Is the cause of America's decline due to our declining intelligence? With causes as diverse as failure at every level of the educational system and open borders it seems more than just possible.
Pitiful! What was the last book you read? "Dreams from my Father"? Do unintelligent people build financial empires or is that not possible without Affirmative Action and DEI?
Given how much money Trump has lost over the years and his criminal conviction for business fraud, it is doubtful that Trump can correctly interpret a spreadsheet or profit-loss statement.
No. Everyone in government pointed out that Trump is unbrief-able and does not have the attention span to hold a 30 minute meeting. The book Lucky Loser points out how Trump makes one bad business decision after another. Trump seem incapable of understanding tax policy such as the macroeconomic effects of tariffs.
You can thank Samantha Power for the (post-)modern hollowing out of 'genocide.' A truly evil internationalist, currently head of USAID, and author of 2002's ""A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide."
This is done on purpose. Unlike local ethnic massacres and the even more common ethnic cleansing, genocide is relatively rare - in the 20th century, it was just Armenians, Jews and Tutsis that experienced it. But because it is so rare, it is useless as a tool in common and garden variety politics tool kit. So there is lots of pressure to expand the term to anything one doesn't like. Like with McCarthyism.
I think the Cambodian thing under Pol Pot was close in spirit but not killing a "tribe" (gens) but rather just your vital eggheads, four-eyes, and assorted poindexters. Should be a word to encompass both. I get what you mean about it being a useless tool. A certain type of person observes that a word wins arguments and tries to slip in new meanings of the word to win more arguments. It takes a while for honest people to catch on
Josef Stalin came near to killing more then enough vital eggheads too. The Finnish Winter war in 1939, and the first 4 months of the German-Russian war 1941 were disasters.
Stalin exiled or killed all the good physicians at some point because he thought his doctors were trying to kill him. Did he kill a bunch of other smart types too? I know he messed up biology research because he was really into one scientist who was wrong (Lysenko?)
That's not a counterargument. It's mere contradiction. For it to be genocide the "palestinians" would have to be a genuine people, not just a loose collection of Arabs who happened to be living in Israel in 1948. It's no more a people than "Chicagoans". Sure there are people who call themselves that but if you killed them all no one would call it genocide.
Merely losing a war you started and stupidly refusing to surrender and release hostages doesn't make you the victim of genocide. It just means you are not too bright and don't care much about the wellbeing of the rest of your so called people
Oh you are vile. Almost saying they are not human enough to call it genocide.
I get it that end US hegomony (some years ago) has meant that Israel is doomed because of its outrageous behaviour so yes this is existential for Israel.
But wanting to defend or excuse Genocide!!! On the grounds that they are only Palestinians. Seriously sick.
Thank God most American jews and British jews know a lot lot better.
Cremieux Recueil on his substack a month ago wrote about the comparative decline of European Catholic countries post-reformation (Ottoman origins of modernity). In a nutshell, his argument was Catholic Counter-Reformation effectively undercut local flourishing. I mean, one couldn't in good faith argue the Protestant-lands suddenly had a boost in natural intelligence.
The failure of the educational system, the collapsing fertility and open borders are all downstream of the US Cathedral that was activated in the early 1960s.
Why 1960s? Why not 1776 or 1865 or 1924? The cathedral theory is pretty silly to be honest. Anyway, the US is not in decline, educationally or otherwise. The US has one of the best educational systems in the world, just look at the US PISA results by race, White Americans outscore European countries, Hispanic Americans outscore Latin American countries and Asian Americans outscore Asian countries. The US receives many low skilled immigrants, but this is offset by the high skilled immigrants the country receives, the US is the leading destination for elite immigration in the world. Economically the US is putting other rich countries to shame.
Interestingly, the Cremieux post shows that elite German human capital migrated to Protestant areas that had made what at the time were liberal reforms.
Cremieux is important because he emphasizes that what counts is not the average cognitive performance but the top 0.01% or so. +4SDs?
PISA - US swims somewhere in the middle. Finns and other Scandinavians are much better, for example. Most Europeans are average too, though. By the way, comparing Asian Americans to non-migrating Asians is problematic since people with top cognitive performance are particularly prone to migrating.
