Good morning, and welcome to all new subscribers. I passed the 10,000 mark this week, so for new readers, and in a grotesque act of self-congratulation, here are my five most read posts (in reverse order):
The Unbearable whiteness of being an academic
The rational case for monarchy
The tragedy of Telford’s girls
Children of Men is really happening
This week I wrote about whether we can take back control of the institutions (free), while I followed it up by looking at the (related) decline of clubs in our lives. I also wrote about the growing ideological baby gap.
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Elsewhere, Duncan Robinson in the Economist on why Britain is becoming a nation of emigrants again.
The circumstances that had Callaghan dreaming of life elsewhere then are similar to today’s. Young, potentially mobile workers have it hardest. Graduate-trainee salaries have fallen by 22% in real terms since 2010, according to High Fliers, a graduate-recruitment research agency. An uneven tax system whacks thrusting youngsters. Overall the British state has a smaller tax take than its European neighbours. But those on a typical professional salary with a student loan face marginal rates (41%) similar to those in continental Europe and higher than in Australia and Canada.
People leave when opportunity lies elsewhere. The realisation that Britain is not, by north European standards, a rich country is entering the country’s bloodstream. British GDP per person is now below countries it used to rival, whether Germany, Australia or Canada. Britain’s comparison country is increasingly Italy, a country where it is the norm for young people to leave, rather than an exception. In a few years’ time the point of comparison may be Poland, which thanks to tearaway growth, is always gagging for workers. In the 1980s “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet”, a tv comedy about a group of Geordie builders working in Germany, became a hit. A 2030 remake might be titled “Do Widzenia, Pet”.
For now, the last ones in are the rest ones out. A net influx of EU citizens has turned into an exodus. Fanny, a 25-year-old Frenchwoman who graduated from the London School of Economics in 2020, is one. Of the roughly 20 French students on her course, she was one of only two to stick around. Now she too is departing, after taking a job in Marseille. Her salary will be the same in net terms but instead of paying for a room in a dingy flatshare in east London, it will stretch to a one-bed at. If a job in London, where British salaries are highest, requires living in flat-share until your 30s no wonder people consider going…’
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On a similar theme, Janan Ganesh on how Brexit has made us more European (in a bad way).
In 2028, its tax burden — its fiscal receipts as a share of national output — is projected to be five percentage points higher than in 2016. Social democrats on the continent must be blushing at this faithful emulation of their model. The tax rise hasn’t just occurred since Brexit, but in part because of it. Having forfeited some economic growth by gumming up trade with its nearest and largest market, the UK has to tax more to fund the same level of state provision.
There is a paradox here that Leavers can chew over at their leisure. Britain was at its most liberal and “Anglo-Saxon” inside the European project. The tax burden fell as low as 28 per cent in 1994, when the nation was a member of not just any EU, but one run by Jacques Delors, whose European Commission was seen by UK tabloids as a vector for socialism. It is outside the club that Britain has felt the hand of government most. In the 1960s, the UK’s tax burden was as high as Scandinavia’s. Now it is going up again, and without the consolation of art as good and as caustic as the Beatles’ “Taxman”.
What never existed was a sound liberal or free-market case for Brexit. There were not enough opportunities elsewhere in the world to make up for lost European trade. There were not enough growth-sapping EU regulations to throw aside. Politicians of a pro-market bent who voted Leave should be pressed until the end of their careers to say what on earth they thought they were doing. The prime minister is a good place to start. As mitigation for his tax rises, he is entitled to cite the cost of fiscal relief during the pandemic and the secondary effects of the war in Ukraine. At all turns, however, the question comes back: does Brexit make the problem better or worse?
Bad convergence is still convergence, though. Thanks in part to Brexit, Britain is evolving a polity more like that of a young Mediterranean democracy, a tax burden more like that of a Nordic social market and a currency more like the single European one.
Still, at least we got immigration down.
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Although I’m more pessimistic than ever about the future, I’m quite sanguine about the coming Labour takeover. Perhaps even more so after reading this Helen Lewis piece on Keir Starmer:
Starmer’s two defining characteristics are his reluctance to explain his actions and his willingness to act ruthlessly. My advice to Labour Kremlinologists: Treat him like a stage magician. Don’t listen to the patter, watch his hands. His team likes to pick fights while disclaiming any knowledge that their actions are controversial.
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I don’t know how or why I started following Gurwinder’s substack, but it’s consistently good and interesting. In the latest he lists 40 useful concepts you might know.
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Richard Hanania reviews Weirdest People in the World.
My personal background also made me naturally inclined to think that there was something distinct about Westerners. My family came to the United States from the Middle East, and I grew up around Arab Christians. While religious similarity with the majority population made assimilation relatively frictionless, for the first generation there was always a sense that the white people around them were psychologically different. One particular moment that sticks out for me is when a relative was talking about someone he knew who made an excuse as to why he couldn’t be somewhere at a certain time. This was followed by the statement, said in passing, that “he wouldn’t lie, you know, he’s an American.” The implication was that when an Arab gives you an excuse for why he can’t be somewhere, you can start with the premise that he’s probably just saying whatever is most convenient for him in the moment. As someone who is hardwired to be pathologically honest and disagreeable, it was always the casual lying and how taken for granted it was that alienated me most from the culture I grew up in, and allowed me to fit in among the WEIRD, to the extent that I could fit in anywhere.
