The only way to really fix racial disparity is through the provision of starter homes.
Both sides of the argument neglect perhaps the most salient root cause of the disintegration of the Black family- neoliberalism and deindustrialisation. It is simply impossible to ignore the fact that high unemployment rates in a community destroy the mechanism for stable family formation- hypergamy. Put simply, male unemployment in a community destroys any hope of stable family formation at anywhere near the rate needed for the community to remain healthy. Sure, people do get married and form relationships outside their cultural ingroup, but it's always going to be a small minority, not really significant from a sociological perspective, and, when it does happen, it is almost always going to result in the couple shifting upwards, away from the community which needs another stable family so desperately.
Because fathers do matter, at a community level. They are the key to upward social mobility (Dr Raj Chetty, Social Mobility research) and the key to mitigating violent behaviour when a dearth of economic opportunity and unregulated markets lead to gangs. Rates of gang membership are roughly equal per population for African American and Latino communities, not surprising given the PEW research on income distribution for Blacks and Latinos is virtually identical, but the absence of fathers in one community compared to the other, where they are still present, leads to a large difference in the ratios of murder rates, for one simple reason- even matriarchal cultures give their boys over to the supervision of men when they hit puberty. Male supervision at the community level is the thing which really mitigates young males natural biological aggression.
The mistake most liberals make is imagining that higher education alone, and the redistribution of jobs to reflect a more diverse workforce for the 10% can make any difference at all for the bottom 90%. It can't. The only thing it will succeed at is in making wealthy people slightly more comfortable with themselves and slightly less guilty. Although capital works differently, most community wealth is built from the ground up, through labour and chiefly through better paid blue collar jobs, mainly in the trades.
If we really want to see a reduction in racial disparities several things have to happen. First, libertarian land reforms to free up building land and make it cheap, also greatly decreasing the legal element of regulatory costs. Second, build starter homes- there is societal cost in lost entrepreneurship, when young people are unable to repay the principal of their mortgage within 10 years and own the collateral to part-stake a business start-up. If government is involved, it should be through the provision of short-range rail, particular new spur lines, and in so doing greatly expanding the availability of potential real estate, whilst providing a cheap, very low carbon method for most people to get to work.
It is possible to innovate in the housing sector. Last time I checked it was $60K to 3D print a home, and the Swedes have had great successes in finding cost-savings for their home production, with 45% of all labour completed off-site, through prefabrication in factories- it also helps that this is a form of long-term carbon sequestration. Western construction sectors have been structurally undersupplying the provision of single family homes for some time now (30 years in the UK, where the problem is at it's worst). It’s one of the principal reasons why so many people have felt as though their living standards have been falling for some time, because if rents and mortgages make up an ever greater share of your income, then it’s true.
America has neglected starter homes for decades. Why? Certainly not because of market forces- there is huge pent up demand, as witnessed by America's birth figures falling off a cliff. Contrary to what you may have read, most millennials want kids or want more kids- they simply cannot afford them because of housing costs. No, instead it's the American government monopoly on building land, artificially inflating scarcity costs, which has priced starter homes out of the market.
Most politicians don't understand the fundamental economics, or if they do, they keep quiet about it- not wanting to play into the fears of boomers, who believe, quite erroneously, that more houses would adversely affect their property values- in point of fact, greater supply further down the housing ladder inflates demand on subsequent tiers, as it means more people have the equity to qualify for mortgages for a bigger and better house, which it turns out is quite a popular aspiration.
Most politicians and policy makers believe, again quite erroneously, that more demand will necessarily mean more supply. Generally it might be true, but it is certainly not true of housing, where the increase in scarcity costs from inflated land values rises faster than the rate of house prices. In period of excess demand this means that housing construction itself becomes less profitable, with all the profits going to those who have the market specialism to be able to capture as much available building land as possible, and who can then sit and wait as the value of their asset quickly inflates in value.
There is an old rule in classical economics- it's called Say's Law. It's the idea that demand doesn't create supply, but rather that supply creates demand. Of all the sectors of the economy, it's most true in housing. Currently, the West is headed towards a scenario where the only thing it produces is mortgage debt as an asset class. It's tragic, because the provision of ample housing is about the only industry which is capable of reversing the decline of the West into economic ruin and the only thing which can virtually eliminate seemingly intractable racial disparities. Along one route we can see a New Gilded Age, with stagnant Western economies and a gradual return to the Victorian squalor of London. Along the other, it is possible that the West might be able to reinvigorate itself into a patchwork of dynamic and booming cities and communities, where a combination of money available to be spent on consumer spending and renewed entrepreneurship makes us innovative again- with America the chief beneficiary of this resurgent enterprise.
Every cultural group which has ever risen to the Round Table of Equals in America's Camelot has done so through industrial demand for more labour and the higher wages it brings, and the only industry left in the West which can deliver these transformative tight labour markets replete with economic opportunity is the housing market. If America truly wants to see African Americans take a seat at the table as real equals the only way to do is is to build more singe family starter homes- masses of them, and to provide the vocational training and ample economic opportunities which will see young African American women spoiled for choice, with responsible, fit, young Black men, earning really good money, ready to settle down and have a family.
And it’s a solution which really would raise all boats, regardless of race- providing opportunities to any kids born to blue collar roots or in the underclass. It just so happens it would help African American kids most of all.
Interesting proposal and a topic I believe in strongly. Home ownership is foundational in a thriving society. You make excellent points about the detrimental effects of government interference and NIMBY. Building codes disallow new and more efficient methods, zoning disallows smaller, closer homes and our betters don’t want the help living next door.
The cause of disfunction in any group can be debated but given the evident rot, how does one go about creating Bedford Parks and not Pottervilles? Culture matters and successful home ownership requires certain things of people which are not entirely evident in much of society. We saw this in the transition of new public housing to ghettos.
There has to be a better way and it has to include the realtor industry taking 5-6% of every transaction. And it has to exclude government “help.”
Your point about Bedford Park vs. Pottervilles is well-taken, but a large portion of the problem is solved by ownership. This is why at least some of the Nordic Model states offer income tax rebates against mortgage interest payments and they also happen to have some of the highest rates of wealth inequality in the world. Simply put, they found they could eliminate a significant amount of public expenditure on public housing maintenance, b shifting people from being tenants of the state to owning there own homes. Thatcher had the same idea with selling off old council housing stock.
Indeed although the effect was not particular profound, one paper which I read (skimmed the conclusions!) showed that per 10% increase in sales of public housing reduced crime by 1.5%, both in terms of violent crime and property crime. It's important to not that the change wasn't due to switching, gentrification or a change of the people. Instead the paper showed that the mechanism was behavioural change- attitudes changed because of the change in ownership status.
I agree with you on the sorry state of American public housing. The best advice is to follow that of Thomas Sowell, who has repeatedly asserted that public housing worked fine when it was an aspirational thing, something which could be achieved through respectable behaviour by the low income WORKING poor. There are also plenty of examples where public housing works well in Europe, provided a stringent system of evictions is enforced for those who evidence anti-social behaviour. So there are two ways of doing it- either through front end selection by employment status, or the rigorous expulsion of antisocial disruptors who ruin other residents lives and act as spreaders for bad behaviour, but both require a paradigm shift in thinking amongst the ruling class in the Anglosphere- less soft thinking and a recognition that left unchecked high density public housing can become a super-spreader event for social ills.
So, there are a couple of distinctions to make- first, there is a difference between housing affordability and affordable housing- the former uses market mechanisms on the supply side, the latter relies on government subsidy. The latter type is a waste of money and would be better addressed by using new public housing as a stepping stone to private homeownership, by insisting upon residents adopting a saving plan as a condition in addition to selection by employment status. Many on the Left don't see this as a particular public good, but one has to remember that housing as a commodity is extraordinarily susceptible to pricing mechanisms- shifting the deserving working poor upwards would make rent somewhat more cheap generally.
There is a problem with better run, pragmatic public housing. In London, there is quite an old housing project called the Peabody Estates. It was set up by an American Quaker banker and is a charitable concern. It still includes the requirement for employment, though thankfully they've abandoned the Quaker embargo against drinking- but because they also insist upon high standards of behaviour for tenants, nobody wants to leave!
I also agree with you on the realtors- nothing like self-interest as an incentive to grease the wheels of commerce.
I wrote this essay as a response to an article in Quillette discussing Glenn Loury, praising him for exploring both sides of the Structure vs. Individual argument at different times in his career. Both sides have a point, but I take issue with the Left's solution. Libertarian paternalism is called for. A better solution would be to focus 'help' on those who are willing to make better choices. It's what we used to do, and it's worth noting that in the period directly before Lyndon Johnson's War On Poverty, Black America was advancing towards parity through there own efforts at an ever-accelerating rate, especially in the North- it took government intervention to derail their upward rise.
They may not have called it Libertarian Paternalism back then, because Richard Thaler hadn't coined the term, but these sorts of incentives for better choices were in evidence everywhere. Scholarships were available for gifted kids willing to work hard. Public housing was for the hardworking poor and was aspirational. People forget the basic psychology, people value what is earned, and waste what is given away for free.
Great as always, Geary! I have a supportive observation: For a spell, in England, our family lived in council housing but at a time when anti social behaviour was not just unwelcome but suppressed actively. It was informative for the rest of my life just how disruptive to a community anti-social behaviour was. Compassion didn't work, exclusion was the only answer. If people can't self regulate, they need to be accommodated somewhere else where they can't disrupt the peace. Thing is - people who could manage the boundaries made for a much better community.
Exactly. There a process in criminology called 'the clarity principle'- it's the idea that deterrence only works if the punishment is clear and delivered in a timely fashion. the societal benefit in excluding the worst offenders is that it changes the behaviour of those who might otherwise be tempted to misbehave. By contrast, indulgence only amplifies the bad behaviour one wants to discourage, because people learn the lesson that there are no consequences to their actions.
This doesn't mean that conservatives are completely right on this issue. Longer sentences should only be considered when public safety is an issue- all the evidence shows that longer sentences don't work because most criminals think they are uniquely smart and wont get caught- raising the percentage of offenders who are caught greatly reduces the total crimes committed.
One of the biggest mistakes made during the War on Drugs era was the belief that there was a limited pool of potential offenders, when the incentives were insane, with street dealers often earning $1K profit a day, tax-free. Believing there was a limited pool of bad guys, the sentences were predictably punitive at around 71 months as an average, which in turn encouraged gang groomers to recruit and corrupt kids more quickly. It sped up the conveyor belt of corruption. A more rational approach, which recognised the incentives of drug dealing compared to other options, would have seen sentences much shorter, with judicial discretion applied to target those most likely to become violent offenders for longer sentences. It's called a disruption strategy and was deployed with a high degree of success during the War on Terror era.
Most would be surprised to learn just how many high risk candidates for terrorism ended up in prison with short sentences for burglary, common assault, drug dealing or other offences which wouldn't always carry a custodial sentence.
Excellent point on the value of earning. There is no replacement for the dignity which earning provides.
You bring up the third rail issue of the black community being much stronger during Jim Crow than post Great Society. Seems that would be worth considering. Why? And how could policy be tailored to draw on the strengths? Merit is uplifting. Equity is soul destroying.
