every imaginable new product and service nowadays, including Wall Street's formulas for selling money to itself. People keep using the buzzword out of desperation - there isn't enough real innovation to go around, and they know it.

But I wouldn't characterize it as a slowing of technological progress, rather that this progress is no longer the kind of innovation our economy needs: one that gives investment opportunities, and the accompanying demand for labor. Progress has gotten too predictable, too commodifiable, and established corporations can, mostly, handle it themselves. Joke all you like about Facebook and Youtube, but the ongoing revolution in biotech is not frivolous at all. It just isn't leading to a giant raft of startup companies that can buoy a whole stock market. The point of the DotCom boom was that people thought IT would provide enough constant innovation to keep investors afloat. They were wrong.

As for biotech...when Monsanto wants to develop a new soybean or something, they don't need to go hat in hand to Joe Six Pack asking for a loan. The investor is becoming obsolete; this was concealed for a remarkably long time, through the LBO boom and the DotCom boom and finally the phoney Ponzi yields from MBS. Now investors are plowing into Treasuries and commodities but it seems to me that's the end of the line; these people are just looking to escape inflation, not find a yield, and even that modest goal might detonate the global economy - see Egypt, food prices in.

When investment goes away, demand for labor drops - hence 30 years of wage stagnation and now, apparently, unemployment at an official 9% in perpetuity. Immigration makes things worse, RKU's FIRE parasites make things worse - but the real problem is a mismatch between technological progress and the needs of our economy.

Charlie said...

Speaking of RKU:

"it's obviously true that evolution has generally shaped organisms, certainly including people, to act in behalf of their "EGI" (Extended Genetic Interests). However, evolution is a completely blind process that takes the shortest distance between two points, namely the most cost-effective mechanism for implementation. Therefore, the approach human behavior takes in support of its EGI isn't based on SNP scanners---which wasn't easily found in Cro-Magnon caves---but instead usually relies upon crude empirical proxies for genetic similarity."

I think explaining in-group out-group behaviour, like that between Singaporeans and Chinese immigrants, in terms of a "bad reading" from those crude empirical proxies is a bit of a stretch. I think a kind of game theory explanation makes more sense: these foreigners might collude with each other to promote themselves at our expense. Therefore, we have to collude against them to prevent this.

It's my opinion that this kind of arms-race logic, where even the possibility of an opposing faction demands the formation of a counter-faction, is what creates funny situations like that village where people were divided into two opposing camps, based solely on which side of the street they lived on. Well that, and I doubt that the people of that village were very smart...or very busy...anyhow I think evolutionary biologists are perhaps reluctant to give people credit for that kind of unconscious logic, and temperamentally prefer genetically-oriented explanations, even if they make less sense.

Simon in London said...

Talking about in-group/out-group: the 9/11 Muslim attack on New York stopped Irish Catholic support for anti-British IRA terrorism almost entirely, both in the USA and in the British Isles. It reminded me of those 1950s Alien Invasion movies where the USA and the USSR put aside their intra-human conflict to fight a much more alien enemy.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps I should've used different terminology. Blacks are more viewed as bad boy thugs (tough, athletic, womanizing, breaking the law) and Pakistanis are seen as more the angry, mentally unstable haters who are estranged from society.

Yeah, that's probably correct, and you do have more of the right idea than I thought, although more in the sense that Blacks are seen both ways, often at the same time while Pak Mans are generally seen as only the latter (and as wannabees if they're doing the former), more like the White working class.

Of course, rates of mental illness and "society owes me, so my antisocial violence is justified" in general seem higher (to me) amongst Black people than Pakistani, but there is slightly more of tendency to idealize social resentment amongst Black people (due to glamour and all the other factors) as being based legitimate beefs with poverty, discrimination and structural racism rather than jumping to "foreigner won't assimilate".

Things like Black gang rape and predation on young girls (although anti-paedophile groups do suggest this happens in an organised way more amongst Muslims, at least) possibly do get sensationalised less than amongst Pakistanis, I think, which fits the "alienated haters" script.

Steve Sailer said...

