If you look at how RH defends his case in other people's comment section and Twitter, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that his brain is atrophying.
1) He denies point blank that cross-national data is useful, but the entire basis of his argument is that the U.S. performs better than its average IQ would suggest and we have to just accept the first explanation for this that pops into his head. So he's saying studying lots of different countries is useless, but random data points are useful. Can this even be a serious argument?
2) He relies on the magic resilience of U.S. institutions in the face of demographic change as if he is a boomer who watches Hannity all day, but the fact is that this hope has *already* been falsified by the experience of California.
3) He admits that certain demographic changes would in fact doom America (e.g. majority black), but then he waves this away by saying they won't happen. But his whole argument is that America shouldn't regulate who comes!
4) He claims Brazil is 50% black (actual figure 7.6%).
5) He uses average house size as a indicator of wealth to show Alabama is richer than Japan, as if somehow it would be possible for Japan (343 people per km2) to up its GDP sufficiently to match Alabama (38 people per km2) for physical space. The same argument would show Alabama was richer than Manhattan and his other arguments are just as dopey.
But there's a bigger problem, which is that America's relative wealth is a combination of elite immigration and having the global reserve currency (plus certain other related institutional advantages). These were achieved, basically, by conquering the world in 1945 when blacks were segregated and the rest of America was an increasingly un-diverse white-nationalist country. Post 1965 immigration and diversity is, at best, completely irrelevant. Even if we accept that relatively high diversity stopped America developing a welfare state like Western Europe (probably true) and that this is a net advantage (dubious because the work arounds the U.S. uses to manage poverty such as subsidised mortgages may be more harmful) it wouldn't follow that *more* immigration is still good, it would just mean that there is an optimum level of diversity and the U.S. was closer to it than Europe in the 1960s. It may actually still have been above it even then, a fortiori today.
1) I noticed this same bizarre argument from him. If you don't think countries can be compared, then why are you basing your argument on a comparison between countries? For example, average IQ is only a blunt measure of human capital, and does not necessarily precisely capture elite human capital. One explanation for the US' greater prosperity, which I've already mentioned, as well as you and many others, is that the US has had elite immigration basically from the beginning. The Puritans and Quaker settlers had one of the highest literary rates of European groups in their time, and even today the US receives elite immigrants from Europe. Point being, average IQ doesn't capture everything, and yet he uses it to jump to the bizarre conclusion that racial diversity, not other possible explanations like geography, but racial diversity is the cause of US wealth. Also, as I've been pointing out, the US is a single data point, and you can't see a pattern with that, but Hanania refuses to look at other countries to see if there's the pattern he's guessing there, because the truth is, there isn't.
3) Yeah, while it's true that the US has been sheltered from mass migration from Africa for obvious geographic reasons, it's not hard to imagine a scenario where open borders lead to an influx of African immigration that just keeps on increasing. The US is an extremely attractive place for African migrants, especially if they were to establish a large diaspora in the country.
4) The number of self-declared blacks in Brazil is small, but most Brazilians have significant Sub-Saharan African genetic ancestry.
5) It's also bizarre not to consider the ways in which Japan is nicer than Alabama. On crime, life expectancy, public transportation, and on several other measures Japan is a much better place to live than Alabama, and it's really weird not to consider that. The idea that one should only care about GDP per capita strikes me as bizarre as the idea that one shouldn't care about GDP per capita at all, and that it doesn't matter if your country has the GDP per capita of Haiti or Canada. Obviously GDP per capita matters, but so do other measures of well-being.
6) Good point about the timing here. It is important to note that not only was the US already exceptionally wealthy in the 1960s, before the recent diversity and when the country still understood itself as a primarily ethnic European country, but the US was already exceptionally productive before the First World War. By the early decades of the 20th century the US had already overtaken the UK in per capita GDP and per capita industrial output, which tells us that post-65 immigration really has nothing to do with US prosperity. These immigrants arrived in the already very prosperous country.
On (4), I see RH probably arrived at his 50% figure by counting pardos as Black (or more likely is just copying someone else who did). But this category includes everyone who is mixed race. From come cursory reading, few pardos are plurality, let along majority black by descent, but for various political reasons they are sometimes described as black. Contra, RH, Brazil seems to be a fairly good comparison point as a large country with a demographic mix similar to that which America is developing (albeit minus most of the high IQ elite).
In Average is Over Tyler Cowen said America would become a place with fancier favelas and a bigger but still minority smart fraction living in gated communities.
It's important to remember that this is the best case scenario of the world the pro-immigration folks want to build.
"We will move from a society based on the pretense that everybody is given an okay standard of living to a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now. I imagine a world where, say 10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent of current-day millionaires albeit with better health care."
"Much of the rest of the country will have stagnant or maybe even falling wages in dollar terms, but a lot more opportunities for cheap fun and also cheap education. Many of these people will live quite well, and those will be the people who have the discipline to benefit from all the free or near-free services modern technology has made available. Others will fall by the wayside."
----
"When I visit Latin America, I am struck by how many people there live cheaply. In Mexico, for instance, I have met large numbers of people who live on less than $10,000 a year, or maybe even less than $5000 a year. They hardly quality as well-off but they do have access to cheap food and very cheap housing. They cannot buy too many other things. They don't always have the money to bring the kid to the doctor or to buy new clothes. Their lodging is satisfactory, if not spectacular, and of course the warmer weather helps."
"What if someone proposed that in a few parts of the United States, in the warmer states, some city neighborhoods would be set aside for cheap living? We would build some "tiny homes" there; tiny homes that might be about 400 square feet and cost in the range of $20,000 to $40,000. We would build some very modest dwellings there, as we used to build in the 1920s. We would also build some makeshift structures there, similar to the better dwellings you might find in a Rio de Janeiro favela. the quality of the water and electrical infrastructure might be low by American standards, though we could supplement the neighborhood with free municipal wireless (the future version of Marie Antoinette's famous alleged phrase will be "Let them watch Internet!"). Hulu and other web-based TV services would replace more expensive cable connections for those residents. Then we would allow people to move there if they desired. In essence, we would be recreating a Mexico-like or Brazil-like environment in part of the United States....Many people will be horrified at this thought. How dare you propose we stuff our elderly into shantytowns? Maybe they are right to be upset, although recall that no one is being forced to live in these places. Some people might prefer to live there...
"The most extreme low-rent move is to go 'off the grid.' For all the technological progress we have seen, a growing number of Americans are disconnecting from traditional water and electricity backups and making their own way, often in owner-built homes, micro-homes, trailer parks, floating boats, or less elegantly in tent cities, as we find scattered around the United States, including in Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Some of these options are gruesome, but many people are doing it by choice. New technologies, such as powerful local generators and solar power, are making it easier to strike out on one's own."
"There is one final way we will adjust to uneven wage patterns and that is with our tastes. Many of society's low earners will reshape their tastes--will have to reshape their tastes--toward cheaper desires. Caviar is an expensive desire and Goya canned beans is a relatively cheap desire. Don't scoff at the beans: With an income above the national average, I receive more pleasure from the beans, which I cook with freshly ground cumin and rehydrated, pureed chiles, Good tacos and quesadillas and tamales are cheap too, and that is one reason they are eaten so frequently in low income countries."
"Just as some poorer people will do without fancy infrastructure, so will others do without advanced health care. Since we won't be willing to pay for full-benefit Medicare and Medicaid for everyone who will need it, some people will see cut benefits or rationed access to doctors. Our political system will try to construct that rationing so that voters blame the doctors rather than the politicians, but one way or another rationing will increase. Imagine many more millions of people wishing to see a doctor and having to wait weeks or months to do so."
I guess Hanania would argue that Brazil doesn't have a high IQ, so they can't benefit from diversity creating an environment of low social trust which then creates a less generous welfare state. Yes, that's his argument, despite the fact that it sounds like a joke. Of course, Brazil's welfare state is pretty big for a country of its income, so there you go.
I think the idea that social trust is not good for economic growth is pretty preposterous to begin with, and to the extent that anything beyond average or elite IQ matters, it's going to be something like social coordination which is in part social trust. For example, East Slavic countries underperform relative to their IQs, their problem seems to be something related to coordination/social trust. His other premises aren't much better.