'how could policy be tailored to draw on the strengths?'
Government should focus on creating the market circumstances for economic opportunity, more than help- primarily by curtailing its own bad behaviour is terms of planning and zoning. Building land is a commodity, and even a relatively small percentage change in the supply of any commodity can make a huge difference to the prices people pay as purchasers of single family homes. It's the pursuit of some supposed moral good which causes such needless hardship in the world. Whenever people try to work collectively, they end up trying to tell other people how and where to live.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a heterodox- I believe government can do good, if it far more careful in rationing what is a scarce and precious resource, so it is spent more effectively. A good example would be the child tax credit- generally a good idea, but it should have been far more limited- the data shows that cognitive outcomes are most improved in the pre-school years, particularly in terms of childhood nutrition.
In order to create a starter home construction boom American government needs to focus on four areas- libertarian land reforms, short-range rail, vocational training, and lifting regulatory restrictions to increase the domestic production of materials for the construction supply chain, particularly lumber.
Don't get me wrong, I am also a libertarian, but mostly a civic libertarian. Beyond this, my main issue with government is waste and inefficiency.
On the Black community pre-Great Society- it's worth noting that those communities which were most the beneficiaries of disastrous government interventions were also the most damaged. Just ask the white working class in the UK, who effectively became an underclass as a result of high density urban public housing and the welfare dependency fostered by the Welfare State.
But this wasn't the only issue. The death knell for so many communities was deindustrialisation. The highly educated have a view of human nature which is Blank Slate. They believe that anyone can be educated to anything- it's why their now infamous 'Learn to Code' fiasco had a close to zero success rate- because those gifted enough to become coders had already selected out of their communities long before the need for en masse occupational shifts.
Neoliberalism failed to account for the fact that in most groups, there is a fairly high minority of males who will never be academically capable, aren't suitable for the service sector and whose best economic opportunity will always be better paid blue collar work. It's why housing is the only skeleton key which unlocks the potential of a resurgent West.
My comment was worded clumsily. The strength of the community is the family. Government policy discouraged two parent households and contributed to the collapse of the family. The results are horrific. Deindustrialisation added to the misery.
I, too believe in government. Especially when it acts within the bounds of its competence, which is very limited.
I wish I could see a path out of the morass but I really don’t. Government is not benevolent and the voters are not ethical. Theft will continue and tyranny will follow.
Have you seen the documentary What Killed Michael Brown? It's by Eli Steele addresses what he refers to as 'poetic truth'- something which is untrue, but can be used to address perceived greater truths. The main reason I ask is because it contains a lot of social history specifically in relation to the Black community.
There is great clip of a young James Earl Jones in film- it's used to illustrate and preface the fact that the government sent agents into every major American city on a client recruitment drive, telling women the government would give them money provided they didn't have a working man in the house. Obviously, given the historical context, some communities were far more harmed than others.
I don't know what they were thinking- did they really think that women could do a better job raising kids, particularly boys, by themselves. Even girls are harmed by the absence of fathers, though not in terms of social mobility or higher rates of violent crime- it increases their risks of suicide, drug addiction, homelessness and prostitution.
The What Killed Michael Brown? documentary is available on Amazon, although I wouldn't bother with the HD version, as the production values aren't that high. Actually, looking at it in the UK it's now available for free as part of the Prime, package although this may not be the case in all regions
The other thing I would recommend is Coleman Hughes early essay on Quillette, entitled The Case for Black Optimism. It illustrates that despite decades of bad policies a combination of market opportunities, extended family networks and better calibrated approaches, the situation had begun to reverse itself in the 2000s and early 2010s. Unfortunately, a combination of deeply flawed availability heuristics created by the MSM elevating Black cases of police brutality to the national stage, whilst only reporting identical cases of police brutality against unarmed white men at the local level, paired with a zealously uninformed activist movement- set back this largely positive social trend by more than a generation.
Everybody has heard of George Floyd, but who has heard of Tony Timpa (footage also available on YouTube)?. Coleman Hughes also interviewed a veteran police trainer with decades of experience on his YouTube channel- his informed opinion was that policing was confronting two major problems- 1) One could never tell how a particular individual would react to possessing power and authority over others. 2) No matter how realistic the training simulation, it's impossible to tell how well a person is going to react to a life-threatening situation.
Good sources of insight. I have not seen Eli Steele’s film but I am aware of it. The official narrative is a web of lies meant to obfuscate rather than inform. There are a number of black voices who seek to shed light in the darkness; mostly to a limited and already sympathetic audience. They are buried by the legacy media. I’m waiting for Eli to do the George Floyd review. Risky to go against the narrative.
I pray for a entrepenureal person combining the drive of Elon Musk, the compassion of (admittedly, fictional) George Bailey, and logistical savvy of Sam Walton -- who will buy Ikea. I imagine a revolution that expands the retailer's offerings into displaying and selling more than the furnishings for a 33 m^2 small home selling instead the entire structure -- all in a (big) box. With, of course, the traditional cryptic pictoglyphic instructions on how the pieces are to be assembled. The US actually went through phases of this notion with Stickley's "Craftsman" movement, and then the kit-homes from Sears Roesbuck, then the Levitttowns, then "Mobile" (Alabama) homes. We have the technology. Pulling the pieces together still seems to elude us. But to a point made elsewhere, yes, cities in the US tend to impose zoning and code restrictions that demand certain $VALUES of properties to be build. They sometimes disguise the value requirement with roof pitch or street width or "amenities" requirements. But the driving force is city administration notions that a household/family necessarily demands certain services (school, police, fire, sewer, trash) etc from the city, and the cost of providing the services to an address must be covered by the tax to be paid from the address. Assuming the same tax rate applied to all addresses, the service costs sets the house value. So, for real instances, the neighborhood -- city officials, administrators, voters, and hired planners -- forbid a boxy mobile home sited among the stately Queen Anne style structures nearby.
Although America was yet to hit several key milestones in terms of Civil Rights, in economic and civic terms America was at its greatest when it decided to harness the liberty ship ethos to free enterprise and the civic realm. It wasn't the government which created this era, but rather the belief that a person could make a decent profit and provide a social good which was of benefit to people generally.
It's not capitalism that is the problem, but rather the cynicism of an era when people honestly believe that in order to fulfil one's duty to shareholders one has to treat workers like shit and give the customer crap deals.
We lost more than we can possibly imagine when we gradually lost the 'we're all in this together' mentality.
I was watching an adherent of the tech libertarian philosophy the other day allaying fears over the labour impacts of AI, arguing that every time similar tech changes have happened in the past, it's meant that worker living standards were raised because they became more productive. He divided sectors of the economy into slow and fast. Fast is the market forces that allow people to buy gloriously vivid TVs which can fill an entire wall. Slow is education, healthcare and housing- all of which are sectors over which the state exerts the greatest amount of control.
That looks interesting! I will have to give it a read. It's also worth noting that several countries in Northern Europe have had significant successes removing lower value jobs from the economy through minimum wage increases causing automation pressures. It might seem counterintuitive- but the pay off is that it creates value further up the value chain.
Government really gets it wrong on this one. One job installing and servicing automated kiosks is easily worth 5 to 10 people working checkout jobs. The reason? Well, first there is a net positive taxation effect- you have to be at least in the top 40% of the income spectrum to be a net positive contributor- and the aggregation of people towards the bottom of the income spectrum is going to dilute the effect of public spending per child on education, for example. Second, people further down the income spectrum have a large portion of the money from their labour earmarked for areas like rents which don't have any real benefit on the broader economy through the multiplier effect.
Higher income people, by comparison, can employ a veritable legion of people on reasonably decent pay by comparison- as gardening maintenance specialists, chefs and restauranteurs and in home improvements. One of the great policies from the Nordic model is the debt interest tax relief on borrowing- whether a student repaying loans or a couple with a mortgage around 30% of any debt interest repayments is tax deductible- and most of this money gets deployed in supporting diffuse consumer spending which benefits the broader economy, rather than in the far less beneficial rentier economics side of the economy, which amounts to capital collection.
Where most governments go wrong with minimum wage legislation is in applying it too broadly. One wants lower minimums in socioeconomically deprived areas so that tradable production and logistics hubs move into the area- and my brother is a chef- when restaurants are forced to raise their prices because of excessive minimum wages, both the chefs and the wait staff take a real-term pay cut because of lost tips income. Tips should be tax exempt- although at least bare minimal minimum wages are advisable, otherwise the bland and horrible food chains enjoy a dominating competitive advantage.
Let's not neglect the role of regulation here, as well. At least where I live, the City Council and associated bureaucrats have a huge stack of regulations that must be obeyed to build any sort of housing, down to the roof pitch and number of parking units. (And the regulators *hate* cars; one developer I talked to said that the City planners would let him build 6 units with parking, or 32 without - on the same plot of land.
Sure, this is one of those things which really pisses me off. There are huge tracts of available building land in the London greenbelt, which are little better than concreted wasteland. The problem is that housing is such a sensitive market, that only a 10% total of applications rejected and a 10% cost increase in regulations. This doesn't mean we shouldn't have regulations- electrics in particular need to be tightly regulated by ensuring qualified electricians, a duty of care and legal liability- otherwise people get electrocuted or die in house fires.
The thing I hate, is the government urge to tell people how to live, for some imagined future positive goal. At the moment its climate, but it's been other things in the past- even the desire to fully motorise American leisure time! If they really want people to change, give them better options. This is why I highlighted short-range rail as one way government should get involved. Short-range rail makes sense from a cost perspective, per rail mile, and a 30 min ride on a train to work is highly preferable to an hour's car journey, half of it stuck in traffic, and the other half getting tense about the bad driving of other road users! I used to have to play classical music on my way to work- it helped keep me calm....
The Swedes have a great way of integrating road use with public transport. You can drive less than five miles to a cheap multistorey, park for the day, take a quick train to work and the parking usually has a supermarket, and caters to most of the modern basic needs.
Plus, the only real barrier to short-range rail is reimbursed real estate cost. Spur lines solve a lot of the problem in this respect.
Nice article, i agree with most of it. I would just mention some points
It is not just related to African Americans, see the communities of "white trash", most probably they have the same issue, but being white, they do not fit the victim narrative.
The prices of things are not related to cost of producing them, that only happens on a "perfect competition market", the prices of things are as much as we can make the customers pay for them. Please read "the two income trap", then compare that some 50 years ago a family with just one average income could buy a house, have a car, a life and pay for education of the children. We have improved our processes, so price of goods should have fallen, and the purchasing power of the workers should have increased. However today we need more than two average incomes to do the same. How come the prices of housing and the prices of education have ballooned, because these markets are not competitive (but regulated) and the designated people or groups benefit from these. The same situation could have happened to other items, but housing and education show this very well. Therefore here you should break down and for each chapter ask yourself "qui prodest".
Then there is also the subside policy to create sectors that are dependent on it, you can read the chapter about African American on "the end of work".
The sentence that offer generates demand, well, you can expect anything from these people called themselves economists. Think about prostitution and the current narrative, there will be a demand, hence eventually there will be an offer, and it will always be there, believing that because we just write a paper it will go away just show how stupid (yes, stupid, not just naive) certain people are.