The other thing is that class is a big, big deal in Britain, while race is a bigger deal in America. A lot of recent British developments are the triumph of the working class (For example, I talked to Renee Zellweger's accent coach for "Bridget Jones Diary" and she said all the upper middle class types have been lowering their accents to not sound offensively toffish.) It's pretty easy to assimilate into working class norms.

Anonymous said...

The other thing is that class is a big, big deal in Britain, while race is a bigger deal in America.
Oh, I think Brown-Blair took care of that, in 50 years the UK will be majority muslim. Class problem solved.

Anonymous said...

Talking about in-group/out-group: the 9/11 Muslim attack on New York stopped Irish Catholic support for anti-British IRA terrorism almost entirely
that's because the hypocrisy could no longer stand and the government actually had to enforce the law. Amazing what can happen when the government decides to do that. Immigration for example.

Anonymous said...

were also motivated by sheer rage and hatred of the English. The Pakistani view was that since white chavs beat us up and vandalize our parents' stores, we'll brutalize their women to get revenge.
the pakis may hate the english but that's not the reason, thats what any minority does when they are caught doing anything. Remember that hmong in wisconson that killed six whites? "they say wacist things" were the first words out of his mouth.

glamor? said...

The association of "glamor" with blacks (in general, I'm sure some of them are deserving of the term) is something very strange, very bizarre. In the traditional meaning of that word, they are closer to the antithesis of glamor. Glamor means sophistication, civility, taste, acting intelligent and beautiful with an awareness of past, present and future as a forum for your whiles and graciousness extending to all who interact with you. Applying the word "glamor" to the class of black to which I think you are referring, is inaccurate, to say the least. The more accurate words would be ... well, nothing akin to "glamor." They can imitate, but they did not create the society which hosts them. And I am not sure why anyone would think they better "fit in" than Pakistanis (who don't either.) They have not "fit in" to any American city; at any percentage above 15 or 20, they pretty much destroy them.
And the same black-on-white violence is in evidence as in America. White people are so stupid and delusional where this is concerned. Like they are frozen in fear.

Anonymous said...

Why is ghetto American black culture glamorous to young British men? I mean glamorous as that which is considered "exciting, different and worth emulation".

I think the answer could be in the nature of British men, compared to their continental Euro counterparts. They are stuffy and keep their emotions to themselves ... "stiff upper lip".

American Black culture provides some British men, often middle class, with a more exciting mask than traditional class-based formalisms with which to interact with their friends.

It is much like the old social rules in that "acting black" has become a highly formal set of behaviours, such as when greeting someone (high five, "yo") rather than something that comes naturally (they're not really gangsters). But it is considered informal compared to the behaviours of their grandparents.

Anonymous said...

When investment goes away, demand for labor drops

It has very little to do with investment. Demand for labor in the US drops because (a) a lot of work gets outsourced abroad, and (b) a lot of the work that remains in the US gets done by cheap labor imported from abroad. With those two factors at work it would take a staggering amount of investment in the US to compensate for them.

Truth said...

"The association of "glamor" with blacks in general..."

We spell "glamor" with a "u", there, Gatsby.

Simon in London said...

Anon:
"That's the most stupid comment made here in the last month. Anti-British IRA terrorism ended decades ago, it did not "stop" due to 9/11."

No, I think "Anti-British IRA terrorism ended decades ago, it did not "stop" due to 9/11" would be the most stupid comment made here in the last month.

PIRA ceasefire was in 1997. The 'Real IRA' Omagh bombing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omagh_bomb - took place in 1998 and killed 29 people.

ben tillman said...

While I understand that a Californian would be inclined to see immigration as one of the main problems here, I have to say that for most of America it is hard to believe immigration is more than a side issue vis a vis wage stagnation.

From VDare: Since the official end of the recession in June 2009 non-Hispanics have lost 1.2 million jobs while Hispanics have gained 490,000 positions.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, you're fighting back hard, what, complaining 4-5 times aday on a WN website. And I thought WWII veterans made sacrifices for the cause!

Oh, go beat up a white person.

Anonymous said...

PIRA ceasefire was in 1997. The 'Real IRA' Omagh bombing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omagh_bomb - took place in 1998 and killed 29 people.


I can't help but notice that both the ceasefire and the bombing took place years before 9/11. Which rather undercuts the claim that 9/11 brought the violence to a halt.