The ironic thing about his Japan talk is that while I can provide lots of explanations for why Japan would be poorer that don't impinge on Japanese genetics, I'm perfectly willing to entertain the idea that Japanese IQ isn't the equivalent of white IQ and that they may have other undesirable traits (conformity, lack of creativity, risk aversion, etc).
If that's true then high end as well as low end immigration could be a mistake. Even if East Asians would make good dentists, it's not worth it if they vote to keep my kids in masks at school all day. In fact Asian immigration to my state/county did lead to leftist policies during COVID.
I especially liked his Tweet "I know that think tanks routinely rank other OECD countries as more business friendly, but I asked some dudes and they agree that can't be right."
"high diversity stopped America developing a welfare state like Western Europe (probably true)"
Probably untrue, there is no reason to believe America doesn't have a comparable welfare state to other OECD countries (I'll grant you France is terrible). The people get a heck of a lot less out of it (for instance, spending as much on government health insurance but not actually getting universal coverage), but the money is spent.
"Probably untrue, there is no reason to believe America doesn't have a comparable welfare state to other OECD countries"
I think we're agreeing. Let's say for the sake of argument, that racial diversity is responsible for America being pretty much the only 1st world country not to have socialised medicine, the workaround America uses of pseudo-private employer health insurance might actually be even worse, and is certainly more expensive.
In general, unless you are willing to kill/deport/enslave the poors (or to totally re-orient your economy so they have something to do), direct cash payments might just be the cheapest way to keep them sedate.
Richard Hanania ignores the potential for ethnic conflict, other measures of social well-being that may depend on social trust, and that demographic preservation may be a value for its own sake, but even focusing on the argument he is making, it is obvious that the argument doesn't work.
Yeah, the US is exceptionally wealthy, and more free-market than Northern Europe, but the US is a single data point. Generally, redistribution and government size are positively correlated with GDP per capita. Of course, redistribution and government size don't cause prosperity, it's just that more prosperous countries can have more of them, and those things don't stop countries from being prosperous. So IQ or human capital is the main determinant of prosperity, but maybe being more free market makes one richer among high IQ countries? If that were the case, the other Anglo offshoots, which are similarly free-market as the US, would also be richer than Northern Europe, but they are poorer, and the same goes for South Korea.
So why is the US richer than its average IQ predicts? It may have to do with things like geography and a huge population, but a theory is that the US has had continuous elite immigration, and this may not show up in the average IQ even if elite immigrants may be making a difference. For example, the US still attracts elite scientists and business people from Europe, and perhaps this has always been the case to some extent. By elite immigration here I really mean elite, as opposed to the kind of mass migration that Australia receives, which doesn't seem to be helping Australia's GDP per capita.
The US is also in the same league as Qatar/UAE/Saudi Arabia in that it is the world's largest oil producer and LNG exporter. Most people don't think of the US this way, but it's true. Canada and Australia are even more dependent on mining and oil/gas exports.
The difference is that the oil/gas sector is small in the US economy, and the US has a giant industrial and service economy that exports highly complex products. With the exception of a few countries that manage to have a high GDP per capita because of high concentration of natural resources, or tourism, or financial services schemes, all rich countries are rich because they have complex economies that produce high value products in the international trade.
The US was also extremely rich before the US started to be an oil/gas exporter. All that said, I don't think the idea that the US has historically benefited from natural resources is ridiculous, it's certainly much more plausible than the idea that the US got rich because of racial diversity, given the fact that the US was already rich before post-65 immigration.
It's fair to say the the USA has a more free market economy than France, but I don't really buy that for the entire OECD. Whether we use government spending or various business friendliness measures it's not that special. And that's with the USA basically hiding a lot of its health expense in the "private (but not really)" sector.
On the US, the most important point was left out. It is the economic, financial and military power of the world. It can support its economy regardless of pure market influences, for example the Fed printing unbacked dollars, or forcing Europe to suicidally withdraw from cheap Russian raw material sources and markets by military means.
While it's the case that the US didn't want Europe to depend on Russia for energy, Russia was the one who destroyed trade between Europe and Russia, because you know, they invaded Ukraine. Countries other than the US do things in the world. Germany was happy to continue to ignore the UK and Eastern European countries, to continue to buy energy from Russia, but the invasion made the politics of that impossible.
Even if there were a positive correlation between the ethnic diversity and wealth of a country, isn't it much more likely that, rather than ethnic diversity causing greater wealth, that greater wealth causes greater ethnic diversity, because greater wealth attracts inward migration which, in turn, leads to greater diversity?
"Diversity destroys social trust and shrinks government" is basically a phenomena unique to Southern Whites hating Southern Blacks. You take that out of the picture and there really is no track record of it working.
And it only works because the whites outnumber the blacks. In the Reconstruction South blacks voted in other blacks to office where they were a majority and it was a fucking disaster, just like black run areas today. The reason the north was willing to end reconstruction and allow Jim Crow is because propping up dysfunctional black governance was unpopular and unsustainable. Later the great migration reduced the black population enough so that by the 1960s you could end Jim Crow but still have white majorities in the south (at the state level). In those localities where southern blacks are in control it's a disaster.
Even if whites eventually start feeling less social trust you've still got lots of new voters that like the welfare state to make up for whatever doubts they have. That's how things went empirically in the places immigrants moved to.
“Although Europeans invented communism, most countries that implemented communism were not European countries, but rather Latin Americans, Arabs, Africans, and Asians. The only Europeans that implemented communism ‘by choice’ were Russians, which are distant to the typical northern, central European population which is the largest fraction of the American White ancestry. Furthermore, communism has been substantially promoted by Jews, which are only about 50% European in ancestry. I realize this section is speculative.”
Not really true. Italian Fascism and National Socialism aren’t communist but they definitely highly collectivist state ideologies that were responsible for nationalizing most of their domestic industries. Mussolini in particular nationalist most of the economy under his tenure.
Everyone's been significantly poorer than the USA since America was founded. Colonial purchasing power was higher than the UK. The US had a strong genetic founding stock, a huge untapped continent full of massive resources, and no peer competitors to stop its expansion or drag it into costly wars. Later was the victor in two world wars that didn't touch it at all that saw the old European empires mortgage themselves to America.
The countries he's listed spend the same % of GDP on government as the US, and I'd argue less if you include Employer Group Health Insurance as a quasi-government expense.
To keep it simple lets use the international monetary fund for total government spending.
The US clocks in at 42% of GDP in 2021. Canada, the UK, Japan, Australia, and the Netherlands clock around the same.
Famously socialist Sweden or European powerhouse Germany clock in at 50%.
That’s pretty close, and pretty much the entire difference is that the USA puts a lot of money into Employer Group Health Plans rather then universal healthcare. Is that an important difference? I’d argue that the Employer Group market (both the insurance and what it pays for) is so highly regulated and subsidized its a kind of quasi-public expenditure. Nobody would defend it as close to a free market. It’s not a huge accomplishment that the US has to spend 18% for GDP to accomplish what Sweden does for 10%, keeping that extra money “off the books” doesn’t change that.
So I’m not really buying that US government is dramatically more free market then Europe or Japan (maybe France).
As to immigration, the proper test case would be places in America that got a lot of immigrants and shifted to the left, like CA and NY. Everyone would agree that immigration did not result in any kind of collapse in government spending or increase in market freedom in those places. In fact counter to your claim that government spending hasn't increased since the 60s we've actually seen government spending increase pretty substantially, but its mostly been at the state and local level (the big driver being that places like CA and NY became one party DEM states whose taxes and spending exploded).
As to why Japan is poorer then Alabama lets examine.
(Side Note: I haven't been to Alabama but I have spent significant time in both West Virginia and Japan. The idea that poor US states are "richer" then Japan strikes me as kind of insane based on the evaluation, but I guess Medicaid adds to GDP and pizza is cheaper in Alabama then Japan).
Even two decades after the bubble burst, Japan has a PPP per capita of $42k. Alabama is about the same on PPP.