About "German": it ain't necessarily so. Only Netherlands, and one century later, England and Scotland were main destinations, not the Luther-Lands. Sure, Dutch is a Germanic, and English and Scots mostly Germanic tongues with Norman-French admixtures, but to call them German is a bit over the top. Immigration into the Dutch and British places was mixed: Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, some non-Catholic Germans, and of course the French Huguenots. Oh, and some Italians too.
1960s as a departure point: Yep. You can see it by the string of military losses starting in the 1960s, as well as the gradual loss of manufacturing capacity compared to Germany or Japan.
Another example which doesn’t fit Acemoglu’s model is Japan (before the American occupation & rewriting of its constitution). Highly centralized and coercive “extractive” institutions like zaibatsu but an economic powerhouse.
I made the mistake of buying Why Nations Fail on audiobook. Didn't finish it because as you said, they went through great lengths to compound on the same point over and over again.
The real problem with the economics "Nobel" prize is that there are not nearly enough economists making major new discoveries of lasting value to justify the award on an annual basis. Indeed, when you look at lists of publications in the CV's of leading academic economists you have to feel sorry for them. So much effort expended writing technically abstruse papers of such little significance.
Unlike physics, say, it is useful to think of economics as more like checkers than chess. The subject is so easy on the face of it that the number of true experts is vanishingly small.
Good point. I feel like this can be applied to other things, like criminal justice, where we had a good system at one point, actually locking people up, but we keep trying to innovate and discover new methods that don't work, like rehabilitating criminals or making excuses for them like systemic racism and now the new thing, saying that they are too incompetent to be responsible for murder. How many other areas have we "completed" but then backtracked in a convoluted way?
At a certain tipping point, the risk:reward of change is much worse than stasis. As fields progress (down the right course) good disruption becomes increasingly rare.
From what I can tell, economics has come so far that most economists deny simple supply/demand. Certainly when it comes to labor. Or perhaps economics has evolved to justify the position of big money.
One of the obvious implications of their argument (which I doubt that they would support) is that white Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders should re-colonize sub-Saharan Africa (and Haiti and certain large American cities) and forcibly create inclusive institutions, since the inhabitants of the latter places so obviously cannot create them for themselves. Then the Europeans, et al., can leave and see how long it takes before the natives re-institute extractive institutions. This would also satisfy (at least, in part) Popper's falsifiability requirement.
Acemoglu, like other public intellectuals Nowrasteh, Hanania, Caplan and others, just seem to have a really hard time understanding Western liberal culture in general. The natural law, property rights paradigm that's second nature to any Scots-Irish, Anglo-Saxon or Cajun redneck is only conceptualized by them after laborious, tendentious reasoning with lots of wiggle room. Like why corporations can enforce property lines but countries can't, for example. Or why COVID and Trump mean millenia of erudite political philosophy and processes just need to be tossed. Or more to the point here, why society-wide prosperity must be due to the abstract "institutions" those capricious Brits hauled around and not, not I tell you, the persons staffing them.
Extractive, eh? Like slavery? In the Middle Ages Europe was an island of non-slavery, surrounded by slavers. Without Whites the entire world would still practice slavery, like it always did for all of history until Whites forced the non-Whites to stop. Whites are the only people who have come up with moral arguments against slavery.
Even the Chinese Buddhist monks had slaves working their rice fields.
The Arabs took slaves in Iberia, and slaves in Africa. They raided Europe for centuries to take slaves. The women were raped, the men were killed through the practice of galley slaves, who were chained to the oars until they died. The Arabs took special pleasure in enslaving Christians, with adults and children lining up to throw rocks at the captives. Ottomans enslaves Whites in the Balkans for centuries. Tartars in Crimea took Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Baltic women as slaves and sold them to the Ottomans and Arabs. The Arabs raided throughout the Caucasus. They also bought Black slaves from the Somalis and other African slavers. The slaves were shipped to Arab lands and to India, and even China.
All of this went on until Whites forced the Arabs and Ottomans to stop.
Africans, from west to east, were also forced to stop and free their African slaves. Likewise the Indian tribes in North and South America and in between were forced to stop using slaves - they enslaved Whites, bought Black slaves, and enslaved other Indians. The Comanches and Apaches raided each other and sold the captives as slaves to other tribes, until Whites forced them to stop. The "trail of tears" included thousands of Black slaves owned by the Indians.
