Archive for August 2007

The Industrial Revolution is the great event of world history. Before this, from the Stone Age to 1800, there was no gain in average living conditions. Now incomes rise steadily.

It is attributed to political stability and free markets in 18th-century England. But this is the convenient fantasy of modern economists. Medieval England was much more pro-market than even Thatcherite England – the average government tax rate then was less than 1 per cent – yet achieved no growth.

Instead, the Industrial Revolution is more plausibly linked to a Darwinian process of “survival of the richest” that operated from at least 1250. Capitalist attitudes and economic growth triumphed in England because those with such attitudes came to predominate in the population by biological means. The modern English are the descendants of the upper classes of the preindustrial world, those who prospered economically. The poor disappeared. This process was most likely cultural, but we cannot exclude the possibility that the English may even be genetically capitalist.

To see how these processes operated consider the following. The average Briton in 1788, when the first edition of The Times appeared, ate only as many calories a day as hunter-gatherers (2,300). The diet was more monotonous. Life expectancy was only slightly above that of hunter-gatherers (38 years). Height is a good guide to nutrition and health: men in England averaged 5ft 6in (1.68m), the same as males in the Stone Age. And while foragers satisfy their material wants with small amounts of work, the modest comforts of the English in 1800 were purchased only through a life of unrelenting drudgery. Men then worked 60 hours a week. Male hunter-gatherers typically got by on the 35-hour week.

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A few years ago when the economic crisis in Argentina was at its worst, many Argentineans of Italian descent wanted to come back to Italy. They were either the children or descendants of Italian parents who had settled there. As such they didn’t have Italian passports, but they invoked the right of return, the fast lane if you wish, to settle in what they had always regarded as their original motherland.

By all accounts they made ideal immigrants. Brilliant, educated, they were skilled workers or professionals. They could already speak Italian because they had learned it at home from their parents or grandparents. What’s more, they didn’t just “know” Italian culture, they belonged to it. Italians — in one variant or another — constitute a sizable portion of the Argentinean population.

Since one of Italy’s problems is an ageing, dwindling population, you’d think our politicians would have jumped at the occasion to bring in loads of energetic, enthusiastic people whose dearest wish was to be reunited to the country they loved. These “immigrants” would have adjusted easily; there would not have been the usual problems encountered in moving to a foreign country: the Argentinean-Italians would have been eager to assimilate. In fact it wasn’t even a question of integration or assimilation. These South Americans of Italian extraction just wanted to come home.

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Britons are more suspicious of Muslims than Americans and other Europeans, according to a poll for the Financial Times.

Only 59 per cent of Britons thought it possible to be both a Muslim and a citizen of their country, a smaller proportion than in France, Germany, Spain, Italy or the US - the other countries polled by Harris Interactive.

British citizens were also the most likely to predict a “major terrorist attack” in their country in the next 12 months; consider Muslims “a threat to national security”, and believe Muslims had too much political power in their country.

However, on more personal measures of integration - having Muslim friends and accepting the marriage of their child to a Muslim - Britons showed more enthusiasm than some other countries.

The findings suggest that terrorist plots against the UK, including the London bombings of July 7 2005, have hardened British attitudes towards Muslims. Osama Saeed of the Muslim Association of Britain blamed the findings on what he called “a vicious campaign” by the press against the Muslim community.

Most British respondents -52 per cent - expected a “major terrorist attack” in their country within a year. Even in Spain where the Basque extremist group Eta has recently abandoned a ceasefire, only 32 per cent predicted a big attack. The numbers fell to 30 per cent in the US and 15-18 per cent in France, Italy and Germany.

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I now have a copy of the letter John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt sent to the board of the Chicago Global Affairs Council after it cancelled their September appearance there under political pressure. The letter follows, below.

A couple of comments. This is a sad business. Two distinguished profs who have both spoken at the Council before are disinvited regretfully/squeamishly by a respected professional friend, and informed that they might only speak if someone else comes to counter their statements. The old “context” argument used against Rachel Corrie and everyone else. Your views are too toxic to be heard unless we “balance” them.

Walt and Mearsheimer point out that Michael Oren spoke at the Council earlier this year on Middle East matters without “context.” Oren is a neoconservative who made aliyah to Israel in the 70s and who served as an officer in the Israeli army. John Mearsheimer served as an officer in the United States Air Force. Let us be very clear about this: A former officer in the Israeli Army who lives in Israel (and has lately served in the Israeli Reserves) may hold forth about our policy in the Middle East, but a former officer in our Air Force has no place to do the same. You don’t have to be a nativist to find this mindboggling. Mearsheimer and Walt are all for Oren speaking, they just want to be able to speak too. And just compare the literary and analytical work of Oren and Mearsheimer; there is no comparison. Oren is a polemicist, Mearsheimer a serious student of American policy. Deeply dispiriting. Where is Alan Dershowitz, to decry the censorship?

I’m upset. I tell myself that this just shows how afraid the other side is of the truth, but face it, they’re winning. Last night my wife said at dinner that I am “paying a price” for my views on the Middle East. I have a long career as a journalist. I lost a blog-job earlier this year over these issues, I can’t get paying assignments to write about these matters; and they are all that I care about, as my country fumbles through the aftermath of 9/11 and Iraq. I sense some of that same sorrow in the Walt and Mearsheimer letter that follows. At the peaks of their careers, they have devoted themselves to these policy issues out of some sense of duty; and they’re not being allowed to speak. It appears from the letter that a friendship has ended: the authors’ with Marshall Bouton. How long before the country wakes up from this madness?