Alabama receives probably somewhere around $5k-$10k in federal subsidy per capita from the USA. This comes in a lot of forms including direct payments, them being so dependent on things like Medicaid, and their low tax revenue.
Alabama also gets huge investments from the US military (one of the biggest employers).
Alabama is able to benefit from being in a common market and citizenship with the rest of America, Japan does not.
On that line of thinking, when Japan was killing America in the auto industry in the 1980s the USA put huge trade restriction on Japan. The only way Japan could continue to sell autos was to open plants in the USA so that they could be “Made in America”. There is a huge Toyota plant in Alabama as a result, and many foreign manufacturers build factories all over the America south to get around this quota. I’d argue this is effectively a subsidy for those regions at Japans expense. Because people in Alabama can vote in US elections and Japanese can’t Alabamans can leverage US economic power to their advantage. One could discuss these trade and market issues at length, but there is a huge advantage to being inside the USA versus out that has little to do with Alabama as an economic powerhouse.
Alabama has 50,000 square miles of land. While not all of it is fit for living, much of it is. Alabama has 5M people.
Japan has 150,000 square miles, but 90% of that is mountains in the center. Only 10% is fit for living. Japan has 125M people.
In addition to a lot more land to house a lot less people Alabama also has much more natural resources then Japan (which basically has none).
In 1960 Japan had a GDP per capita of $475. US GDP per capita was $3,000. Even if Alabama was lower than the US average, it was still starting from a much higher point than Japan. Yet now they are equal.
The above are all non-IQ related reasons, but I’m willing to assume that Asians are uncreative and their IQ isn’t as worth as much as white IQ for reasons others have alluded to. Certainly the demographic collapse of East Asia the last two decades hasn’t helped economic dynamism either. I doubt that possibility helps the case for immigration though (even the smart ones aren’t that good).
Richard has a theory he needs to be true "diversity reduces social trust and leads to free markets" and so he just keeps throwing theories and anecdotes at it and ignoring when they fall apart.
Firs he claimed that America hasn't seen big increases in government spending as a % of GDP since the 1960s, but that's not true.
Then he claimed America spent less then as a % of GDP on government then other OECD countries, but then people pointed out that many other countries spend the same (or less).
Then he claimed that Japan is poor because of industrial policy and unions, until people pointed out that its industrial sector is its most productive and globally competitive.
Then it was a bunch of random anecdotes about regulations in Japan, as if they are the only country that has farm subsidies or small business rackets. Was there any attempt to quantify the impact of this and link it to GDP differences. Of course not. How can you blame small retail stores for a 40% GDP gap if the entire sector is 5% of GDP? You can't.
Alabama has bigger houses! Population density being 25-50x higher in Japan can't possibly be an explanation.
He never responds to this stuff. He just moves on to the next bad argument or anecdote.
I'll post my existing comments here below, but its just an all around poor performance from an obvious ideologue troll that is stuck in an empirical corner.
I have a strange counterargument. I call it "sexy". The point is that Asian and Indian men living in Western countries have very big problems in the marriage market, which is why they remain unhappy virgins, and having such men is not good for society. And it is not good that India is deprived of highly intelligent people - this even goes to the detriment of the West, because a poorer India is a source of headache for Western countries.
Another example: Jews. On average, they are politically very leftist, and in addition, they are overrepresented in white-collar financial crimes:
And yet, despite their ostensible social conservativism, they form voting blocks for leftist parties. It's almost like ethnic quotas, enabling nepotistic networks and ethnic enclaves and seeing their rivals in what they percieve to be a zero sum competition harmed beats out anything else.
their children assimilate to american degeneracy and whatever benefit those values confer quickly diminishes. And even for the more religious firstgen minorities, their ethnocentrism (demands to have white wealth redistributed to them) swamps out any social conservatism. Blacks, as has been noted, are on some measures socially conservative, but they care more about getting those programs
Blacks have long been much more socially conservative than white liberals and it hasn't mattered. This kind of "social conservatism" isn't enough to counter the desire for welfare, ethnic spoils, and other reasons they vote for the left.
And in the case of immigrants the social conservatism usually recedes after a generation. The IQ is forever.
You can see this with Asians too. They don't like affirmative action *when it harms Asians*, but they don't mind it when it helps them (AAPI business loans) or when it hurts whites. The goal of Asians isn't meritocracy so much as they want to be treated the way blacks and hispanics are by the left.
As far as the 4D chess theory, people who suspect such things usually are showing the flaws in their own understanding and character. There’s a correlation between immigration restrictionism and paranoid conspiracy theories about other’s motives, because they both come from an ugly zero-sum view of the world. They’re very confused by someone who can face data but doesn’t have their same small-minded motivations but instead wants to see humanity flourish.
Agh. You were criticising open borders less than a year ago. You are all over the place like Anatoly Karlin (who until recently was a white nationalist who endorsed Richard Spencer, now he is suddenly open borders). https://www.richardhanania.com/p/does-immigration-threaten-western
"Yeah. Well I’m not for open borders. I’m more pragmatic and I sort of take every country on its own terms. As far as whether diversity is good or bad, I don’t like that framing because it really depends on the context." - Richard Hanania, Aug. 2022
Just out of curiosity, mind if I suggest another zero-sum conspiracy theory?
My impression is that Californians like David Cole, Unz and Sailer tend to note improvements in certain nearby areas thanks to Hispanic immigration displacing blacks further away. (That it also displaced/marginalized conservative whites seems to have made a less salient impact on them.)
Unz talking about it or that you personally have lived in a place where you have seen the benefits of a certain minority being replaced?
What I'm suggesting is that people that have lived in such a place may be rather charitable in how they interpret the larger evidence on immigration. Perhaps you understand that it seems to require some explanation when you (and Unz and Cole) who aren't coy about the problems of 85 IQ people suddenly condemn everyone concerned about 90 IQ people flooding the country as ignorant and small minded?
Like if a Swede had troublesome Somalian neighbors supplanted by somewhat less troublesome Syrians, would that risk giving him an overly charitable interpretation on the overall impact of Syrian asylum seekers?
So what is the point of comparing nations' outcomes in relation to their demographic diversity? If the numbers are all junk, just let people decide "I want more immigrants" or "I don't want more immigrants" based on personal taste. Seems perfectly fine to my small mind. Let the humans flourish or not on their own. Most people want a certain cultural continuity. That's a hard thing to buy with the extra money the junk numbers tell us we get from diversity.
I mean the second chart is a joke. You have African on one end and Europe and East Asia on another and a line that goes slightly down and that’s supposed to prove something. You can make a million charts like that. Not enough observations, too many confounding variables, observations are not independent. This isn’t how statistics should be used.
If you read, you see that I already tried adding regional controls and this changed nothing. I have found this does the same thing as a proper spatial lag control. So your worry has already been ruled out.
You found a null result but if you found a real result in either direction it wouldn’t have meant anything. It’s a bad measure and underpowered and too many lurking variables. Just because you have data doesn’t mean it’s useful for the question. And lol at the state analysis with 50 observations. I maybe will write a longer piece on why cross national data is garbage and can’t be saved with controls
At best, hannania is playing russian roulette with your posterity (readers of this blog), hoping that there is some heretofore unstated lurking variable that makes it such that introducing more basement iq third worlders into the west somehow wont dampen economic prosperity, lead to more racial wealth expropriation, crime (race-based and otherwise) etc. If not, well sucks to suck, you and your kids will be dhimmis. Some businesses may see some short-term benefits though!
I'm going to let a few points go without mention, not because I agree, but for length.
"After the 1960s, it became impossible to get overwhelming majorities in favor of major additions to the welfare state."
"The biggest drivers of government spending are now the entitlement programs that an overwhelmingly white country supported in the 1930s and again in the 1960s."
Partly this is because the big items, healthcare and retirement, were addressed like they were everywhere else in the world.
I would also argue that employer group health insurance is basically a government program given its highly regulated nature as both insurance, the sector its expenses come from, and the tax subsidy. Eliminating that does a lot to eliminate the difference between the USA and Europe. That would add another 6-7% of GDP to "government expenditure".
