I find it hard to square your conclusions with what is actually happening on the ground all over Europe. That is, the rise of populist political parties that are strongly anti-immigration (primarily with respect to Muslims), including proposals not only to essentially end it but to deport (a la Trump) migrants already residing in the host country. These parties are usually the second or third most popular party in these states, with fractured polities, and are even part of the governing coalition. Many of the "mainstream" parties are now adopting serious restrictions on migration to co-opt support from the populists. I dunno, call me crazy, but it seems that there is little social trust between say ethnic Germans, French, Swedes, etc. and their Muslim neighbors.
Spot on. I live there. From a European perspective the above is a hilarious article. Only economists can come up with such otherworldly and sterile povs. In every European country Muslims have built parallel societies with parallel norms - and labor participation and crime rates.
Other minorities do mingle, intermarry, perform well or excel in school and the labor market. And they don't dominate the national crime rates and they do not show the contempt for - especially - western women, Jews and gays.
Funny enough the biggest champions and protectors of Muslim immigrants since the 80s have been - obviously - progressives (while the business sector welcomed them warmly as cheap labor - for about a decade until international markets opened and cheap labor took a hike. The former laborers remained).
The progressives also see themselves - of course - as the champions and protectors of women's rights, girls safety. But harassment, intimidation and sexual violence by - especially - Moroccan boys and men is a decades old widespread hush hush problem. We had a ‘loverboy’ problem already 25 years ago - akin to the current UK grooming gang scandal. Though that as well started already in the 80s and there are examples that go back to the earliest Pakistani immigrants in the UK in the 60s)
Ánd progressives champion the gay scene. Which also saw, since the 80s, generous levels of violence by, again, mainly Moroccan boys and men).
So progressives and centrists find themselves between a moral rock and a hard place. Which leads to, let's call it 'underreporting'. To no one's surprise the Green left party kept a report showing that Moroccans dominate gay bashing in the drawer until they were exposed as hiding it (‘No we were not! We were just protecting a vulnerable minority’).
Veiled girls are now official symbols of feminism, of young Muslim girls liberating themselves: 'Look, she's veiled AND she's at a university.' How this is an act of feminist liberation is beyond me. A far more accurate conclusion is that a veiled Muslim girl / woman is granted greater freedom by her parents and broader environment. (The clannishness of Moroccans and Turks in the Netherlands, and for instance of Algerians, Moroccans and Chechens in FR, Turks in DE and Pakistanis in the UK is crystal clear.
In the msm honor killings (if reported) are generally described as family drama's, the tragic consequence of a culture clash between parent and child. And that's that.
Just last week, economics writer Tim Worstall (UK, equally ignorant of what is going on in society) wrote a Substack article very similar to Caplan’s halleluja article. Though St. Milt considers it impossible to combine high immigration with a welfare state. Which Caplan above seems to want to expand.
Yes, the dangerous and appalling red/green alliance. Proving once again that the Left hates capitalism so intensely that they would rather surrender their fundamental liberty and live as serfs under Islam than as free people under capitalism.
Your second to last paragraph is making some assumptions about how the relationships work that I do not think are at all reasonable, being much more likely to be driven by third things than the 1:1 relationships.
Home Ownership: Is it the fact that people own instead of rent, or the fact that people who own tend to live in the same place longer (so you know each other) and the fact that the sorts of people who save up enough to buy a house and maintain it tend to be more trustworthy people? In other words, do you think that if we just gave houses to everyone the average level of trustworthiness would go up?
Population Density: Probably helps, although probably as a function of how many bad actors there will be in an area. The power laws in play in crime and other bad behavior make the absolute number of bad people in an area more relevant than the percentage.
Commuting Time: This seems to be a proxy for density, but possibly is also due to the "lots of people I don't know around all the time." Not confident at all, but I would guess trust goes up when people see a smaller number of people and can track their behaviors better.
Better Policing: I think you are spot on here, with the addition of "actually prosecuting crimes". This reduces the absolute number of criminals, and thus the relevant number of crimes. One point about decriminalizing, however, is that decriminalizing murder won't make people feel more trusting. It is less that things are illegal in the legislative sense that matters and more about whether the actual norms are being followed. The link between crime rate and trust is broken here; you could declare being Amish illegal tomorrow, and despite the crime rate skyrocketing their intragroup social trust measure wouldn't go down.
