Wrong Side of History newsletter 52

And think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realms

Good morning, and welcome to all new subscribers. I’ve decided to start experimenting with putting my occasional newsletter out on Fridays or Saturdays. Besides which, half the English population will be too distracted tomorrow by Gareth Southgate’s brave boys facing Spain. I couldn’t think of a better name than Sunday West so I just decided on the ‘Wrong Side of History newsletter’ – catchy!

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Since the last newsletter, I have written about Germany’s exciting new utopian social experiment, which seems to be going as well as most utopian experiments.

The third Canon Club event took place, on Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

With the 75th anniversary of Nineteen Eighty-Four, I wrote about the battle for the legacy of George Orwell, who would agree with me on everything.

Ahead of the Conservative Party’s inevitable disaster, I wrote about how my predictions of doom were correct. I followed this up by asking whether the Right would return with ‘Gen Z’. (I’ve put in inverted commas as I still think this these generations are fake). So far, the election results among 18-24s suggests not.

Being a metropolitan ponce who’s out of touch with real people, I wrote in defence of drinking café lattes.

I wrote the case against empathy

On the continual influence of France on British elites.

After the election, the re-emergence of sectarianism in English politics.

On why centrists and liberals are unwise to ally with the hard left.

And I wrote about how the comforting idea that Britain sends too many people to jail is not in fact reflected by the sentences. It looks like Labour does intend to release a large number of criminals.

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Elsewhere, Neil O’Brien wrote about the same subject, why prison works and why the Conservative government failed to build more cells.

Around 50% of all crime is committed by 10% of all offenders - according to the Ministry of Justice’s own statistics.  Within this, 4% of all crimes are being caused by just 0.2% of all criminals. You might think that people with a large number of previous offences would get much longer, exemplary sentences when they appear in court. But this is not what the courts are doing. For some offence types the length of sentence actually appears to go down: “more crime, less time”.

O’Brien, who survived the election to remain as an MP, also wrote about what went wrong.

I wrote a while back that the Tories struggled because they don’t know what they actually believe in, and I tried listing some basic principles. Not all conservatives will agree with all of these, and at times I have my doubts – but it’s worth setting some ideas out. It’s something I’d like to expand at some point in the future, maybe as a book or series of posts.

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This was a fascinating piece by David Brooks on late bloomers

But for many people, the talents that bloom later in life are more consequential than the ones that bloom early. A 2019 study by researchers in Denmark found that, on average, Nobel Prize winners made their crucial discoveries at the age of 44. Even brilliant people apparently need at least a couple of decades to master their field.

Successful late bloomers are all around us. Morgan Freeman had his breakthrough roles in Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy in his early 50s. Colonel Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken in his 60s. Isak Dinesen published the book that established her literary reputation, Out of Africa, at 52. Morris Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s leading chipmaker, at 55. If Samuel Johnson had died at 40, few would remember him, but now he is considered one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language. Copernicus came up with his theory of planetary motion in his 60s. Grandma Moses started painting at 77. Noah was around 600 when he built his ark (though Noah truthers dispute his birth certificate).

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Janan Ganesh on why neoliberalism is not to blame for the rise of the radical right.

There is no correlation between a country’s exposure to market forces and its degree of populist anger. The hard right is flourishing in social democracies and in more market-centred ones; in regions that are poorer than their nation’s average, such as the German east, and in regions that are much richer, such as the Italian north; in countries that have experienced government cuts (Britain) and in ones that have spent at will (the US); in places where manufacturing has collapsed over the decades and in places where it hasn’t.

The reason for voters moving to the right is boring and simple – immigration. I’ve written before that, alone among western European nations, Denmark has put the brakes on unskilled immigration, and their radical right did very poorly at recent elections.

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Rob Henderson on the gender equality paradox.

More recently, a study of 67 countries found that although women generally tend to hold stricter moral views, gender differences in verdicts in hypothetical court scenarios are largest in wealthier and more equal societies. Specifically, women view misconduct more unfavorably than men in most places, but this difference in judgment is larger in richer and more equal countries.

This gender gap has also been found for physical differences in things like height, BMI, obesity, and blood pressure. Across societies, men tend to be taller, heavier, and have higher blood pressure than women. But in rich and relatively equal societies, gender differences are particularly large.

The gender-equality paradox might also help to explain why the gender gap in political orientation has grown among young people. One natural explanation is that young women are outpacing men in higher education, with men now making up just 40 percent of college students. Some evidence suggests that college tends to cultivate more liberal attitudes.

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A great Scott Alexander post on a form of game theory:

If the Lifeboat Games seemed suspiciously like nationalism, and the Backscratchers Clubs seemed suspiciously like clubs/cults/ideologies, the stories in this section seem suspiciously like the Establishment - whether it’s the Catholic Establishment of the Middle Ages, the conservative Establishment of mid-20th-century America, or the progressive Establishment of today. Elites support each other not directly - which would be hard to coordinate - but by all supporting the same ideology. If it’s hard for non-elites to break into the ideology, then everyone with the ideology will be elites, and supporting the ideology is an indirect way of elites supporting other elites in a big backscratching network. This is one of the solutions to Class Warfare Having A Free Rider Problem.

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I’ve been in Paris this week, fleeing the terror of a socialist government, high taxes and extreme right-wing politics for the safety of France.

Paris is obviously a wonderful place, and one of the major advantages it has over London is that it is much denser at its core. Much of central London is full of very low density, ugly post-war architecture, a product of government housing projects that mean more people being priced out of living in the neighbourhoods they’d prefer. This post by Britain Remade’s Sam Dumitriu and Ben Hopkinson from back in April set out ways of increasing supply in central London.