About the hypergamy we can talk other time as discussing it goes completely against the current narrative, but it is real, it is there and it will always be there.
It is getting summer time in the center of the Mediterranean, when you want you can pass by and we will have a beer, if i remember our discussions about the Ukrainian war then i think you will be the one paying ;)
With consumer goods it's slightly different. Personally, I don't mind Hisense deciding they don't want me to buy cheaper TV and instead decide to sell me a telly which is the same price, but better in every conceivable way (other than sound, for some reason)- their 50 inch 4K UHD smart TVs are now under £300...
I look forward to our beer. I need to get busy on my sci fi novel! I need the cash :)
I understand your point would not place the divide is on B2B Vs B2C, home appliances market is competitive, so it is not exactly the same, official education is also B2C but it is not competitive. Compare the "effort required" (cost as % of income) that was needed for a TV 50 years ago and today, then you will see the difference in "cost", being in a competitive market makes the difference. Take for instance cost of certain utilities (water, electricity) and compare the "effort required" 50 years ago and today, most probably the effort required today is higher, and it is not because they do a "better job" (that they may do), but because they can squeeze you more because the market is not that competitive.
It's not by accident that the biggest growth in expenditure as a percentage of income has all come in areas of the market where government is most heavily involved- housing, healthcare and higher education.
Firstly I should say that I enjoy your work immensely, I’m always pleased to see another post of your because they are always worth reading.
Secondly I must say that almost all of your ideas presented here are basically solid. Social housing, unemployment, de-industrialization, hypergamy and the important of fatherhood are real concerns that must be addressed.
Thirdly, however I think you are making a major mistake in the way you are framing this question that could cause major problems. You frame this as a solution to racial disparities. Racial disparities are not a problem and never have been. Racial disparities are statistical artifacts not a physical realities. Moving the needle on some gauge is moving the needle on some gauge but not necessarily real change in the lives of real people.
You are running a serious risk of being smacked in the face by Goodhart’s law;
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
I am interested in helping the Black community, but I am not interested in helping the Black community BECAUSE it’s doing worse that the White community and even more poorly than the Asian community. I’m interested in helping the Black community BECAUSE they are suffering needlessly.
Consider this, a social program that (deliberately or not) moves resources into the Black community but away from other sections of society could move the racial disparity needle but make the over all society worse. Even a flattening, let alone a decline in the outcomes of the non-black community could cause the racial disparity statistics to “improve” but at the cost of an increase in human suffering. A White or Asian individual doing well at school, getting a good job working hard and staying out of trouble could in fact make the racial disparity figures WORSE if there was not an equal proportion of the same virtuous deeds in the Black community. Clearly a focus on racial disparity figures could lead to perverse incentives and bad outcomes.
Clean and comfortable homes, happy families, healthy babies and plenty of them, education that prepares the young to lead fulfilling lives should be the focus of our work. Not making one number on a spread sheet closer to another number.
“Don’t compare yourself to some else today but to yourself yesterday” I think I got that from Jordan Peterson, he was talking about self improvement but I think it works for racial groups as well.
Before I finish I would like to make a few more specific points on social housing. One of my particular interests is Chinese society, modern and traditional. I wonder if you are familiar with the Tǔlóu (土楼) buildings of Southern China ?
What they are basically is a 3-5 level multi apartment condominium structure, built of earth bamboo and wood, some of which have been in use for 800 years (with constant maintenance of course).
I mention them because one of the criticism of the social housing projects such as the infamous Cabrini-Green homes of the Chicago Housing Authority was that there was something wrong with the architecture.
Crime, poverty, poor management and lack of funding certainly played a part in it’s failure but to me these look like weak excuses for an underlying social pathology. Blaming the symptoms rather than the disease. The Tulou villages of China show that multilevel apartment blocks are perfectly feasible, even operating at a medieval economic level with the technology of a village craftsman and the management of a clan council. And it can be maintained for centuries, Cabrini-Green, in the most powerful and technologically advanced nation in the world only lasted about 60 years.
So what if some Asian migrants, maybe the direct descendants of the original Tulou builders, recreated them on a much larger scale in Europe or the USA ? Would that increase or decrease racial disparities ?
Good point about the social housing. The best I've looked at would have to be the Singapore model, but there are plenty of other good examples of decent, well-functioning social housing around the world including mainland Europe and the Peabody estates in London I mentioned. The key criteria for success would appear to be discrimination purely on the basis of behaviour, although layout and architectural design seems to be a key factor as well. The earlier modern attempts tried to create areas of high density where people could mingle and socialise. Big mistake, these areas quickly became dominated by delinquent youth. If anything, the more successful recent models tend to create spaces which provide the illusion of privacy and views which deemphasis population density levels.
I largely agree with your other observations at a pragmatic level, but think we have to 'sell' an objective of greater equality because of human psychology and, even worse, the politics of the situation. What I'm really aiming for is a class-based solution- using economic opportunity to lift as many young men who've been told by an education system which only values one thing that they are worthless. The last time I looked at the stats on relative poverty in the States it was 9% of White people and 22% of Blacks, but of course one has to account for the 12 years of average age difference.
On the psychology, if one looks at Jonathan Haidt's work on Moral Foundations and set aside the small percentage who are pure libertarians, then one quickly sees two groups emerging. Social conservatives who comprise roughly 60 to 70% of Western populations and who are primarily motivated by fairness, and the 20 to 30% who are psychological Left-leaning liberals and sees fairness in terms of equality of income or outcome. As a general rule, the latter group tend to be born more socioeconomically privileged and possess a certain level of class guilt, but the decisive factor appears to be parental education levels.
Here's the thing- their urge for income equality is purely theoretical, even in social progressives. They've done tests in Scandinavian countries, the most socially progressive in the world, and found that when they gave paired contestants maths tests and cash prizes to distribute, instead of awarding the cash proportionately, per question asked, which an equality of opportunity mindset might suggest, the student participants disproportionately rewarded those with perfect or high scores, and punished those who didn't do well. So, in other words, equality of outcome or income is a purely theoretical construct which doesn't survive people's pragmatic sense of justice in the real world. Instead, a more realistic model in harmony with human nature would be to aim for procedural fairness- something which, even in the 2010s, we were still a long way from attaining- FT research and an article on the subject showed that people from backgrounds further up the class and educational ladder were generally less capable at the job they were doing, but more capable of arguing for pay raises and promotions, with higher expectations- whilst people from further down the socioeconomic ladder were far more likely to be capable, but less likely to push for jobs and pay which matched their ability.
On the subject of social pathologies, I tend to take a 'you broke it, you fix it' attitude- and let's face it Western governments caused this problem with disastrous social and economic policy. In the UK, it's just as true for White Working Class boys as it is for Black British Afro-Caribbean boys (Or British Bangladeshi boys, to an extent)- all of whom were historically subject to terrible government interventions paired with a neoliberalism which was deeply pathological in its Blank Slate thinking.
It's worth noting that China has learned from our mistakes on the latter point. Now that they are making Africa China's China and are in the process of offshoring, they are shipping out all the low value manufacturing labour, and keeping all the medium to high value labour for their own workforce. One of the basic things which most economists refuse to recognise is that the core reason for the slump in productivity in much of the West, particularly in the EU, is that the service sector is inherently unproductive- or at least it was when it couldn't be automated or scaled.
Anyway, one of the reasons I argue for this type of mostly libertarian production of a blue collar economic boom is because I've looked at Scottish Public Health Policing. The remarkable thing is not that they managed to half violent crime in a decade, taking Glasgow from the Knife Crime Capital of Europe to Scotland, in its entirety, to one of the least violent countries in Europe. Plenty of places can boast the same- as proactive policing was rolled out throughout the West, crime figures dropped off a cliff, as it was introduced.
No, what is amazing about the Scottish model was that by focusing on Youth Reform, they managed to do it without substantially increasing prison populations. Put simply, they managed to shift almost an entire generation of teenage boys from troubled backgrounds and impoverished circumstances into gainful employment in blue collar trades- as chefs, carpet layers, roofers, etc.
Personally, this leads me be to believe that the real source of intransigence of so many of the West's social issues, it's thorny or wicked problems, is political polarisation or partisanship. Each side possesses roughly 25 to 30% of the solution and the rest only comes from the friction which arises from trying to merge the two approaches. Youth reform works, if it leads to decent blue collar employment. Proactive policing works. But they both work best when combined.
Another example would be the generally remarkable improvement in educational results in London. Modest public investment works, when it's targeted at improving teachers classroom practice. But it works best when paired with fundamentally stricter schools in which the teacher imparts knowledge. There is a school in one of the poorest high crime communities in London. It's outperforming Eton. They hand out 30 minute detentions for being one minute late to school at 6.00am. It's not an anecdote- there are huge number of London schools which perform close to this level- but it does stand above the rest. It's called the Brampton Manor Academy.
My point would be if one aimed to help those most in need through market-based economic opportunity in America, one would naturally find that a higher percentage of the kids one would help would be Black. It's universal in mindset- the reason it addresses racial disparity is because some are more in need than others.
The problem with liberals and progressives is that they always want to help out of sympathy, 'you poor dear!', when their motive should be enlightened self-interest. More people gainfully employed and fewer people dependent on the state equals a more broadly distributed tax burden. More young men in work means less crime- regardless of what their race happens to be.
You’ve mentioned the Scottish Public Health Police project before in your writings and I’m keen to learn more. I guess if it’s not exactly run by fathers and uncles then it’s mainly run by a group of very paternal and avuncular men.
It should be noted of course that the Tulou structures I found so interesting are the products of a pre-modern clan based agrarian society. Juvenile delinquency would have been very rare and living on government welfare was just not an option, but death by starvation or bandit attack was a real possibility. The circular design of the Tulou wasn’t just an efficient use of space it was also for a castle-like defense.
The rigid clan based system gave everyone a definite place in the hierarchy and a literal place in the house. Accommodations for grandparents, parents and bachelors was all pre-determined. In the center of the structure is the ancestor worship temple. Try putting one of those in the community center of a council housing project ! It’s not that you are forbidden from burning incense and bowing to a statue, we all have freedom of worship right ? But which statue are you going to use ? Are you even allowed to erect a statue in public in Britain anymore ? If yes, of whom ? Can’t use him, he was an imperialist, can’t use him, he was a misogynist, can’t use him he killed a bunch of Irish catholics, can’t use him he was Irish catholic and killed a bunch of English protestants, and so on and so on. What about her ? She was quite gay, yes but was she gay enough ?
By the time you get to a compromise there’s no money left in the budget and the planning committee just erect an abstract blob that inspires reverence in exactly no one and nothing.
Oh wait ! I’ve got it ! I have conclusive evidence that a bronze statute of Harry Potter playing quidditch has been erected in London.
Problem solved. He is now your ancestor and God. (and also Batman)
Now obviously I’m having a bit of fun here but I think you can see my point. Traditional communities had a much higher level of what Ibn Khaldun called “Asabiyyah”, that feeling of togetherness which is essential for a functioning society.
I have read Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind” it’s a very good work and I think he makes a similar point, sociobiology mentions it explicitly. A group of more closely related individuals functions together more effectively, that’s kind of the secret behind the bee hive.
Do we have a technological substitute to bring together an increasingly diverse community ?