Citizenship: This seems a strange assertion. It doesn't seem likely to me that there mere fact of citizenship is what is driving low trust here. People don't learn citizenship status and then derive how much they trust someone based on that, but rather impute citizenship status based on other signals. As such, lower rates of citizenship correlate with lower rates of trust almost certainly because the behaviors of non-citizens are such that trust goes down (likely among both citizens AND non-citizens!) That might be to differences in norms and expectations, or outright bad behavior, whatever, but it is nearly infeasible that what is causing the distrust is knowledge of someone's citizenship status, such that changing that status with a swipe of the pen would affect trust.
(You might be able to test that, in fact, by looking at trust based on various levels of "you are allowed to be here", comparing ratios of visas, green cards, naturalized citizens, and how those societies trust each other. Getting data would be hard, I suspect.)
In all, that second to last paragraph seems to be demanding a cry of "Correlation does not equal causation!" Possibly also a reminder that trying to put pressure on one side of a statistical regularity is unlikely to be effective at changing the other side.
Last week I shared a piece in the NYT on Putnam's findings, where "The extent of the effect is shocking,". Interesting to read the counterargument here.
****“Diverse” communities have low trust, but the reason isn’t that diversity hurts trust; it’s that non-whites – especially blacks and Hispanics – have low trust.****
I don't follow. If some 'communities' suffer from low trust--and they do; even European nations vary widely--why would forcing them together not result in even lower trust?
High trust societies derive from communities with shared, common culture. If you have a bunch of people from different cultures that are incompatible or differ in a variety of ways, distrust is not only natural; it's a completely rational response and an expression of sensible survival instincts.
Supporting zionists is logical, in the fight for civilization I stand with the civilized Nation fighting against The barbarians
Fight the Jews and Christians until they pay the jizia says the Quran
Trade Center Bombers were Muslims. The Bombay & Mumbai India Attackers were M uslims. The Achille Lauro Cruise Ship Hijackers were Muslims. The September 11th 2001 Airline Hijackers were Muslims. The Russian airliner bombers were Mu slims. The Paris assassins were Muslims. The Mali hotel attackers were Muslims. The San Bernardino killers were Muslims. The Orlando shooter was a Muslim, etc., etc., etc... And these headliners are not even the half of it.
Lesson 2(a)
Think of it:
Buddhists living with Hindus = No Problem.
Hindus living with Christians = No Problem.
Hindus living with Jews = No Problem. Christians living with Shintos = No Problem. Shintos living with Confucians = No Problem. Confucians living with Bahai's = No Problem. Bahai's living with Jews = No Problem. Jews living with Atheists = No Problem. Atheists living with Buddhists = No Problem. Buddhists living with Sikhs = No Problem. Sikhs living with Hindus = No Problem. Hindus living with Bahai's = No Problem. Bahai's living with Christians = No Problem. Christians living with Jews = No Problem. Jews living with Buddhists = No Problem. Buddhists living with Shintos = No Problem. Shintos living with Atheists = No problem
«Geographic mobility, strangely, seems to reduce individual trust but raise social trust.»
I realize that this is an 8 year old post, that recently ragebaited the denizens of Substack but... what the hell did you mean by that?
Even with ChatGPT I cannot quite figure it out.
Do I posit, that social trust somehow means "trust in formal institutions", which... I guess you didn't finish "The Case Against Education" yet and thought that would be a good thing?
Or the interpretation, that those people trust individual others less, but... their local community networks more? How would that even work? All the people around me are assholes, but at our neighborhood meetup we get shit done?
EDIT: Guess you're getting piled on here now, because someone shared that 7 year old article, that nobody back then commented on and you probably forgot about. [also not to be mean, but it's very hard to follow] So... guess you probably won't want to answer. Which... fair enough. Should have checked the date, before commenting myself.
I'm curious if the relevant term might be homogeneity instead of diversity.
Is it possible that some homogeneous communities have a high level of trust that breaks once outsiders join?
It seems almost self-evident that many extremely homogenous communities have high levels of trust, might it just be that any level of diversity breaks that trust and increasing diversity doesn't do much?
White people are just better off amongst themselves & do not enjoy the company of other races. That alone is a form of conflict & there is no reason to justify our preference. Any non-white who disagrees can just go live amongst their own kind & enjoy their shitty culture without us.
Reminds me of that town in Missouri where the white homogeneous police could not manage the white homogeneous killer so the white homogeneous community killed their white homogeneous bully.
Lamborghini the farmer versus the elitist Ferrari...
Christian or pagan monarchs vs Christian or pagan peasants...