Haven't we been taught that to wage aggressive war is justified if it frees slaves in the end? Thanks to Whites there is no slavery left. Or almost none: Some Africans and Indians still keep slaves, where they can get away with it without Whites interfering.
-----------
Speaking of Central Africa, how does Daron Acemoglu explain the fact that in that state and its neighbors, people tend to set up shop in a neighboring country? Because if they do it at home, all of the large extended family, and all their friends, come to loiter in the store, talk crap for hours, and take whatever they want. Because of a complete disrespect for a person's private property. You should "share with your family." So they go to another country. It seems the "extractive institutions" are simply African families.
-----------
Liberia was set up with a constitution nearly identical to the one in the U.S., and the country was populated by Christian Blacks from the U.S., with plenty of help in seeing how governance and private business should be run. They proceeded to oppress the native Blacks, and the country had one of the bloodiest civil wars in Africa, where they cut off the hands of villagers en masse to terrorize a region.
-----------
Eritrea was colonized by Italy - and the Eritreans still like the Italians today! They got everything from Italy. The Italians hired them as soldiers when they invaded Ethiopia, with French and British blessing, and Mussolini abolished the Black Ethiopia's slavery. Everyone agreed that the Eritreans made good soldiers. (Meanwhile the Germans had been arming the Ethiopians, to slow down Italy's advance, because Mussolini opposed Austria's joining with Germany, which almost all Austrians had favored. Austria was Italy's neighbor, and he contacted Britain and France for "a solution to the German Question." Ethiopia kept him busy elsewhere.)
What about Eritrea today? It is run by Blacks, thanks to Britain taking it from Italy and then leaving it. (The Eritreans generally say that they liked the Italians but not the British.) Eritrea is one of the world's most hideous states. The "police" walk into a store and demand money whenever they want. They act exactly like gangsters. It is a country that truly deserves being called a gangster state.
How is Eritrea's condition the fault of EUROPEANS? Looking at history, it is Eritrea's lack of the European benefactors that is the problem. Eritrean organizations in Europe write signs with "Some day Eritrea will be free" in Italian.
-----------
Meanwhile in Ethiopia, which was never colonized, the government has recently waged a vicious war against the Tigray, 2020-2022. As usual in Africa, government is the way to take the wealth for yourself, and the rulers then dish it out as they please. They withheld money for the Tigray region, which then rebelled. Hundreds of thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands of women were raped. The government soldiers even forced fathers to rape their daughters and forced boys to rape their mothers. Tigray who fled to Saudi Arabia through Yemen were machine gunned to death in the hundreds by the Saudi border.
Where in this did Whites do the exploitation and the killing?
Africa has had 214 military coups since 1950, with at least 106 of them being successful. This in at least 45 of the 54 African nations.
As Ann Coulter writes, by the end of the 1980s not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office. Of some 150 heads of state, only six had voluntarily relinquished power. In Congo alone, in 1964, over a million people, virtually all civilians, died in sectarian strife.
Mobutu Sese Seko took power in Congo and became one of the richest men in the world. He had 17 wives, lots of mistresses, 55 children - and he was a cannibal.
Uganda's Idi Amin killed thousands of people, including the Chief Justice, the country's university's Vice Chancellor, and an Anglican Archbishop. Westerners would like Anglican archbishops to be killed, right? Surely it's Westerners' fault? One of Amin's former wives was found dismembered in the trunk of a car. Amin was believed to perform blood rituals over his victims, and he boasted numerous times about eating human flesh.
The researcher Robert Klintberg reported on oil-rich Equatorial Guinea as being "a land of fear and devastation no better than a concentration camp - the 'cottage industry Dachau of Africa.'" Under Macias Nguema, more than half of the population was either killed or fled into exile.
In Nigeria, between 1988 and 1993, an official report estimated $12.2 billion was “diverted” from the fiscus. In 1990, the United Nations concluded that Nigeria had one of the worst records for human deprivation of any country in the developing world.
In the case of South Africa, is it racist to suggest that if you (even for the good reason of ending apartheid) shift the leadership of a country from a group with an average IQ of 100 to one with an average IQ of 85 you might expect a degradation in your electrical, criminal justice and transportation systems leading inevitably to chaos? Just asking.