"Currently, the West is headed towards a scenario where the only thing it produces is mortgage debt as an asset class."
This is the cornerstone of all argument on the housing issue, Geary.
Land is the source and repository of all use value, and conversion to a fungible asset class via securitization is the praxis by which sequestration of the resulting exchange value concentrates ownership.
One of the best arguments against reparations for slavery and colonialism, is that almost all wealth in the world was generated after the colonial period had ended, from 1960 onwards- perhaps a decade earlier in the US.
We have to look at the processes which led to such a massive transformation of lifestyles and material abundance. I would argue that as productivity and wages rose, so too did disposable income. This amplified the power of market mechanisms by perhaps an order of magnitude, as voluntary exchange was supercharged to fulfil Westerners every material want or need.
It's also what was chiefly responsible for China's economic miracle, mainly confined to their coastal population of 300 million. The manufacturing industries which they gained weren't that profitable at all- at wafer thin 6% profit margins this was barely enough to cover inflation, tax and risk. Instead, it was the spending power of wage generation which accomplished China's economic miracle, as whole new consumer industries, generally far more profitable than the manufacturing, emerged as a 2nd order effect, to cater to the newly somewhat enriched class of textile and manufacturing workers- to serve their wants and needs, again, through supercharged voluntary exchange.
The problem with asset speculation, or what has systemically become guaranteed asset inflation, is that whilst it generates profits through the pricing mechanism, it's not entirely clear that it creates or adds value. Sure, it creates more capital, but when the bulk of that capital is devoted to further asset speculation, to what extent does this process generate genuine value? Instead, rising rents and mortgage repayments strip the market of the computational power of voluntary exchange, as more and more disposable income is devoted to the basic need for shelter.
And what's the endgame of this scenario? The WEFs supercities, 'you will own nothing and you will be happy'- government and private sector oligarchs deciding not only where people will live, but also how people will live. Of course, it's nowhere near that simple. The housing market is also a huge source of value creation. In addition to house building, people spend an inordinate amount of money getting their nest just right, and, contrary to what the Left might maintain, luxury flats and accommodation is probably the most virtuous of all, because a combination of high turnover and the tendency to remodel and redesign amongst the rich, means that voluntary exchange is yet again supercharged.
But the entire system is powered by disposable income- ordinary people making free choice through voluntary exchange in a market system, asserting their wants and desires upon the world through their buying decisions and in so doing transforming the world through aggregated needs and wants. Without this benign mechanic, the world becomes an ever-shrinking Aristocracy of Wealth where corporate interests fight fiercely over an ever-shrinking pie. It's the road to Neofeudalism and a New Gilded Age.
The font of our modern cornucopia is voluntary exchange, without it the West is done. America is perhaps the best example, although the UK with its geographical restrictiveness also serves to illustrate. Urban wastelands juxtaposed with islands of thriving superabundance. The islands possess the iterative power of voluntary exchange, the sheer value and labour it creates, the wastelands do not. Voluntary exchange is the water cycle- the labour it creates as a byproduct is an amplifying feedback system.
"It's the road to Neofeudalism and a New Gilded Age."
I was convinced, back in the eighties, that the road you describe was already well-traveled, Geary.
"The font of our modern cornucopia is voluntary exchange, without it the West is done."
Agreed, but the type of exchange is critical, or I should say that the type of wealth that is exchanged is critical. Capital tends to concentrate always, and securitization has removed the possibility of volition from the largest transactions. It has also assigned exchange value to asset classes devoid of any basis in real wealth.
By the time the average citizen realizes how their wealth-basis has been sequestered without their express permission, it's always too late.
> but the absence of fathers in one community compared to the other
It would be most interesting to have an in depth comparison of Blacks vs. Latinos. Both Victims of course so that gives the comparison at least something like an even starting point. (I can testify that I Oppress both groups equally.)
Being as I am, a Racist, I'd expect part of the difference in outcomes to be genetic, but I'd also expect most of it to be cultural, and as you say, one of the more salient differences is that Latino fathers tend to hang around -- Victimhood notwithstanding. I'd also expect that a major difference is that whereas American Blacks grow up in a culture where the objective is to avoid work, Latinos sneak across the border precisely to work -- illegally and thus with no legal protections whatsoever, and furthermore they are likely to send much of their earnings back home. On that point the two cultures could hardly be more different.
You shouldn't joke about being a racist, mate! Humour doesn't always translate well into print. I've looked at the best evidence for intelligence by group- from the burgeoning field of polygenics and GWAS. By now they've probably mapped out 90% of the complex genetic interplay which contributes to the heredity of intelligence, and the evidence shows that the genetic gap is only about 10% of that previously asserted- so no more than 1.5 IQ points. The only exception is Ashkenazi Jews, whose higher tendency towards neurological disorders associated with high intelligence is evidence of strong selection pressures in the last 2000 years.
Of course, there are those who have made arguments to the contrary, but they generally tend to make post hoc ergo proctor hoc arguments about edu PGS, as though educational outcomes aren't heavily influenced by the huge difference a narrative of agency can make compared to a narrative of oppression and grievance. This doesn't mean that structural racism doesn't exist, but the last thing you should be telling kids, particularly boys, is that the world is stacked against them.
Anyway, London has effectively broken this assertion. Because of the high concentration of the Black British population in London, the successes there led to Black kids scoring roughly the same as White British kids in our national exams at 16. What were the contributory factors? The introduction of free schools (our version of charters). Modest public investment in teacher training- most especially classroom practice. Above all, stricter schools with a knowledge-rich approach to education- in which teachers lead the class through instruction, instead of trying to encourage the children to explore and produce knowledge for themselves as though any knowledge produced from this method would necessarily be more 'pure'.
As to culture, even though the Left's prescription is wrong, they are right in highlighting structural factors. Plus, we need to remember that the most important factors which determine outcomes have nothing to do with the more precious elements of culture- food, music, cadence, history. Two factors emerge as culprits for damaging Black communities. The first is deindustrialisation. The second is a combination of terrible public housing policies and welfare system which discouraged fatherhood.
Values and personal responsibility matters at an individual level, but they can't help at a community level when disruption causes catastrophic damage to the community. Just ask the mainly White fathers in Montana, who, deprived of their traditional occupations in the lumber industries, quickly turned to suicide and drug overdoses. At one point, both were epidemic.
This is why the housing sector is the key to American rejuvenation- it has the potential to provide the economic opportunity to heal communities of all types, regardless of whether they happen to be Black or White.
Joke isn't the right word. By the doctrines of PC right thru to wokeness, I am a Racist. I believe in genetics and that the human brain is not an exception to the universal rules that apply to everything else. Variation, adaptation and selection happen to humans too and the brain is not excepted.
> so no more than 1.5 IQ points
That would be good news if true, but I suspect motivated results, rather like the modern 'science' that biological sex isn't real either. As for me, I'm with Murray until persuaded otherwise -- which I'm very open to! Racial differences are perhaps humanity's greatest challenge, how to admit to the differences and still avoid Nazism? It's a huge problem.
> strong selection pressures in the last 2000 years.
Exactly. Since the Jews still have Victim status, it's permitted to admit to their superiority since Victims are always permitted to be better than whitey, but *never* worse by any metric. Thus I can point out that Jews are over represented by 100X among Nobel Laureates and by 200X among chess grandmasters.
> as though educational outcomes aren't heavily influenced by the huge difference a narrative of agency can make compared to a narrative of oppression and grievance
That's the thing. I myself feel that group differences should almost never be mentioned however given the woke logic that, since all human brains are identical, it follows that if any group is doing poorly, the answer can *only* be Oppression. This essentially forces us to confront the fact that some groups do poorly for cultural and genetic reasons and that Oppression has long since been replaced by affirmative action.
> the successes there led to Black kids scoring roughly the same as White British kids in our national exams at 16
I follow your reports on that with interest. I'd love to be wrong. In any case, there can be no doubt that the improvements you mention can only be welcomed.
I'm a Reluctant Racist. There can be no question that all must be equal before the law and 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal ...' *must* be 'believed' even if it isn't true. It is a 'necessary lie' -- an aspiration. Thus, my saying that the races are not equal is quite understandably seen by most as a monstrous blasphemy. However, I think the current approach simply isn't working and it's time to try something else, like telling the truth.
The gap has shrunk. It's down to about 8 points in the UK. What remains is largely a result of complex social mechanics, although as I mentioned GWAS does show very small differences by population. The biggest factor is Vitamin D deficiency by ethnicity. Liberals try to ignore this because they believed that it might indicate a relationship between ethnicity and ideal latitude- quite the contrary a recent Lancet study showed that African population living in Africa are some of the most Vitamin D deficient in the world.
The studies are mixed, but those that don't show a link screen out low birth weight, premature birth, preeclampsia and maternal death in childbirth in their multivariate analysis, all of which are far less genetic than previously thought and correlate with Vitamin D deficiency! Another factor is access to green spaces in cities, specifically in relation to access to unstructured and unsupervised play. Once other factors are eliminated, identical twins adopted into different communities show a 2.6 difference in IQ. Fathers or close genetic male relatives in the household are hugely important- improving cognitive development, motor skills and even genetic longevity and health outcomes later in life (due to telomere length).
Socioeconomics also play a role, but less than the Left believes. Where is does matter is in the ability for couples to select into communities where most of the parents are heavily invested in the educational process. Although there is little data that isn't hopelessly corrupted by the biases of Left-leaning educational researchers, I would guess that 80% of all enrichment effects are down to half an hours reading at bedtime every night in the early years, combined with 30 minutes of parental supervision later on, making sure the child completes their consolidation homework. The catch is every kids parent in the school had to do the same, or else most time and effort on the part of the teachers will be soaked up by trying to address those kids who are lagging behind (which is generally true, but much more of a problem in schools where not all parents do the minimum).
The geneticists were right about IQ on a purely individual level, they didn't consider epigenetic factors and they simply didn't believe that social and environmental disadvantages might apply throughout the West, regardless of the host culture. They were wrong on the latter count and epigenetics either didn't exist or was very know when most of the academic work was done. Ironically, those who believe in structural racism were actually right- they simply identified the wrong root cause- implicit bias- instead the primary driver seems to be high ingroup in some minority communities, paired with Vitamin D deficiency and the basic disadvantage of raising kids in urban landscapes, particularly those without access to green areas safe for kids to play.
> The gap has shrunk. It's down to about 8 points in the UK.
That's believable. When someone tells me there are no differences at all -- which is basically impossible -- I disbelive, but honest evidence that the gap is smaller than we thought -- even better, that it is narrowing -- is most welcome. Frankly I can't imagine the mind of someone who *wants* the races to be unequal. I suppose if you really are a Nazi and enjoy wars of extermination then maybe that's what you want, but not me. Can you even begin to imagine the horror?
What remains is largely a result of complex social mechanics, although as I mentioned GWAS does show very small differences by population. The biggest factor is Vitamin D deficiency by ethnicity.
I've never doubted that the greater issues are social. The essential thing is for the woke/progressives and the Blacks in general to face the fact that most of their problems are not Oppression and in fact whitey has been turning himself inside out for decades trying to help them succeed -- but you have to diagnose the correct disease before you can treat it.