As for the claim that Irish-Americans were funding the IRA, that's not the case either. The IRA was a designated terrorist organization and it was illegal to give money to it in the US. It's possible that some funds donated from the US to charities in NI got diverted to the IRA. But the major source of IRA support always came from the Soviet Union via its satellites, Libya in particular.

Anonymous said...

From what I'm hearing here, Black British seem to have assimilated quite a bit more than African-Americans. Our AAs often want to avoid becoming "white chocolate" and tend to be pretty adamant about maintaning their culture. Of course a lot of black culture (food, accent, religion) is pretty distinctly American, but they might not always want to acknowledge that.

The Chav culture of the UK is really big on soccer, street brawling, and drinking. Anti-academic and anti-intellectual attitudes are pretty strong as well. I've read that a lot of older middle and upper class English detest them, but the youth like them. Nick Griffin's BNP seems to get a lot more traction when it blasts Pakistanis and Muslims, compared to when it criticizes blacks. Not too long ago, some BNP political activists got in a very public fight with some Pakistanis. Interestingly, this same BNP, which has a reputation for white supremacy, made an attempt to reach out to black Christian voters. Apparently, even white nationalists in Britain are sort of okay with blacks. Check out the link below.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/05/bnp-christianity-black-voters-dagenham

I find a lot of Americans have mixed feelings on blacks. They see blacks as glamourous (due to sports and music) and fun to be around, but thuggish and racist at times. Of course, a lot of more liberal Americans view past racism and oppression as the roots of bad behavior. I think it can be said that virtually all Americans would just like blacks to get their act together and join mainstream society - very few here hate them (outside maybe the northeast and perhaps the South). It's a complicated relationship between blacks and whites - and Obama did a good job of positioning himself as someone that could build bridges and solve the race problem.

Anonymous said...

Black gang rape and predation on young girls is disproportionately vs young black girls, whereas Pakistani rape & predation (outside of their wives & close relatives) is disproportionately vs young lower-class white girls.

I believe what the Pakistanis and Muslims were doing was befriending really really young girls, usually from broken homes. Then plying them with drugs and alcohol, before brutalizing them and then pimping them out. Less of a street crime and more of a calculated act against a weak group of people. In some ways, it could even be construed as an act of warfare. I'd guess that while whites and blacks are more dangerous, their assault is of a non-racial nature and isn't designed to humiliate the general population.

Anonymous said...

To use Whiskey language......

Black British = Alpha male

Muslim/Pakistani British = resentful and resented Beta male gone crazy

Indian-British = $$$$$$$

Truth said...

"their assault is of a non-racial nature and isn't designed to humiliate the general population."

Really? Then why don't they do it to poor Muslim girls?

Anonymous said...

Really? Then why don't they do it to poor Muslim girls?

I said that white and black rapists were non-racial, so there is no specific attack on Muslims. Muslim rapists are racist and choose whites for humiliation, out of hatred for them.

Anonymous said...

From what I'm hearing here, Black British seem to have assimilated quite a bit more than African-Americans.

Most British Blacks are of West Indian descent. West Indians seem to do well in the USA - better than the AAs. Examples being Sidney Poitier and Colin Powell.

I've read West Indians claim this is because slavery was abolished earlier in the West Indies, and although everyone tends to think of Jamaica, most of the West Indies is comprised of tiny little islands, and when the plantations were no longer viable, the whites left, and the blacks ran the places. Hence, they've got more confidence. Or thats how they see it.

The Chav culture of the UK is really big on soccer, street brawling, and drinking. Anti-academic and anti-intellectual attitudes are pretty strong as well.

The chav culture has been around for a very long time. You can go back over a 100 years and find this stuff. In Marxist terms chavs = lumpen proletariat. What has happened in recent decades is that that lumpen proles have vastly increased in numbers whilst the better behaved proles have decreased.

Nick Griffin's BNP seems to get a lot more traction when it blasts Pakistanis and Muslims

Yes. It does doesn't it.

Before the BNP there was the National Front (NF) who wanted to expel everyone who could not trace their ancestry back before 1945 - blacks, muslims, indians, the lot.

