In one sense, this analysis would support RH's position because it was when America achieved (word chosen advisedly) its lowest level of diversity (1930s - 1965) that it experienced its biggest growth in the welfare state and government spending, which then stalled after the post-1965 growth of diversity.
RH's argument is simultaneously crazy, evil, and retarded. Crazy because it is denies the most obvious thing in the world, namely that importing immigrants from country X makes your country resemble country X more. Evil, because it proposes using immigration as a democracy hack, crashing social trust in order to trick ethnocentric voters into voting for free market policies . Retarded, because it attributes wildly outsized effects of different welfare state models on economic growth. However, one premise is true: countries with diversity are unlikely to become competently governed social democracies, which for Lolbertarian techbros is the worst fate imaginable.
The simplest explanation for why healthcare and retirement were implemented in the post war era are:
1) World War mobilization expanded the franchise (universal suffrage, women, minorities).
2) Healthcare had advanced to the point that it actually helped more then hurt and was simultaneously a complex product with an insurance component.
3) People were actually living past 65 for the first time in history.
4) We were rich enough to afford it.
5) We had just lived through a depression and war.
Does anyone think that if we had more Hispanics in 1965 that we wouldn't have ended up with Medicare? We had more Hispanics in 2010 and we got Obamacare, largely because the Hispanics voted for it.
His whole thesis full of so many lies and inconstancies its embrasing.
So what RH is arguing, I think, is that the West in general had a big expansion of the welfare state after WW2 that continued until into the 70's. But in the U.S. it stalled in the mid 60's and the main reason is that people saw bantus flush with new welfare going crazy and the free-market minority were able to exploit this and so the U.S. ended up with a smaller welfare state than other western countries. This is at least somewhat true, but it's hard to disentangle how much is lower social trust as a result of diversity, and how much is specific revulsion about how bantus behave. For my part, I'd rather have a slightly larger, and more honest, welfare state without all the urban devastation and murder rates 5 times higher than any other western country, but RH would say this makes me 'small' and not a nietzschean overman like him.
In any case, this proves precisely nothing about the likely effects of adding additional, different diversity to the United States. RH's argument actually boils down to 'we can't know anything, there are too many confounders' so you are just supposed to ignore clear examples of U.S. states getting Democrat supermajorities thanks to hispanic immigration and then promptly falling apart. Too many cofounders, bro. These are the musings of a crazy person.
I think it's all premised on the idea that "the welfare state" stopped growing in the 1970s because of disgust with black crime, thus being at a lower level then Europe/Japan. The problem is:
1) It didn't stop growing.
2) The part that did stopped because the underlying issue was addressed (healthcare and retirement), and also it didn't stop growing (Obamacare).
3) It's not actually smaller then Europe/Japan (most countries, French are crazy).
I agree with you that a well functioning "welfare state" isn't the end of the world. Partly because well functioning would imply its less "welfare state" than "social insurance state". Where the size of government is kept reasonable and there aren't huge net transfers between people and groups (especially a dysfunctional underclass), but simply the government fulfilling the role of insurance underwriter on certain risks.
This is what the better functioning high IQ countries do.
Low IQ countries usually have more of a welfare state, where the government still spends a lot of money but it's all handouts and corruption. Brazil has government expenditure as a % of GDP around the same as America, which would seem to refute his thesis. Sometimes though these third world countries are so poor and dysfunctional that there is nothing left to distribute, such as how Venezuela went from spending around the same % of GDP as America to 10% once their entire economy collapsed. That is one way to shrink the government.
And then there's that other kind of 'diversity'... the West's obsession with 'identity'. Heather Mac Donald's The Diversity Delusion provides chilling evidence of how this is harming the West's competitiveness in science and technology: ”A study by the American Association for the Advancement of Science found “systemic anti-LGBTQ bias within STEM industry and academia.” HM comments dryly that “somehow NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than two hundred Nobel prizes before the agency realised that scientific progress depends on ‘diversity’. Meanwhile, “driven by unapologetic meritocracy, China is catching up to the United States in science and technology. Identity politics in American science is a political self-indulgence we cannot afford.”
In one sense, this analysis would support RH's position because it was when America achieved (word chosen advisedly) its lowest level of diversity (1930s - 1965) that it experienced its biggest growth in the welfare state and government spending, which then stalled after the post-1965 growth of diversity.
