The Final Solution
March 27th, 2004, 01:08 PM
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/diverse.htm
March 14, 2004
More Diversity = Less Welfare?
By Steve Sailer
I wrote an article in 2001 entitled "Immigration and Welfare"
recounting a study done by Frank Salter (the
sociobiologically-oriented political scientist at the Max Planck
Institute in Germany) on Moscow beggars. Some were Russians, just like
the vast majority of the pedestrians. Other panhandlers were dressed
in the distinctive garb of Moldova, a small former Soviet republic
that gained independence in 1991. Finally, some of the beggars were
darker-skinned Gypsies (also known as Roma), who are visibly of South
Asian origin.
"Unbeknownst to them, the beggars were being monitored by a team of
ethologists (students of the science of behavior). The researchers
counted each time a passerby gave money to a beggar. A pattern soon
emerged. The Russian pedestrians preferred to give to their fellow
Russians, with the Moldavians, their fellow Eastern Europeans, as
their second choice. The Asiatic Gypsies were so unpopular that they
had to resort to a wide variety of tactics to scrounge spare change,
ranging from singing and dancing, to importuning tightwads, to
dressing up their children in crutches and eye-patches."
This wasn't an anomaly. Salter has compiled a broad array of evidence
(summed up in his new book Welfare, Ethnicity, and Altruism: New
Findings and Evolutionary Theory) indicating that people tend to be
more generous to those more closely related to themselves
genealogically. He summed up the political implications like this:
"The liberal left supports generous welfare but also policies that add
to ethnic heterogeneity, such as high levels of immigration. It does
not seem to have occurred to them that they must choose between
maximizing the two."
David Goodhart, the editor of the fine center-left British magazine
Prospect, mentioned to me recently that he used my article in writing
his now famous essay in his February 2004 edition: "Too diverse? Is
Britain becoming too diverse to sustain the mutual obligations behind
good society and the welfare state?" In it, Goodhart echoes Salter:
"A generous welfare state is not compatible with open borders and
possibly not even with US-style mass immigration."
Goodhart's reasoning is more rigorous than most because of his respect
for both the great Edmund Burke and the late William D. Hamilton, the
English evolutionary theorist who may eventually emerge as the most
influential English thinker of the second half of the 20th Century:
"Thinking about the conflict between solidarity and diversity is
another way of asking a question as old as human society itself: who
is my brother? With whom do I share mutual obligations? The
traditional conservative Burkean view is that our affinities ripple
out from our families and localities, to the nation and not very far
beyond. That view is pitted against a liberal universalist one which
sees us in some sense equally obligated to all human beings from
Bolton to Burundi. Evolutionary psychology stresses both the
universality of most human traits and - through the notion of kin
selection and reciprocal altruism - the instinct to favour our own. In
any case, Burkeans claim to have common sense on their side. They
argue that we feel more comfortable with, and are readier to share
with, and sacrifice for, those with whom we have shared histories and
similar values. To put it bluntly - most of us prefer our own kind."
After Goodhart's piece was reprinted in the Guardian, it caused a
ruckus in Britain among the politically and culturally dominant left.
It's a little hard to figure why-his policy recommendations are rather
weak tea-other than that nobody had ever had the courage before to say
in polite society such common-sense truths as that welfare states work
best in homogenous Scandinavian countries. Goodhart gently points out
that that just because "diversity" and "solidarity" may both be good
things, they are not necessarily compatible.
Some Americans on the right have taken up the cry that therefore mass
immigration saved us from socialism or European levels of welfare.
Their argument is that since ethnic diversity tends to corrupt the
workings of government by making politics into a scramble for tax
dollars and government jobs for relatives, as the history of
Democratic machines in immigrant cities like Chicago and Boston
testifies, that made big government less popular with voters.
Okay . but you've got to be a truly fanatical libertarian to argue
that the more parasitical and inefficient the government the better.
How about if we had honest, effective government and let the voters
then choose the size of government they wanted?
Further, this immigration-prevented-socialism theory is a massive
misreading of American history. There was never socialism in America
because there was never feudalism in America. Contra Marx, the
socialist urge grew not out of capitalism but out of the extreme
inequality and rigidity of the aristocratic system, where the nobility
owned almost all of the land by inheritance. Early in the century, a
hereditary member of the British House of Lords complained that Prime
Minister Lloyd George had created new Lords solely because they were
self-made millionaires who had only recently acquired large acreages.
When asked, "How did your ancestor become a Lord?" he replied sternly,
"With the battle-ax, sir, with the battle-ax!"
Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson worked hard to make land ownership
extremely widespread in America, banning primogeniture (the English
tradition of leaving all the real estate to the eldest son) and
setting up a Federal bureaucracy to sell government land on the
frontier cheaply to the common man. Combined with the low population
density of 19th Century America, this kept land costs low, wages high,
and opportunity present. That is the historical basis of America's
vast middle class, a foundation being undermined by the current mass
immigration system (and let's not even speak of President Bush's Open
Borders proposal).
Moreover, America's relatively brief experiment with a generous
welfare state was doomed by our African-American population. America
tried to import the two fundamentals of the Swedish welfare state-high
welfare payments and an end to social disapproval of
illegitimacy-beginning about 1961. In parts of the U.S., such as
heavily Scandinavian Minnesota, this worked reasonably well. But
American voters were confronted with stunning speed with the
realization that African-Americans responded differently than Swedes
did to the new incentive structures. Welfare allowed much of
African-American society to revert to African-style family structures.
In Africa, men often expect to be provided for by their women. One
group of African feminists recently estimated that women do four times
as much work in Sub-Saharan Africa as men do. (See James Q. Wilson's
recent book The Marriage Problem for the normally covered-up details
on the relationship between African family structure and
African-American problems.)
With paternal providers rendered obsolete, the black crime rate
skyrocketed and urban whites fled to the suburbs, selling their homes
cheaply at great damage to their life savings. As early as the 1966
Congressional elections, the voters were in revolt. Over time, voters
had their officials throw a vast number of dangerous young men in
prison and, in 1996, cut back on welfare for single mothers. Social
conditions seem to have stabilized and even improved due to these
illiberal measures as the crime rate has dropped sharply and the black
illegitimacy rate inches downward.
The conservatism of current American voters, so widely decried around
the world, stems in large part from this increase in the black crime
rate in the 1960s. The politically correct way to refer to this
historical event is "white fear of crime," as if it was all a
hallucination. But the statistics are clear that there is nearly a
degree of magnitude difference in the crime rate between non-Hispanic
whites and African-Americans. Blacks are imprisoned nine times as much
as non-Hispanic whites and commit murders eight times as many murders.
White Americans do not accept this behavior as their own.
That is why America is turning away from a Scandinavian-style welfare
state.
[Steve Sailer [email him], is founder of the Human Biodiversity
Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website
www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.]
March 14, 2004
More Diversity = Less Welfare?
By Steve Sailer
I wrote an article in 2001 entitled "Immigration and Welfare"
recounting a study done by Frank Salter (the
sociobiologically-oriented political scientist at the Max Planck
Institute in Germany) on Moscow beggars. Some were Russians, just like
the vast majority of the pedestrians. Other panhandlers were dressed
in the distinctive garb of Moldova, a small former Soviet republic
that gained independence in 1991. Finally, some of the beggars were
darker-skinned Gypsies (also known as Roma), who are visibly of South
Asian origin.
"Unbeknownst to them, the beggars were being monitored by a team of
ethologists (students of the science of behavior). The researchers
counted each time a passerby gave money to a beggar. A pattern soon
emerged. The Russian pedestrians preferred to give to their fellow
Russians, with the Moldavians, their fellow Eastern Europeans, as
their second choice. The Asiatic Gypsies were so unpopular that they
had to resort to a wide variety of tactics to scrounge spare change,
ranging from singing and dancing, to importuning tightwads, to
dressing up their children in crutches and eye-patches."
This wasn't an anomaly. Salter has compiled a broad array of evidence
(summed up in his new book Welfare, Ethnicity, and Altruism: New
Findings and Evolutionary Theory) indicating that people tend to be
more generous to those more closely related to themselves
genealogically. He summed up the political implications like this:
"The liberal left supports generous welfare but also policies that add
to ethnic heterogeneity, such as high levels of immigration. It does
not seem to have occurred to them that they must choose between
maximizing the two."
David Goodhart, the editor of the fine center-left British magazine
Prospect, mentioned to me recently that he used my article in writing
his now famous essay in his February 2004 edition: "Too diverse? Is
Britain becoming too diverse to sustain the mutual obligations behind
good society and the welfare state?" In it, Goodhart echoes Salter:
"A generous welfare state is not compatible with open borders and
possibly not even with US-style mass immigration."