He writes:
What Henrich calls the Church’s “Marriage and Family Plan” (MFP), which included features like monogamy in addition to an obsession with preventing broadly-defined incest, had important downstream consequences in practically every aspect of life. Young men would be more likely to find marriage partners since a few high-status leaders could not claim a disproportionate share of women, creating incentives for individuals to be more hard-working and less violent. The power of elders was further reduced by an inability to arrange marriages in ways that would keep wealth and resources within the same family, unlike in Muslim societies where the son of one brother would often be wedded to the daughter of another. When incest taboos extended to sixth cousins, Henrich estimates that an individual may have had 10,000 total relatives that were off limits in the marriage market. This wouldn’t be a big deal in a modern city, but when most people lived in small villages it would have created major difficulties for anyone trying to find a spouse. This led to a population that was more mobile, less embedded in kinship networks, and ultimately more individualistic.
I agree with Hanania that I don’t buy Henrich’s conclusion on genetics. I also suspect that, had Henrich come to a different conclusion, the Weirdest People in the World wouldn’t have been published. But I agree it’s still a marvellous book that explains so much. I’ve also been meaning to review Henrich’s great work, but my notes are about 15,000 words long so it’s become an albatross.
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Madeline Grant on Christianity in retreat in the Daily Telegraph.
Anthony Trollope’s The Warden offers a brilliant warning against iconoclasm for the sake of it. For decades, Mr Harding, a sweet old man, has managed an almshouse that cares for the poor. Eventually this happy idyll is disrupted when a liberal idealist teams up with a London journalist to launch a campaign accusing Harding of greed and corruption. Some of the ecclesiastical bigwigs are convinced. Eventually, the Warden leaves the hospital for an impoverished parish on the edge of Barchester. In his absence, the post is left vacant; the paupers lose Harding’s kindly ministrations, without getting a penny in benefit. Like Arnold, Trollope may have been writing in the 19th century, but the message is timeless. Destruction is no guarantee that a brave new order emerges in its stead.
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James Marriott also wrote about the Wellcome ho-ha.
To anyone unfamiliar with the censorious jargon that is threatening to become the lingua franca of modern academia, the grounds on which Medicine Man was shut down must seem either incomprehensible or bleakly hilarious. The public was piously informed that the exhibition was “very much a product of its time”. That time being . . . 2007. Ah, 2007. A cruel and bitter age.
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There was an interesting feature in the Guardian on Thamesmead, by Oliver Wainright. This bit amused me, however: ‘Architects and planners visited from across the globe to marvel at the brave new waterworld... Thamesmead was showered with accolades’. I think if you’re looking at the question ‘how could this have ended up a misery no one wanted to live in’, your answer might be contained in that sentence. I wonder what the Cockneys themselves thought, and whether anyone bothered to ask them. I bet they hated it from the start.
Meanwhile, while on the continent you see towns restoring pre-war styles after the disasters of the 20th century, Britain remains stuck with architecture no one outside the profession likes. I started a thread a while back on ridiculous NIMBY reasons for blocking new buildings, and while they are indeed absurd, it’s hard to honestly fill because most new-builds in Britain are horrible.
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Finally, Christmas is coming and Sam Bowman’s ‘Things I Recommend You Buy and Use’ list is becoming an institution in itself. Some great suggestions there.
Congratulations!
Glanced at Bowman's Christmas list. Would have been useful when I was a young graduate in my first professional job age 25. Less so when I now have a house filled with things I can't quite figure out how I managed to acquire. The dilemmas of shopping for Christmas for a man in his 40s.
The Labour takeover, eh? It will come, and it will change nothing. Is that the expectation?
One line in the above really puzzles me. In the piece about growing up as an Arab Christian, the author quoted refers to other Americans as “white”. I am also of Syrian Christian descent and grew up around immigrant elders and their first generation children as my aunts and uncles (and mother). I never remember the dominant culture being referred to as “white”, rather by their ethnic group, usually Poles, Czech, or other Eastern European, Pennsylvania Dutch, etc. this was In Allentown, Pennsylvania, a very working class, steel, car plants, and mining city. On census forms Arabs are instructed to check European as ethnic group. Those same forms require my adopted pure blooded Mayan son to check Hispanic rather than Native American as that is only for native North Americans. Very confusing.
When I was in my early 40’s, nearly 20 years ago, at a Palestinian friend’s party, a redneck neighbor casually said to the hostess “your sister married a white guy, didn’t she?”. It was the first time I thought of myself as non white. I came home and told my very pale husband “hey, I married a white guy!” It has remained a family joke ever since.
I am not saying there wasn’t prejudice for them to live with. My mother “passed” as Italian, she married an Italian and absorbed cultural ways of cooking, etc. from her early married life. I’d be interested in hearing if others consider Arabs non-white.