Evolutionary psychiatry: foundations, progress and challenges. Randolph Nesse reviews the literature on the field of evolutionary psychiatry, which seeks to understand mental illness from an evolutionary viewpoint. The field’s key insight, he argues, is recognising that some conditions taken to reflect mental illness are adaptive or were adaptive in our ancestral environment — at least some of the time. For example, negative emotions such as fear and anxiety have adaptive functions.

Sex-specific associations between education-related genetic factors and fertility extend beyond educational attainment. Ivan Kuznetsov and colleagues examine whether the relationship between education polygenic scores and completed fertility varies by sex. Analysing data from the Estonian Biobank, they find that polygenic scores are negatively related to fertility among women but are unrelated or even positively related among men.

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Written by Noah Carl.

There’s a certain type of liberal centrist commentator who really cares about immigration—or, more precisely, about opposing restrictions on immigration. For such individuals, there are a few positions more detestable than wanting to drastically curb the number of migrants entering the country.

These commentators are typically highly educated. They’re often academics. Many of them departed for Bluesky when Elon Musk took over Twitter (as a way to protest the rise in anti-immigration1 and racist content that followed his acquisition of the platform). They tend to think of themselves as the “adults in the room”. Being seen as outward-looking and cosmopolitan is a core part of their identity.

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Written by Peter Frost.

If as race realists seem to believe higher intelligence reliably produces civilizational superiority, then East Asian civilizations should have dominated the world. The most technically capable civilizations on earth, possessing ships and navigational tools that their competitors lacked, looked out at the wider world and largely declined to conquer it.
—S.R. Kanobana, ‘What if race realists are right?’

Why didn’t East Asians use their civilizational advantage to conquer new lands Actually, they did, and long before Western Europeans. The Han subjugated what is now South China and large parts of central Asia. On a smaller scale, Vietnam embarked on a southward push from the tenth century onward:

But this expansionism then gave way to self-imposed isolation — through the various Haijin policies of China beginning in the fourteenth century, the Sakoku policy of Japan from 1603 to 1868, and the Soeguk jeongchaek policy of nineteenth-century Korea. The main reason was fear of disruptive foreign influences, particularly via Christian missionaries.

If East Asia had not gone down this path, the last few centuries would have been rather different, with China absorbing much of Southeast Asia, and Japan becoming an imperial power much earlier.

The Japanese, remember them? Once they left their bubble, they lost no time getting into the game. By mid-1942, their empire comprised 12-15% of the world’s population, with close to a million Japanese settled in Manchuria, over 700,000 in Korea, and 300,000 in Taiwan, plus many more to come…

Yet Kanobana is right when he says that “the highest-IQ populations on the planet [did] not produce the grandest empires.” Whereas East Asian imperialism remained regional, European imperialism became decidedly global. Why?

Fear of foreign religions

Again, the main cause was self-imposed isolation at a time when European powers were pushing into the Americas, Africa and Asia. When Japan finally opened up to the world, there wasn’t much left to take — other than China and lands already taken by European powers.

The self-imposed isolation was driven mostly by a longstanding fear of foreign influences — especially foreign religions that promised a better life after death in exchange for renouncing betterment in the here and now. A millennium earlier, many Chinese were living in Buddhist monastic communities. One historian alleges that northern China had some 40,000 temples and 3,000,000 monks and nuns — more than a tenth of the population.1 These figures seem inflated, yet we have the example of neighboring Tibet, where monks once made up 13% of the population and 26% of the men.2

The loss of productive workers alarmed government officials, like this one in the eighth century:3

Today the Buddhist and Taoist clergy throughout the empire eat but do not till, clothe themselves but do not weave. They disseminate dangerous talk and harmful theories with which to deceive the ignorant. The annual cost of food and clothing for a single monk amounts to some thirty thousand cash. The taxes supplied by five adults do not equal that amount.

There were also demographic consequences. Monks rejected marriage, produced no heirs, and recognized no obligations to their parents — all this, to free themselves from earthly concerns and attain nirvāņa. These aims stood in contrast to those of Confucianism, which viewed the family as the foundation of society.4

Things came to a head in the ninth century, when the state forced nearly 300,000 monks and nuns to return to secular life, while confiscating temple properties and melting down statues to make coins.5 Eventually, the monasteries were allowed to operate — on the condition of being registered and taxed. They also had to accept the state’s role in approving high-ranking monastic leaders.

Thus, when Christian missionaries arrived in the sixteenth century, they were seen as bringing the same evils their Buddhist precursors had brought. By promoting celibacy and undermining family loyalty, these foreign religions challenged the Confucian view of life as a debt to be repaid to one’s ancestors and descendants.

No constraints on bad emperors or bad decisions

Empire-building was constrained not only by fear of foreign religions but also by lack of continuity in governance. The achievements of one emperor could be undone by the failures of the next. As Francis Fukuyama points out:6

In dynastic China, this was known as the “bad emperor” problem: Every now and then, a terrible tyrant would emerge and burst the boundaries of custom and accepted morality, doing enormous damage to the society.

For Fukuyama, even good emperors were not above this problem. “Even if a despot is benevolent, how does he or she know, in the absence of a free press and formal procedures such as elections that reveal preferences, what the common interest is?”7

European empires were more sustainable because religion acted as a check on state overreach. Christianity created parishes, schools, hospitals, universities, ecclesiastical courts and, more broadly, what we call “the rule of law” — all of which existed alongside the state and, to some degree, above it. In East Asia, religious institutions were weaker, less independent and less developed. State institutions were therefore less constrained, being accountable solely to the state.

Fukuyama’s argument overlaps with one advanced by Jonathan Schulz in a study of global variation in human psychology: Christianity replaced a situational morality based on kinship with a universal one of fair play toward kin and non-kin alike. This morality took root especially in northwest Europe, where human relations have long been characterized by weak kinship ties, nuclear families, late marriage and solitary living for at least part of adulthood. In such an environment, people “tend to be more individualistic, independent, analytically minded, and impersonally prosocial (e.g., trusting of strangers) while revealing less conformity, obedience, in-group loyalty, and nepotism.”8

Schulz attributes this mindset to the efforts of the Western Church, based in Rome, which banned cousin marriages up to the seventh degree. He argues that this ban promoted individualism by breaking up clans. However, a taboo against cousin marriage seems to have prevailed even in pre-Christian times, notably among the pagan Germanic peoples. The initial ban was taken from the Visigothic Code in the seventh century, and writers used the term “Germanic” to describe the stricter method, adopted in the ninth century, for calculating forbidden degrees of marriage.9 Also, studies of ancient DNA show a very low rate of cousin marriage in pre-Christian Western Europe.10

The Western Church probably adopted an existing taboo against cousin marriage in line with its policy of Christianizing pagan customs. As the new faith moved further west and north, it assimilated local traditions, including mental and behavioral norms.11

Western Christianity thus became focused on individualism, universal morality, original sin and the need to manage feelings of guilt. This mental and behavioral package — now enforced more effectively by the Church through its superior organization — helped create a society based more on universal rules than on shared kinship.