There are around 540,000 council homes in London, which together take up roughly 7,344 hectares of land. At a density of 73 dwellings per hectare (ha), London’s council estates are roughly three times less dense than Maida Vale, which is the densest square kilometre in the capital. Maida Vale achieves high levels of density, not through imposing concrete towers, but through gentle density – attractive Edwardian mansion blocks complemented by communal gardens.

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‘The authors find that cities Luther had personally influenced between 1517-1522 in the form of letters, visits or students were more likely to become Protestant by 1530. Similarly, the more personal influence Luther had on a city between 1517-1522, the more likely that it adopted Protestantism. This is clear simply looking at the bivariate relationships below.’

Interesting post by Mark Koyama on whether individuals matter.

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Ollie Ryan Tucker on the increasing influence of Hindu nationalism on British politics. It is notable that Harrow MP Bob Blackstone took his oath on both the Holy Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, a uniquely Tory form of syncretism that reflects the party’s new post-imperial role. On a similar topic, Sam Bidwell also wrote about Britain’s new millet system.

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Hadley Freeman on the Omnicause.

So trans rights are connected to Palestinian rights are connected to environmental concerns, and any self-respecting progressive who cares about one has to care about the other two. Queers for Palestine; headlines in the Guardian such as “Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have immense effect on climate catastrophe”; standfirsts in the New York Times such as “In many students’ eyes, the war in Gaza is linked to other issues, such as policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, racism and the impact of climate change.”  Too long, didn’t read? “Everything that I don’t like is fascism.” I’ve lost count now of the number of Democrat senators whose social media biographers finish with “she/her. Palestine.”

It’s like that graphic someone produced showing all the big issues overlapping with ‘Palestine’ in the middle.

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Munira Mirza on how British elites lost their way.

So what has happened to this idea of elite formation in liberal societies? Arguably, something subtle has changed in the culture of these institutions and within the British elite itself since the 1980s or 1990s. Modern institutions today emphasise their ethos of meritocracy (even though they continue to have a highly socially privileged and white intake), but Wooldridge argues they seem to have lost a vital characteristic of elite formation, which is the idea of ‘noblesse oblige’. Students are no longer trained to think of themselves as custodians of a nation who ought to ‘give back’ in return for their status, but as highly talented individuals who have earned their position through intellectual superiority and therefore deserve to pursue their own ambition first and foremost. As one disillusioned Harvard graduate, Saffron Huang, wrote recently of her alma mater: ‘In place of elite formation is a production line of professional strivers – albeit ones with relative wealth and a valuable social network.’

I agree that Singapore offers a good example of an effective civil service, and it’s a city-state worthy of our admiration. I have Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs by my bedside right now, and will post about it when I’m done.

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A good round-up by Charlotte Gill on all the insane things your money gets spent on. 

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Richard Hanania on having children.

Children experience life with a kind of magic and wonder that we as adults can only catch the most fleeting glimpses of, and it’s a joy to bring that perspective into your home and daily life. In their first few years, they are completely dependent on you, and this tends to snap you out of any sort of melancholy or existential dread you might be prone to.

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David Rozado on Wikipedia bias.

Results show a mild to moderate tendency in Wikipedia articles to associate public figures ideologically aligned right-of-center with more negative sentiment than public figures ideologically aligned left-of-center. These results suggest that Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy (NPOV) is not achieving its stated goal of viewpoint impartiality in Wikipedia articles.

And on Twitter:

Map master Francois Valentin on Italy’s persistent divisions.

How mobility in England increased after the Black Death.

Most south-east Asian billionaires are Chinese.

Exercise spurns neuron growth in mice. As I wrote, exercise is really good for you!

A short history of flowers in art.

The rising proportion of books authored by women, in one chart.

The beautiful Gerald Road Police Station in Belgravia. London, 1957.

‘The death toll of the First World War is much greater when you account for the fact that soldiers surviving the war suffered much greater death rates throughout their lives. This is seen by comparing the 1894 male birth cohort (prime age to enlist) to the 1900 birth cohort (just past the war).’ This was my family experience; my great-uncle survived the trenches but died in his fifties; his father passed away in his seventies and his surviving son (he’d lost another in the Second World War) in his 80s or 90s.

‘Over the 17th and 18th century, English men referred to their wives much more positively! This is in aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, which glorified romantic love!’

Someone made restored footage of the Roman Empire with Midjourney and Luma Dream Machine.

The new Oslo ad is fun.

America's rivers and streams used to be much more polluted than they are now.

On a similar optimistic note, solar energy is proving techno-optimists right.

How much money each James Bond film made. Time to put the franchise to bed!

‘In late 1991, Denmark started telling families about how to position their babies so as to avoid asphyxiation, and the SIDS rate fell by two thirds shortly after.’

Taylor Swift’s effect on the economy is so large that it could allow the Bank of England to defer an interest rate cut.

An exciting sounding project for a new community in New York state.

On a similar note, a nice visualisation of what Cambridge New Town could look like. Of course the pessimist in me – which is basically all of me – suspects it will be just more of the same.

‘In a short little window between 1991 and 1998, religion [in America] changed dramatically. Among 18-35 year olds: The share who were Christian dropped 14 points. The share who were non-religious rose 12 points. All in just a seven year span.’ And the decline of American Christianity is the most influential social trend of our age.

‘In 2010 Michigan Central Train Station in Detroit was abandoned and looked like this. Just this year, after huge investment led by Ford with Google, Newlab, Michigan, and Detroit, it looks like this.’

In Hollywood films, the most shameful thing is to be poor. ‘In Bollywood movies, the most shameful thing is to be unmanly or unfeminine.’

Have a good weekend, and finally - come on, England! Let’s hope it’s a re-run of the Armada of 1588 rather than the memory-holed Armada of 1589.