Rachel Silverthorne's Ride (1938), mural
by John W. Beauchamp at Muncy Post Office. Government-funded art used to
promote love of family, community, and nation.
In my last post I discussed
the uncoupling of gene-culture coevolution in the Western world. We are no
longer co-evolving genetically with an environment where kinship matters less
and less and where the market economy has become the main way we process social
and economic transactions. Meanwhile, this cultural environment has continued
to evolve on its own ... and at an ever-faster rate.
A lot of cultural change has
happened since that uncoupling in the late nineteenth century. The extended
family is gone—few young people have significant relationships with their
cousins or grandparents … if only because most of the latter are already dead
because of longer generation times. As for the nation-state, kinship no longer
plays even a symbolic role—your "nation" is where you currently
reside. Only the nuclear family remains as a kin group, and that last holdout
is crumbling. A growing proportion of the population lives alone, and the
families that do exist are increasingly "blended" or single-parent.
This liquidation of kinship is
driven by the expansion of the market economy and its accompanying ideology of
liberalism. This ideology allows some differences of opinion: Right-liberals
wish to let kinship self-liquidate and wither away on its own, whereas
Left-liberals want to use the State to accelerate the process. Both agree,
however, on the end game. Once kinship has been reduced to a vestigial role,
individual freedom will be maximized, and we will be able to do the most with
what we have in a global marketplace.
So why worry? There may be
bumps and potholes on the road to a better world, but we'll all be better off
in the end. So let's stay the course and ignore the purveyors of doom and
gloom. Such is the thinking that prevails among our elites.
I see fewer grounds for
optimism:
Psychological mismatch
We are creating conditions of
extreme social atomization that have never existed before and for which we are
psychologically ill prepared. It's true that northwest Europeans have a long
history of individualism, and this is largely why our ancestors were able to
create free societies where the market economy replaces kinship networks as the
main way for people to relate to each other. Nonetheless, we’ve freed ourselves
from ties of kith and kin to a degree that would surprise even our recent
ancestors, with no accompanying changes to our psychological makeup.
Some consequences are already
visible: after decades of uninterrupted increase among white Americans, life
expectancy is falling because of suicide and opioid abuse among the growing numbers
of men who live alone. Those people are like canaries in a coal mine.
To make matters worse, we are
exporting this societal model to the rest of the world. The psychological
consequences will be much worse there, as can be seen with immigrants to the
West. Typically, the first generation has low levels of dysfunction; the
problems arise mostly in the second and third generations.
You may ask: how can that be
when the latter are more acculturated? To ask the question is to answer it.
Non-Western societies keep people in line through multiple social, cultural,
and ideological restraints. Migration to the West dissolves those restraints in
an acid bath of personal freedom. The first generation will be OK, but the
succeeding generations will have a serious mismatch between their genotype and
our phenotype of extreme individualism. Some of them will become a caricature
of Western dysfunction. Others will try to recreate the restrictive environment
of their ancestors.
Decline of the bourgeois mindset
The market economy requires a
certain psychological makeup. It will not, for instance, self-generate in a
low-trust society where people are fixated on the present and prefer to settle
personal disputes through violence. In that context, the market mechanism will
be confined in space and time to marketplaces. It will not spread throughout
society to encompass most of the transactions that people carry on with each
other (Frost 2018).
This was the case for most of
history and prehistory. It's not that people didn't understand markets. They
did. It's just that they preferred to get most of what they wanted on their own
or through people they could trust in their kinship network. Conditions were
not in place for the market mechanism to break out of this straitjacket and
create a true market economy.
It's no coincidence that this
breakout happened in northwest Europe, where kinship networks were already
relatively weak, where most adults remained single into their mid to late
twenties, and where many never married. Once the market economy took off, people
exploited its possibilities by pushing their envelope of phenotypic plasticity—by
living, thinking, and behaving in new ways. Then, through selection over
succeeding generations, the mean genotype followed this evolving phenotype,
thus allowing people to keep pushing the envelope farther and farther.
In sum, this market-driven
environment favored the survival and reproduction of people with a certain psychological
makeup. Such people were more future-oriented, less willing to settle personal
disputes with violence, and better able to process numerical and textual data. In other words, this was the bourgeois mindset of thrift, self-control, foresight, numeracy,
and literacy (Clark 2007; Clark 2009; Frost 2011; Frost 2017; Frost and
Harpending 2015; hbd*chick 2014; Rindermann 2018, pp. 86-87).
Cultural decline
This mindset has helped the
market economy to work better, but there is no reason to think that the latter
will return the favor. This was pointed out by Daniel Bell in his work The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976).
In it, he argued that the market economy encourages consumerism and desires for
immediate fulfilment, thus eroding the values of thrift and delayed
gratification that originally made it possible. Furthermore, since personal
desires cannot be satisfied without effort, and since people vary in their
ability to make the necessary effort, there will be growing pressure on the
State to step in and satisfy those desires for everyone. The culture itself
will become narcissistic.
