Maybe because there’s zero incentive to move to a place full of unhappy people? The more interesting question is whether places like Korea, Japan, and Iceland, which have very little ethnic diversity, are happier for their having achieved a comfortable standard living without diversity than with.

If the idea is that the U.S. will inevitably slide toward second-world status if the whole place comes to look a lot more like California and Arizona demographically

I think the argument is more that if you replace the natives with Latin Americans from dystopian hellholes, then your country will turn into something rather like a dystopian Latin American hellhole, rather than the comparatively pleasant place it may be at the moment. There’s nothing magic about the borders of the US, after all. Political culture is about people, not borders. Now, whether it’s necessarily true that switching out the populations leads directly to that result is debateable. Perhaps the country’s institutions are strong enough that they’ll leave their imprint on foreign peoples as much as natives. But it’s silly to pretend that the other possibility simply doesn’t exist.

The other issue, of course, is that the country belongs to the natives, and while it might please us to govern their country otherwise, it is, when it comes right down to it, their country and no one else’s. And one ought to respect that. If we don’t like it, we can go elsewhere. They, for the most part, can’t — they’ve only got the one homeland.

And remember: la mitraille is grapeshot, not the machinegun, which is la mitrailleuse. I’m sure the Iron Duke would have giggled like a six-year-old at the invention of actual automatic weapons. “People power?” he would have said. “What is this people power? We have the Maxim-gun, and they have not.”

Regards, and thanks for an entertaining conversation…

Bancroft is indeed, simply out to lunch. I would point to the economic success of the U.S. in the 20th Century and the mass prosperity enjoyed by millions, and I would tell him that statements like this: “A fluctuating currency is bad for all but the speculative, who are but a handful among millions” is disproved by the actual experience of the 20th Century. Of course, if Ron Paul is right, our eventual doom is just around the corner, but I would also characterize Mr. Paul as “out to lunch” (although I’m not so quick to dismiss Paul mainly because I have such high respect for John Derbyshire, who is something of a Ronulan himself).

Ironically, I agree with the good Duke when it comes to crime in urban America — this shouldn’t be surprising since I consider myself a neocon and think that Rudy’s achievement in NYC with respect to the crime rate is a public policy achievement worthy of the good Duke himself.

But I fear our little back and forth is hijacking Will’s wonderful blog, so I promise to suck it up and begin checking you out over at “Unqualified Reservations” on a regular basis and perhaps we will meet again on your home turf.

No, the world of 2008 has not been overrun by barbarians. At least not yet. What is worrying, however, is that it seems to have lost the ability it once had to extend the limes and convert barbarism back to civilization. If you go to Google News and search for “poisoned arrows,” the result is not encouraging.

You make my point for me. Faced with statistics that you don’t like, it’s very easy to wriggle around them - as you just have. Faced with statistics that you do like, it’s very easy to propound them uncritically as absolute proof of one’s hypothesis - as I did earlier.

For a comparison across centuries, that British crime rate number (indictable offences per capita known to the police) is incredibly solid. (Although I am skeptical about that drop in the ’90s.) It is compiled by a single continuous agency, it is presented to us by an authority that would have every interest in concealing rather than revealing the data, etc, etc, etc.

And you know what? You’re right. It is still shite. It proves nothing.

Neither history nor government is a science. They are both arts. The former is the art of narrative interpretation, the latter is the art of sovereign management.

Because there are no controlled experiments in government, it is impossible to reliably verify any connection between policies and results. I think that the breakdown of the African-American family and the policies of the Great Society had something to do with each other. Whereas I know the atomic weight of hydrogen. I can convince you irrefutably of the latter. No one can convince anyone irrefutably of the former.

The connection between policies and results, like the quality of Gigli, must remain a matter of opinion. You seem like a basically sensible person, and I’m not at all surprised that your opinions are the same as mine. Sensible people can think. Reason works. The scientific method is only one special case of it.

The trouble is that when explaining why I think that much (certainly not all) of the world has gone to hell since 1908, I am trying to explain why Gigli is shite to someone who has not only never seen Gigli, but has never seen any movies at all, and who doesn’t trust my opinion in the slightest.

You have been trained, I gather, to understand the past through numbers. Even many historians are trained this way these days. It is essentially a rejection of history, just as 20C economics is a rejection of the discipline practiced by Ricardo, Mill, and Smith. Ever so much easier and more effective than just making these dangerous professions illegal.