Cuban revolutionaries turning on their own, far more white and Christian and alike yet...
After Europe burned its Jews it turned against its own.
Tommy Robinson being persecuted by the Anglican government of England...
Burning of witches, inquisitions and several other moments in history indicate that homogeneous societies have a few flaws.
Homogeneous cultures killing their own when their own became unmanageable. Or the 100-year war in Europe after they expelled their Jews. Hatfields and McCoys, civil war Union and Confederates. Generally generalizations are general 🤷
Yea I’d much rather deal with my own kind’s problems than that of a foreign people.
Imagine believing that flooding our countries with outsiders is somehow going to improve social trust. Anyone advocating for diversity is by definition a traitor to their own kind & should be treated as such.
Very many Dutch citizens experience the presence of Islam around them. And I can report that they have had enough of burkas, headscarves, the ritual slaughter of animals, so-called honour revenge, blaring minarets, female circumcision, hymen restoration operations, abuse of homosexuals, Turkish and Arabic on the buses and trains as well as on town hall leaflets, halal meat at grocery shops and department stores, Sharia exams, the Finance Minister's Sharia mortgages, and the enor-mous overrepresentation of Muslims in the area of crime, including Moroccan street terrorists...Be courageous. Do what many Dutch citizens are screaming out for. Stop all immigra-tion from Muslim countries, ban all building of new mosques, close all Islamic schools, ban burkas and the Koran. Expel all criminal Muslims from the country.Accept your responsibility!
I’d just point out that Geert Wilders is a rabid Zionist. Israel is the reason we have Muslim refugees in the first place & Israel has publicly stated Europe should take millions of Palestinians. The Jews of your country are primarily responsible for lobbying for migration & diversity as a weapon against you. Any politician who doesn’t address this, at least in action is just part of the problem.
I find it hard to square your conclusions with what is actually happening on the ground all over Europe. That is, the rise of populist political parties that are strongly anti-immigration (primarily with respect to Muslims), including proposals not only to essentially end it but to deport (a la Trump) migrants already residing in the host country. These parties are usually the second or third most popular party in these states, with fractured polities, and are even part of the governing coalition. Many of the "mainstream" parties are now adopting serious restrictions on migration to co-opt support from the populists. I dunno, call me crazy, but it seems that there is little social trust between say ethnic Germans, French, Swedes, etc. and their Muslim neighbors.
Spot on. I live there. From a European perspective the above is a hilarious article. Only economists can come up with such otherworldly and sterile povs. In every European country Muslims have built parallel societies with parallel norms - and labor participation and crime rates.
Other minorities do mingle, intermarry, perform well or excel in school and the labor market. And they don't dominate the national crime rates and they do not show the contempt for - especially - western women, Jews and gays.
Funny enough the biggest champions and protectors of Muslim immigrants since the 80s have been - obviously - progressives (while the business sector welcomed them warmly as cheap labor - for about a decade until international markets opened and cheap labor took a hike. The former laborers remained).
The progressives also see themselves - of course - as the champions and protectors of women's rights, girls safety. But harassment, intimidation and sexual violence by - especially - Moroccan boys and men is a decades old widespread hush hush problem. We had a ‘loverboy’ problem already 25 years ago - akin to the current UK grooming gang scandal. Though that as well started already in the 80s and there are examples that go back to the earliest Pakistani immigrants in the UK in the 60s)
Ánd progressives champion the gay scene. Which also saw, since the 80s, generous levels of violence by, again, mainly Moroccan boys and men).
So progressives and centrists find themselves between a moral rock and a hard place. Which leads to, let's call it 'underreporting'. To no one's surprise the Green left party kept a report showing that Moroccans dominate gay bashing in the drawer until they were exposed as hiding it (‘No we were not! We were just protecting a vulnerable minority’).
Veiled girls are now official symbols of feminism, of young Muslim girls liberating themselves: 'Look, she's veiled AND she's at a university.' How this is an act of feminist liberation is beyond me. A far more accurate conclusion is that a veiled Muslim girl / woman is granted greater freedom by her parents and broader environment. (The clannishness of Moroccans and Turks in the Netherlands, and for instance of Algerians, Moroccans and Chechens in FR, Turks in DE and Pakistanis in the UK is crystal clear.
In the msm honor killings (if reported) are generally described as family drama's, the tragic consequence of a culture clash between parent and child. And that's that.