> Liberals try to ignore this because they believed that it might indicate a relationship between ethnicity and ideal latitude- quite the contrary a recent Lancet study showed that African population living in Africa are some of the most Vitamin D deficient in the world.
Interesting!! I've taken it for granted that whitey is basically a de-colorized negro due to the need to make D in a sunlight depleted latitude.
> Another factor is access to green spaces in cities, specifically in relation to access to unstructured and unsupervised play. Once other factors are eliminated, identical twins adopted into different communities show a 2.6 difference in IQ.
I'll take it. To be quite fair I'd need to see your data subject to rebuttal, but at this moment it sure sounds good to me.
> Fathers or close genetic male relatives in the household are hugely important- improving cognitive development, motor skills and even genetic longevity and health outcomes later in life (due to telomere length).
Sure, we completely agree about all that. Blacks are in a sort of death-spiral. As I know we agree, just blaming whitey for everything isn't going to help.
> Socioeconomics also play a role, but less than the Left believes. Where is does matter is in the ability for couples to select into communities where most of the parents are heavily invested in the educational process. Although there is little data that isn't hopelessly corrupted by the biases of Left-leaning educational researchers, I would guess that 80% of all enrichment effects are down to half an hours reading at bedtime every night in the early years, combined with 30 minutes of parental supervision later on, making sure the child completes their consolidation homework. The catch is every kids parent in the school had to do the same, or else most time and effort on the part of the teachers will be soaked up by trying to address those kids who are lagging behind (which is generally true, but much more of a problem in schools where not all parents do the minimum).
Amen.
> The geneticists were right about IQ on a purely individual level, they didn't consider epigenetic factors
Sure. I think in ages to come folks will shake their heads wondering how we could ever have been so stupid as not to have understood epigenetics. Lamark's Revenge!
> and they simply didn't believe that social and environmental disadvantages might apply throughout the West, regardless of the host culture. They were wrong on the latter count and epigenetics either didn't exist or was very know when most of the academic work was done. Ironically, those who believe in structural racism were actually right- they simply identified the wrong root cause- implicit bias- instead the primary driver seems to be high ingroup in some minority communities, paired with Vitamin D deficiency and the basic disadvantage of raising kids in urban landscapes, particularly those without access to green areas safe for kids to play.
The cool thing is that, as a pragmatist, not a doctrinalist, I can give 100% support to your programme quite irrespective of what the 'real' breakdown is between genetics and all the rest. It doesn't matter. Do good things anyway. So much could be done.
Interesting proposal and a topic I believe in strongly. Home ownership is foundational in a thriving society. You make excellent points about the detrimental effects of government interference and NIMBY. Building codes disallow new and more efficient methods, zoning disallows smaller, closer homes and our betters don’t want the help living next door.
The cause of disfunction in any group can be debated but given the evident rot, how does one go about creating Bedford Parks and not Pottervilles? Culture matters and successful home ownership requires certain things of people which are not entirely evident in much of society. We saw this in the transition of new public housing to ghettos.
There has to be a better way and it has to include the realtor industry taking 5-6% of every transaction. And it has to exclude government “help.”
Rough water ahead, keep paddling.
Your point about Bedford Park vs. Pottervilles is well-taken, but a large portion of the problem is solved by ownership. This is why at least some of the Nordic Model states offer income tax rebates against mortgage interest payments and they also happen to have some of the highest rates of wealth inequality in the world. Simply put, they found they could eliminate a significant amount of public expenditure on public housing maintenance, b shifting people from being tenants of the state to owning there own homes. Thatcher had the same idea with selling off old council housing stock.
Indeed although the effect was not particular profound, one paper which I read (skimmed the conclusions!) showed that per 10% increase in sales of public housing reduced crime by 1.5%, both in terms of violent crime and property crime. It's important to not that the change wasn't due to switching, gentrification or a change of the people. Instead the paper showed that the mechanism was behavioural change- attitudes changed because of the change in ownership status.
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1685.pdf
I agree with you on the sorry state of American public housing. The best advice is to follow that of Thomas Sowell, who has repeatedly asserted that public housing worked fine when it was an aspirational thing, something which could be achieved through respectable behaviour by the low income WORKING poor. There are also plenty of examples where public housing works well in Europe, provided a stringent system of evictions is enforced for those who evidence anti-social behaviour. So there are two ways of doing it- either through front end selection by employment status, or the rigorous expulsion of antisocial disruptors who ruin other residents lives and act as spreaders for bad behaviour, but both require a paradigm shift in thinking amongst the ruling class in the Anglosphere- less soft thinking and a recognition that left unchecked high density public housing can become a super-spreader event for social ills.
So, there are a couple of distinctions to make- first, there is a difference between housing affordability and affordable housing- the former uses market mechanisms on the supply side, the latter relies on government subsidy. The latter type is a waste of money and would be better addressed by using new public housing as a stepping stone to private homeownership, by insisting upon residents adopting a saving plan as a condition in addition to selection by employment status. Many on the Left don't see this as a particular public good, but one has to remember that housing as a commodity is extraordinarily susceptible to pricing mechanisms- shifting the deserving working poor upwards would make rent somewhat more cheap generally.
There is a problem with better run, pragmatic public housing. In London, there is quite an old housing project called the Peabody Estates. It was set up by an American Quaker banker and is a charitable concern. It still includes the requirement for employment, though thankfully they've abandoned the Quaker embargo against drinking- but because they also insist upon high standards of behaviour for tenants, nobody wants to leave!
I also agree with you on the realtors- nothing like self-interest as an incentive to grease the wheels of commerce.
I wrote this essay as a response to an article in Quillette discussing Glenn Loury, praising him for exploring both sides of the Structure vs. Individual argument at different times in his career. Both sides have a point, but I take issue with the Left's solution. Libertarian paternalism is called for. A better solution would be to focus 'help' on those who are willing to make better choices. It's what we used to do, and it's worth noting that in the period directly before Lyndon Johnson's War On Poverty, Black America was advancing towards parity through there own efforts at an ever-accelerating rate, especially in the North- it took government intervention to derail their upward rise.
They may not have called it Libertarian Paternalism back then, because Richard Thaler hadn't coined the term, but these sorts of incentives for better choices were in evidence everywhere. Scholarships were available for gifted kids willing to work hard. Public housing was for the hardworking poor and was aspirational. People forget the basic psychology, people value what is earned, and waste what is given away for free.
Great as always, Geary! I have a supportive observation: For a spell, in England, our family lived in council housing but at a time when anti social behaviour was not just unwelcome but suppressed actively. It was informative for the rest of my life just how disruptive to a community anti-social behaviour was. Compassion didn't work, exclusion was the only answer. If people can't self regulate, they need to be accommodated somewhere else where they can't disrupt the peace. Thing is - people who could manage the boundaries made for a much better community.
Exactly. There a process in criminology called 'the clarity principle'- it's the idea that deterrence only works if the punishment is clear and delivered in a timely fashion. the societal benefit in excluding the worst offenders is that it changes the behaviour of those who might otherwise be tempted to misbehave. By contrast, indulgence only amplifies the bad behaviour one wants to discourage, because people learn the lesson that there are no consequences to their actions.
This doesn't mean that conservatives are completely right on this issue. Longer sentences should only be considered when public safety is an issue- all the evidence shows that longer sentences don't work because most criminals think they are uniquely smart and wont get caught- raising the percentage of offenders who are caught greatly reduces the total crimes committed.
One of the biggest mistakes made during the War on Drugs era was the belief that there was a limited pool of potential offenders, when the incentives were insane, with street dealers often earning $1K profit a day, tax-free. Believing there was a limited pool of bad guys, the sentences were predictably punitive at around 71 months as an average, which in turn encouraged gang groomers to recruit and corrupt kids more quickly. It sped up the conveyor belt of corruption. A more rational approach, which recognised the incentives of drug dealing compared to other options, would have seen sentences much shorter, with judicial discretion applied to target those most likely to become violent offenders for longer sentences. It's called a disruption strategy and was deployed with a high degree of success during the War on Terror era.
Most would be surprised to learn just how many high risk candidates for terrorism ended up in prison with short sentences for burglary, common assault, drug dealing or other offences which wouldn't always carry a custodial sentence.
Excellent point on the value of earning. There is no replacement for the dignity which earning provides.
You bring up the third rail issue of the black community being much stronger during Jim Crow than post Great Society. Seems that would be worth considering. Why? And how could policy be tailored to draw on the strengths? Merit is uplifting. Equity is soul destroying.
'how could policy be tailored to draw on the strengths?'
Government should focus on creating the market circumstances for economic opportunity, more than help- primarily by curtailing its own bad behaviour is terms of planning and zoning. Building land is a commodity, and even a relatively small percentage change in the supply of any commodity can make a huge difference to the prices people pay as purchasers of single family homes. It's the pursuit of some supposed moral good which causes such needless hardship in the world. Whenever people try to work collectively, they end up trying to tell other people how and where to live.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a heterodox- I believe government can do good, if it far more careful in rationing what is a scarce and precious resource, so it is spent more effectively. A good example would be the child tax credit- generally a good idea, but it should have been far more limited- the data shows that cognitive outcomes are most improved in the pre-school years, particularly in terms of childhood nutrition.
In order to create a starter home construction boom American government needs to focus on four areas- libertarian land reforms, short-range rail, vocational training, and lifting regulatory restrictions to increase the domestic production of materials for the construction supply chain, particularly lumber.
Don't get me wrong, I am also a libertarian, but mostly a civic libertarian. Beyond this, my main issue with government is waste and inefficiency.
On the Black community pre-Great Society- it's worth noting that those communities which were most the beneficiaries of disastrous government interventions were also the most damaged. Just ask the white working class in the UK, who effectively became an underclass as a result of high density urban public housing and the welfare dependency fostered by the Welfare State.
But this wasn't the only issue. The death knell for so many communities was deindustrialisation. The highly educated have a view of human nature which is Blank Slate. They believe that anyone can be educated to anything- it's why their now infamous 'Learn to Code' fiasco had a close to zero success rate- because those gifted enough to become coders had already selected out of their communities long before the need for en masse occupational shifts.
Neoliberalism failed to account for the fact that in most groups, there is a fairly high minority of males who will never be academically capable, aren't suitable for the service sector and whose best economic opportunity will always be better paid blue collar work. It's why housing is the only skeleton key which unlocks the potential of a resurgent West.
My comment was worded clumsily. The strength of the community is the family. Government policy discouraged two parent households and contributed to the collapse of the family. The results are horrific. Deindustrialisation added to the misery.
I, too believe in government. Especially when it acts within the bounds of its competence, which is very limited.
I wish I could see a path out of the morass but I really don’t. Government is not benevolent and the voters are not ethical. Theft will continue and tyranny will follow.
Cheers.
Have you seen the documentary What Killed Michael Brown? It's by Eli Steele addresses what he refers to as 'poetic truth'- something which is untrue, but can be used to address perceived greater truths. The main reason I ask is because it contains a lot of social history specifically in relation to the Black community.
There is great clip of a young James Earl Jones in film- it's used to illustrate and preface the fact that the government sent agents into every major American city on a client recruitment drive, telling women the government would give them money provided they didn't have a working man in the house. Obviously, given the historical context, some communities were far more harmed than others.