RH's argument is simultaneously crazy, evil, and retarded. Crazy because it is denies the most obvious thing in the world, namely that importing immigrants from country X makes your country resemble country X more. Evil, because it proposes using immigration as a democracy hack, crashing social trust in order to trick ethnocentric voters into voting for free market policies . Retarded, because it attributes wildly outsized effects of different welfare state models on economic growth. However, one premise is true: countries with diversity are unlikely to become competently governed social democracies, which for Lolbertarian techbros is the worst fate imaginable.
The simplest explanation for why healthcare and retirement were implemented in the post war era are:
1) World War mobilization expanded the franchise (universal suffrage, women, minorities).
2) Healthcare had advanced to the point that it actually helped more then hurt and was simultaneously a complex product with an insurance component.
3) People were actually living past 65 for the first time in history.
4) We were rich enough to afford it.
5) We had just lived through a depression and war.
Does anyone think that if we had more Hispanics in 1965 that we wouldn't have ended up with Medicare? We had more Hispanics in 2010 and we got Obamacare, largely because the Hispanics voted for it.
His whole thesis full of so many lies and inconstancies its embrasing.
So what RH is arguing, I think, is that the West in general had a big expansion of the welfare state after WW2 that continued until into the 70's. But in the U.S. it stalled in the mid 60's and the main reason is that people saw bantus flush with new welfare going crazy and the free-market minority were able to exploit this and so the U.S. ended up with a smaller welfare state than other western countries. This is at least somewhat true, but it's hard to disentangle how much is lower social trust as a result of diversity, and how much is specific revulsion about how bantus behave. For my part, I'd rather have a slightly larger, and more honest, welfare state without all the urban devastation and murder rates 5 times higher than any other western country, but RH would say this makes me 'small' and not a nietzschean overman like him.
In any case, this proves precisely nothing about the likely effects of adding additional, different diversity to the United States. RH's argument actually boils down to 'we can't know anything, there are too many confounders' so you are just supposed to ignore clear examples of U.S. states getting Democrat supermajorities thanks to hispanic immigration and then promptly falling apart. Too many cofounders, bro. These are the musings of a crazy person.
I think it's all premised on the idea that "the welfare state" stopped growing in the 1970s because of disgust with black crime, thus being at a lower level then Europe/Japan. The problem is:
1) It didn't stop growing.
2) The part that did stopped because the underlying issue was addressed (healthcare and retirement), and also it didn't stop growing (Obamacare).
3) It's not actually smaller then Europe/Japan (most countries, French are crazy).
I agree with you that a well functioning "welfare state" isn't the end of the world. Partly because well functioning would imply its less "welfare state" than "social insurance state". Where the size of government is kept reasonable and there aren't huge net transfers between people and groups (especially a dysfunctional underclass), but simply the government fulfilling the role of insurance underwriter on certain risks.
This is what the better functioning high IQ countries do.
Low IQ countries usually have more of a welfare state, where the government still spends a lot of money but it's all handouts and corruption. Brazil has government expenditure as a % of GDP around the same as America, which would seem to refute his thesis. Sometimes though these third world countries are so poor and dysfunctional that there is nothing left to distribute, such as how Venezuela went from spending around the same % of GDP as America to 10% once their entire economy collapsed. That is one way to shrink the government.
And then there's that other kind of 'diversity'... the West's obsession with 'identity'. Heather Mac Donald's The Diversity Delusion provides chilling evidence of how this is harming the West's competitiveness in science and technology: ”A study by the American Association for the Advancement of Science found “systemic anti-LGBTQ bias within STEM industry and academia.” HM comments dryly that “somehow NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than two hundred Nobel prizes before the agency realised that scientific progress depends on ‘diversity’. Meanwhile, “driven by unapologetic meritocracy, China is catching up to the United States in science and technology. Identity politics in American science is a political self-indulgence we cannot afford.”
I reviewed The Diversity Delusion here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
Hanania's "Diversity is good for GDP" reminds me a bit of Kaufman's "Whiteshift is not that bad"
My reaction to both is "compare much more diverse Latin America to much less diverse USA/Canada"