But it's also not a true statement that government hasn't grown. Total government spending, including state and local, has increased from around the high 20s in the late 1960s to close to 40% (before COVID insanity).
This doesn't include the MASSIVE unfunded liabilities most state and local have in their retirement obligations to government employees (which is absolutely the worst in blue areas).
Where did a lot of the growth come from? The states and cities that immigrants flooded into (California, NY, etc) became one party DEM polities whose expenditures exploded.
Far from diversity "destroying trust and making the welfare state unpopular" it supercharged it. There is now a huge difference in tax and fiscal policy between states (NY/CA vs TX/FL) and most blue cities and their white suburbs/exurbs.
There has also been all the "emergency spending" such as after the housing crash and COVID. This spending was mostly done by the Democrats (the post vaccine spending bills passed on party line votes for instance). Given how often we seem to have "crises" I tend to think of this as an ongoing expense rather than a series of runoffs. When the crisis happens, expect Democrats to be more spending happy.
The one big ongoing federal expansion we've seen was Obamacare, both the exchanges and the Medicaid expansion. Romney did better than Reagan in 1980 amongst whites 59 vs 56, but the white share decreased from 88% to 72%, so instead of a landslide he lost. Hispanics were only 2% of the electorate in 1980 and Asians aren't even listed.
Romney's poor performance among minorities capped off a generational effort by the Republican Party to win over minorities with kindness and amnesty that ended in failure. If a Mormon isn't nice enough, maybe nice isn't the problem here. Perhaps immigrants just wanted their Obamacare and the rest of what the left was selling. Reaganism created a country where Reagan 2.0 couldn't win.
We'll revisit electoral implications later.
"America is Already Low IQ"
Are Hispanics better then blacks, yes.
Are Hispanics not as bad an immigrant as the Muslims Europe gets, yes.
There are just so many of them though. The relative quality has been swamped by quantity. We can see what happened to the places that got lots of them (NY, CA, etc). This is an empirical fact. TX and FL have been able to delay turning into CA and NY because their whites are way further to the right, and in some cases because their Hispanics have a unique history (Cubans).
Note that in DeSantis got 65% of the white vote in 2022. So Hispanics still aren't as good as whites. Hispanic vote share tends to go up and down with white vote share, which you would expect because popular governors are popular with everyone. But it's always systematically lower, and you can't run on being the COVID governor in every race every year in every state. Eventually you're going to have an election where a huge minority group voting far to the left of whites costs you an election.
"There are some Mexicans who mow my lawn and do the gardening for like $60 a month, and they reduce the average income of my town, but I’m better off because of them."
No you aren't. It costs you $60 UP FRONT. That property tax bill you get. The income tax bill you get. Where do you think the money is going? You think someone making that kind of wage rate pays enough tax for the education and health expenditure for these people? Let's not even get into how all of them being around jacks up your cost of living.
It seems cheap because the costs are hidden. But you pay bro.
Here is the crux of your entire piece:
1) If the GOP were nicer to Hispanics they would win Hispanics. It's all Prop 187 fault, etc.
Prop 187 was a "keyhole solution" that said illegals couldn't get welfare and a judge struck it down. Shows how useless "keyhole solutions" are and how much Hispanics like welfare.
2) The GOP has been doing this since the 80s. Reagan gave amnesty in 1987. The GOP purged the paleocons in the 1990s and the same time that the DEMs were about as anti-immigration as the GOP (go look a the 1996 DEM platform). Bush, McCain, and Romney all ran on being pro-immigration and pro-Hispanic.
3) This has never led to electoral success. In every election and every polity minorities vote to the left of whatever the white norm is. Over decades, regardless of candidates, regardless of location, regardless of issues.
4) The closest thing to minority outreach success we've had are Trump (they aren't sending their best, border state governors who bus them to Kamala Harris's house, or the most successful Hispanic GOP candidate in history, Ron DeSantis, who tricked a bunch of Hispanics onto a plane to Martha's Vineyard in ***Sept 2022*** and bragged about it on national news (he won a landslide with hispanics a couple months later).
DeSantis didn't do this after the election, he did it during the heart of the campaign in a huge profile way.
So there simply is no empirical relation between the GOP stance on immigration and the voting habits of immigrants. If there was, there would be a conflict of interest. But there isn't. Keeping immigrants out costs no votes now and prevent future democratic voters from existing.
5) It doesn't matter if Hispanics don't like LBGT. Blacks don't like LBGT either. They aren't big on abortion either. It doesn't matter. Blacks want free shit from the government and affirmative action.
They will give trans whatever it wants if the checks keep coming.
That's what Hispanics want too, just to a lessor degree. And yes the guys doing your lawn get free shit from the government because they consume government services they don't pay enough in taxes to fund.
"The Sailer Strategy"
The Sailer Strategy noted that due to immigration making it impossible to be competitive on the coasts the only path to victory for the GOP laid open was winning the Upper Midwest. The Upper Midwest was full of working class whites. So the GOP should focus on winning working class whites.
This was Romney's flaw, even if you juice your Hispanic share a few points or are more acceptable to highly educated whites, you still aren't going to win the states they are in (not that Romney could win Hispanics).
Every election in recent memory has validated the Sailer strategy. If you win the Upper Midwest, you win. If you lose, you lose. It will be like that again in 2024.
The second part of the strategy was to associate the Democratic Party with black people, especially black activists. Since nobody likes black people this is a winning strategy, but you have to get over the GOP sensitivity to being called racist.
Closing Thoughts:
Many libertarians have been able to make peace with the idea that immigration is bad. Milton Freedman noted that you can't combine it with a welfare state (so basically DOA), Charles Murray wrote in The Bell Curve that unselected Hispanic immigration would become a problem, Gregory Clark came to a similar conclusion throughout the course of his work, Jason Richwine essentially showed that open borders would destroy rather then create trillions in economic value.
You can be a libertarian and still think bringing a bunch of dumbs that hate markets into the country is a terrible idea. In fact I'd say you basically have to think its a dumb idea if your libertarian.
Because your an immigrant, because you make your living selling a certain ideology and because your personally committed to it, you've got to twist yourself in knots to avoid the empirical reality (I haven't even touched all the problems in this essay). That's really all there is to it.
If I'm right that immigrants are:
1) Destined to vote left because they like the policies of the left.
2) Will do so no matter what the GOP does (short of trying to out socialism the DEMs).
3) There is no correlation between your strategy of niceness/amnesty and immigrant support for GOP/markets
...then that's it bro. If there are already too many Hispanics in the country and we are all doomed, we are all doomed. Oh well, guess we shouldn't have let them in the first place. Listing to your advice in the 90s was a huge fuck up. At least stop digging so we collapse a bit slower, don't make the problem worse engaging in futility.
I started enjoying Twitter and Substack more when I muted that guy. I’m not sure if he fits the original definition of a troll but he’s pretty darn close.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, like all internet racist you can’t differentiate what you think from what you want to be true. You don’t understand statistics if you don’t get 99% of social science is pure garbage (lol, fractionalization index), while many online rightists are just as naive as those making nonsense measures of democracy.
I could play this stupid game very easily. Cross-national data is some of the lowest form of social science there is, and that’s saying a lot. But I’m telling you that you should be ignoring it.
If you look at how RH defends his case in other people's comment section and Twitter, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that his brain is atrophying.
1) He denies point blank that cross-national data is useful, but the entire basis of his argument is that the U.S. performs better than its average IQ would suggest and we have to just accept the first explanation for this that pops into his head. So he's saying studying lots of different countries is useless, but random data points are useful. Can this even be a serious argument?
2) He relies on the magic resilience of U.S. institutions in the face of demographic change as if he is a boomer who watches Hannity all day, but the fact is that this hope has *already* been falsified by the experience of California.
3) He admits that certain demographic changes would in fact doom America (e.g. majority black), but then he waves this away by saying they won't happen. But his whole argument is that America shouldn't regulate who comes!
4) He claims Brazil is 50% black (actual figure 7.6%).