I don't know what they were thinking- did they really think that women could do a better job raising kids, particularly boys, by themselves. Even girls are harmed by the absence of fathers, though not in terms of social mobility or higher rates of violent crime- it increases their risks of suicide, drug addiction, homelessness and prostitution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlSwsE22nX0&t=1s
The What Killed Michael Brown? documentary is available on Amazon, although I wouldn't bother with the HD version, as the production values aren't that high. Actually, looking at it in the UK it's now available for free as part of the Prime, package although this may not be the case in all regions
The other thing I would recommend is Coleman Hughes early essay on Quillette, entitled The Case for Black Optimism. It illustrates that despite decades of bad policies a combination of market opportunities, extended family networks and better calibrated approaches, the situation had begun to reverse itself in the 2000s and early 2010s. Unfortunately, a combination of deeply flawed availability heuristics created by the MSM elevating Black cases of police brutality to the national stage, whilst only reporting identical cases of police brutality against unarmed white men at the local level, paired with a zealously uninformed activist movement- set back this largely positive social trend by more than a generation.
Everybody has heard of George Floyd, but who has heard of Tony Timpa (footage also available on YouTube)?. Coleman Hughes also interviewed a veteran police trainer with decades of experience on his YouTube channel- his informed opinion was that policing was confronting two major problems- 1) One could never tell how a particular individual would react to possessing power and authority over others. 2) No matter how realistic the training simulation, it's impossible to tell how well a person is going to react to a life-threatening situation.
Good sources of insight. I have not seen Eli Steele’s film but I am aware of it. The official narrative is a web of lies meant to obfuscate rather than inform. There are a number of black voices who seek to shed light in the darkness; mostly to a limited and already sympathetic audience. They are buried by the legacy media. I’m waiting for Eli to do the George Floyd review. Risky to go against the narrative.
I pray for a entrepenureal person combining the drive of Elon Musk, the compassion of (admittedly, fictional) George Bailey, and logistical savvy of Sam Walton -- who will buy Ikea. I imagine a revolution that expands the retailer's offerings into displaying and selling more than the furnishings for a 33 m^2 small home selling instead the entire structure -- all in a (big) box. With, of course, the traditional cryptic pictoglyphic instructions on how the pieces are to be assembled. The US actually went through phases of this notion with Stickley's "Craftsman" movement, and then the kit-homes from Sears Roesbuck, then the Levitttowns, then "Mobile" (Alabama) homes. We have the technology. Pulling the pieces together still seems to elude us. But to a point made elsewhere, yes, cities in the US tend to impose zoning and code restrictions that demand certain $VALUES of properties to be build. They sometimes disguise the value requirement with roof pitch or street width or "amenities" requirements. But the driving force is city administration notions that a household/family necessarily demands certain services (school, police, fire, sewer, trash) etc from the city, and the cost of providing the services to an address must be covered by the tax to be paid from the address. Assuming the same tax rate applied to all addresses, the service costs sets the house value. So, for real instances, the neighborhood -- city officials, administrators, voters, and hired planners -- forbid a boxy mobile home sited among the stately Queen Anne style structures nearby.
Although America was yet to hit several key milestones in terms of Civil Rights, in economic and civic terms America was at its greatest when it decided to harness the liberty ship ethos to free enterprise and the civic realm. It wasn't the government which created this era, but rather the belief that a person could make a decent profit and provide a social good which was of benefit to people generally.
It's not capitalism that is the problem, but rather the cynicism of an era when people honestly believe that in order to fulfil one's duty to shareholders one has to treat workers like shit and give the customer crap deals.
We lost more than we can possibly imagine when we gradually lost the 'we're all in this together' mentality.
I was watching an adherent of the tech libertarian philosophy the other day allaying fears over the labour impacts of AI, arguing that every time similar tech changes have happened in the past, it's meant that worker living standards were raised because they became more productive. He divided sectors of the economy into slow and fast. Fast is the market forces that allow people to buy gloriously vivid TVs which can fill an entire wall. Slow is education, healthcare and housing- all of which are sectors over which the state exerts the greatest amount of control.
Have you encountered, "The Good Jobs Strategy" ?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DZQE31I
That looks interesting! I will have to give it a read. It's also worth noting that several countries in Northern Europe have had significant successes removing lower value jobs from the economy through minimum wage increases causing automation pressures. It might seem counterintuitive- but the pay off is that it creates value further up the value chain.
Government really gets it wrong on this one. One job installing and servicing automated kiosks is easily worth 5 to 10 people working checkout jobs. The reason? Well, first there is a net positive taxation effect- you have to be at least in the top 40% of the income spectrum to be a net positive contributor- and the aggregation of people towards the bottom of the income spectrum is going to dilute the effect of public spending per child on education, for example. Second, people further down the income spectrum have a large portion of the money from their labour earmarked for areas like rents which don't have any real benefit on the broader economy through the multiplier effect.
Higher income people, by comparison, can employ a veritable legion of people on reasonably decent pay by comparison- as gardening maintenance specialists, chefs and restauranteurs and in home improvements. One of the great policies from the Nordic model is the debt interest tax relief on borrowing- whether a student repaying loans or a couple with a mortgage around 30% of any debt interest repayments is tax deductible- and most of this money gets deployed in supporting diffuse consumer spending which benefits the broader economy, rather than in the far less beneficial rentier economics side of the economy, which amounts to capital collection.
Where most governments go wrong with minimum wage legislation is in applying it too broadly. One wants lower minimums in socioeconomically deprived areas so that tradable production and logistics hubs move into the area- and my brother is a chef- when restaurants are forced to raise their prices because of excessive minimum wages, both the chefs and the wait staff take a real-term pay cut because of lost tips income. Tips should be tax exempt- although at least bare minimal minimum wages are advisable, otherwise the bland and horrible food chains enjoy a dominating competitive advantage.
Let's not neglect the role of regulation here, as well. At least where I live, the City Council and associated bureaucrats have a huge stack of regulations that must be obeyed to build any sort of housing, down to the roof pitch and number of parking units. (And the regulators *hate* cars; one developer I talked to said that the City planners would let him build 6 units with parking, or 32 without - on the same plot of land.
Sure, this is one of those things which really pisses me off. There are huge tracts of available building land in the London greenbelt, which are little better than concreted wasteland. The problem is that housing is such a sensitive market, that only a 10% total of applications rejected and a 10% cost increase in regulations. This doesn't mean we shouldn't have regulations- electrics in particular need to be tightly regulated by ensuring qualified electricians, a duty of care and legal liability- otherwise people get electrocuted or die in house fires.
The thing I hate, is the government urge to tell people how to live, for some imagined future positive goal. At the moment its climate, but it's been other things in the past- even the desire to fully motorise American leisure time! If they really want people to change, give them better options. This is why I highlighted short-range rail as one way government should get involved. Short-range rail makes sense from a cost perspective, per rail mile, and a 30 min ride on a train to work is highly preferable to an hour's car journey, half of it stuck in traffic, and the other half getting tense about the bad driving of other road users! I used to have to play classical music on my way to work- it helped keep me calm....
The Swedes have a great way of integrating road use with public transport. You can drive less than five miles to a cheap multistorey, park for the day, take a quick train to work and the parking usually has a supermarket, and caters to most of the modern basic needs.
Plus, the only real barrier to short-range rail is reimbursed real estate cost. Spur lines solve a lot of the problem in this respect.
Hello Geary,
Nice article, i agree with most of it. I would just mention some points
It is not just related to African Americans, see the communities of "white trash", most probably they have the same issue, but being white, they do not fit the victim narrative.
The prices of things are not related to cost of producing them, that only happens on a "perfect competition market", the prices of things are as much as we can make the customers pay for them. Please read "the two income trap", then compare that some 50 years ago a family with just one average income could buy a house, have a car, a life and pay for education of the children. We have improved our processes, so price of goods should have fallen, and the purchasing power of the workers should have increased. However today we need more than two average incomes to do the same. How come the prices of housing and the prices of education have ballooned, because these markets are not competitive (but regulated) and the designated people or groups benefit from these. The same situation could have happened to other items, but housing and education show this very well. Therefore here you should break down and for each chapter ask yourself "qui prodest".
Then there is also the subside policy to create sectors that are dependent on it, you can read the chapter about African American on "the end of work".
The sentence that offer generates demand, well, you can expect anything from these people called themselves economists. Think about prostitution and the current narrative, there will be a demand, hence eventually there will be an offer, and it will always be there, believing that because we just write a paper it will go away just show how stupid (yes, stupid, not just naive) certain people are.
About the hypergamy we can talk other time as discussing it goes completely against the current narrative, but it is real, it is there and it will always be there.
It is getting summer time in the center of the Mediterranean, when you want you can pass by and we will have a beer, if i remember our discussions about the Ukrainian war then i think you will be the one paying ;)
With consumer goods it's slightly different. Personally, I don't mind Hisense deciding they don't want me to buy cheaper TV and instead decide to sell me a telly which is the same price, but better in every conceivable way (other than sound, for some reason)- their 50 inch 4K UHD smart TVs are now under £300...
I look forward to our beer. I need to get busy on my sci fi novel! I need the cash :)
I understand your point would not place the divide is on B2B Vs B2C, home appliances market is competitive, so it is not exactly the same, official education is also B2C but it is not competitive. Compare the "effort required" (cost as % of income) that was needed for a TV 50 years ago and today, then you will see the difference in "cost", being in a competitive market makes the difference. Take for instance cost of certain utilities (water, electricity) and compare the "effort required" 50 years ago and today, most probably the effort required today is higher, and it is not because they do a "better job" (that they may do), but because they can squeeze you more because the market is not that competitive.
It's not by accident that the biggest growth in expenditure as a percentage of income has all come in areas of the market where government is most heavily involved- housing, healthcare and higher education.
Hello Geary.
Firstly I should say that I enjoy your work immensely, I’m always pleased to see another post of your because they are always worth reading.
Secondly I must say that almost all of your ideas presented here are basically solid. Social housing, unemployment, de-industrialization, hypergamy and the important of fatherhood are real concerns that must be addressed.
Thirdly, however I think you are making a major mistake in the way you are framing this question that could cause major problems. You frame this as a solution to racial disparities. Racial disparities are not a problem and never have been. Racial disparities are statistical artifacts not a physical realities. Moving the needle on some gauge is moving the needle on some gauge but not necessarily real change in the lives of real people.
You are running a serious risk of being smacked in the face by Goodhart’s law;
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
I am interested in helping the Black community, but I am not interested in helping the Black community BECAUSE it’s doing worse that the White community and even more poorly than the Asian community. I’m interested in helping the Black community BECAUSE they are suffering needlessly.
Consider this, a social program that (deliberately or not) moves resources into the Black community but away from other sections of society could move the racial disparity needle but make the over all society worse. Even a flattening, let alone a decline in the outcomes of the non-black community could cause the racial disparity statistics to “improve” but at the cost of an increase in human suffering. A White or Asian individual doing well at school, getting a good job working hard and staying out of trouble could in fact make the racial disparity figures WORSE if there was not an equal proportion of the same virtuous deeds in the Black community. Clearly a focus on racial disparity figures could lead to perverse incentives and bad outcomes.
