Sunday West: March 12

Why the Dutch do it better

Good morning neighborinos, and welcome to another instalment of ‘Wrong Side of History’. This week I wrote about the Iraq War and how democracy is affected by the prevalence of cousin marriage; if that subject interests you, there is more here. I also wrote about how the housing crisis is not caused by empty homes; and I wrote about whether liberalism is making people mentally ill.

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Elsewhere, Eric Kaufmann in The Tablet on the contrasting fortunes of American Jews and Asians.

On the one hand, Jews who are not Orthodox are embracing liberal secularism, intermarriage, symbolic ethnicity and post-ethnicity. Pew data showsthat around half of non-Orthodox Jews have married non-Jews, rising to 72% among those tying the knot in the 2010s. Among Jews with one non-Jewish parent, 82% have married non-Jews compared to just 34% of those with two Jewish parents. While 91% of Orthodox Jews say it is very important that their grandchildren be Jewish, just 4% of nonreligious Jews agree.

Young ethnic Jews are either more Orthodox or more secular-liberal than their parents. Those taking the liberal path place little value on their offspring identifying as Jewish or marrying a Jew. I’m a good example: As someone raised in a secular environment, with an ethnically Jewish father and a half-Chinese, half-Hispanic mother, I am married to a non-Jew. The net result of this process is to water down the distinctive Jewish identity and ethos. Affluence may also be playing a role in blunting Jews’ willingness to work, strive, and save as their ancestors did.

On the other hand, those who are Orthodox, notably the ultra-Orthodox, are growing rapidly as a share of the religiously observant Jewish population because they have a fourfold fertility advantage over non-Orthodox Jews. Some project that the ultra-Orthodox will comprise the majority of observant Jews by 2050. Ultra-Orthodox Jews value religious rote learning, not secular science and elite careers. Meanwhile, the trading and literacy skills that gave Jews an early advantage in the knowledge economy are now better exemplified by the fast-growing Asian population….

In 1925, 25% of Harvard’s incoming class was Jewish. In 2020, according to Shira Telushkin, a mere 6% identify their religion as Jewish. The infamous 15% quotas placed on Jews in the Ivy League in the early and mid 20th century would hardly be necessary today, when just 7% of Ivy League students in the 100,000-strong Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveys of 2020-22 identify their religion as Jewish.

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I recently wrote about the horrendous situation in Wakefield, and Ben Sixsmith wonders if the Labour Party will do anything to salvage its honour on this issue.

The local MP is Jon Trickett — a veteran Labour politician who has been in parliament since 1996. Trickett spent last week posting on Twitter about trophy hunting, corporation tax and — I’m not making this up — the possibility that his tweets are not appearing on people’s timeline because “algorithms are rigged against dissenting voices on the Left”. He has not, as far as I can tell, found time to take a stand against the persecution of four schoolboys in his constituency — unless, of course, that blasted algorithm has somehow hidden it.

The teacher in Batley is still in hiding.

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At UnHerd, James Vitali on Noel Skelton, the largely-forgotten conservative thinker.

Michael Gove – a passionate Unionist and, that rare thing, a genuinely intellectual politician — resembles Skelton in more ways than one. His new plan to cut through the jungle of lease holding interests exhibits some of the ambition required. And there is no shortage of parliamentary ginger groups sprouting up that resemble the “YMCA” of the interwar years which provided the party with so much fresh thinking, and to which Skelton, Eden and Macmillan all belonged. But it took two decades before Skelton’s vision for the country percolated to the top of his party. Conservatives today cannot afford to wait that long for an intellectual reinvigoration.

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And Matthew Crawford on his native California.

I grew up in California, moved away in the early Nineties, and moved back in 2019. One of the new things I noticed upon my return was small signs stuck to the side of a car, or printed on posterboard and erected on a street corner, advertising “DMV services”. After some intercourse with a few of these, I came to understand that these entrepreneurs are “fixers”, a species that most Americans are unacquainted with. If you want to get something done in the developing world, you often need to engage the services of a fixer. This is someone who has connections in the bureaucracy, often by virtue of kinship. Being a naïve visitor without connections, you couldn’t possibly know whom to bribe, how to approach them, or what forms must be observed. These things must be accomplished with delicacy. You, brainwashed to believe in the Weberian version of bureaucracy as impersonal rationality, are too naive to navigate a real one in most parts of the world. Too European….