In the Netherlands, Gert Wilders had a lot of traction and he is anti-muslim. But Gert Wilders will have nothing to do with the neighbouring Flemish Nationalists, the Vlaams Belang. The Flemish speak Dutch and are kith and kin to the Dutch. Why won't Gert have anything to do with them?

The Vlaams Belang are on the face of it civic nationalists like the Scots Nationalists. But if lefties are to be believed, their original supporters were veterens of WWII Nazi foreign legion, the Flemish Waffen SS.

Gert Wilders has spent a lot of time in Israel.

This doesn't necessarily mean Gert Wilders and the BNP are funded from Israel. It could mean they recognise they are likely to get more sympathetic press from a news media where Jews are over-represented.

One can only speculate how this would have panned out if Israel were in the middle of black africa.

Anonymous said...

What has happened in recent decades is that that lumpen proles have vastly increased in numbers whilst the better behaved proles have decreased.

Defection probably explains this more than differential breeding - industry is massively downscaled and the working class is humiliatingly defeated (at least that's the perception), there are none of the manly jobs which allow the "working man" to define himself as the "working man" (a concept Steve brings up again and again), Leftist Marxist ideology forbids entering into any middle class occupations as much if not more than middle class snobbery does, and besides there aren't that many of those jobs and the middle class kids are better at them.

So two options, if you are a young working class man, become much more attractive, than they were to your cohort in the 1970s and 1980s - live like a lumpenprole, take on that violent, stupid, crass culture (because its a culture adapted to structural unemployment with no possibilities of accumulation or competition between that), i.e. be a Chav or defect to a service centre makework McJob and try to make up your self esteem by live it up in a hedonistic nightlife. Most of these young Brits chose the latter, but depressingly high numbers chose the former, particularly more so outside of large cities.

Immigration doesn't help with this, because what manufacturing jobs there are, which are simple enough to give to non-English speakers, are farmed out to immigrants who'll take less wages and a lower quality of life.

Really? Then why don't they do it to poor Muslim girls?

Middle Eastern cultures have traditionally had of proprietarian marriage and arranged marriage and obsessions with female purity that more strongly enforce female cloistering than the pre-modern West. I'm not sure why, either because males cheat more (in Darwinian terms, if that's the explanation, because kids cost less) or because female effort in food production is more irrelevant. This gets ramped up a lot as a badge of Muslim counter-culture in the UK, just as the West has transitioned further away from it (led by Northwest Europe) - so there's not really opportunity.

Africans/Blacks have long traditions of female sexual freedom (in ways that may not be good for their societies) that mean their women are not cloistered either, in general.

neil craig said...

Technological breakthroughs are taking place at a rate unprecedented in history it is just that they do not get translated into products. Look at Moore's law - that computer capacity doubles every 2 years, now 18 months. Simply because computers are a growing part of our economy this is bound to be a net faster increase for society. Look at strength of materials - we now have buckytubes, theoretically capable of making space elevators, something Clarke forecast for the middle of next century.

The problem is that government parasitism restricts the development into technology. They banned flying cars, they turned space into a NASA preserve & NASA into a bureaucratic swamp. You can't put a new chemical product on the market without spending years & at least £1 bn on certification. You can't put up a house using modern building techniques & may not be allowed to at all on a new site.

The good news from that is that if we are still making progress & most years we are, we could easily match China's 10% growth simply by sharply reducing government parasitism.

I personally think we could "legislate innovation" with X-Prizes which would be jam in addition to that +10% growth.

"Free land" will be available as soon as we start building L5 settlements in space & perhaps as soon as seasteding gets going.

Education is tough but I suggest firing the parasites & rewarding succesful teachers would work.

Anonymous said...

Blacks in the UK are vibrant; Pac-Men aren't. Mystery solved.

Truth said...

"I said that white and black rapists were non-racial, so there is no specific attack on Muslims. Muslim rapists are racist and choose whites for humiliation, out of hatred for them."

I read wrong, my mistake.

Anonymous said...

"As you may have noticed, life is different today. Americans tend to marry later, have fewer children, and live more stressed out lives because they need both parents to work to afford a house in a 'good' school district."

30 years of Reaganomics.

Anonymous said...

It sounds like you should be using John Kerry's Middle Class Misery Index, which incorporates items like health care costs and college tuition.