Clean and comfortable homes, happy families, healthy babies and plenty of them, education that prepares the young to lead fulfilling lives should be the focus of our work. Not making one number on a spread sheet closer to another number.
“Don’t compare yourself to some else today but to yourself yesterday” I think I got that from Jordan Peterson, he was talking about self improvement but I think it works for racial groups as well.
Before I finish I would like to make a few more specific points on social housing. One of my particular interests is Chinese society, modern and traditional. I wonder if you are familiar with the Tǔlóu (土楼) buildings of Southern China ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_tulou
What they are basically is a 3-5 level multi apartment condominium structure, built of earth bamboo and wood, some of which have been in use for 800 years (with constant maintenance of course).
I mention them because one of the criticism of the social housing projects such as the infamous Cabrini-Green homes of the Chicago Housing Authority was that there was something wrong with the architecture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini-Green_Homes
Crime, poverty, poor management and lack of funding certainly played a part in it’s failure but to me these look like weak excuses for an underlying social pathology. Blaming the symptoms rather than the disease. The Tulou villages of China show that multilevel apartment blocks are perfectly feasible, even operating at a medieval economic level with the technology of a village craftsman and the management of a clan council. And it can be maintained for centuries, Cabrini-Green, in the most powerful and technologically advanced nation in the world only lasted about 60 years.
So what if some Asian migrants, maybe the direct descendants of the original Tulou builders, recreated them on a much larger scale in Europe or the USA ? Would that increase or decrease racial disparities ?
That’s all for now.
Peace be with you.
Good point about the social housing. The best I've looked at would have to be the Singapore model, but there are plenty of other good examples of decent, well-functioning social housing around the world including mainland Europe and the Peabody estates in London I mentioned. The key criteria for success would appear to be discrimination purely on the basis of behaviour, although layout and architectural design seems to be a key factor as well. The earlier modern attempts tried to create areas of high density where people could mingle and socialise. Big mistake, these areas quickly became dominated by delinquent youth. If anything, the more successful recent models tend to create spaces which provide the illusion of privacy and views which deemphasis population density levels.
I largely agree with your other observations at a pragmatic level, but think we have to 'sell' an objective of greater equality because of human psychology and, even worse, the politics of the situation. What I'm really aiming for is a class-based solution- using economic opportunity to lift as many young men who've been told by an education system which only values one thing that they are worthless. The last time I looked at the stats on relative poverty in the States it was 9% of White people and 22% of Blacks, but of course one has to account for the 12 years of average age difference.
On the psychology, if one looks at Jonathan Haidt's work on Moral Foundations and set aside the small percentage who are pure libertarians, then one quickly sees two groups emerging. Social conservatives who comprise roughly 60 to 70% of Western populations and who are primarily motivated by fairness, and the 20 to 30% who are psychological Left-leaning liberals and sees fairness in terms of equality of income or outcome. As a general rule, the latter group tend to be born more socioeconomically privileged and possess a certain level of class guilt, but the decisive factor appears to be parental education levels.
Here's the thing- their urge for income equality is purely theoretical, even in social progressives. They've done tests in Scandinavian countries, the most socially progressive in the world, and found that when they gave paired contestants maths tests and cash prizes to distribute, instead of awarding the cash proportionately, per question asked, which an equality of opportunity mindset might suggest, the student participants disproportionately rewarded those with perfect or high scores, and punished those who didn't do well. So, in other words, equality of outcome or income is a purely theoretical construct which doesn't survive people's pragmatic sense of justice in the real world. Instead, a more realistic model in harmony with human nature would be to aim for procedural fairness- something which, even in the 2010s, we were still a long way from attaining- FT research and an article on the subject showed that people from backgrounds further up the class and educational ladder were generally less capable at the job they were doing, but more capable of arguing for pay raises and promotions, with higher expectations- whilst people from further down the socioeconomic ladder were far more likely to be capable, but less likely to push for jobs and pay which matched their ability.
On the subject of social pathologies, I tend to take a 'you broke it, you fix it' attitude- and let's face it Western governments caused this problem with disastrous social and economic policy. In the UK, it's just as true for White Working Class boys as it is for Black British Afro-Caribbean boys (Or British Bangladeshi boys, to an extent)- all of whom were historically subject to terrible government interventions paired with a neoliberalism which was deeply pathological in its Blank Slate thinking.
It's worth noting that China has learned from our mistakes on the latter point. Now that they are making Africa China's China and are in the process of offshoring, they are shipping out all the low value manufacturing labour, and keeping all the medium to high value labour for their own workforce. One of the basic things which most economists refuse to recognise is that the core reason for the slump in productivity in much of the West, particularly in the EU, is that the service sector is inherently unproductive- or at least it was when it couldn't be automated or scaled.
Anyway, one of the reasons I argue for this type of mostly libertarian production of a blue collar economic boom is because I've looked at Scottish Public Health Policing. The remarkable thing is not that they managed to half violent crime in a decade, taking Glasgow from the Knife Crime Capital of Europe to Scotland, in its entirety, to one of the least violent countries in Europe. Plenty of places can boast the same- as proactive policing was rolled out throughout the West, crime figures dropped off a cliff, as it was introduced.
No, what is amazing about the Scottish model was that by focusing on Youth Reform, they managed to do it without substantially increasing prison populations. Put simply, they managed to shift almost an entire generation of teenage boys from troubled backgrounds and impoverished circumstances into gainful employment in blue collar trades- as chefs, carpet layers, roofers, etc.
Personally, this leads me be to believe that the real source of intransigence of so many of the West's social issues, it's thorny or wicked problems, is political polarisation or partisanship. Each side possesses roughly 25 to 30% of the solution and the rest only comes from the friction which arises from trying to merge the two approaches. Youth reform works, if it leads to decent blue collar employment. Proactive policing works. But they both work best when combined.
Another example would be the generally remarkable improvement in educational results in London. Modest public investment works, when it's targeted at improving teachers classroom practice. But it works best when paired with fundamentally stricter schools in which the teacher imparts knowledge. There is a school in one of the poorest high crime communities in London. It's outperforming Eton. They hand out 30 minute detentions for being one minute late to school at 6.00am. It's not an anecdote- there are huge number of London schools which perform close to this level- but it does stand above the rest. It's called the Brampton Manor Academy.
My point would be if one aimed to help those most in need through market-based economic opportunity in America, one would naturally find that a higher percentage of the kids one would help would be Black. It's universal in mindset- the reason it addresses racial disparity is because some are more in need than others.
The problem with liberals and progressives is that they always want to help out of sympathy, 'you poor dear!', when their motive should be enlightened self-interest. More people gainfully employed and fewer people dependent on the state equals a more broadly distributed tax burden. More young men in work means less crime- regardless of what their race happens to be.
Thank you for that considerable reply Geary.
You’ve mentioned the Scottish Public Health Police project before in your writings and I’m keen to learn more. I guess if it’s not exactly run by fathers and uncles then it’s mainly run by a group of very paternal and avuncular men.
It should be noted of course that the Tulou structures I found so interesting are the products of a pre-modern clan based agrarian society. Juvenile delinquency would have been very rare and living on government welfare was just not an option, but death by starvation or bandit attack was a real possibility. The circular design of the Tulou wasn’t just an efficient use of space it was also for a castle-like defense.
The rigid clan based system gave everyone a definite place in the hierarchy and a literal place in the house. Accommodations for grandparents, parents and bachelors was all pre-determined. In the center of the structure is the ancestor worship temple. Try putting one of those in the community center of a council housing project ! It’s not that you are forbidden from burning incense and bowing to a statue, we all have freedom of worship right ? But which statue are you going to use ? Are you even allowed to erect a statue in public in Britain anymore ? If yes, of whom ? Can’t use him, he was an imperialist, can’t use him, he was a misogynist, can’t use him he killed a bunch of Irish catholics, can’t use him he was Irish catholic and killed a bunch of English protestants, and so on and so on. What about her ? She was quite gay, yes but was she gay enough ?
By the time you get to a compromise there’s no money left in the budget and the planning committee just erect an abstract blob that inspires reverence in exactly no one and nothing.
Oh wait ! I’ve got it ! I have conclusive evidence that a bronze statute of Harry Potter playing quidditch has been erected in London.
Problem solved. He is now your ancestor and God. (and also Batman)
Now obviously I’m having a bit of fun here but I think you can see my point. Traditional communities had a much higher level of what Ibn Khaldun called “Asabiyyah”, that feeling of togetherness which is essential for a functioning society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asabiyyah
I have read Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind” it’s a very good work and I think he makes a similar point, sociobiology mentions it explicitly. A group of more closely related individuals functions together more effectively, that’s kind of the secret behind the bee hive.
Do we have a technological substitute to bring together an increasingly diverse community ?
Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell.
"Currently, the West is headed towards a scenario where the only thing it produces is mortgage debt as an asset class."
This is the cornerstone of all argument on the housing issue, Geary.
Land is the source and repository of all use value, and conversion to a fungible asset class via securitization is the praxis by which sequestration of the resulting exchange value concentrates ownership.
Thanks very much for another insightful essay.
One of the best arguments against reparations for slavery and colonialism, is that almost all wealth in the world was generated after the colonial period had ended, from 1960 onwards- perhaps a decade earlier in the US.
We have to look at the processes which led to such a massive transformation of lifestyles and material abundance. I would argue that as productivity and wages rose, so too did disposable income. This amplified the power of market mechanisms by perhaps an order of magnitude, as voluntary exchange was supercharged to fulfil Westerners every material want or need.
It's also what was chiefly responsible for China's economic miracle, mainly confined to their coastal population of 300 million. The manufacturing industries which they gained weren't that profitable at all- at wafer thin 6% profit margins this was barely enough to cover inflation, tax and risk. Instead, it was the spending power of wage generation which accomplished China's economic miracle, as whole new consumer industries, generally far more profitable than the manufacturing, emerged as a 2nd order effect, to cater to the newly somewhat enriched class of textile and manufacturing workers- to serve their wants and needs, again, through supercharged voluntary exchange.
The problem with asset speculation, or what has systemically become guaranteed asset inflation, is that whilst it generates profits through the pricing mechanism, it's not entirely clear that it creates or adds value. Sure, it creates more capital, but when the bulk of that capital is devoted to further asset speculation, to what extent does this process generate genuine value? Instead, rising rents and mortgage repayments strip the market of the computational power of voluntary exchange, as more and more disposable income is devoted to the basic need for shelter.
And what's the endgame of this scenario? The WEFs supercities, 'you will own nothing and you will be happy'- government and private sector oligarchs deciding not only where people will live, but also how people will live. Of course, it's nowhere near that simple. The housing market is also a huge source of value creation. In addition to house building, people spend an inordinate amount of money getting their nest just right, and, contrary to what the Left might maintain, luxury flats and accommodation is probably the most virtuous of all, because a combination of high turnover and the tendency to remodel and redesign amongst the rich, means that voluntary exchange is yet again supercharged.
But the entire system is powered by disposable income- ordinary people making free choice through voluntary exchange in a market system, asserting their wants and desires upon the world through their buying decisions and in so doing transforming the world through aggregated needs and wants. Without this benign mechanic, the world becomes an ever-shrinking Aristocracy of Wealth where corporate interests fight fiercely over an ever-shrinking pie. It's the road to Neofeudalism and a New Gilded Age.