WASHINGTON — Seven weeks after the collapse of legislation in Congress, the outcry against illegal immigration is louder than ever, manifested by proposed clampdowns at the state and local level and an uproar over the arrest of an undocumented immigrant in the execution-style slayings of three New Jersey college students.

Scores of organizations, ranging from mainstream to fringe groups, are marshaling forces in what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich calls “a war here at home” against illegal immigration, which he says is as important as America’s conflicts being fought overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While most of the groups register legitimate, widespread concerns about the impact of illegal immigration on jobs, social services and national security, the intense rhetoric is generating fears of an emerging dark side, evident in growing discrimination against Hispanics and a surge of xenophobia unseen since the last big wave of immigration in the early 20th century.

“I don’t think there’s been a time like this in our lifetime,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute and former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “Even though immigration is always unsettling and somewhat controversial, we haven’t had this kind of intensity and widespread, deep-seated anger for almost 100 years.”

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Violent crime along the U.S.-Mexico border, which has long plagued the scrubby, often desolate stretch, is increasingly spilling northward into the cities of the American Southwest.

In Phoenix, deputies are working the unsolved case of 13 border crossers who were kidnapped and executed in the desert. In Dallas, nearly two dozen high school students have died in the last two years from overdoses of a $2-a-hit Mexican fad drug called “cheese heroin.”

The crime surge, most acute in Texas and Arizona, is fueled by a gritty drug war in Mexico that includes hostages being held in stash houses, daylight gun battles claiming innocent lives, and teenage hit men for the Mexican cartels. Shipments of narcotics and vans carrying illegal workers on U.S. highways are being hijacked by rival cartels fighting over the lucrative smuggling routes. Fires are being set in national forests to divert police.

In Laredo, Texas, a teenager who had been driving around the United States in a $70,000 luxury sedan confessed to becoming a Mexican cartel hitman when he was just 13. In Nogales, Ariz., an 82-year-old man was caught with 79 kilograms of cocaine in his Chevrolet Impala. The youth was sentenced to 40 years in prison in one slaying case and is awaiting trial in another; the old man received 10 years.

In Southern California, Border Patrol agents routinely encounter smugglers driving immigrant-laden cars who try to escape by driving the wrong way on busy freeways. And stash houses packed with dozens of illegal immigrants have been discovered in Los Angeles.

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Spanish-speaking students are flooding into an Illinois school district so fast that teachers who educate in English only are being involuntarily transferred, and they believe there will come a time when they no longer will have a job.

“I know what the trend is, and it’s not looking good,” Valerie Goranson told the Chicago Tribune. “Even if my job was saved this year, what about next year?”

She has twice lost a teaching assignment in the Waukegan district because she doesn’t speak Spanish, she said. Last year, after teaching 5th grade at North Elementary for six years, district officials moved her to Clark Elementary to make room for a Spanish-speaking teacher at North.

Now she says it’s happening again.

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The broadcaster’s last FM distribution partner in Russia, Bolshoye Radio, said it had been told to remove BBC content or risk being shut down.

Two other Russian FM stations have dropped BBC programming recently.

The BBC’s Russian Service can still be heard online and on medium and short wave frequencies in Russia.

BBC executives said they would appeal against the decision.

‘Propaganda’

“The BBC entered into the relationship with Bolshoye Radio in good faith,” said Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC Global News.

“We cannot understand how the licence is now interpreted in a way that does not reflect the original and thorough concept documents.”

He said the licensing agreement allowed for 18% of Bolshoye’s content to be foreign-produced.

Bolshoye Radio’s owners, financial group Finam, told the BBC that Russia’s media regulators required that all programming be produced by the station itself.

A spokesman for the company said management had made the decision without outside prompting and that it was well known that the BBC was set up to broadcast foreign propaganda.

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Last year, former Tory minister George Walden wrote a book about the future of life in Britain and why record numbers were emigrating. Taking the form of a letter from a father to his son, it provoked a massive, positive response from readers when it was serialised in the Daily Mail.

In the book, Guy and Catherine despaired at having to bring up their two children in an area that had been dramatically changed by mass immigration, where their children had become a minority in school and teachers struggled to deal with so many pupils who did not speak English.

The country - where 57 per cent of births in the capital are now to mothers who were born abroad - seemed to be failing them on multiple fronts, not just on education but also on security and health care.

Since then, the couple have given up the battle and moved abroad to Canada. And they are not alone in their decision. As Walden pointed out in the first serialisation, a total of 350,000 people left Britain in 2004 - equivalent to a third of the population of Birmingham.

Walden observes that despite all the changes mass immigration has brought in Britain, there remains a conspiracy of silence that has stifled debate on one of the most important issues of our age.

Now, in this thought-provoking followup, Walden examines Guy and Catherine’s new quality of life, using it as a mirror to reflect the dreadful state of Britain today.

Walden, who served as higher education minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, has been married to Sarah for 38 years and they have three grown-up children. The son to whom his letters are addressed is fictional, but the incidents affecting him and his wife are based on fact.

Dear Son,

It’s getting on for ten months now since you and Catherine left for a new life in Canada. And we didn’t get the impression, when we came to see you, that you’ve regretted your decision for a moment.

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