These negative effects were
being noticed by the late nineteenth century, notably in Catholic
encyclicals. In Rerum novarum (1891),
the church stated that employers must see the worker "as a person ennobled
by Christian character" and ensure that he "be not exposed to
corrupting influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away to
neglect his home and family, or to squander his earnings."
In the United States, the
Progressive Era of the 1890s to the 1920s reflected this same mistrust of the
free market and individualism. Many movements for community or national
improvement began in that era, particularly those for temperance, social
hygiene, immigration control, nature conservation, urban beautification, and so
on.
Genetic decline
Alongside this cultural
decline, the bourgeois mindset also seems to have suffered genetic decline.
There is growing evidence that people in Western countries are losing the
gene-based improvements their ancestors had gained in cognitive capacity and other
mental traits.
The strongest evidence for
this regressive evolution is seen in an Icelandic study that shows a steady
decline since the early twentieth century in alleles associated with high
educational attainment (Kong et al. 2017). Only a fraction of such alleles have
been identified to date, but it is disturbing that the ones we have identified
are being replaced by alleles associated with low educational attainment. There
is also evidence that mean reaction time has increased since the Victorian era
(Madison 2014; Madison et al. 2016; Woodley et al. 2013). Finally, the Flynn
effect is leveling off and even reversing in some Western countries (Rindermann
2018, p. 88). The Flynn effect is itself illusory, being due mostly to
increasing familiarity with test taking. With peak familiarity the genetic
decline is now becoming visible.
At first, this decline was driven by a reversal of class differences in natural increase.
Previously, the lower classes had failed to reproduce themselves and had steadily
absorbed downwardly mobile members of the middle class, which at that time was
much more reproductively successful (Clark 2007). In the late nineteenth
century this situation reversed. The middle class had fewer children because
they wished to pursue higher education and pay for the trappings of an affluent
lifestyle. Meanwhile, working people were better able to settle down, marry,
and have children. This was largely because industrialists began to recognize
they had a vested interest in creating stable communities for their workers.
Two English companies, Cadbury's and Lever Brothers, showed the way by
providing their employees with housing, medical care, and recreational
activities. Other companies followed suit, and this industrial paternalism
became a model for the welfare state (Wikipedia 2019a)
These class differences in
natural increase would eventually narrow, particularly after the Second World
War. All classes participated in the postwar economic boom and baby boom, with fertility
rising among middle-class couples. This leveling of class differences was
further aided by greater access to contraception for people of all backgrounds.
Since the 1970s the IQ decline
seems to be driven much more by decomposition of the nuclear family:
proportionately more births are to single mothers who tend to have children by
sexy men who are less intelligent and more prone to violence (see previous
post).
The Indian summer of the mid-twentieth century
This cultural and genetic
decline leveled off during the mid-twentieth century. On both the right and the
left, people had become convinced that the market economy was fouling its nest
through impulse buying, needless consumer debt, and erosion of community
values. In response, a new societal model came into being.
That model took shape during
the last great depression and lasted until the 1960s. Called the "New
Deal" in the U.S., it was characterized by low immigration, particularly
of unskilled, low-wage labor, by high unionization, by corporate paternalism
(employee benefits, recreational activities for workers, etc.), and by the
welfare state (pensions, health care, unemployment insurance). It was also
characterized by propaganda to promote the family, the community, and the
nation. Although this societal model is now branded as "fascist" it
was present to some degree in all advanced societies, including America under
Roosevelt and the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Indeed, Roosevelt's America
was a lot less liberal than we like to think. The Hays Code, introduced in 1930
and strengthened in 1934, imposed strict moral guidelines on movie making.
Meanwhile, Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor in the Roosevelt
administration, brought in policies to encourage marriage, larger families, and
population growth:
Maternalists would use the New Deal to reward the domestic woman and discourage the working mother. They expanded and nationalized existing state programs that protected mothers and created "new ones to deliver social benefits to the wives and widows of wage-earning men." They "prescribed domesticity to unemployed women in vocational programs that trained [them] for housekeeping and parenting," and they urged "counseling services for mothers tempted to work outside the home." Linking truancy, incorrigibility, and emotional disorders among children to a "mother's absence at her job," the Maternalists mounted campaigns to bring working mothers home. (Carlson 2002)
Under the New Deal, support was also given to artwork that promoted love of family, community, and nation. This was particularly so with "regionalist” artists like Thomas Hart Benton, Thomas Craven, and many others (Baigell 1974).