This was the magic bullet that led to global dominance by people who had hitherto lived on the fringes of the known world. Western Europeans proved to be better at building societies that encompassed not only close kin and close friends but also millions who might not even know each other.

Conclusion

East Asians failed to build global empires for two reasons: (1) self-imposed isolation, motivated mainly by fear of Christianity and the disruptive effects it might have; and (2) a failure to build institutions that can act independently of the state and limit its excesses.

In Europe, such institutions were built by the church. Does this mean that East Asia made a mistake in keeping Christianity out?

Not necessarily. A religion may have different consequences in different populations. Among practicing Buddhists, monks were much less widespread in India than in Tibet, where they became 26% of the male population. China might have become a second Tibet, with a similar level of material development, if it had treated this foreign faith more leniently.

Buddhist missionaries exploited a weakness of East Asians — low time preference, which leads to lifelong anxiety about death and the hereafter. Would Christian missionaries have exploited this weakness with even more success? And would they have been even more successful in undermining family loyalty?

In East Asia, Christianity has gone furthest in South Korea, where it is the largest organized religion and has converted almost a third of the population. Initially, converts destroyed their ancestral tablets and refused to bow before the corpse, tomb or picture of a deceased parent. Such practices are still condemned by the Protestant churches.12

Traditionally, ancestral reverence is seen as part of a social contract between the generations — as the glue that holds them together:13

Offspring are indebted to parents for the love and sacrifices of the latter during their earliest years. The care and support of elderly parents is a repayment, though inevitably inadequate, of this indebtedness … Korean children are not encouraged to be independent of their parents. Instead, parents view children as extensions of themselves and inculcate children with a spirit of mutual dependency between successive generations.

This view clashes with Western individualism: “Not only do American parents encourage their children to be independent and self-reliant in their earliest years, but parents are also extremely loathe to become dependent on their adult offspring in old age”.14

Elder care seems to be an Achilles heel of South Korea and, more broadly, the formerly Confucian countries of East Asia:15

While American caregivers cited love and affection more frequently, Korean caregivers emphasized that their motivations were primarily based on filial responsibility, strongly influenced by the Confucian sentiment, including three core values: (1) respect for parents, (2) family harmony, and (3) sacrifice for parents.

As these values disappear, elderly parents no longer receive the same support. Many turn to suicide: “South Korea’s elderly suicide rate is not merely the highest among the member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, it is the highest in the world.”16

South Korea also has the world’s lowest fertility rate, at only 0.8 children per woman.17 Relatedly, it has the highest rate of single-person households at 42%.18 Could all this be due to the replacement of Confucianism with Western individualism? China is not far behind. In fact, it might soon overtake South Korea in the race to the bottom.

This is what happens when the software of Western culture is run on the hardware of Eastern minds. Such an outcome was already foreseen a half-millennium ago, when East Asians put a stop to their empire-building and withdrew into isolation.

Peter Frost has a PhD in anthropology from Université Laval. His main research interest is the role of sexual selection in shaping highly visible human traits. Find his newsletter here.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

Endorse it. Applaud it. Celebrate it. But whatever you do, do not call it replacement.

The share of whites is declining in the countries their ancestors built. Not by chance. Not by accident. And not by some inexorable law of social gravity. But by conscious policy decisions. Without hyperbole, one might say that elites have purposefully pursued immigration policies, including lenient enforcement of borders, that have radically changed the demographics of Western countries—the primary effect being the diminishment of white majorities.

And yet, the claim that whites are being replaced by the concerted efforts of elites is not only rejected in mainstream discourse; it is condemned as a dangerous conspiracy theory. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, replacement theory is “a far-right conspiracy” which has been “widely ridiculed for its absurdity.” According to PBS, it is a “conspiracy theory [that] says there’s a plot to diminish the influence of white people.” And according to the New York Times, it is a “racist, sexist doctrine” spreading in “far-right circles.”

Across mainstream outlets, the rhetoric is almost identical. Those who believe that whites are being replaced are ridiculed as “far-right” or “extremists” who hold “conspiratorial beliefs.” Often, these discussions—or should I say, denunciations, for they are rarely discussions—conflate different views about white decline, suggesting that anybody who believes that the decline of whites is being caused by intentional policy decisions also believes that such decisions are heavily influenced by a coven of nefarious Jews.

The goal is obvious: make reasonable skeptical conversation about demographic change nearly impossible. Thus, replacement becomes the ghost that only materializes for applause. If you celebrate it, it exists; if you denounce it, it not only disappears but becomes a symptom of some feverish political delusion.

The goal in this essay is to address replacement theory dispassionately as something between an empirical hypothesis and a political narrative. Though I focus especially on the United States, similar analysis likely applies to other Western countries.

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The Collapse of Teen Fertility in the Digital Era. Nathan Hudson and Hernan Boedo argue that the rise of smartphones and social media accounts for the worldwide fall in teen fertility beginning in 2007. Analysing data from the US, they find that areas with worse 4G coverage, owing to their terrain, saw smaller falls in teen fertility after 2007. They also use time diary data to show that in-person socialising collapsed over the same period.

The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches. Hunt Allcott and colleagues examine the impact of lockable phone pouches in US schools. Tracking schools before and after they adopted pouches, and comparing them to schools that did not adopt pouches during the relevant period, they find that adoption leads to higher student well-being (albeit with a lag) but has no discernible effect on test scores.

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Timestamps:

00:00 Welcome and Overview

01:16 Attack in Ghent

02:43 Department Turns on Him

04:39 Police and Prosecutor Inaction

06:00 Petitions and Media Hit Pieces

08:11 Journal Controversy Fallout

12:28 Cambridge DEI Story

15:19 Ghent Timeline and Protest Culture

17:28 Research Project and Pivot to Wokeness

18:18 Wokeism Defined

21:05 How to Be Anti-Woke

24:10 Institutionalization After 2020

26:50 Culture Shift vs Institutions

29:10 Business Incentives Not Ideology

30:42 Youth Attitudes and Survey Data

32:57 Israel Palestine Through Woke Lens

34:05 Will Democrats Rebrand DEI

35:32 DEI Campaign Fallout

36:50 Swing Voters and Woke Backlash

37:44 Is Wokeness Fading

40:05 Cancel Culture Then Now

43:31 Elites Intelligence and Woke

45:23 Ideology Versus Tactics

54:32 Strategies for Equality

58:50 Hereditarian Revolution Ahead

01:06:31 Embryo Selection and Future IQ

01:07:25 Next Election and Closing

Watch the full video below:

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Written by Noah Carl.