The Europeans in the US, Canada, etc set up institutions like the ones they had back home in Europe. The Canadian Parliament is directly modeled on the UK Parliament. So the question gets bumped back: why better institutions in the UK? They can’t blame that on colonialism or being “extractive.”
For sure on that. Also right about the unconscious, about defense mechanisms, about the central importance of psychic conflict, and so much more. There’s a raft of experiments and data validating so many of his specific propositions as well as an extensive body of high quality outcome studies on the clinical efficacy of the treatments derived from his concepts and techniques.
Is the cause of America's decline due to our declining intelligence? With causes as diverse as failure at every level of the educational system and open borders it seems more than just possible.
Kissinger, Blinken. The incredible Kamala as candidate. Yes.
(refusal to admit the decline and desperate efforts to cover it up and the real thing.
The choice is between backing the Genocide or owning up to US's inability to protect Israel from its self harm. You know they'll do the stupid thing.)
One may want to include Trump in the group of not very intelligent. How can a man who has never read a book be president.
Pitiful! What was the last book you read? "Dreams from my Father"? Do unintelligent people build financial empires or is that not possible without Affirmative Action and DEI?
Funnily enough the last book I read was Acemoglu and Johnson, Power and Progress. Finished it on Sunday.
(not very good)
Forgive my snark. Few even read articles these days much less books. Any articulate argument is welcome.
The snark wasn't aimed at me - I only replied because of the coincidence.
It’s ok, he wrote books.
Trumps books were all written by ghosts
You don’t say.
how am I supposed to sleep now?
Boo!
It is not that Trump did not write the books that list him as author. It is that he did even bother to read them.
And yet, he has. There are a hundred ways to engage with the world of ideas these days. Knowing how to read a balance sheet is likely more important.
Given how much money Trump has lost over the years and his criminal conviction for business fraud, it is doubtful that Trump can correctly interpret a spreadsheet or profit-loss statement.
Are you trying to demonstrate your stupidity?
No. Everyone in government pointed out that Trump is unbrief-able and does not have the attention span to hold a 30 minute meeting. The book Lucky Loser points out how Trump makes one bad business decision after another. Trump seem incapable of understanding tax policy such as the macroeconomic effects of tariffs.
Sure in A group of not very intelligent.
But he is no way near the group of not very intelligent that Kamala exemplifies.
Anyone seen the plagiarism story yet on Kamala?
If we keep misusing and expanding the use of "genocide" it will soon mean as little specifically as "racism"
You can thank Samantha Power for the (post-)modern hollowing out of 'genocide.' A truly evil internationalist, currently head of USAID, and author of 2002's ""A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide."
This is done on purpose. Unlike local ethnic massacres and the even more common ethnic cleansing, genocide is relatively rare - in the 20th century, it was just Armenians, Jews and Tutsis that experienced it. But because it is so rare, it is useless as a tool in common and garden variety politics tool kit. So there is lots of pressure to expand the term to anything one doesn't like. Like with McCarthyism.
I think the Cambodian thing under Pol Pot was close in spirit but not killing a "tribe" (gens) but rather just your vital eggheads, four-eyes, and assorted poindexters. Should be a word to encompass both. I get what you mean about it being a useless tool. A certain type of person observes that a word wins arguments and tries to slip in new meanings of the word to win more arguments. It takes a while for honest people to catch on
Josef Stalin came near to killing more then enough vital eggheads too. The Finnish Winter war in 1939, and the first 4 months of the German-Russian war 1941 were disasters.
Stalin exiled or killed all the good physicians at some point because he thought his doctors were trying to kill him. Did he kill a bunch of other smart types too? I know he messed up biology research because he was really into one scientist who was wrong (Lysenko?)
Don't be an idiot - Gaza = Genocide. Denial just makes you look silly.
israelis don't deny it - they are quite open about the aims.
That's not a counterargument. It's mere contradiction. For it to be genocide the "palestinians" would have to be a genuine people, not just a loose collection of Arabs who happened to be living in Israel in 1948. It's no more a people than "Chicagoans". Sure there are people who call themselves that but if you killed them all no one would call it genocide.