5) He uses average house size as a indicator of wealth to show Alabama is richer than Japan, as if somehow it would be possible for Japan (343 people per km2) to up its GDP sufficiently to match Alabama (38 people per km2) for physical space. The same argument would show Alabama was richer than Manhattan and his other arguments are just as dopey.
But there's a bigger problem, which is that America's relative wealth is a combination of elite immigration and having the global reserve currency (plus certain other related institutional advantages). These were achieved, basically, by conquering the world in 1945 when blacks were segregated and the rest of America was an increasingly un-diverse white-nationalist country. Post 1965 immigration and diversity is, at best, completely irrelevant. Even if we accept that relatively high diversity stopped America developing a welfare state like Western Europe (probably true) and that this is a net advantage (dubious because the work arounds the U.S. uses to manage poverty such as subsidised mortgages may be more harmful) it wouldn't follow that *more* immigration is still good, it would just mean that there is an optimum level of diversity and the U.S. was closer to it than Europe in the 1960s. It may actually still have been above it even then, a fortiori today.
1) I noticed this same bizarre argument from him. If you don't think countries can be compared, then why are you basing your argument on a comparison between countries? For example, average IQ is only a blunt measure of human capital, and does not necessarily precisely capture elite human capital. One explanation for the US' greater prosperity, which I've already mentioned, as well as you and many others, is that the US has had elite immigration basically from the beginning. The Puritans and Quaker settlers had one of the highest literary rates of European groups in their time, and even today the US receives elite immigrants from Europe. Point being, average IQ doesn't capture everything, and yet he uses it to jump to the bizarre conclusion that racial diversity, not other possible explanations like geography, but racial diversity is the cause of US wealth. Also, as I've been pointing out, the US is a single data point, and you can't see a pattern with that, but Hanania refuses to look at other countries to see if there's the pattern he's guessing there, because the truth is, there isn't.
3) Yeah, while it's true that the US has been sheltered from mass migration from Africa for obvious geographic reasons, it's not hard to imagine a scenario where open borders lead to an influx of African immigration that just keeps on increasing. The US is an extremely attractive place for African migrants, especially if they were to establish a large diaspora in the country.
4) The number of self-declared blacks in Brazil is small, but most Brazilians have significant Sub-Saharan African genetic ancestry.
5) It's also bizarre not to consider the ways in which Japan is nicer than Alabama. On crime, life expectancy, public transportation, and on several other measures Japan is a much better place to live than Alabama, and it's really weird not to consider that. The idea that one should only care about GDP per capita strikes me as bizarre as the idea that one shouldn't care about GDP per capita at all, and that it doesn't matter if your country has the GDP per capita of Haiti or Canada. Obviously GDP per capita matters, but so do other measures of well-being.
6) Good point about the timing here. It is important to note that not only was the US already exceptionally wealthy in the 1960s, before the recent diversity and when the country still understood itself as a primarily ethnic European country, but the US was already exceptionally productive before the First World War. By the early decades of the 20th century the US had already overtaken the UK in per capita GDP and per capita industrial output, which tells us that post-65 immigration really has nothing to do with US prosperity. These immigrants arrived in the already very prosperous country.
On (4), I see RH probably arrived at his 50% figure by counting pardos as Black (or more likely is just copying someone else who did). But this category includes everyone who is mixed race. From come cursory reading, few pardos are plurality, let along majority black by descent, but for various political reasons they are sometimes described as black. Contra, RH, Brazil seems to be a fairly good comparison point as a large country with a demographic mix similar to that which America is developing (albeit minus most of the high IQ elite).
In Average is Over Tyler Cowen said America would become a place with fancier favelas and a bigger but still minority smart fraction living in gated communities.
It's important to remember that this is the best case scenario of the world the pro-immigration folks want to build.
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-toady-class-on-average-is-over/
Cowen:
"We will move from a society based on the pretense that everybody is given an okay standard of living to a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now. I imagine a world where, say 10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent of current-day millionaires albeit with better health care."
"Much of the rest of the country will have stagnant or maybe even falling wages in dollar terms, but a lot more opportunities for cheap fun and also cheap education. Many of these people will live quite well, and those will be the people who have the discipline to benefit from all the free or near-free services modern technology has made available. Others will fall by the wayside."
----
"When I visit Latin America, I am struck by how many people there live cheaply. In Mexico, for instance, I have met large numbers of people who live on less than $10,000 a year, or maybe even less than $5000 a year. They hardly quality as well-off but they do have access to cheap food and very cheap housing. They cannot buy too many other things. They don't always have the money to bring the kid to the doctor or to buy new clothes. Their lodging is satisfactory, if not spectacular, and of course the warmer weather helps."
"What if someone proposed that in a few parts of the United States, in the warmer states, some city neighborhoods would be set aside for cheap living? We would build some "tiny homes" there; tiny homes that might be about 400 square feet and cost in the range of $20,000 to $40,000. We would build some very modest dwellings there, as we used to build in the 1920s. We would also build some makeshift structures there, similar to the better dwellings you might find in a Rio de Janeiro favela. the quality of the water and electrical infrastructure might be low by American standards, though we could supplement the neighborhood with free municipal wireless (the future version of Marie Antoinette's famous alleged phrase will be "Let them watch Internet!"). Hulu and other web-based TV services would replace more expensive cable connections for those residents. Then we would allow people to move there if they desired. In essence, we would be recreating a Mexico-like or Brazil-like environment in part of the United States....Many people will be horrified at this thought. How dare you propose we stuff our elderly into shantytowns? Maybe they are right to be upset, although recall that no one is being forced to live in these places. Some people might prefer to live there...
"The most extreme low-rent move is to go 'off the grid.' For all the technological progress we have seen, a growing number of Americans are disconnecting from traditional water and electricity backups and making their own way, often in owner-built homes, micro-homes, trailer parks, floating boats, or less elegantly in tent cities, as we find scattered around the United States, including in Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Some of these options are gruesome, but many people are doing it by choice. New technologies, such as powerful local generators and solar power, are making it easier to strike out on one's own."
"There is one final way we will adjust to uneven wage patterns and that is with our tastes. Many of society's low earners will reshape their tastes--will have to reshape their tastes--toward cheaper desires. Caviar is an expensive desire and Goya canned beans is a relatively cheap desire. Don't scoff at the beans: With an income above the national average, I receive more pleasure from the beans, which I cook with freshly ground cumin and rehydrated, pureed chiles, Good tacos and quesadillas and tamales are cheap too, and that is one reason they are eaten so frequently in low income countries."
"Just as some poorer people will do without fancy infrastructure, so will others do without advanced health care. Since we won't be willing to pay for full-benefit Medicare and Medicaid for everyone who will need it, some people will see cut benefits or rationed access to doctors. Our political system will try to construct that rationing so that voters blame the doctors rather than the politicians, but one way or another rationing will increase. Imagine many more millions of people wishing to see a doctor and having to wait weeks or months to do so."
He is genuinely a crazy person.
I guess Hanania would argue that Brazil doesn't have a high IQ, so they can't benefit from diversity creating an environment of low social trust which then creates a less generous welfare state. Yes, that's his argument, despite the fact that it sounds like a joke. Of course, Brazil's welfare state is pretty big for a country of its income, so there you go.
I think the idea that social trust is not good for economic growth is pretty preposterous to begin with, and to the extent that anything beyond average or elite IQ matters, it's going to be something like social coordination which is in part social trust. For example, East Slavic countries underperform relative to their IQs, their problem seems to be something related to coordination/social trust. His other premises aren't much better.
The ironic thing about his Japan talk is that while I can provide lots of explanations for why Japan would be poorer that don't impinge on Japanese genetics, I'm perfectly willing to entertain the idea that Japanese IQ isn't the equivalent of white IQ and that they may have other undesirable traits (conformity, lack of creativity, risk aversion, etc).
If that's true then high end as well as low end immigration could be a mistake. Even if East Asians would make good dentists, it's not worth it if they vote to keep my kids in masks at school all day. In fact Asian immigration to my state/county did lead to leftist policies during COVID.
+1
I especially liked his Tweet "I know that think tanks routinely rank other OECD countries as more business friendly, but I asked some dudes and they agree that can't be right."