Western Europe and its offshoots (the US, Canada etc.) have gone further than any other countries in embracing “diversity” and admitting culturally dissimilar migrants. Both of America’s two largest states, California and Texas, are now majority minority. More than 40% of school children in the Austrian capital of Vienna identify as Muslim. Out of 25 players on the French national football squad, only five are of European ethnic origin. And leading institutions in North America openly discriminate against white men.

Western Europe and its offshoots also score lowest on measures of racism. For example, the World Values Survey asks respondents whether they would dislike having “people of a different race” as neighbours.1 West Europeans, North Americans and Anglo-Oceanians are among the least likely to say that they would. People in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa are far more likely to answer in the affirmative. (South Americans resemble West Europeans in their answers, which makes sense given that many have Spanish, Portuguese or Italian heritage.)

Not only that, but Western Europe and its offshoots consistently come lowest on measures of nepotism and in-group orientation. As Joe Henrich writes in his book The WEIRDest People in the World, “WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do”.2

All this evidence has led some scholars to suggest that West Europeans are selected, culturally and genetically, for lower ethnocentrism—that they’re simply less ethnocentric than other populations. Kevin MacDonald makes this case in his book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition. Ed Dutton puts forward similar arguments in Race Differences in Ethnocentrism. And while Henrich doesn’t use the term “ethnocentrism”, he does claim that WEIRD psychology (including less favouritism toward co-ethnics) came about through a long process of cultural evolution, beginning in the 4th century.

Each of these authors has a slightly different theory for the origin of low West European ethnocentrism (though they share common elements). But I won’t get into the details here. The point is that all three suggest that low West European ethnocentrism is something that emerged gradually over many centuries of cultural and/or genetic evolution. Which seems to imply that, by the 20th century, West Europeans had a relatively weak disposition toward ethnocentrism.3

The problem with all these theories is that there’s one huge, glaring counter-example: Nazi Germany (along with related movements in other parts of central Europe). Nathan Cofnas has raised this point in one of his papers:

Germans in 1933 presumably would have reported very high levels of ethnocentrism in a survey … Now it is taboo to express such opinions. In 1933, Germans elected Hitler. In 2005, Germans with basically the same genes as their grandparents elected Angela Merkel, and largely supported her project of bringing in (what will end up being) millions of nonwhite immigrants.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

When I was young, I had a morbid fascination with VHS horror movie covers. The more macabre they were, the more captivating. Most of the films were tasteless, even boring, and many would likely have held little interest for me were it not for one simple but powerful fact: I was not supposed to watch them. And because I was not supposed to watch them, I wanted to watch them. They acquired a transgressive allure.

The names of those films became almost legendary among the children in my neighborhood: Friday the 13th, Halloween, Hellraiser. It was thrilling even to catch one of them, heavily edited for cable. The blood and cursing were largely gone but the transgression was not.

This is hardly a personal idiosyncrasy. Literature, mythology, religion and cinema are filled with stories about the paradoxical seductiveness of the forbidden. Indeed, according to the Christian understanding of the world, the Fall of man began with a prohibition. God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And it was precisely this forbidden fruit that became the object of irresistible desire:

But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

The same pattern recurs throughout Western literature. Many of our most compelling tragic heroes are those who monomaniacally pursued forbidden knowledge or who stubbornly rejected the prohibitions of authority. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Faust bargained for forbidden wisdom. Satan refused to yield to God. Victor Frankenstein violated the limits of nature. Their actions often ended in catastrophe—but their rebellion, their defiance, their refusal to submit, continues to fascinate us. Why?

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Written by Narek Harutun.

Next month will see the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which has already sparked a backlash over perceived historical inaccuracies and unexpected casting choices—such as Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Travis Scott as Demodocus. I therefore wanted to revisit an article that was published a few years ago in Aeon, a usually respectable magazine, titled ‘The whitewashing of Rome’. It was authored by Jaime Mackay, a writer and translator living in Italy who’s ostensibly quite the Italophile.

Mackay begins by discussing the history of fascism in Italy, including Mussolini’s adoption of ancient Roman aesthetics. I will skip over this part. My main objection concerns Mackay’s treatment of ancient Roman history. He writes:

There is a case to be made that the Romans, through the Latin language, were the progenitors of Western culture. As members of an ancient Mediterranean society, however, they didn’t have any notion of whiteness.

This is technically true. An ancient Roman wouldn’t have looked at a Gaul or Dacian and believed they were of the same genus (a Latin term) just because they both had a light complexion. But Mackay then goes further, asserting:

One straightforward reason for this is that they weren’t, or weren’t primarily, what we’d now term white.

It’s certainly true that the Romans did not perceive themselves as members of the “white race” in the modern sense. But to assert that they were not what we would call white? That is preposterous. His primary source of evidence is an article covering a 2019 study that analysed ancient DNA from Rome during the imperial period (27 BC to 300 AD). The study found that:

Of 48 individuals sampled from this period, only two showed strong genetic ties to Europe. Another two had strong North African ancestry. The rest had ancestry connecting them to Greece, Syria, Lebanon, and other places in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.

To state the obvious, we can hardly reach a definitive conclusion that Imperial Rome, a city of over a million people, was primarily non-white/non-European based on a sample of only 48 individuals. Still, I have to concede that the study does count as valid evidence. However, I noticed that Greece was being lumped in with Syria, Lebanon and the Middle East, so I decided to read the paper for myself. And I found other oddities.

When the authors of the study say that only two samples showed strong genetic ties to Europe, what they actually mean is strong ties to Western Europe. Southern Europe—which includes Greece, Southern Italy, Cyprus etc.—is not considered Western Europe, so it gets conveniently added to the broad category “Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East”. Which genetic clusters do the individuals in these categories belong to?

Two-thirds of Imperial individuals (31 out of 48) belong to two major clusters (C5 and C6) that overlap in PCA with central and eastern Mediterranean populations, such as those from southern and central Italy, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta.

In actual fact then, more than two thirds of the 48 individuals had ancestry linked to Europeans, while only a quarter had ancestry linked to Levantine and Near-Eastern peoples.

Now, given the history of conflict and trade, as well as sheer geographical proximity, I would have happily conceded that today’s populations from Southern Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Malta have more Middle Eastern genetic admixture than their Western European counterparts. But Mackay and his ilk will not even meet us halfway. Instead, Mediterranean peoples are sneakily cleaved away from the larger European population to which they belong.

Furthermore, writers from the Greco-Roman world did not use the word “African” to refer to the black-skinned peoples that inhabit the lands south of the Sahara, as we do today. In ancient times, “African” usually referred to either Punics, Libyans or Berbers, all of whom had what we would regard as light or olive skin, much the same as the Romans and Greeks themselves had. By contrast, “Aethiopian” was the catch-all term to describe black people (i.e., sub-Saharan Africans) like the Nubians, for example.