The font of our modern cornucopia is voluntary exchange, without it the West is done. America is perhaps the best example, although the UK with its geographical restrictiveness also serves to illustrate. Urban wastelands juxtaposed with islands of thriving superabundance. The islands possess the iterative power of voluntary exchange, the sheer value and labour it creates, the wastelands do not. Voluntary exchange is the water cycle- the labour it creates as a byproduct is an amplifying feedback system.
"It's the road to Neofeudalism and a New Gilded Age."
I was convinced, back in the eighties, that the road you describe was already well-traveled, Geary.
"The font of our modern cornucopia is voluntary exchange, without it the West is done."
Agreed, but the type of exchange is critical, or I should say that the type of wealth that is exchanged is critical. Capital tends to concentrate always, and securitization has removed the possibility of volition from the largest transactions. It has also assigned exchange value to asset classes devoid of any basis in real wealth.
By the time the average citizen realizes how their wealth-basis has been sequestered without their express permission, it's always too late.
Great comment.
Bravo Geary.
> but the absence of fathers in one community compared to the other
It would be most interesting to have an in depth comparison of Blacks vs. Latinos. Both Victims of course so that gives the comparison at least something like an even starting point. (I can testify that I Oppress both groups equally.)
Being as I am, a Racist, I'd expect part of the difference in outcomes to be genetic, but I'd also expect most of it to be cultural, and as you say, one of the more salient differences is that Latino fathers tend to hang around -- Victimhood notwithstanding. I'd also expect that a major difference is that whereas American Blacks grow up in a culture where the objective is to avoid work, Latinos sneak across the border precisely to work -- illegally and thus with no legal protections whatsoever, and furthermore they are likely to send much of their earnings back home. On that point the two cultures could hardly be more different.
You shouldn't joke about being a racist, mate! Humour doesn't always translate well into print. I've looked at the best evidence for intelligence by group- from the burgeoning field of polygenics and GWAS. By now they've probably mapped out 90% of the complex genetic interplay which contributes to the heredity of intelligence, and the evidence shows that the genetic gap is only about 10% of that previously asserted- so no more than 1.5 IQ points. The only exception is Ashkenazi Jews, whose higher tendency towards neurological disorders associated with high intelligence is evidence of strong selection pressures in the last 2000 years.
Of course, there are those who have made arguments to the contrary, but they generally tend to make post hoc ergo proctor hoc arguments about edu PGS, as though educational outcomes aren't heavily influenced by the huge difference a narrative of agency can make compared to a narrative of oppression and grievance. This doesn't mean that structural racism doesn't exist, but the last thing you should be telling kids, particularly boys, is that the world is stacked against them.
Anyway, London has effectively broken this assertion. Because of the high concentration of the Black British population in London, the successes there led to Black kids scoring roughly the same as White British kids in our national exams at 16. What were the contributory factors? The introduction of free schools (our version of charters). Modest public investment in teacher training- most especially classroom practice. Above all, stricter schools with a knowledge-rich approach to education- in which teachers lead the class through instruction, instead of trying to encourage the children to explore and produce knowledge for themselves as though any knowledge produced from this method would necessarily be more 'pure'.
As to culture, even though the Left's prescription is wrong, they are right in highlighting structural factors. Plus, we need to remember that the most important factors which determine outcomes have nothing to do with the more precious elements of culture- food, music, cadence, history. Two factors emerge as culprits for damaging Black communities. The first is deindustrialisation. The second is a combination of terrible public housing policies and welfare system which discouraged fatherhood.
Values and personal responsibility matters at an individual level, but they can't help at a community level when disruption causes catastrophic damage to the community. Just ask the mainly White fathers in Montana, who, deprived of their traditional occupations in the lumber industries, quickly turned to suicide and drug overdoses. At one point, both were epidemic.
This is why the housing sector is the key to American rejuvenation- it has the potential to provide the economic opportunity to heal communities of all types, regardless of whether they happen to be Black or White.
Joke isn't the right word. By the doctrines of PC right thru to wokeness, I am a Racist. I believe in genetics and that the human brain is not an exception to the universal rules that apply to everything else. Variation, adaptation and selection happen to humans too and the brain is not excepted.
> so no more than 1.5 IQ points
That would be good news if true, but I suspect motivated results, rather like the modern 'science' that biological sex isn't real either. As for me, I'm with Murray until persuaded otherwise -- which I'm very open to! Racial differences are perhaps humanity's greatest challenge, how to admit to the differences and still avoid Nazism? It's a huge problem.
> strong selection pressures in the last 2000 years.
Exactly. Since the Jews still have Victim status, it's permitted to admit to their superiority since Victims are always permitted to be better than whitey, but *never* worse by any metric. Thus I can point out that Jews are over represented by 100X among Nobel Laureates and by 200X among chess grandmasters.
> as though educational outcomes aren't heavily influenced by the huge difference a narrative of agency can make compared to a narrative of oppression and grievance
That's the thing. I myself feel that group differences should almost never be mentioned however given the woke logic that, since all human brains are identical, it follows that if any group is doing poorly, the answer can *only* be Oppression. This essentially forces us to confront the fact that some groups do poorly for cultural and genetic reasons and that Oppression has long since been replaced by affirmative action.
> the successes there led to Black kids scoring roughly the same as White British kids in our national exams at 16
I follow your reports on that with interest. I'd love to be wrong. In any case, there can be no doubt that the improvements you mention can only be welcomed.
I'm a Reluctant Racist. There can be no question that all must be equal before the law and 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal ...' *must* be 'believed' even if it isn't true. It is a 'necessary lie' -- an aspiration. Thus, my saying that the races are not equal is quite understandably seen by most as a monstrous blasphemy. However, I think the current approach simply isn't working and it's time to try something else, like telling the truth.
The gap has shrunk. It's down to about 8 points in the UK. What remains is largely a result of complex social mechanics, although as I mentioned GWAS does show very small differences by population. The biggest factor is Vitamin D deficiency by ethnicity. Liberals try to ignore this because they believed that it might indicate a relationship between ethnicity and ideal latitude- quite the contrary a recent Lancet study showed that African population living in Africa are some of the most Vitamin D deficient in the world.
The studies are mixed, but those that don't show a link screen out low birth weight, premature birth, preeclampsia and maternal death in childbirth in their multivariate analysis, all of which are far less genetic than previously thought and correlate with Vitamin D deficiency! Another factor is access to green spaces in cities, specifically in relation to access to unstructured and unsupervised play. Once other factors are eliminated, identical twins adopted into different communities show a 2.6 difference in IQ. Fathers or close genetic male relatives in the household are hugely important- improving cognitive development, motor skills and even genetic longevity and health outcomes later in life (due to telomere length).
Socioeconomics also play a role, but less than the Left believes. Where is does matter is in the ability for couples to select into communities where most of the parents are heavily invested in the educational process. Although there is little data that isn't hopelessly corrupted by the biases of Left-leaning educational researchers, I would guess that 80% of all enrichment effects are down to half an hours reading at bedtime every night in the early years, combined with 30 minutes of parental supervision later on, making sure the child completes their consolidation homework. The catch is every kids parent in the school had to do the same, or else most time and effort on the part of the teachers will be soaked up by trying to address those kids who are lagging behind (which is generally true, but much more of a problem in schools where not all parents do the minimum).
The geneticists were right about IQ on a purely individual level, they didn't consider epigenetic factors and they simply didn't believe that social and environmental disadvantages might apply throughout the West, regardless of the host culture. They were wrong on the latter count and epigenetics either didn't exist or was very know when most of the academic work was done. Ironically, those who believe in structural racism were actually right- they simply identified the wrong root cause- implicit bias- instead the primary driver seems to be high ingroup in some minority communities, paired with Vitamin D deficiency and the basic disadvantage of raising kids in urban landscapes, particularly those without access to green areas safe for kids to play.
> The gap has shrunk. It's down to about 8 points in the UK.
That's believable. When someone tells me there are no differences at all -- which is basically impossible -- I disbelive, but honest evidence that the gap is smaller than we thought -- even better, that it is narrowing -- is most welcome. Frankly I can't imagine the mind of someone who *wants* the races to be unequal. I suppose if you really are a Nazi and enjoy wars of extermination then maybe that's what you want, but not me. Can you even begin to imagine the horror?
What remains is largely a result of complex social mechanics, although as I mentioned GWAS does show very small differences by population. The biggest factor is Vitamin D deficiency by ethnicity.
I've never doubted that the greater issues are social. The essential thing is for the woke/progressives and the Blacks in general to face the fact that most of their problems are not Oppression and in fact whitey has been turning himself inside out for decades trying to help them succeed -- but you have to diagnose the correct disease before you can treat it.
> Liberals try to ignore this because they believed that it might indicate a relationship between ethnicity and ideal latitude- quite the contrary a recent Lancet study showed that African population living in Africa are some of the most Vitamin D deficient in the world.
Interesting!! I've taken it for granted that whitey is basically a de-colorized negro due to the need to make D in a sunlight depleted latitude.
> Another factor is access to green spaces in cities, specifically in relation to access to unstructured and unsupervised play. Once other factors are eliminated, identical twins adopted into different communities show a 2.6 difference in IQ.
I'll take it. To be quite fair I'd need to see your data subject to rebuttal, but at this moment it sure sounds good to me.
> Fathers or close genetic male relatives in the household are hugely important- improving cognitive development, motor skills and even genetic longevity and health outcomes later in life (due to telomere length).
Sure, we completely agree about all that. Blacks are in a sort of death-spiral. As I know we agree, just blaming whitey for everything isn't going to help.
> Socioeconomics also play a role, but less than the Left believes. Where is does matter is in the ability for couples to select into communities where most of the parents are heavily invested in the educational process. Although there is little data that isn't hopelessly corrupted by the biases of Left-leaning educational researchers, I would guess that 80% of all enrichment effects are down to half an hours reading at bedtime every night in the early years, combined with 30 minutes of parental supervision later on, making sure the child completes their consolidation homework. The catch is every kids parent in the school had to do the same, or else most time and effort on the part of the teachers will be soaked up by trying to address those kids who are lagging behind (which is generally true, but much more of a problem in schools where not all parents do the minimum).
Amen.
> The geneticists were right about IQ on a purely individual level, they didn't consider epigenetic factors
Sure. I think in ages to come folks will shake their heads wondering how we could ever have been so stupid as not to have understood epigenetics. Lamark's Revenge!
> and they simply didn't believe that social and environmental disadvantages might apply throughout the West, regardless of the host culture. They were wrong on the latter count and epigenetics either didn't exist or was very know when most of the academic work was done. Ironically, those who believe in structural racism were actually right- they simply identified the wrong root cause- implicit bias- instead the primary driver seems to be high ingroup in some minority communities, paired with Vitamin D deficiency and the basic disadvantage of raising kids in urban landscapes, particularly those without access to green areas safe for kids to play.
The cool thing is that, as a pragmatist, not a doctrinalist, I can give 100% support to your programme quite irrespective of what the 'real' breakdown is between genetics and all the rest. It doesn't matter. Do good things anyway. So much could be done.