"high diversity stopped America developing a welfare state like Western Europe (probably true)"
Probably untrue, there is no reason to believe America doesn't have a comparable welfare state to other OECD countries (I'll grant you France is terrible). The people get a heck of a lot less out of it (for instance, spending as much on government health insurance but not actually getting universal coverage), but the money is spent.
"Probably untrue, there is no reason to believe America doesn't have a comparable welfare state to other OECD countries"
I think we're agreeing. Let's say for the sake of argument, that racial diversity is responsible for America being pretty much the only 1st world country not to have socialised medicine, the workaround America uses of pseudo-private employer health insurance might actually be even worse, and is certainly more expensive.
In general, unless you are willing to kill/deport/enslave the poors (or to totally re-orient your economy so they have something to do), direct cash payments might just be the cheapest way to keep them sedate.
Richard Hanania ignores the potential for ethnic conflict, other measures of social well-being that may depend on social trust, and that demographic preservation may be a value for its own sake, but even focusing on the argument he is making, it is obvious that the argument doesn't work.
Yeah, the US is exceptionally wealthy, and more free-market than Northern Europe, but the US is a single data point. Generally, redistribution and government size are positively correlated with GDP per capita. Of course, redistribution and government size don't cause prosperity, it's just that more prosperous countries can have more of them, and those things don't stop countries from being prosperous. So IQ or human capital is the main determinant of prosperity, but maybe being more free market makes one richer among high IQ countries? If that were the case, the other Anglo offshoots, which are similarly free-market as the US, would also be richer than Northern Europe, but they are poorer, and the same goes for South Korea.
So why is the US richer than its average IQ predicts? It may have to do with things like geography and a huge population, but a theory is that the US has had continuous elite immigration, and this may not show up in the average IQ even if elite immigrants may be making a difference. For example, the US still attracts elite scientists and business people from Europe, and perhaps this has always been the case to some extent. By elite immigration here I really mean elite, as opposed to the kind of mass migration that Australia receives, which doesn't seem to be helping Australia's GDP per capita.
The US is also in the same league as Qatar/UAE/Saudi Arabia in that it is the world's largest oil producer and LNG exporter. Most people don't think of the US this way, but it's true. Canada and Australia are even more dependent on mining and oil/gas exports.
The difference is that the oil/gas sector is small in the US economy, and the US has a giant industrial and service economy that exports highly complex products. With the exception of a few countries that manage to have a high GDP per capita because of high concentration of natural resources, or tourism, or financial services schemes, all rich countries are rich because they have complex economies that produce high value products in the international trade.
The US was also extremely rich before the US started to be an oil/gas exporter. All that said, I don't think the idea that the US has historically benefited from natural resources is ridiculous, it's certainly much more plausible than the idea that the US got rich because of racial diversity, given the fact that the US was already rich before post-65 immigration.
It's fair to say the the USA has a more free market economy than France, but I don't really buy that for the entire OECD. Whether we use government spending or various business friendliness measures it's not that special. And that's with the USA basically hiding a lot of its health expense in the "private (but not really)" sector.
On the US, the most important point was left out. It is the economic, financial and military power of the world. It can support its economy regardless of pure market influences, for example the Fed printing unbacked dollars, or forcing Europe to suicidally withdraw from cheap Russian raw material sources and markets by military means.
While it's the case that the US didn't want Europe to depend on Russia for energy, Russia was the one who destroyed trade between Europe and Russia, because you know, they invaded Ukraine. Countries other than the US do things in the world. Germany was happy to continue to ignore the UK and Eastern European countries, to continue to buy energy from Russia, but the invasion made the politics of that impossible.
Even if there were a positive correlation between the ethnic diversity and wealth of a country, isn't it much more likely that, rather than ethnic diversity causing greater wealth, that greater wealth causes greater ethnic diversity, because greater wealth attracts inward migration which, in turn, leads to greater diversity?
"Diversity destroys social trust and shrinks government" is basically a phenomena unique to Southern Whites hating Southern Blacks. You take that out of the picture and there really is no track record of it working.
And it only works because the whites outnumber the blacks. In the Reconstruction South blacks voted in other blacks to office where they were a majority and it was a fucking disaster, just like black run areas today. The reason the north was willing to end reconstruction and allow Jim Crow is because propping up dysfunctional black governance was unpopular and unsustainable. Later the great migration reduced the black population enough so that by the 1960s you could end Jim Crow but still have white majorities in the south (at the state level). In those localities where southern blacks are in control it's a disaster.
Even if whites eventually start feeling less social trust you've still got lots of new voters that like the welfare state to make up for whatever doubts they have. That's how things went empirically in the places immigrants moved to.
“Although Europeans invented communism, most countries that implemented communism were not European countries, but rather Latin Americans, Arabs, Africans, and Asians. The only Europeans that implemented communism ‘by choice’ were Russians, which are distant to the typical northern, central European population which is the largest fraction of the American White ancestry. Furthermore, communism has been substantially promoted by Jews, which are only about 50% European in ancestry. I realize this section is speculative.”
Not really true. Italian Fascism and National Socialism aren’t communist but they definitely highly collectivist state ideologies that were responsible for nationalizing most of their domestic industries. Mussolini in particular nationalist most of the economy under his tenure.
Also the intellectuals behind Communism and Socialism were mostly not white (Jews) at least early on.
*Jews are white in some definition of white term
1-) Non-Muslim Caucasoid
2-) European genetic cluster
*There are many gentile intelectuals early period.
Examples:
-Proudhon was french
-Engels was german
- Kropotkin was russian
-Bakunin was russian
-Kautsky was czech
-James Connoly was Irish
* More importantly Marx didnt write Das Kapital in synanogue. He was assimilated jew. He was under european culture.
Everyone's been significantly poorer than the USA since America was founded. Colonial purchasing power was higher than the UK. The US had a strong genetic founding stock, a huge untapped continent full of massive resources, and no peer competitors to stop its expansion or drag it into costly wars. Later was the victor in two world wars that didn't touch it at all that saw the old European empires mortgage themselves to America.
The countries he's listed spend the same % of GDP on government as the US, and I'd argue less if you include Employer Group Health Insurance as a quasi-government expense.
To keep it simple lets use the international monetary fund for total government spending.
The US clocks in at 42% of GDP in 2021. Canada, the UK, Japan, Australia, and the Netherlands clock around the same.
Famously socialist Sweden or European powerhouse Germany clock in at 50%.
That’s pretty close, and pretty much the entire difference is that the USA puts a lot of money into Employer Group Health Plans rather then universal healthcare. Is that an important difference? I’d argue that the Employer Group market (both the insurance and what it pays for) is so highly regulated and subsidized its a kind of quasi-public expenditure. Nobody would defend it as close to a free market. It’s not a huge accomplishment that the US has to spend 18% for GDP to accomplish what Sweden does for 10%, keeping that extra money “off the books” doesn’t change that.
So I’m not really buying that US government is dramatically more free market then Europe or Japan (maybe France).
As to immigration, the proper test case would be places in America that got a lot of immigrants and shifted to the left, like CA and NY. Everyone would agree that immigration did not result in any kind of collapse in government spending or increase in market freedom in those places. In fact counter to your claim that government spending hasn't increased since the 60s we've actually seen government spending increase pretty substantially, but its mostly been at the state and local level (the big driver being that places like CA and NY became one party DEM states whose taxes and spending exploded).
As to why Japan is poorer then Alabama lets examine.
(Side Note: I haven't been to Alabama but I have spent significant time in both West Virginia and Japan. The idea that poor US states are "richer" then Japan strikes me as kind of insane based on the evaluation, but I guess Medicaid adds to GDP and pizza is cheaper in Alabama then Japan).
Even two decades after the bubble burst, Japan has a PPP per capita of $42k. Alabama is about the same on PPP.
Alabama receives probably somewhere around $5k-$10k in federal subsidy per capita from the USA. This comes in a lot of forms including direct payments, them being so dependent on things like Medicaid, and their low tax revenue.
Alabama also gets huge investments from the US military (one of the biggest employers).