Mackay goes on to critique the idea that the Greco-Roman world’s iconic, plain-white marble statues constitute evidence of porcelain skin as a beauty standard:

Like others to this day, he made the mistake of assuming that the abundance of plain marble statues that remain from antiquity are evidence that Roman populations preferred white bodies to Black ones. This is wrong for many reasons. Firstly, because there are plenty of examples of statues that were made from grey, pink and green marble. More importantly, though, because literary sources tell us that almost all such works were originally painted in polychrome blues, reds and yellows.

I agree with the first half of this paragraph. Marble statues are, indeed, not evidence of what skin colours Romans considered beautiful. (The Romans did, however, view white skin as the epitome of female beauty, a point I will return to.) But the latter half leaves me confused. Does Mackay think the Romans were painting the skin of their statues in blacks, blues, reds and yellows? He omits that the polychrome paints would obviously have been applied to the clothing or armour of the statue.

In any case, Mackay continues:

Poets too have left numerous odes celebrating Black bodies: Asclepiades, an Asian physician, likens the object of his desire to a ‘coal’ that, when heated, comes to ‘glow like rosebuds’, and Martial describes a woman who is ‘darker than night, than an ant, pitch, a jackdaw, a cicada’ as an ideal of beauty.

This may be his most egregious paragraph. First, notice how he casually refers to Asclepiades as “an Asian physician”. While technically true, the lack of context almost makes me think he hoped the layman would come away with the impression that people who resembled Jackie Chan were prominent citizens in the Roman Empire. They weren’t.

In the Greco-Roman world, “Asian” was the demonym for inhabitants of Asia Minor or Anatolia, the landmass that constitutes most of today’s Turkey, which was at the time colonised and populated by Greeks, especially in the coastal regions. By the time of the late Roman Republic, “Asian” would essentially have been synonymous with “Greek from Asia Minor”. So, all of this is to say: Asclepiades was Greek.

However, the part I really want to home-in on is where Mackay cites two Roman love poems, which he argues idealise phenotypically “black” features, insufferably describing them as “Odes celebrating black bodies”. This is an example of the oft-seen mistake of failing to account for nuances in language. Consider the legendary 9th century King of Norway, Halfdan the Black. Did he have dark skin and African features? Of course not. He earned that nickname on account of his jet-black hair.

Colours can be literal descriptors of hue, as with Halfdan and his hair. Or simple means of differentiating two people who share the same name, as in the case of Alexander’s generals Cleitus the Black and Cleitus the White. But in many areas, particularly art, they are symbolically associated with abstract concepts. Predating any modern form of “racism”, humans throughout history have tended to associate white with purity and innocence and black with death and evil.

The underworld is dark; the bile of depression is black; thieves come out at night. While dark clouds portend danger, white clouds predict peace—and a serene journey for sailors. The dove and the lamb are white. The vestal virgins are clad in white. And so on.

Mackay only cites an excerpt from Martial’s poem, which describes his love interest as “darker than night, than an ant, pitch, a jackdaw, a cicada.” To really understand this you need to read the rest of the poem, which my preferred translation gives as:

She desires me – Procillus, envy me! –
one whiter than a new-wet swan,
than privet, lilies, silver, snow:
but I desire one dark as night,
cicada, black ant, pitch, or crow.
You thought to hang yourself:
I know you well, Procillus, oh, you’ll live.

Here Martial is writing to his friend Procillus, who is envious that a girl “whiter than a new-wet swan” desires Martial. As mentioned earlier, white was purity. It was femininity—the beauty standard of the times. Pale, white skin also signified aristocratic luxury, as working-class Roman women would have developed more of a tan when working outside. Skin whitening cosmetics were often used by Roman women to achieve a paler look.

Martial writes that he is attracted to the darkness of his real love interest. Dark skin may have been enthralling to someone bored by the beauty standards of the time, which were predictable, visible, bright, white. But the description may not even be a physical one. The phrase “darker than night” could very well refer to his love interest’s personality. Perhaps she was mysterious, at times frightening and dangerous, but alluring?

There are various possible interpretations, but simply describing Martial’s poem as an “ode to black bodies” is lazy. While Martial’s love interest may have had dark hair and eyes and tanned or even black skin, that was surely not the crux of his attraction to her.

Mackay proceeds to claim that there were many “nonwhite individuals” who achieved prominence in the Roman hierarchy, citing as an example Lusius Quietus, a Berber general from the 100s.

However, labelling a Berber as “nonwhite” or “African” is tricky and requires nuance. In today’s conception of “nonwhiteness” as “non-European”, a Moroccan Berber does qualify as such. Just like with certain East Asians, their skin may be as light as an Englishman’s, but they are considered non-white because they aren’t European. So, while Berber complexion can range all the way from pale to dark brown, these Berbers would be considered “nonwhite”. Wouldn’t they?

Well, it gets complicated. The U.S. Census would classify Berbers, and all other Middle Eastern or North African people, as “White/Caucasian”. How can this be? It stems from the now antiquated classification of peoples into three major racial groups: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. This system ignored skin colour and was instead defined by peoples’ morphological traits. Europeans, North Africans and Middle Easterners all shared Caucasoid features (skull shape, narrow high-bridged nose, etc.) Hence they all fell under the umbrella of “Caucasian” or “White”.

Now, while I’d argue this makes more sense than Mackay’s approach to racial classification, I wouldn’t bother to argue over it. At the end of the day, I think Berbers are Berbers. They’re an interesting and unique people—neither “white” European nor Arab nor “black” African. And they have managed to maintain their indigenous North African culture despite living under the yoke of various foreign empires for much of their history.

Mackay could have simply argued that there were a diverse range of cultures that lived and served under the banner of the late Roman Empire, and in myriad roles—from slaves to military officers. In that case, there would be little to disagree with. But instead he seems fixated on sticking it to “white supremacists”. He wants us to believe the Rome of the 1st century AD was demographically equivalent to contemporary New York City, with large shares of black and even Asian people.

It gets worse. An actual professor of Roman history from the University of London parroted the very same arguments in 2022. In his article at The Conversation, Richard Alston insinuates that emperor Septimius Severus was black because he was from North Africa, although (unlike Mackay) he is humble enough to hedge the claim:

Severus’ Blackness has historically been questioned ... We cannot prove Severus’ skin colour, but it is wrong to assume that he was light-skinned.

Alston then gives his take on the Berber theologians Cyprian of Carthage and St Augustine of Hippo, both of whom were from North Africa. He asks, “Why would we imagine any of these individuals as White?”