I am not saying that just because Charles Francis Adams would be appalled by the state of government today, he is right. Just because he’s a dead white man, or something. What I’m saying is that there is no a priori reason to consider the methods and practices of public policy in 2008 superior to those of 1908, and there are indeed quite a few reasons to believe that the methods of 1908 (or, for that matter, 1808) got better results with much less powerful tools.

At least according to one biographer, the Duke of Wellington felt that all the problems of modern urban government could be solved with one simple phrase: “pour la canaille, la mitraille.” If the late Mr. Wellesley could observe the world as it is today, do you feel that he would consider himself disproved by mere observation? If not, what would you say to convince him?

Or try this piece by George Bancroft. Is Bancroft simply out to lunch? Has he gone around the bend? And if so, how would you explain it to him?

It is difficult to pin you down because your prose is full of questionable assumptions, you mix your metaphors, you make broad generalizations (which don’t relate to my own personal experience), etc., etc.

I finally got you to give me some data though, and for that I’m grateful.

Before we get to the British crime rate increase (I thought we were talking about the U.S.?) over the 20th Century, you pose a question for me:

“If I tell you that Gigli is a cinematic disaster and Blade Runner* is a work of genius, will you ask me what data supports my conclusion?”

No, I’ll ask you why you came to your conclusion and you’ll say something like: “Ben Afleck can’t act and he is awful in Gigli”, to which I might say “I always liked Afleck’s work when he finds a good script, so do you think the script was bad?” and then you’ll either say something like “Anyone who thinks Ben Afleck’s acting was ever passable is beyond hope” or maybe if you are feeling more charitable “Yes definitely, the script was horrible, nothing the characters said was believable to me…” etc., etc. I might also ask you what you mean by the notion of “cinematic disaster” because I remain interested in the financial success of the movie industry and find it fascinating when a movie I think is “shite” does well at the box office.

So when I ask you how you came to your conclusions, you provide me with reasons and clarifications of your terms, supported by the data at hand: namely the movie you just saw, other movies (to use as reference points), your personal experiences, your aesthetic tastes, etc.

Similarly with the comparison between the quality of government in1908 and 2008: all I was trying to understand was the basis for your comparisons and the data you used to come to your conclusion. So when I read in your prose a statement like the following, which is what you imagine the goofy Webbs (who were using data that was false…which means it is important to get your data correct, not that data is meaningless) would say when confronted with 2008 Britain:

“our cities will be filthy, dangerous, and colonized by truculent foreigners”

I remain baffled because as bad as certain parts of British cities may be (and I read a lot of Theodore Dalrymple, so I know there is much to be concerned about) my own experience of London (I lived there for a year while studying at the LSE) was that it was clean, safe, and enlivened by the presence of hard-working foreigners. And furthermore, it is strange that you refuse to acknowledge the fact that there were plenty of places in 1908 Britain that were filthy and dangerous (not as many foreigners around, I’ll give you that). But what about the crime, Arminius, what about the crime? Well, in short, the report you linked to acknowledges that their data from 1908 wasn’t as good as the data from 2008 so that explains some of the rise in crime. In addition, you had all sorts of young men roaming the world in service of HMG defending the Empire, which I’m sure helped keep crime lower at home (scroll down in the report a little further and you come to the 16,895 soldiers killed in the 2nd Boer War, which doesn’t include all the dead South Africans…if you want to talk about barbarism). There are other factors that I’m sure explain this dramatic rise and yes, I’m willing to concede that it is possible one factor might be the government was better at keeping the peace in 1908 than it was in 2008. But “better at keeping the peace” also might mean more innocent people were locked up and/or killed in the course of routine police work in 1908 than 2008, so what do your value more, absolute safety or basic civil liberties (i.e. Saudi cities, from what I understand, are quite safe, assuming you are a Muslim man taking a stroll down to the local mosque). So even your case against 2008 using crime statistics is hardly a slam-dunk. Furthermore, I’m in broad agreement with many of the libertarian critiques of modern day government policies, which I concede have mucked things up for the urban poor in Britain and the U.S.

But I remain skeptical that you can simply say, on the basis of our screwed up welfare policies (or maybe even our lax immigration policies) that the quality of government in 1908 was higher than 2008 because I remain convinced that the government of 1908 was screwing up in many different ways unique to that time and place. And furthermore, I remain totally unconvinced, based on the rise in 20th century British crime, that the governments in the West, including the U.S., in 2008 have degenerated “into patronage, bureaucracy and barbarism.” I will, however, check out what Charles Francis Adams Jr. has to say as he sounds like a fascinating man.