Merely losing a war you started and stupidly refusing to surrender and release hostages doesn't make you the victim of genocide. It just means you are not too bright and don't care much about the wellbeing of the rest of your so called people
Oh you are vile. Almost saying they are not human enough to call it genocide.
I get it that end US hegomony (some years ago) has meant that Israel is doomed because of its outrageous behaviour so yes this is existential for Israel.
But wanting to defend or excuse Genocide!!! On the grounds that they are only Palestinians. Seriously sick.
Thank God most American jews and British jews know a lot lot better.
So refusing to quietly submit to its destruction is now "outrageous behavior".
Cremieux Recueil on his substack a month ago wrote about the comparative decline of European Catholic countries post-reformation (Ottoman origins of modernity). In a nutshell, his argument was Catholic Counter-Reformation effectively undercut local flourishing. I mean, one couldn't in good faith argue the Protestant-lands suddenly had a boost in natural intelligence.
The failure of the educational system, the collapsing fertility and open borders are all downstream of the US Cathedral that was activated in the early 1960s.
Why 1960s? Why not 1776 or 1865 or 1924? The cathedral theory is pretty silly to be honest. Anyway, the US is not in decline, educationally or otherwise. The US has one of the best educational systems in the world, just look at the US PISA results by race, White Americans outscore European countries, Hispanic Americans outscore Latin American countries and Asian Americans outscore Asian countries. The US receives many low skilled immigrants, but this is offset by the high skilled immigrants the country receives, the US is the leading destination for elite immigration in the world. Economically the US is putting other rich countries to shame.
Interestingly, the Cremieux post shows that elite German human capital migrated to Protestant areas that had made what at the time were liberal reforms.
Thanks - I'll do the queries point for point:
Cremieux is important because he emphasizes that what counts is not the average cognitive performance but the top 0.01% or so. +4SDs?
PISA - US swims somewhere in the middle. Finns and other Scandinavians are much better, for example. Most Europeans are average too, though. By the way, comparing Asian Americans to non-migrating Asians is problematic since people with top cognitive performance are particularly prone to migrating.
About "German": it ain't necessarily so. Only Netherlands, and one century later, England and Scotland were main destinations, not the Luther-Lands. Sure, Dutch is a Germanic, and English and Scots mostly Germanic tongues with Norman-French admixtures, but to call them German is a bit over the top. Immigration into the Dutch and British places was mixed: Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, some non-Catholic Germans, and of course the French Huguenots. Oh, and some Italians too.
1960s as a departure point: Yep. You can see it by the string of military losses starting in the 1960s, as well as the gradual loss of manufacturing capacity compared to Germany or Japan.
Another example which doesn’t fit Acemoglu’s model is Japan (before the American occupation & rewriting of its constitution). Highly centralized and coercive “extractive” institutions like zaibatsu but an economic powerhouse.
The book does discuss countries like the Soviet Union that became economically advanced under extractive conditions.
I made the mistake of buying Why Nations Fail on audiobook. Didn't finish it because as you said, they went through great lengths to compound on the same point over and over again.
I found Isaac Kanyama's paper here
https://www.academia.edu/58557483/Quality_of_institutions_Does_intelligence_matter
I thought you'd lost an "ow" in "fell Nobelists" until I looked it up:
a: fierce, cruel, terrible
b: sinister, malevolent
Though I also like this one: a thin tough membrane covering a carcass directly under the hide
Too bad his research didn't lead the elites to preserve and expand our successful institutions, instead they persist in doing the opposite.
The real problem with the economics "Nobel" prize is that there are not nearly enough economists making major new discoveries of lasting value to justify the award on an annual basis. Indeed, when you look at lists of publications in the CV's of leading academic economists you have to feel sorry for them. So much effort expended writing technically abstruse papers of such little significance.
Unlike physics, say, it is useful to think of economics as more like checkers than chess. The subject is so easy on the face of it that the number of true experts is vanishingly small.
There are exceptions however: https://shorturl.at/4aacQ
Economics, like lots of other subjects, has been a completed discipline for a long time. The low hanging fruit has been picked.
Good point. I feel like this can be applied to other things, like criminal justice, where we had a good system at one point, actually locking people up, but we keep trying to innovate and discover new methods that don't work, like rehabilitating criminals or making excuses for them like systemic racism and now the new thing, saying that they are too incompetent to be responsible for murder. How many other areas have we "completed" but then backtracked in a convoluted way?