Again, there is a distinct lack of context. Germanic Vandals ruled parts of North Africa for a century. Are they part of black history too? Do the Afrikaners who have dwelt in South Africa since the 17th century qualify as black? I have no issue with recognising Berbers as “non-white”. My point of contention is describing olive-skinned North Africans as “black”. St Augustine of Hippo would have likely resembled a modern-day Spaniard. Are Iberians therefore black? Maybe. After all, it was Dumas who allegedly stated, “Africa begins at the Pyrenees.”

Later in his article, Alston seems to contradict himself, concluding with the patronising declaration that:

Black Romans were central to Classical culture and not as an exceptional few or as slaves or servants. They were soldiers and traders, dramatists, poets, philosophers, theologians, and emperors.

Wait. Did he not concede earlier that Septimius Severus being black is something we cannot prove? Plus, the handful of individuals he selected as evidence of “black Romans” were all North Africans/Berbers, i.e., men that probably looked similar to present-day Iberians? How then did he jump to, “Black Romans were central”?

Emperor Septimius was of Punic heritage and likely had a more swarthy tone than the average native Italic or Gallic citizen of the Empire. He was still not “black”. Not in the sense that Mackay and Alston wish to convince their audience of. The most glaring evidence is an anecdote—likely apocryphal, though still relevant—in which Septimius has an encounter with an Aethiopian (i.e., an actual black person). As the Historia Augusta recounts:

After inspecting the wall near the rampart in Britain … just as [Severus] was wondering what omen would present itself, an Ethiopian from a military unit, who was famous among buffoons and always a notable joker, met him with a garland of cypress. And when Severus in a rage ordered that the man be removed from his sight, troubled as he was by the man’s ominous colour and the ominous nature of the garland, [the Ethiopian] by way of jest cried, it is said, “You have been all things, you have conquered all things, now, O conqueror, be a god.”

Why on Earth would the emperor be troubled by the sight of the Aethiopian’s black skin and consider it a bad omen if he himself were black? Because he wasn’t. Septimius Severeus was a North African Punic.

In their quest to expose the supposed “whitewashing” of ancient Rome, Mackay and Alston ironically engage in their own version of “blackwashing”. Yes, there were black Africans in the Roman Empire, but practically all the examples given were individuals of North African origin, who presumably had olive skin and broadly “Caucasian” features. What’s more, the Romans did see light skin as the pinnacle of female beauty. And despite being slightly darker than their counterparts to the North, most ancient Romans were genetically European and therefore white.

Narek Harutun is an Armenian-Australian writer interested in history, philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology and psychology. He has a Substack and can be reached via email: sevarevcross@gmail.com.

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Gender differences in body dissatisfaction: A large-scale investigation among adolescents using two international surveys. Clotilde Napp examines gender differences in body dissatisfaction in a large, nine-country sample. Consistent with the conventional wisdom, she finds that girls report higher body dissatisfaction in every country and age group. She also finds that body dissatisfaction has a stronger negative association with life satisfaction among girls.

Left-Wing Ideology, Mental Health and Body Modifications. Meng Hu and Emil Kirkegaard re-examine whether people with left-wing views have worse mental health. In an online survey of Americans, they confirm that every aspect of mental health correlates negatively with leftism. They also find that left-wing Americans are more likely to have tattoos and unnatural hair colours, lifestyle choices that are associated with worse mental health.

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Written by Noah Carl.

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Written by Adam Rochussen.

If you go to Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the European Union, you’ll encounter a building with a newly unveiled banner that displays the word “DEMOCRACY” in vertical lettering. Underneath is the imperative to “PROTECT WHAT MATTERS”. This is Ursula von der Leyen’s very subtle attempt to imply that the EU represents democracy and democracy is what matters.

The appeal to democracy as an axiomatic good is pervasive. Across the world, there are hundreds of political parties with the term “democratic” (or one of its derivatives) in their name. Germany alone has a “Christlich Demokratische Union”, a “Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands” and a “Freie Demokratische Partei”. The Korean peninsula has also bought into the axiom, with the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” in the North and the “Democratic Party of Korea” ruling in the South.

In the US, we have the “Democratic Party” whose members claim to be deeply concerned about “defending democracy”. Though it’s not just the Democrats who play this game. Here in California, Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco has been trying to investigate election fraud—supposedly to defend democracy. In response, Democratic judges and politicians have been blocking him from doing so—also supposedly to defend democracy. We’ve seen dramatic gerrymandering shifts that we are told are essential to protect democracy, or at least one party’s version of it.

Democracy, in its modern manifestation, has become the ultimate thought-terminating cliché. Rarely do we see an elaboration of why democracy is good. It is simply taken for granted. What even is democracy? And where did it come from?

The myth of mob rule

“Δημοκρατία” (rule by the people) was a revolutionary Athenian idea that emerged roughly 2,500 years ago. Back then, things worked a little differently. Citizens saw political engagement as an essential duty of civic life. To be apolitical, as many profess they are nowadays, no doubt due to polarisation fatigue, carried social stigma. Instead of voting for representatives, the ancient Athenians used a lottery system, which randomly assigned a group of citizens to political office for a certain period. (Though military generals were elected.)

This had several advantages. First, the divide between politicians and citizens was non-existent. There was no such thing as a professional politician. Second, politicians weren’t constantly grovelling for votes by promising more free government money to various constituencies, such as pensioners or welfare recipients.1

They were motivated to rule well, rather than to win elections. Third, the ancient Athenian system avoided elite capture, as power was constantly being reassigned away from any one cabal. The main counter-argument to Athenian democracy is that such a direct system results in “mob rule”. Sounds scary. But is it true?

Claims of mob rule usually centre on rare, misunderstood cases. The trial and execution of Socrates is a prime example. We are told that Socrates was sentenced to death by a majority and that this is bad because we know he was a famous philosopher and therefore presumably innocent. Not quite.

History has been very kind to Socrates, mainly because much of it was written by his student Plato. In reality, Socrates was an anti-democratic (ergo, anti-Athenian) radical who many saw as complicit with the Thirty Tyrants regime—a Sparta-backed violent dictatorship that ruled Athens for eight months in 404 BC.

That regime, led by several of Socrates’ former associates, massacred thousands of Athenians without trial, confiscated private property to fund the Spartan army, and stripped citizenship from everyone who wasn’t loyal.

While the official charges raised against Socrates were quite nebulous—impiety and corrupting the youth—it is likely that his associations with the despised Thirty Tyrants regime played a role in his prosecution. (Note that, after Athenian democracy was restored, an amnesty was passed, granting immunity for crimes carried out during the tyranny.) In any case, the charges against him were perfectly consistent with Athenian law of the time.