Alabama is able to benefit from being in a common market and citizenship with the rest of America, Japan does not.
On that line of thinking, when Japan was killing America in the auto industry in the 1980s the USA put huge trade restriction on Japan. The only way Japan could continue to sell autos was to open plants in the USA so that they could be “Made in America”. There is a huge Toyota plant in Alabama as a result, and many foreign manufacturers build factories all over the America south to get around this quota. I’d argue this is effectively a subsidy for those regions at Japans expense. Because people in Alabama can vote in US elections and Japanese can’t Alabamans can leverage US economic power to their advantage. One could discuss these trade and market issues at length, but there is a huge advantage to being inside the USA versus out that has little to do with Alabama as an economic powerhouse.
Alabama has 50,000 square miles of land. While not all of it is fit for living, much of it is. Alabama has 5M people.
Japan has 150,000 square miles, but 90% of that is mountains in the center. Only 10% is fit for living. Japan has 125M people.
In addition to a lot more land to house a lot less people Alabama also has much more natural resources then Japan (which basically has none).
In 1960 Japan had a GDP per capita of $475. US GDP per capita was $3,000. Even if Alabama was lower than the US average, it was still starting from a much higher point than Japan. Yet now they are equal.
The above are all non-IQ related reasons, but I’m willing to assume that Asians are uncreative and their IQ isn’t as worth as much as white IQ for reasons others have alluded to. Certainly the demographic collapse of East Asia the last two decades hasn’t helped economic dynamism either. I doubt that possibility helps the case for immigration though (even the smart ones aren’t that good).
Richard has a theory he needs to be true "diversity reduces social trust and leads to free markets" and so he just keeps throwing theories and anecdotes at it and ignoring when they fall apart.
Firs he claimed that America hasn't seen big increases in government spending as a % of GDP since the 1960s, but that's not true.
Then he claimed America spent less then as a % of GDP on government then other OECD countries, but then people pointed out that many other countries spend the same (or less).
Then he claimed that Japan is poor because of industrial policy and unions, until people pointed out that its industrial sector is its most productive and globally competitive.
Then it was a bunch of random anecdotes about regulations in Japan, as if they are the only country that has farm subsidies or small business rackets. Was there any attempt to quantify the impact of this and link it to GDP differences. Of course not. How can you blame small retail stores for a 40% GDP gap if the entire sector is 5% of GDP? You can't.
Alabama has bigger houses! Population density being 25-50x higher in Japan can't possibly be an explanation.
He never responds to this stuff. He just moves on to the next bad argument or anecdote.
I'll post my existing comments here below, but its just an all around poor performance from an obvious ideologue troll that is stuck in an empirical corner.
What do you think about this article?
https://web.archive.org/web/20200909000227/http://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2017/01/19/the-flaws-of-meritocratic-immigration/
I have a strange counterargument. I call it "sexy". The point is that Asian and Indian men living in Western countries have very big problems in the marriage market, which is why they remain unhappy virgins, and having such men is not good for society. And it is not good that India is deprived of highly intelligent people - this even goes to the detriment of the West, because a poorer India is a source of headache for Western countries.
Another example: Jews. On average, they are politically very leftist, and in addition, they are overrepresented in white-collar financial crimes:
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2022/12/09/review-jews-and-crime-in-medieval-europe/
Non-European people are more socially conservative, more religious. Why isn't anyone talking about this in right-wing circles?
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_country
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_by_country_or_territory
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Inequality_Index
And yet, despite their ostensible social conservativism, they form voting blocks for leftist parties. It's almost like ethnic quotas, enabling nepotistic networks and ethnic enclaves and seeing their rivals in what they percieve to be a zero sum competition harmed beats out anything else.
their children assimilate to american degeneracy and whatever benefit those values confer quickly diminishes. And even for the more religious firstgen minorities, their ethnocentrism (demands to have white wealth redistributed to them) swamps out any social conservatism. Blacks, as has been noted, are on some measures socially conservative, but they care more about getting those programs
Blacks have long been much more socially conservative than white liberals and it hasn't mattered. This kind of "social conservatism" isn't enough to counter the desire for welfare, ethnic spoils, and other reasons they vote for the left.
And in the case of immigrants the social conservatism usually recedes after a generation. The IQ is forever.
You can see this with Asians too. They don't like affirmative action *when it harms Asians*, but they don't mind it when it helps them (AAPI business loans) or when it hurts whites. The goal of Asians isn't meritocracy so much as they want to be treated the way blacks and hispanics are by the left.
Nice!
As I told Noah, you shouldn’t use cross-national data except in very rare circumstances.
https://www.noahsnewsletter.com/p/diversity-and-economic-freedom-a/comment/17192295
As far as the 4D chess theory, people who suspect such things usually are showing the flaws in their own understanding and character. There’s a correlation between immigration restrictionism and paranoid conspiracy theories about other’s motives, because they both come from an ugly zero-sum view of the world. They’re very confused by someone who can face data but doesn’t have their same small-minded motivations but instead wants to see humanity flourish.
Agh. You were criticising open borders less than a year ago. You are all over the place like Anatoly Karlin (who until recently was a white nationalist who endorsed Richard Spencer, now he is suddenly open borders). https://www.richardhanania.com/p/does-immigration-threaten-western
"Yeah. Well I’m not for open borders. I’m more pragmatic and I sort of take every country on its own terms. As far as whether diversity is good or bad, I don’t like that framing because it really depends on the context." - Richard Hanania, Aug. 2022
Just out of curiosity, mind if I suggest another zero-sum conspiracy theory?
My impression is that Californians like David Cole, Unz and Sailer tend to note improvements in certain nearby areas thanks to Hispanic immigration displacing blacks further away. (That it also displaced/marginalized conservative whites seems to have made a less salient impact on them.)
Anything like that been going where you've lived?
I mean it’s explicitly in the piece.
Unz talking about it or that you personally have lived in a place where you have seen the benefits of a certain minority being replaced?
What I'm suggesting is that people that have lived in such a place may be rather charitable in how they interpret the larger evidence on immigration. Perhaps you understand that it seems to require some explanation when you (and Unz and Cole) who aren't coy about the problems of 85 IQ people suddenly condemn everyone concerned about 90 IQ people flooding the country as ignorant and small minded?
Like if a Swede had troublesome Somalian neighbors supplanted by somewhat less troublesome Syrians, would that risk giving him an overly charitable interpretation on the overall impact of Syrian asylum seekers?
yeah hispanics may help alter the composition of crime in some places they worsen the overall picture
The blacks move somewhere.
So what is the point of comparing nations' outcomes in relation to their demographic diversity? If the numbers are all junk, just let people decide "I want more immigrants" or "I don't want more immigrants" based on personal taste. Seems perfectly fine to my small mind. Let the humans flourish or not on their own. Most people want a certain cultural continuity. That's a hard thing to buy with the extra money the junk numbers tell us we get from diversity.
I mean the second chart is a joke. You have African on one end and Europe and East Asia on another and a line that goes slightly down and that’s supposed to prove something. You can make a million charts like that. Not enough observations, too many confounding variables, observations are not independent. This isn’t how statistics should be used.
If you read, you see that I already tried adding regional controls and this changed nothing. I have found this does the same thing as a proper spatial lag control. So your worry has already been ruled out.
You found a null result but if you found a real result in either direction it wouldn’t have meant anything. It’s a bad measure and underpowered and too many lurking variables. Just because you have data doesn’t mean it’s useful for the question. And lol at the state analysis with 50 observations. I maybe will write a longer piece on why cross national data is garbage and can’t be saved with controls
At best, hannania is playing russian roulette with your posterity (readers of this blog), hoping that there is some heretofore unstated lurking variable that makes it such that introducing more basement iq third worlders into the west somehow wont dampen economic prosperity, lead to more racial wealth expropriation, crime (race-based and otherwise) etc. If not, well sucks to suck, you and your kids will be dhimmis. Some businesses may see some short-term benefits though!
I'm going to let a few points go without mention, not because I agree, but for length.
"After the 1960s, it became impossible to get overwhelming majorities in favor of major additions to the welfare state."