Just last week, economics writer Tim Worstall (UK, equally ignorant of what is going on in society) wrote a Substack article very similar to Caplan’s halleluja article. Though St. Milt considers it impossible to combine high immigration with a welfare state. Which Caplan above seems to want to expand.
https://timworstall.substack.com/p/piketty-rediscovers-friedman
Yes, the dangerous and appalling red/green alliance. Proving once again that the Left hates capitalism so intensely that they would rather surrender their fundamental liberty and live as serfs under Islam than as free people under capitalism.
Your second to last paragraph is making some assumptions about how the relationships work that I do not think are at all reasonable, being much more likely to be driven by third things than the 1:1 relationships.
Home Ownership: Is it the fact that people own instead of rent, or the fact that people who own tend to live in the same place longer (so you know each other) and the fact that the sorts of people who save up enough to buy a house and maintain it tend to be more trustworthy people? In other words, do you think that if we just gave houses to everyone the average level of trustworthiness would go up?
Population Density: Probably helps, although probably as a function of how many bad actors there will be in an area. The power laws in play in crime and other bad behavior make the absolute number of bad people in an area more relevant than the percentage.
Commuting Time: This seems to be a proxy for density, but possibly is also due to the "lots of people I don't know around all the time." Not confident at all, but I would guess trust goes up when people see a smaller number of people and can track their behaviors better.
Better Policing: I think you are spot on here, with the addition of "actually prosecuting crimes". This reduces the absolute number of criminals, and thus the relevant number of crimes. One point about decriminalizing, however, is that decriminalizing murder won't make people feel more trusting. It is less that things are illegal in the legislative sense that matters and more about whether the actual norms are being followed. The link between crime rate and trust is broken here; you could declare being Amish illegal tomorrow, and despite the crime rate skyrocketing their intragroup social trust measure wouldn't go down.
Citizenship: This seems a strange assertion. It doesn't seem likely to me that there mere fact of citizenship is what is driving low trust here. People don't learn citizenship status and then derive how much they trust someone based on that, but rather impute citizenship status based on other signals. As such, lower rates of citizenship correlate with lower rates of trust almost certainly because the behaviors of non-citizens are such that trust goes down (likely among both citizens AND non-citizens!) That might be to differences in norms and expectations, or outright bad behavior, whatever, but it is nearly infeasible that what is causing the distrust is knowledge of someone's citizenship status, such that changing that status with a swipe of the pen would affect trust.
(You might be able to test that, in fact, by looking at trust based on various levels of "you are allowed to be here", comparing ratios of visas, green cards, naturalized citizens, and how those societies trust each other. Getting data would be hard, I suspect.)
In all, that second to last paragraph seems to be demanding a cry of "Correlation does not equal causation!" Possibly also a reminder that trying to put pressure on one side of a statistical regularity is unlikely to be effective at changing the other side.
Jews like Bryan Caplan should be deported to Palestine to enjoy some diversity.
I can't trace through the numbers of this to save my life.
Stupid me. Diversity/homogeneity, greater/lesser, reverse coding.
I'm getting my money back for my Wharton MBA.
The whole thing is an exercise in obfuscation
Last week I shared a piece in the NYT on Putnam's findings, where "The extent of the effect is shocking,". Interesting to read the counterargument here.
****“Diverse” communities have low trust, but the reason isn’t that diversity hurts trust; it’s that non-whites – especially blacks and Hispanics – have low trust.****
I don't follow. If some 'communities' suffer from low trust--and they do; even European nations vary widely--why would forcing them together not result in even lower trust?
High trust societies derive from communities with shared, common culture. If you have a bunch of people from different cultures that are incompatible or differ in a variety of ways, distrust is not only natural; it's a completely rational response and an expression of sensible survival instincts.
Menu
Supporting zionists is logical, in the fight for civilization I stand with the civilized Nation fighting against The barbarians
Fight the Jews and Christians until they pay the jizia says the Quran
Trade Center Bombers were Muslims. The Bombay & Mumbai India Attackers were M uslims. The Achille Lauro Cruise Ship Hijackers were Muslims. The September 11th 2001 Airline Hijackers were Muslims. The Russian airliner bombers were Mu slims. The Paris assassins were Muslims. The Mali hotel attackers were Muslims. The San Bernardino killers were Muslims. The Orlando shooter was a Muslim, etc., etc., etc... And these headliners are not even the half of it.
Lesson 2(a)
Think of it:
Buddhists living with Hindus = No Problem.
Hindus living with Christians = No Problem.