But being sentenced to death seems a bit extreme, doesn’t it? Surely that is mob rule gone mad? Again—not quite. Under Athenian law, defendants in Socrates’s position were invited to suggest their own punishments, and Socrates initially joked that he should be rewarded, before suggesting a trivial fine. Unsurprisingly, this mockery resulted in the jurors showing him little mercy. On balance, his execution was probably justified.

Of course, technocratic critics will often cry “mob rule” whenever more political power is extended to citizens. But if the “mob” comprises intelligent and virtuous citizens, who have skin in the game and shared cultural values, then such rule is preferable to the alternative—i.e., professional politicians buying votes, and elites playing status games over which views are more fashionable.

Mob rule is only bad for the elites when ordinary people hold very different views, as seems to be increasingly the case in modern Western democracies. But it was not true in ancient Athens. There, “mob rule” was democracy, and it was good.

We don’t have real democracy

Athenian democracy was a resounding success. It lasted almost 200 years and was only brought to an end because the Athenians lost an opportunistic war against the Macedonians in the wake of the death of Alexander the Great in 322 BC. Despite constant warring, it never broke down for purely internal reasons, and most of its participants were advocates until the end. The Athenians certainly believed in democracy, and many of them died to protect it.

I would actually take Ursula von der Leyen’s advice and “protect democracy” too—if it was the Athenian kind. But today’s democracy is so far removed from Athenian democracy that the only thing tying the two systems together is the name. Before you accuse me of being too radical, I am far from alone here: half of young Britons say they would never fight to defend their country, and 77% of young Americans are physically ineligible for military service due to drug use, lack of physical fitness (being obese) or mental health problems. Most people don’t seem that keen on protecting modern “democracy” either.

The same is true of politicians. As I’ve already described, opposing parties often use the same slogan (“protecting democracy”) to support diametrically opposed policies. The issue of voter ID in the US is a case in point. Republican politicians are currently trying to pass a bill (the SAVE Act) that would make photo ID a legal requirement for voting, citing the need to protect democracy. Democratic politicians, on the other hand, are vehemently against the bill—also citing the need to protect democracy. (Apparently, legitimate voters might not have a photo ID and could therefore be disenfranchised.) This is despite Americans overwhelmingly supporting voter ID.

Politicians contravening the will of the people is remarkably common. Take the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK. A majority of people, motivated primarily by a desire to curb immigration and reduce European control over British law, voted to leave the EU. The technocrats who run the “democracy”, though, simply couldn’t bring themselves to implement the result.2 The Conservative party dragged their heels, completely lost sight of what the referendum was about, took almost four years to actually leave the EU, remained a part of the European Convention on Human Rights, and then ramped up non-EU immigration in the subsequent years.

Back in 2016, Brits were stronger believers in democracy. The referendum saw an impressive 72% turnout. As a freshly enfranchised 18-year-old, I was among the slim minority who voted “Remain”. Despite me disagreeing with the majority at the time, the unwillingness of our politicians and civil service to enact the will of the majority has only degraded my faith and that of many others in British democracy.

The same pattern emerges across other, modern democracies. Even the mighty EU has seen voter turnout in its elections decline since 1979 (albeit with a slight bump after Brexit).

Perhaps people aren’t bothering to vote because they are slowly realising that voting isn’t actually the point of democracy. Progressive movements like women’s suffrage and civil rights in the US have always focused on the universal right to vote as the ultimate end goal. This isn’t how democracy was practiced by the Athenians at all. Lest we forget, there were no votes for politicians in ancient Athens. Rule by the people meant that the people did the ruling: thousands of citizens would gather on the Pynx Hill, discuss motions, and pass them by a simple show of hands. The voting came with the debate. If you weren’t present, you didn’t get to vote.

We are so far removed from the Athenian ideal today that we have lost sight of this notion of civic engagement (beyond marking a ballot every few years). We feel like we’re a part of the debate because we watch clickbait arguments on YouTube, and laugh at clips of the least charitable renditions of our opponents’ views. Or we read cynical, smug op-eds in our favourite “we-are-the-good-guys” news outlet. We identify with a political tribe, but the people leading that tribe hardly care about us beyond their desire to secure our vote.

Helvetian Hellenism

You have probably gleaned by now that I am pretty fond of Athenian democracy. But we can’t have that in the modern world. It’s fantasy! Well, maybe.

Switzerland gets pretty close. Yes, the Swiss have a representative parliament like many other Western countries, but they also retain some Athenian mechanisms, including both mandatory and optional referenda. Federalism assists with the scaling issue, and some Swiss cantons even retain Pynx-style open-air assemblies where voting is done by a show of hands (they call these Landsgemeinde). While Switzerland seems to be thriving under a more Athenian version of democracy, I’m not sure that its system is generalisable across the West as a whole.

I have already referred to the “mob” of Athenians being “highly intelligent and virtuous citizens, who have skin in the game and shared cultural values”. Indeed, it has been conjectured that ancient Athenians had IQs around a standard deviation higher than modern-day Greeks (though polygenic scoring of ancient Greeks does not support this more broadly outside of Athens).

I suspect that this is key for direct democracy to work well. The Swiss enjoy a very high GDP per capita (~13% higher than the US, adjusted for purchasing power). They have a strong national identity, bolstered by strong civic education (despite the country’s ethnolinguistic diversity). And they have a high national IQ. Switzerland therefore shares many of the democracy-enabling characteristics of ancient Athens.

One thing missing from the Swiss model is the random lottery for political leaders (sortition). Clearly, the main worry here is that of ensuring competency (though our present system has hardly solved this problem). We don’t have a good example from the modern era, but there’s certainly a strong, pragmatic case for sortition.

Values and process

When technocratic types get cagey about giving too much power to the people, they reveal that it’s not democracy they care about, but their preferred values. The elephant in the room is that democracy is only useful as long as the people have the right values.

Take Uganda, a reasonably democratic country. In 2023, its parliament passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act with 389 votes for and only 2 against. Critics complain about executive influence on the parliament and general corruption, but this particular law cannot be ascribed to those factors. Opposition to homosexuality was and is extremely popular among Ugandans.

According to polling by Afrobarometer, 97% of Ugandans believe that homosexuality should be illegal. This isn’t because they’re intolerant in general—Ugandans are quite accepting of other religions, ethnicities and nationalities. They just really don’t like homosexuals. Nor does the picture seem to be changing much over time—despite relentless pressure from western NGOs.

The obvious truth is that the process of democracy, when allowed to play out in a population with somewhat illiberal values, does not arrive at liberalism.

Indeed, the Founding Fathers of the United States heavily favoured liberty over democracy when they established the republic. By contrast, Athens prospered under a pure form of democracy because it was small and its citizens were unusually virtuous and civically minded. Either we aspire to create polities with the same class of citizens, or we favour our preferred values over democratic ones when the two come into conflict. Historically, the West has done latter, and we should stop pretending otherwise.