At first blush, the providers of DMV services appear to fit Slezkine’s description of “service nomads”. But that concept only makes sense when framed against a surrounding society that is settled and cohesive, with taken-for-granted norms that secure a basic solidarity among the host population. Without such a background of belonging, and therefore communal honour to uphold, there would seem to be no need for a separate population and social type invested in transgressor expertise. California has become a polyglot of unrelated diasporas, opportunity-seekers, guest workers, tech Brahmins and multiple-passport-holding functionaries posted to the Pacific Rim economic zone. It is more like the bar scene in Star Wars than like Tolkien’s Shire. We are all wanderers.

In the Times, Ben Macintyre on sci-fi writers who accurately predicted the future.

Every successful sci-fi writer walks in the footsteps of Jules Verne, who harnessed emerging technologies and science to futuristic storytelling as no writer had done before. In From the Earth to the Moon (1865), the French novelist foresaw lunar modules launched from Florida and returning as splashdown capsules. He imagined videophones and Tasers, and correctly predicted weightlessness during space flight.

HG Wells in his fiction anticipated biological warfare, lasers, voice mail and automatic doors. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) predicted flat-panel televisions, earbuds and 24-hour banking machines, although the prize for conceiving the credit card goes to another writer in the genre, Edward Bellamy, in his novel Looking Backward, published in 1888. Douglas Adams imagined a guide to the galaxy that was the “standard repository for all knowledge and wisdom”, now known as the internet.

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How the Dutch did it better. Historian Anton Howes on why the English of the 17^th century envied the Dutch for the way they did commerce. Among the many virtues of the Easterlings:

Thrifty living — which, come to think of it, was probably related to the high consumption taxes, although Childs doesn’t seem to have noticed the connection. Dutch thrift was thought by the English to be especially useful because it allowed wage costs to be kept low — essential for maintaining competitiveness in international markets — while preventing the country having a trade deficit. The English always worried they were sending too much of their silver abroad to pay for French wines and other luxuries, but the Dutch appeared to have prevented this without resorting to import tariffs that might annoy trading partners and prompt retaliation.

The Dutch are famously quite thrifty still, and apparently 68% would ask a good friend for repayment of a $5 loan on the same day. But you don't invent modern capitalism by letting $5 slide. One Dutchman replied to my tweet that he ‘Once received a payment request for €1.20 from a Dutch friend after having a bottle of beer at their house.’

Still, the Netherlands is where I have the highest proportion of subscribers on the continent (along with Denmark, Sweden and Norway) so I won’t say anything negative about this.

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In the Atlantic, Derek Thompson on tentative signs that working from home has raised fertility in the US.

Indeed, the paper found that the biggest effect of remote work on fertility was on older women who already had a child, or several. The authors concluded that “remote work doesn’t necessarily trigger women to initiate childbearing,” but it might help older mothers “balance the competing demands of work and family.”

Remote work isn’t a skeleton key that unlocks the long-running mystery of declining fertility rates across the developed world. These results are not overwhelming, and they are concentrated among a minority of the U.S. population.

As Thompsons writes, these are early signs and we shouldn’t be too hopeful, since every type of intervention to reverse this downward trend seems to make no difference.

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An interesting look at how Poland’s conservatives have done what Britain’s probably should have done over a decade ago, and try to stop their opponents giving each other the top jobs in the institutions. There are mixed results, writes Pierre d’Alancaisez.

The progressive ideas which were once at home in the museum are slowly being driven underground. This seems to upset outsiders as much as the local community. A report by the US NGO Artistic Freedom Initiative highlights the increasing number of arrests of artists under Poland’s blasphemy and defamation laws, amongst them the failed prosecution of Elżbieta Podleśna who painted a rainbow halo on an image of the Virgin Mary. Artistic Freedom Initiative is planning strategic litigation against the Polish Government in European courts, but it was unable to name a local partner organisation that would support this action. Poland’s own supposedly grassroots NGOs, like the Life and Family Foundation, have likewise kept a close watch on the activities of arts organisations — for example, pressuring the authorities to fire the director of Lublin’s Galeria Labirynt for opening the country’s first LGBT book library.

Thanks for reading, and have a good week!

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