Goodhart's reasoning is more rigorous than most because of his respect
for both the great Edmund Burke and the late William D. Hamilton, the
English evolutionary theorist who may eventually emerge as the most
influential English thinker of the second half of the 20th Century:
"Thinking about the conflict between solidarity and diversity is
another way of asking a question as old as human society itself: who
is my brother? With whom do I share mutual obligations? The
traditional conservative Burkean view is that our affinities ripple
out from our families and localities, to the nation and not very far
beyond. That view is pitted against a liberal universalist one which
sees us in some sense equally obligated to all human beings from
Bolton to Burundi. Evolutionary psychology stresses both the
universality of most human traits and - through the notion of kin
selection and reciprocal altruism - the instinct to favour our own. In
any case, Burkeans claim to have common sense on their side. They
argue that we feel more comfortable with, and are readier to share
with, and sacrifice for, those with whom we have shared histories and
similar values. To put it bluntly - most of us prefer our own kind."
After Goodhart's piece was reprinted in the Guardian, it caused a
ruckus in Britain among the politically and culturally dominant left.
It's a little hard to figure why-his policy recommendations are rather
weak tea-other than that nobody had ever had the courage before to say
in polite society such common-sense truths as that welfare states work
best in homogenous Scandinavian countries. Goodhart gently points out
that that just because "diversity" and "solidarity" may both be good
things, they are not necessarily compatible.
Some Americans on the right have taken up the cry that therefore mass
immigration saved us from socialism or European levels of welfare.
Their argument is that since ethnic diversity tends to corrupt the
workings of government by making politics into a scramble for tax
dollars and government jobs for relatives, as the history of
Democratic machines in immigrant cities like Chicago and Boston
testifies, that made big government less popular with voters.
Okay . but you've got to be a truly fanatical libertarian to argue
that the more parasitical and inefficient the government the better.
How about if we had honest, effective government and let the voters
then choose the size of government they wanted?
Further, this immigration-prevented-socialism theory is a massive
misreading of American history. There was never socialism in America
because there was never feudalism in America. Contra Marx, the
socialist urge grew not out of capitalism but out of the extreme
inequality and rigidity of the aristocratic system, where the nobility
owned almost all of the land by inheritance. Early in the century, a
hereditary member of the British House of Lords complained that Prime
Minister Lloyd George had created new Lords solely because they were
self-made millionaires who had only recently acquired large acreages.
When asked, "How did your ancestor become a Lord?" he replied sternly,
"With the battle-ax, sir, with the battle-ax!"
Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson worked hard to make land ownership
extremely widespread in America, banning primogeniture (the English
tradition of leaving all the real estate to the eldest son) and
setting up a Federal bureaucracy to sell government land on the
frontier cheaply to the common man. Combined with the low population
density of 19th Century America, this kept land costs low, wages high,
and opportunity present. That is the historical basis of America's
vast middle class, a foundation being undermined by the current mass
immigration system (and let's not even speak of President Bush's Open
Borders proposal).
Moreover, America's relatively brief experiment with a generous
welfare state was doomed by our African-American population. America
tried to import the two fundamentals of the Swedish welfare state-high
welfare payments and an end to social disapproval of
illegitimacy-beginning about 1961. In parts of the U.S., such as
heavily Scandinavian Minnesota, this worked reasonably well. But
American voters were confronted with stunning speed with the
realization that African-Americans responded differently than Swedes
did to the new incentive structures. Welfare allowed much of
African-American society to revert to African-style family structures.
In Africa, men often expect to be provided for by their women. One
group of African feminists recently estimated that women do four times
as much work in Sub-Saharan Africa as men do. (See James Q. Wilson's
recent book The Marriage Problem for the normally covered-up details
on the relationship between African family structure and
African-American problems.)
With paternal providers rendered obsolete, the black crime rate
skyrocketed and urban whites fled to the suburbs, selling their homes
cheaply at great damage to their life savings. As early as the 1966
Congressional elections, the voters were in revolt. Over time, voters
had their officials throw a vast number of dangerous young men in
prison and, in 1996, cut back on welfare for single mothers. Social
conditions seem to have stabilized and even improved due to these
illiberal measures as the crime rate has dropped sharply and the black
illegitimacy rate inches downward.
The conservatism of current American voters, so widely decried around
the world, stems in large part from this increase in the black crime
rate in the 1960s. The politically correct way to refer to this
historical event is "white fear of crime," as if it was all a
hallucination. But the statistics are clear that there is nearly a
degree of magnitude difference in the crime rate between non-Hispanic
whites and African-Americans. Blacks are imprisoned nine times as much
as non-Hispanic whites and commit murders eight times as many murders.
White Americans do not accept this behavior as their own.
That is why America is turning away from a Scandinavian-style welfare
state.
[Steve Sailer [email him], is founder of the Human Biodiversity
Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website
www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.]