"The biggest drivers of government spending are now the entitlement programs that an overwhelmingly white country supported in the 1930s and again in the 1960s."
Partly this is because the big items, healthcare and retirement, were addressed like they were everywhere else in the world.
I would also argue that employer group health insurance is basically a government program given its highly regulated nature as both insurance, the sector its expenses come from, and the tax subsidy. Eliminating that does a lot to eliminate the difference between the USA and Europe. That would add another 6-7% of GDP to "government expenditure".
But it's also not a true statement that government hasn't grown. Total government spending, including state and local, has increased from around the high 20s in the late 1960s to close to 40% (before COVID insanity).
This doesn't include the MASSIVE unfunded liabilities most state and local have in their retirement obligations to government employees (which is absolutely the worst in blue areas).
Where did a lot of the growth come from? The states and cities that immigrants flooded into (California, NY, etc) became one party DEM polities whose expenditures exploded.
Far from diversity "destroying trust and making the welfare state unpopular" it supercharged it. There is now a huge difference in tax and fiscal policy between states (NY/CA vs TX/FL) and most blue cities and their white suburbs/exurbs.
There has also been all the "emergency spending" such as after the housing crash and COVID. This spending was mostly done by the Democrats (the post vaccine spending bills passed on party line votes for instance). Given how often we seem to have "crises" I tend to think of this as an ongoing expense rather than a series of runoffs. When the crisis happens, expect Democrats to be more spending happy.
The one big ongoing federal expansion we've seen was Obamacare, both the exchanges and the Medicaid expansion. Romney did better than Reagan in 1980 amongst whites 59 vs 56, but the white share decreased from 88% to 72%, so instead of a landslide he lost. Hispanics were only 2% of the electorate in 1980 and Asians aren't even listed.
Romney's poor performance among minorities capped off a generational effort by the Republican Party to win over minorities with kindness and amnesty that ended in failure. If a Mormon isn't nice enough, maybe nice isn't the problem here. Perhaps immigrants just wanted their Obamacare and the rest of what the left was selling. Reaganism created a country where Reagan 2.0 couldn't win.
We'll revisit electoral implications later.
"America is Already Low IQ"
Are Hispanics better then blacks, yes.
Are Hispanics not as bad an immigrant as the Muslims Europe gets, yes.
There are just so many of them though. The relative quality has been swamped by quantity. We can see what happened to the places that got lots of them (NY, CA, etc). This is an empirical fact. TX and FL have been able to delay turning into CA and NY because their whites are way further to the right, and in some cases because their Hispanics have a unique history (Cubans).
Note that in DeSantis got 65% of the white vote in 2022. So Hispanics still aren't as good as whites. Hispanic vote share tends to go up and down with white vote share, which you would expect because popular governors are popular with everyone. But it's always systematically lower, and you can't run on being the COVID governor in every race every year in every state. Eventually you're going to have an election where a huge minority group voting far to the left of whites costs you an election.
"There are some Mexicans who mow my lawn and do the gardening for like $60 a month, and they reduce the average income of my town, but I’m better off because of them."
No you aren't. It costs you $60 UP FRONT. That property tax bill you get. The income tax bill you get. Where do you think the money is going? You think someone making that kind of wage rate pays enough tax for the education and health expenditure for these people? Let's not even get into how all of them being around jacks up your cost of living.
It seems cheap because the costs are hidden. But you pay bro.
Here is the crux of your entire piece:
1) If the GOP were nicer to Hispanics they would win Hispanics. It's all Prop 187 fault, etc.
Prop 187 was a "keyhole solution" that said illegals couldn't get welfare and a judge struck it down. Shows how useless "keyhole solutions" are and how much Hispanics like welfare.
2) The GOP has been doing this since the 80s. Reagan gave amnesty in 1987. The GOP purged the paleocons in the 1990s and the same time that the DEMs were about as anti-immigration as the GOP (go look a the 1996 DEM platform). Bush, McCain, and Romney all ran on being pro-immigration and pro-Hispanic.
3) This has never led to electoral success. In every election and every polity minorities vote to the left of whatever the white norm is. Over decades, regardless of candidates, regardless of location, regardless of issues.
4) The closest thing to minority outreach success we've had are Trump (they aren't sending their best, border state governors who bus them to Kamala Harris's house, or the most successful Hispanic GOP candidate in history, Ron DeSantis, who tricked a bunch of Hispanics onto a plane to Martha's Vineyard in ***Sept 2022*** and bragged about it on national news (he won a landslide with hispanics a couple months later).
DeSantis didn't do this after the election, he did it during the heart of the campaign in a huge profile way.
So there simply is no empirical relation between the GOP stance on immigration and the voting habits of immigrants. If there was, there would be a conflict of interest. But there isn't. Keeping immigrants out costs no votes now and prevent future democratic voters from existing.
5) It doesn't matter if Hispanics don't like LBGT. Blacks don't like LBGT either. They aren't big on abortion either. It doesn't matter. Blacks want free shit from the government and affirmative action.
They will give trans whatever it wants if the checks keep coming.
That's what Hispanics want too, just to a lessor degree. And yes the guys doing your lawn get free shit from the government because they consume government services they don't pay enough in taxes to fund.
"The Sailer Strategy"
The Sailer Strategy noted that due to immigration making it impossible to be competitive on the coasts the only path to victory for the GOP laid open was winning the Upper Midwest. The Upper Midwest was full of working class whites. So the GOP should focus on winning working class whites.
This was Romney's flaw, even if you juice your Hispanic share a few points or are more acceptable to highly educated whites, you still aren't going to win the states they are in (not that Romney could win Hispanics).
Every election in recent memory has validated the Sailer strategy. If you win the Upper Midwest, you win. If you lose, you lose. It will be like that again in 2024.
The second part of the strategy was to associate the Democratic Party with black people, especially black activists. Since nobody likes black people this is a winning strategy, but you have to get over the GOP sensitivity to being called racist.
Closing Thoughts:
Many libertarians have been able to make peace with the idea that immigration is bad. Milton Freedman noted that you can't combine it with a welfare state (so basically DOA), Charles Murray wrote in The Bell Curve that unselected Hispanic immigration would become a problem, Gregory Clark came to a similar conclusion throughout the course of his work, Jason Richwine essentially showed that open borders would destroy rather then create trillions in economic value.
You can be a libertarian and still think bringing a bunch of dumbs that hate markets into the country is a terrible idea. In fact I'd say you basically have to think its a dumb idea if your libertarian.
Because your an immigrant, because you make your living selling a certain ideology and because your personally committed to it, you've got to twist yourself in knots to avoid the empirical reality (I haven't even touched all the problems in this essay). That's really all there is to it.
If I'm right that immigrants are:
1) Destined to vote left because they like the policies of the left.
2) Will do so no matter what the GOP does (short of trying to out socialism the DEMs).
3) There is no correlation between your strategy of niceness/amnesty and immigrant support for GOP/markets
...then that's it bro. If there are already too many Hispanics in the country and we are all doomed, we are all doomed. Oh well, guess we shouldn't have let them in the first place. Listing to your advice in the 90s was a huge fuck up. At least stop digging so we collapse a bit slower, don't make the problem worse engaging in futility.
Hanania really believes this stuff , probably influenced by Bryan Caplan who is a good friend of his .
I started enjoying Twitter and Substack more when I muted that guy. I’m not sure if he fits the original definition of a troll but he’s pretty darn close.
The asterisk in the subtitle doesn't link to anything.
I know Noah Carl and Crémieux. Who are Seb and Bronski?
Thank you
You don’t know what you’re talking about, like all internet racist you can’t differentiate what you think from what you want to be true. You don’t understand statistics if you don’t get 99% of social science is pure garbage (lol, fractionalization index), while many online rightists are just as naive as those making nonsense measures of democracy.
I could play this stupid game very easily. Cross-national data is some of the lowest form of social science there is, and that’s saying a lot. But I’m telling you that you should be ignoring it.
Well I know nothing about you except your stupid doesn’t know statistics comment so I’m fine losing the respect of a random doofus