*Did you see last year’s “Sunshine”? A minor masterpiece and one of the best science fiction films I have seen in a long time.

Let me put this more simply. If I tell you that Gigli is a cinematic disaster and Blade Runner is a work of genius, will you ask me what data supports my conclusion? If so, you are really beyond hope.

No, you probably will want to talk about the box office returns. Anything so long as it’s a number. The fact remains that, in my judgment, even if neither film had had a box-office release, Gigli would be shite and Blade Runner would be great. Reality exists.

I just read a book by an English anthropologist who travelled through French and British West Africa in the 1930s. My father was posted to the US Embassy in Lagos in the late ’90s. The comparison is quite illustrative.

Could I quantify the difference in the quality of government between the two? I could dig up all kinds of numbers. I’m sure that numbers could be dug up to support any such comparison - in either direction. Again, look at all the numbers Sidney and Beatrice Webb produced for their “new civilization,” Soviet Russia. It was all shite.

I am suggesting that you understand how people in 1908 thought. They were just as smart as you, and they understood many things that you do not. Charles Francis Adams Jr., for example, was a general in the Union Army, a scion of the Adams political dynasty, a leading railroad executive, and chairman of the American Historical Association. There is no way to resurrect him and understand what his perspective of 2008 would be, but I would exchange the exercise for all the social statistics in the world.

Another fun game is to apply hindsight to the political debates of the period. Do you think the Fabians who made modern Britain what it is believed that their New Jerusalem would turn out as it has? “Oh, yes, we’ll lose the Empire, our cities will be filthy, dangerous, and colonized by truculent foreigners, and there’ll be about fifty times as much crime. But on the upside, we get council housing, Sir Paul McCartney, and a National Health Service.”

Steve Burton over at WWWTW has described your writing as “half-brilliant and half-unhinged” and while I initially thought this was a good description, I’m finding it harder to agree with the “half-brilliant” part.

To wit, you say the following in defense of your “taste, judgment, two eyes and a brain” methodology:

“Yet imagine a publication in which food reviewers - or movie reviewers, or literary critics, or anyone concerned with the quality of solutions to any problem a million times more trivial than government - had to use the tools of “public policy analysts” to assess results. It would strike you as the most boneheaded nonsense in the world.”

First of all, in what sense is a food reviewer, movie reviewer or literary critic concerned with the “quality of solutions”? I thought they were trying to give the reader an intelligent analysis for why a particular restaurant, movie or book is/isn’t worthwhile. This seems to me a very different exercise than trying to argue the government of 1908 did a better job of keeping its citizens safe, or providing clean water, or delivering the mail, etc., etc. than the government of 2008. In the later case I’d want data to back up your “taste, judgement, two eyes and a brain”. After all, the data for the restaurant critic, movie reviewer, and literary critic are readily accessible to the reader if he wants to go find out what he thinks of the restaurant, movie or book.

You are suggesting that rather than establish some metrics and look for data, I’d be better off in making the 1908/2008 government comparison by reading the subjective thoughts of folks who lived back in 1908 and comparing these thoughts with…well, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to compare the thoughts with from 2008. The latest Pat Buchanan screed? That seems to be stacking the deck a bit, not to mention the fact that these writers back in 1908 must have had access to their own data which should be analyzed just as you should analyze Pat in 2008 quoting some study that he thinks proves something that probably doesn’t prove what Pat thinks it does.

So I guess I’ll ask you again: what was it about the government of 1908 that is so much better than the government of 2008?

Which do you think is harder? Running a restaurant, or running a government? Which do you think is easier to assess in quantitative metrics? The quality of a meal, or the quality of government?

Yet imagine a publication in which food reviewers - or movie reviewers, or literary critics, or anyone concerned with the quality of solutions to any problem a million times more trivial than government - had to use the tools of “public policy analysts” to assess results. It would strike you as the most boneheaded nonsense in the world.

When I assess the quality of government in 2008 by 1908 standards, I use the methods that the writers of 1908 used. Namely: taste, judgment, two eyes and a brain. That these methods are no longer fashionable would not strike those who once practiced them as evidence of progress.

If you are not familiar with these techniques, Google has made a vast supply of pre-1922 writing available. I recommend starting with the Liberal Republican Mugwump types, who were the distant ancestors of the “public policy” experts of today.

Charles Francis Adams Jr., for example, is a great start. If you want to get a little more aggro, go for the Brits: W.E.H. Lecky, Henry Maine, James Fitzjames Stephen, and the like. I think you’ll find that there are many things under heaven and earth that are not taught at Chicago - at least not at present.