At a certain tipping point, the risk:reward of change is much worse than stasis. As fields progress (down the right course) good disruption becomes increasingly rare.
You would certainly think so. However, not necessarily true: https://shorturl.at/KGhNi
From what I can tell, economics has come so far that most economists deny simple supply/demand. Certainly when it comes to labor. Or perhaps economics has evolved to justify the position of big money.
One of the obvious implications of their argument (which I doubt that they would support) is that white Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders should re-colonize sub-Saharan Africa (and Haiti and certain large American cities) and forcibly create inclusive institutions, since the inhabitants of the latter places so obviously cannot create them for themselves. Then the Europeans, et al., can leave and see how long it takes before the natives re-institute extractive institutions. This would also satisfy (at least, in part) Popper's falsifiability requirement.
Acemoglu, like other public intellectuals Nowrasteh, Hanania, Caplan and others, just seem to have a really hard time understanding Western liberal culture in general. The natural law, property rights paradigm that's second nature to any Scots-Irish, Anglo-Saxon or Cajun redneck is only conceptualized by them after laborious, tendentious reasoning with lots of wiggle room. Like why corporations can enforce property lines but countries can't, for example. Or why COVID and Trump mean millenia of erudite political philosophy and processes just need to be tossed. Or more to the point here, why society-wide prosperity must be due to the abstract "institutions" those capricious Brits hauled around and not, not I tell you, the persons staffing them.
Extractive, eh? Like slavery? In the Middle Ages Europe was an island of non-slavery, surrounded by slavers. Without Whites the entire world would still practice slavery, like it always did for all of history until Whites forced the non-Whites to stop. Whites are the only people who have come up with moral arguments against slavery.
Even the Chinese Buddhist monks had slaves working their rice fields.
https://www.amren.com/videos/2021/07/slavery-is-our-original-sin/
The Arabs took slaves in Iberia, and slaves in Africa. They raided Europe for centuries to take slaves. The women were raped, the men were killed through the practice of galley slaves, who were chained to the oars until they died. The Arabs took special pleasure in enslaving Christians, with adults and children lining up to throw rocks at the captives. Ottomans enslaves Whites in the Balkans for centuries. Tartars in Crimea took Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Baltic women as slaves and sold them to the Ottomans and Arabs. The Arabs raided throughout the Caucasus. They also bought Black slaves from the Somalis and other African slavers. The slaves were shipped to Arab lands and to India, and even China.
All of this went on until Whites forced the Arabs and Ottomans to stop.
Africans, from west to east, were also forced to stop and free their African slaves. Likewise the Indian tribes in North and South America and in between were forced to stop using slaves - they enslaved Whites, bought Black slaves, and enslaved other Indians. The Comanches and Apaches raided each other and sold the captives as slaves to other tribes, until Whites forced them to stop. The "trail of tears" included thousands of Black slaves owned by the Indians.
Haven't we been taught that to wage aggressive war is justified if it frees slaves in the end? Thanks to Whites there is no slavery left. Or almost none: Some Africans and Indians still keep slaves, where they can get away with it without Whites interfering.
-----------
Speaking of Central Africa, how does Daron Acemoglu explain the fact that in that state and its neighbors, people tend to set up shop in a neighboring country? Because if they do it at home, all of the large extended family, and all their friends, come to loiter in the store, talk crap for hours, and take whatever they want. Because of a complete disrespect for a person's private property. You should "share with your family." So they go to another country. It seems the "extractive institutions" are simply African families.
-----------
Liberia was set up with a constitution nearly identical to the one in the U.S., and the country was populated by Christian Blacks from the U.S., with plenty of help in seeing how governance and private business should be run. They proceeded to oppress the native Blacks, and the country had one of the bloodiest civil wars in Africa, where they cut off the hands of villagers en masse to terrorize a region.
-----------
Eritrea was colonized by Italy - and the Eritreans still like the Italians today! They got everything from Italy. The Italians hired them as soldiers when they invaded Ethiopia, with French and British blessing, and Mussolini abolished the Black Ethiopia's slavery. Everyone agreed that the Eritreans made good soldiers. (Meanwhile the Germans had been arming the Ethiopians, to slow down Italy's advance, because Mussolini opposed Austria's joining with Germany, which almost all Austrians had favored. Austria was Italy's neighbor, and he contacted Britain and France for "a solution to the German Question." Ethiopia kept him busy elsewhere.)