This essay is adapted from one published at Fruit of Eden.

Adam Rochussen is Postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He writes about science, politics, culture and philosophy.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

Although I cannot be certain, I assume that the celebrated heroes of history were better men than I am. I say this not out of confession or humility, but because it is true. More generally, few truths seem more self-evident than that some men are better than others. Yet few propositions today encounter fiercer resistance. The mere assertion appears indecent, transgressive, even faintly malevolent. It certainly runs contrary to the popular interpretation of the soaring words that open the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...”

Yet, for my part, I can make no sense of the claim that all men are created equal unless it is understood as an assertion of political rights. More troubling still, the contemporary egalitarianism that so often invokes these words (while simultaneously despising their author) is not merely empirically false but pernicious, inspiring as it does a species of relativism whose refusal to judge reduces the world to an insipid mélange of mediocrity, where pop songs are celebrated with the same enthusiasm as the masterpieces of Mozart, where rap lyrics are analyzed with the same diligence as the poetry of Chaucer, where the dogmas of Christianity are mocked as readily as the profligate superstitions of New Age belief, and where the West is regarded as merely one civilization among others—notable, if at all, only for its violence and rapacity.

The dominant view today, it seems, is that any admission that some people, some things, or some cultures are better than others is not merely mistaken but morally dubious. “Who are you to judge?” has become our defiant slogan. Yet the case for equality is so frail that its defenders, when pressed, resort to fallacies, sophistries and moral hectoring, among which the motte-and-bailey is perhaps the most common. For these egalitarians begin with the bold claim that human beings are at least roughly equal in their traits and talents, only to retreat, when confronted with obvious counterexamples, to the more defensible but largely vacuous position that although men may differ profoundly in their abilities, they remain metaphysically or morally equal. Having abandoned their original assertion for one much more vaporous, they then frequently impugn the character of those who persist in dissent. “Are you saying that some human beings are inferior to others? How dare you!”

Well, yes and no. This is where precision becomes essential.

Human beings are not merely different; they are different in ways that are directly relevant for moral evaluation. Whatever one might make of equality in the afterlife, on our planet, men are manifestly unequal. I see no plausible way of escaping this conclusion. A talented neurosurgeon is better than a common thief. This example is extreme of course, but the principle applies mutatis mutandis to other comparisons. If the criminal is worse than the law-abiding citizen, then the saint is surely better than the average man. Once we admit the legitimacy of such judgments, the doctrine of human equality (metaphysical or otherwise) begins to look rather shaky.1

Empirical equality. The most expansive conception of human equality is empirical equality or the belief that human beings are, in some meaningful sense, equal in their traits and talents. Yet this doctrine is so clearly contradicted by ordinary experience that it is rarely defended without an intimidating veneer of jargon or a distracting catalog of qualifications. Nevertheless, it remains implicit in many progressive approaches to public policy and is still, in one form or another, a major feature of Marxism and other blank-slate theories of human nature, which treat man as almost infinitely malleable. Change the environment and you change human nature. Inequality is created, not natural. And it persists only because of the systemic injustices of our society.

Although only the most radical progressives explicitly embrace empirical equality, many otherwise moderate liberals hold to it insofar as they regard claims of significant sex or race differences with profound suspicion. Thus, if one points out that disparities between blacks and whites in the United States are partially caused by intelligence differences between blacks and whites, one is often accused of promoting racism. Similarly if one contends that institutions that are dominated by women may function less well than those dominated by men, one is accused of promoting misogyny. The sacred value of equality, though it violates the plain evidence of our senses, is hard to let go.

Metaphysical equality. One way to reconcile the obviously incorrect view that humans are equal with the longing that they be equal is to introduce the concept of metaphysical equality. People who hold this view often use poetic phrases such as that humans are “equal in the eyes of God” or that they have “equal dignity.” They argue that this kind of equality is perfectly consistent with human variation because metaphysical equality is not an empirical claim at all. At first, this might sound like a verbal consolation prize, a way of telling a terrestrial loser that all people are equal in heaven. Yet the doctrine is more powerful that that, for the rhetoric of metaphysical equality has inspired genuine moral concern, sacrifice and even revolution. I do not dismiss its effectiveness as poetry or propaganda, but I do not believe it withstands intellectual scrutiny.

Consider two profoundly different human beings: Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the sadistic SS, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant pastor who resisted Nazism at great personal cost. What, precisely, does it mean to say that these men were metaphysically equal?

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Negativity Bias in Person Perception: Exploring the Reverse Side of the ‘What is Beautiful is Good’ Stereotype in Women. Tobias Kordsmeyer and colleagues test for negative halo effects in two samples, comprising photos of German and Brazilian women, respectively. They document strong such effects, whereby women deemed more attractive were rated as significantly less socially and intellectually competent.

The genetics of specific cognitive abilities. Francesca Procopio and colleagues carry out a meta-analysis of the heritability of specific cognitive abilities (reasoning, knowledge, processing speed etc.). Across estimates from 77 studies, they find that specific cognitive abilities are about 50% heritable (similar to g). Interestingly, they find that the variance in specific cognitive abilities that is independent of g has about the same heritability.

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Written by Noah Carl.

The writer David Oks recently penned an article titled “Why China got rich and India didn’t”. It went super viral, racking up over 3,700 likes. Notwithstanding this immense popularity, I don’t think it offers a convincing explanation.

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Written by Noah Carl.

It is well known that the US has a higher homicide rate than other Western countries. In the latest version of the UN’s dataset, it has a rate of 5.8 per 100,000 — compared to 1.3 in France, 1.1 in Britain and 0.9 in Germany. So the country is at least five times more homicidal than its former colonial ruler.

The standard explanation on the Right is simple: racial demographics. The US has a large black population, and black people (for whatever reason) commit homicide at incredibly high rates. Indeed, the US is about 14% black, while the blackest country in Europe, Britain, is only 4% black. Here’s what Ann Coulter had to say in 2013:

On the gun crimes, we keep hearing how low they are in Europe, and oh they’re so low and they have no guns. If you compare white populations, we have the same murder rate as Belgium. So perhaps it’s not a gun problem. It is a demographic problem.

How she could have known that white Americans commit murder at the same rate as white Belgians is unclear, since Belgium does not publish homicide data broken down by race or ethnicity. Indeed, the evidence we do have suggests that she was wrong. Belgium’s overall homicide rate in 2012 was 1.6. Meanwhile, the homicide rate for non-Hispanic white Americans in the same year was 2.7.

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Written by Alden Whitfeld and Arctotherium.

Jason Richwine coined the term “Irish Retort” to describe one of the most common tactics deployed in debates over immigration. Raise any concerns about mass immigration today and the response is automatic: “What about the Irish!”