Or simply look at the track record of quantitative sociology across the 20th century. Googling “Sidney Webb” ought to keep you busy for quite some time.

(And everyone who even considers using the word “science” should have to read this.)

Given this track record, Occam’s razor suggests a simple reason for the continued success of objective methodologies in public policy: they are an effective way to camouflage the struggle for money and power which government, at all times and in all places, has consisted of.

“Actually, it reflects an attempt to factor out an extraneous variable: advances in science and engineering. The 20C state can no more take credit for these than it can for the sun coming up - all subsidies to its sun-priests notwithstanding.”

We’ll have to agree to disagree about where to place credit for those advances in science and engineering. In my analysis, there is much government can do to promote the flourishing of both science and engineering (provide property rights, including intellectual property; provide funding for research, e.g. ARPANET; provide the infrastructure for economic growth, e.g. roads, bridges, sewers; provide education, etc.) It can also discourage scientists and engineers if it fails to provide all these public goods. So while I don’t want to take anything away from Henry Ford, Jonas Salk and Steve Jobs, I do think they owe a debt of gratitude to their native country and its government.

But even ignoring the fact that I think government can take some credit for “advances in science and engineering” I still don’t find your argument convincing. To wit, you go on to say:

“Quality of government is not a matter of “statistics.”…All assessments are subjective. I am sorry to have to break this to you.”

Gee, I sort of thought that an assessment of the “quality of government”, while definitely subjective, can be intelligently informed by statistics. For example, if you believe that the quality of government depends on how well the government protects its citizens from criminals, then you’d want to know the statistics on crime, the effectiveness of the gendarmerie, etc. So when you say that our political system has used technology to avoid the “consequences of its degeneration into patronage, bureaucracy and barbarism”, I immediately want to know what are your metrics for these qualities of the political system and do the statistics back up your assessment? In other words, is there really more “barbarism” in 2008 government than there was in 1908? More patronage? I would agree there is more bureaucracy, which can be measured quite easily using statistics on government spending and regulation, but does this increase in bureaucracy justify using the language you used earlier (i.e. “In 1908, there was nothing recognizable as a Third World hellhole anywhere on Earth, whether in California or in the Third World.”)? That language doesn’t sound like someone who is interested in honestly assessing the quality of government in 1908 versus 2008.

Will –

I just saw that clip from “bloggingheads.tv” you linked to and it is priceless! Despite the fact that I’m married to a wonderful wife and I have two children, I have a crush on Megan. Is this normal?

Back when I was a student at the Harris School of Public Policy, I was lucky enough to meet both Doug Massey and William Julius Wilson (WJW), who were both teaching there at the time. I was responsible for getting WJW really mad when I asked him a question about Massey’s data on segregation – he and Massey didn’t exactly see eye to eye on the problems of the inner city poor and apparently I hit a sore spot with the question.

Anyway, personal anecdotes aside, I read the link you provided to the CATO Unbound and I must say my original concerns about how Mexican/Central American “immigrants are performing in school, how many are having births out of wedlock, how many escape from poverty, how many are joining gangs, etc.” are not alleviated. Massey doesn’t really talk about any of these trends directly – all he says is that Mexican immigrants (presumably both legal and illegal) is that they consume social services (their “service usage rates”) are “well below those of other immigrant groups and have fallen sharply since the mid-1990s.” This obscures more than illuminates: is he talking about all generations of immigrants? Does it include the costs of bi-lingual education (which he later mentions as part of “public services” which he claims “are consumed at rates well below what one would expect [by Mexican immigrants] given their socioeconomic characteristics”)? What about the costs of policing immigrant communities? And what about the recent data on Hispanic out-of-wedlock births, which may not cost much now, but represent potentially serious social costs for the future?

I think Massey is a top-flight scholar and I’m glad he makes his data available to the public, so perhaps with further research I can answer some of these questions myself. But again, when I read stories like these in “City Journal”:

1)http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_blacks_and_immigration.html

2)http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_mexifornia.html

3)http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_4_hispanic_family_values.html

I remain concerned that when Massey says “Mexican immigration is not a tidal wave” he may be right in the sense of a dramtic and upcoming destructive force; but I worry that VDH is also right in using a different aquatic metaphor, flood, which may not be as dramatic, but still portends an ominous future for at least some American communities.

It’ll be hard to be back home in America, surrounded by all these atavistic white America-uber-alles guys with their vulgar tastes who are so racist; although their vulgar tastes are forgiven. I mean, it’s the perfect proof of how the market civilizes the barbarians.