Hindus living with Jews = No Problem. Christians living with Shintos = No Problem. Shintos living with Confucians = No Problem. Confucians living with Bahai's = No Problem. Bahai's living with Jews = No Problem. Jews living with Atheists = No Problem. Atheists living with Buddhists = No Problem. Buddhists living with Sikhs = No Problem. Sikhs living with Hindus = No Problem. Hindus living with Bahai's = No Problem. Bahai's living with Christians = No Problem. Christians living with Jews = No Problem. Jews living with Buddhists = No Problem. Buddhists living with Shintos = No Problem. Shintos living with Atheists = No problem
You seem to be on a different page or reality than what I'm talking about good luck with your own kind and avoiding diversity
«Geographic mobility, strangely, seems to reduce individual trust but raise social trust.»
I realize that this is an 8 year old post, that recently ragebaited the denizens of Substack but... what the hell did you mean by that?
Even with ChatGPT I cannot quite figure it out.
Do I posit, that social trust somehow means "trust in formal institutions", which... I guess you didn't finish "The Case Against Education" yet and thought that would be a good thing?
Or the interpretation, that those people trust individual others less, but... their local community networks more? How would that even work? All the people around me are assholes, but at our neighborhood meetup we get shit done?
EDIT: Guess you're getting piled on here now, because someone shared that 7 year old article, that nobody back then commented on and you probably forgot about. [also not to be mean, but it's very hard to follow] So... guess you probably won't want to answer. Which... fair enough. Should have checked the date, before commenting myself.
I'm curious if the relevant term might be homogeneity instead of diversity.
Is it possible that some homogeneous communities have a high level of trust that breaks once outsiders join?
It seems almost self-evident that many extremely homogenous communities have high levels of trust, might it just be that any level of diversity breaks that trust and increasing diversity doesn't do much?
White people are just better off amongst themselves & do not enjoy the company of other races. That alone is a form of conflict & there is no reason to justify our preference. Any non-white who disagrees can just go live amongst their own kind & enjoy their shitty culture without us.
Reminds me of that town in Missouri where the white homogeneous police could not manage the white homogeneous killer so the white homogeneous community killed their white homogeneous bully.
Lamborghini the farmer versus the elitist Ferrari...
Christian or pagan monarchs vs Christian or pagan peasants...
Cuban revolutionaries turning on their own, far more white and Christian and alike yet...
After Europe burned its Jews it turned against its own.
Tommy Robinson being persecuted by the Anglican government of England...
Burning of witches, inquisitions and several other moments in history indicate that homogeneous societies have a few flaws.
Homogeneous cultures killing their own when their own became unmanageable. Or the 100-year war in Europe after they expelled their Jews. Hatfields and McCoys, civil war Union and Confederates. Generally generalizations are general 🤷
Yea I’d much rather deal with my own kind’s problems than that of a foreign people.
Imagine believing that flooding our countries with outsiders is somehow going to improve social trust. Anyone advocating for diversity is by definition a traitor to their own kind & should be treated as such.
Very many Dutch citizens experience the presence of Islam around them. And I can report that they have had enough of burkas, headscarves, the ritual slaughter of animals, so-called honour revenge, blaring minarets, female circumcision, hymen restoration operations, abuse of homosexuals, Turkish and Arabic on the buses and trains as well as on town hall leaflets, halal meat at grocery shops and department stores, Sharia exams, the Finance Minister's Sharia mortgages, and the enor-mous overrepresentation of Muslims in the area of crime, including Moroccan street terrorists...Be courageous. Do what many Dutch citizens are screaming out for. Stop all immigra-tion from Muslim countries, ban all building of new mosques, close all Islamic schools, ban burkas and the Koran. Expel all criminal Muslims from the country.Accept your responsibility!
Stop Islamification!
Geert Wilders, The Party for Freedom
A Thousand Points of Resistance
I’d just point out that Geert Wilders is a rabid Zionist. Israel is the reason we have Muslim refugees in the first place & Israel has publicly stated Europe should take millions of Palestinians. The Jews of your country are primarily responsible for lobbying for migration & diversity as a weapon against you. Any politician who doesn’t address this, at least in action is just part of the problem.
Not if 'their own kind' has a pathological attachment to diversity as a putative guarantee of its own security and prosperity
Yet look how easy it is to identify those amongst our own kind who betray us, just deal with them as traitors and be done with it:
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.
The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.
The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control—
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.
The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.
This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
-Rudyard Kipling
Indeed--yet Bryan is not 'one of our kind'