What about Eritrea today? It is run by Blacks, thanks to Britain taking it from Italy and then leaving it. (The Eritreans generally say that they liked the Italians but not the British.) Eritrea is one of the world's most hideous states. The "police" walk into a store and demand money whenever they want. They act exactly like gangsters. It is a country that truly deserves being called a gangster state.
How is Eritrea's condition the fault of EUROPEANS? Looking at history, it is Eritrea's lack of the European benefactors that is the problem. Eritrean organizations in Europe write signs with "Some day Eritrea will be free" in Italian.
-----------
Meanwhile in Ethiopia, which was never colonized, the government has recently waged a vicious war against the Tigray, 2020-2022. As usual in Africa, government is the way to take the wealth for yourself, and the rulers then dish it out as they please. They withheld money for the Tigray region, which then rebelled. Hundreds of thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands of women were raped. The government soldiers even forced fathers to rape their daughters and forced boys to rape their mothers. Tigray who fled to Saudi Arabia through Yemen were machine gunned to death in the hundreds by the Saudi border.
Where in this did Whites do the exploitation and the killing?
-----------
More about Africa without White rule:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/30/mapping-africas-coups-detat-across-the-years
Africa has had 214 military coups since 1950, with at least 106 of them being successful. This in at least 45 of the 54 African nations.
As Ann Coulter writes, by the end of the 1980s not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office. Of some 150 heads of state, only six had voluntarily relinquished power. In Congo alone, in 1964, over a million people, virtually all civilians, died in sectarian strife.
Mobutu Sese Seko took power in Congo and became one of the richest men in the world. He had 17 wives, lots of mistresses, 55 children - and he was a cannibal.
Uganda's Idi Amin killed thousands of people, including the Chief Justice, the country's university's Vice Chancellor, and an Anglican Archbishop. Westerners would like Anglican archbishops to be killed, right? Surely it's Westerners' fault? One of Amin's former wives was found dismembered in the trunk of a car. Amin was believed to perform blood rituals over his victims, and he boasted numerous times about eating human flesh.
The researcher Robert Klintberg reported on oil-rich Equatorial Guinea as being "a land of fear and devastation no better than a concentration camp - the 'cottage industry Dachau of Africa.'" Under Macias Nguema, more than half of the population was either killed or fled into exile.
In Nigeria, between 1988 and 1993, an official report estimated $12.2 billion was “diverted” from the fiscus. In 1990, the United Nations concluded that Nigeria had one of the worst records for human deprivation of any country in the developing world.
In his papers does he address the "correlation doesn't mean causality" problem?
Doesn’t sound like it.
Big Idea economists are as trustworthy as employees of Big Pharma, Big Government & Big Media.
In the case of South Africa, is it racist to suggest that if you (even for the good reason of ending apartheid) shift the leadership of a country from a group with an average IQ of 100 to one with an average IQ of 85 you might expect a degradation in your electrical, criminal justice and transportation systems leading inevitably to chaos? Just asking.
I believe it was a bigger jump down than that. 85 is the African-American IQ mean. African-African means are even lower.
The Europeans in the US, Canada, etc set up institutions like the ones they had back home in Europe. The Canadian Parliament is directly modeled on the UK Parliament. So the question gets bumped back: why better institutions in the UK? They can’t blame that on colonialism or being “extractive.”
FYI Steve: Not sure about these other “isms”, however many propositions from Freuds work have been operationalized, tested and validated.
He may have been right that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar.
For sure on that. Also right about the unconscious, about defense mechanisms, about the central importance of psychic conflict, and so much more. There’s a raft of experiments and data validating so many of his specific propositions as well as an extensive body of high quality outcome studies on the clinical efficacy of the treatments derived from his concepts and techniques.
Economics is booring.
It seems all economists (beyond lip service) treat the environment as a subset of the economy, when the reverse is true.
FYI, the link to the brave Africans' paper, 'Quality of Institutions: Does Intelligence Matter?' is broken.