When Irish immigrants arrived in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were poor, Catholic (as opposed to Protestant) and heavily overrepresented in crime. Nativists panicked then too. Yet over time, the Irish assimilated, climbed up the social ladder, and became indistinguishable from the average American. The implication is clear, though usually left unstated: today’s immigrants will follow the same arc, and any claim to the contrary is just recycled bigotry.

It’s a neat story, rhetorically powerful and emotionally satisfying. The problem is what it leaves out. Careful studies using multi-generational data show that differences in social outcomes are much more persistent than is commonly assumed. What appears to be rapid convergence is often an artifact of looking too narrowly or too briefly. With this in mind, let’s examine how well the story of rapid European assimilation holds up.

To begin with, the story rests on a quiet omission: a very large share of European immigrants didn’t assimilate at all. They went home.

Between roughly 1850 and 1920, return migration was a defining feature of transatlantic mobility. The return rate of European immigrants during this period was 25–40%. In some decades it reached 60–75% (Bandiera et al., 2013). Italians are the canonical case: between 1890 and 1920, more than half returned to Italy (Klein, 1983). This return migration was negatively selected — the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave (Abramitzky et al., 2019). What we now remember as “successful assimilation” is partly explained by survivorship bias. America did not lift entire populations into the middle class. It retained those who were already capable of doing well and quietly shed the rest.1

This selection process radically alters how we interpret the observed convergence in outcomes. Abramitzky et al. (2014) show that most European immigrant groups that arrived in the early twentieth century, including the Irish, Italians and Russians, already had above-average incomes in the first generation. (There was often little difference between first- and second-generation outcomes.) It is not difficult to turn a group into a success story when many of its poorest members voluntarily leave.

Even after accounting for selection, European economic differences did not evaporate entirely. Using a unique three-generation dataset linking immigrant grandfathers in 1880 to their grandsons in 1940, Ward (2020) finds substantial persistence in occupational income across European ethnicities. As this is the first study to use linked grandparent-grandson data, it demonstrates that intergenerational correlations are stronger when measured properly. As Ward notes, his findings cut directly against the “melting pot” narrative in which ethnic differences fade within a generation or two. They don’t.

Nor did immigrants simply arrive as blank slates and then absorb American culture. They brought their values, habits and norms with them, and these left durable imprints on the places where they settled. We understand this intuitively when it comes to cuisine: Italians didn’t just eat pasta themselves; they taught Americans to eat pasta.2 But the same logic applies in other domains.

A growing literature shows that cultural behaviors persist across generations and shape economic outcomes (Giuliano & Tabellini, 2020; Simpser, 2020; Richwine, 2023; 2024). Fulford et al. (2018), using ancestry data for U.S. counties from 1850 to 2010, show that counties settled by immigrants from richer European countries are more productive today. A 1% increase in GDP per capita of the weighted average of the origin countries predicts roughly a 0.3% increase in the long-run GDP per capita of the county.

And this effect is not simply driven by differences in education between immigrant groups. The researchers also find that once traits like historical state capacity (the length of time for which a nation has had an independent state), trust and cooperation are taken into account, formal education no longer predicts a group’s impact on county productivity. Berger & Engzell (2019) report similar results for inequality and mobility: differences across counties reflect the composition of the groups that settled them.

This brings us to another truth about the Ellis Islander wave of immigration that is rarely spoken: the nativists of the time were correct. Specifically, they were correct about the political impact these new arrivals would have.

The 1880–1924 Ellis Island immigrants entered a country with virtually no welfare state. But their descendants powered the New Deal and, more decisively, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, permanently shifting the American political spectrum leftward. Medicaid, Medicare, and the expansion of Social Security were not accidents; they were the predictable consequences of a transformed electorate (and are, incidentally, responsible for America’s fiscal woes). Any short-run cost-benefit analysis conducted in 1920 would have missed the point entirely.

The result was a durable “Europeanization” of American politics, replacing limited government and sectional coalitions with left-right ideological politics. As can be seen in the chart below, there is a strong correlation between the fraction of immigrants in a county between 1910–1930 and support for state welfare spending.

None of this was unforeseeable. Contemporary observers like Senator David Reed explicitly warned, in defence of the Immigration Act of 1924, that mass immigration from populations less accustomed to self-government would produce electorates more reliant on the state.

There has come about a general realization of the fact that the races of men who have been coming to us in recent years are wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans, that they are untrained in self-government — a faculty that it has taken the Northwestern Europeans many centuries to acquire.

Thoughtful Americans have been despondent for the future of our country when the suffrage should be exercised by men whose inexperience in popular forms of government would lead them to demand too much of their Government, and to rely too heavily upon it, and too little upon their own initiative.

What could not be modelled precisely was the timing. Political integration takes decades, and as such, these effects only became electorally decisive in the late 1920s, with milestones such as Al Smith’s 1928 nomination. Had someone conducted a fiscal analysis of this immigration wave in 1920, they would have concluded it was beneficial. But immigration reshaped politics itself: once immigrants and their descendants gained political power, they used it, and this was predictable.3

Studies of internal migration reveal that even regional differences within a country persist over time. Population movements change societies. While the Great Migration is usually discussed among historians insofar as it pertains to black Americans, numerically speaking, a larger number of white Southerners left the South. This movement measurably increased political conservatism, as measured by Republican vote shares, opposition to the Civil Rights Act, support for Reagan’s tax cuts, and opposition to the certification of the 2020 election (Bazzi et al., 2023a; 2023b).4

Evidence from crime and literacy further undermines the lazy analogy between European immigration then and Hispanic immigration now. Moehling & Piehl (2009) show that, while some European immigrant groups were overrepresented in crime, such as the Irish, it was largely in minor offenses like public drunkenness. Differences in serious crime were generally small. While Italians were somewhat overrepresented in serious crime, they still committed far less than Mexicans, who were the clear exception.

The paper also punctures the myth of European illiteracy. Literacy exceeded 85% for most European groups and large majorities spoke English. Again, Mexico stood apart, with substantially lower literacy and English proficiency.

The same pattern is seen in incarceration data from 1900–1930 (Abramitzky et al., 2024). Once again, Mexicans had much higher rates than native-born Americans, whereas all European groups were the same or lower.

Put differently: European differences were real but comparatively modest.5 That is not evidence of dramatic assimilation success; it is evidence that gaps were small to begin with. And the gap between whites and Hispanics, both historically and today, is far larger.6 Invoking the Irish or Italians as evidence for the power of assimilation is therefore not convincing.7 The Irish Retort doesn’t work.

This essay is adapted from a longer article published at Heretical Insights.

Alden Whitfeld is an independent writer who does research on immigration and politics. Arctotherium is an anonymous writer interested in demographics and the future of civilization.

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