End of the New Deal and beginnings of globalization
The baby boom ended in the
1960s and the economic boom a decade later. To some degree both were victims of
their success. As incomes doubled, and as unemployment remained low, people
could more easily do as they liked. Many postponed marriage, either to pursue
postsecondary education or simply to enjoy the pleasures of the new affluence. Sexual experimentation became widespread. Again, this was made easier by the
success of postwar society, particularly in reducing STDs to a low level and in
creating a safety net that could cope with broken homes and parentless
children. Negative effects were less serious back then than they would be
later.
Meanwhile, the West opened up
to globalization. This began in the late 1960s with outsourcing of textile
production and some manufacturing to low-wage economies, initially the eastern
fringe of Asia (Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea) and later, in the 1980s,
the People's Republic of China, Mexico, and Bangladesh. Outsourcing soon spread
through most of manufacturing and even
high-tech.
This period also saw a steady
rise in the number of immigrants, principally from low-wage countries. The U.S
alone went from taking in just under 300,000 a year in 1965 to over a million a
year by 1990. Illegal immigrants also arrived in growing numbers, their
estimated population in the U.S. now ranging from a low of 11 million to a high
of 29 million (Fazel-Zarandi et al. 2018). Immigration to the United Kingdom
has similarly surged from around 200,000 a year in the 1970s and 1980s to
around 600,000 in the 2000s (Wikipedia 2019b). Most Western countries have
followed suit, including many that had previously not received immigrants on a
large scale.
Jobs have thus been outsourced
to countries where labor is cheaper. Conversely, cheap labor has been insourced
for jobs that, by their very nature, cannot be sent abroad, i.e., in
construction, agriculture, and services. This two-way movement benefits
business at the expense of workers. It is one of the reasons, if not the main
reason, why more and more wealth is accruing to the top 1% (Roser and
Ortiz-Ospina 2016). It is also the reason why workers in the West are getting
poorer: median wages have stagnated since the 1970s and have probably fallen if
we adjust for the decline in employee benefits and the decline in unpaid childcare
by mothers and grandparents (Mishel et al. 2015; Semuels 2013).
The old working class also has
to bear the cost of longer commutes as it gets pushed farther and farther into
the exurbs by the rising cost of housing and by the new class of low-wage immigrants.
The latter now dominate the suburbs and provide the gentry of the inner city
with cheap services (daycare, food services, laundry and dry cleaning,
landscaping, etc.). A new social
geography is being created, with high-income people in the inner city,
immigrants in the suburbs, and the old working class relegated to the exurbs.
This pattern is key to
understanding the gilets jaunes in
France. Why are they so upset over a fuel tax? A big reason is the long
commutes that French working people now have to make.
[...] employment and wealth have become more and more concentrated in the big cities. The deindustrialised regions, rural areas, small and medium-size towns are less and less dynamic. But it is in these places — in "peripheral France" (one could also talk of peripheral America or peripheral Britain) — that many working-class people live. Thus, for the first time, "workers" no longer live in areas where employment is created, giving rise to a social and cultural shock.
[...] This confinement is not only geographical but also intellectual. The globalised metropolises are the new citadels of the 21st century — rich and unequal, where even the former lower-middle class no longer has a place. Instead, large global cities work on a dual dynamic: gentrification and immigration. This is the paradox: the open society results in a world increasingly closed to the majority of working people.
The economic divide between peripheral France and the metropolises illustrates the separation of an elite and its popular hinterland. Western elites have gradually forgotten a people they no longer see. (Guilluy 2018; also see Caldwell 2017)
Why not build housing for them near the big cities? Well, such housing was built. It's now inhabited overwhelmingly by immigrants who provide the inner-city gentry with cheap services:
After the mid-twentieth century, the French state built a vast stock—about 5 million units—of public housing, which now accounts for a sixth of the country's households. Much of it is hideous-looking, but it's all more or less affordable. Its purpose has changed, however. It is now used primarily for billeting not native French workers, as once was the case, but immigrants and their descendants, millions of whom arrived from North Africa starting in the 1960s, with yet another wave of newcomers from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East arriving today.
[...] As a new bourgeoisie has taken over the private housing stock, poor foreigners have taken over the public—which thus serves the metropolitan rich as a kind of taxpayer-subsidized servants' quarters. Public-housing inhabitants are almost never ethnically French; the prevailing culture there nowadays is often heavily, intimidatingly Muslim. (Caldwell 2017)
Conclusion
We need to stop viewing the
market economy as a self-correcting mechanism that works best if left alone.
That view is best reserved for things that have proven themselves over the long
term. That is not the case here. For most of history and prehistory we had
markets but not a true market economy. It has only been over the past thousand
years that this economic system gradually came into being among northwest
Europeans and in the societies they founded. Its current globalized form is
less than a half-century old.
Ironically, free market
proponents often look back with nostalgia to the United States of the 1950s—a
time of high tariffs, low immigration, high corporate taxation, and high
unionization, not to mention the Hays Code and countless other restrictions on
entertainment. The current system is actually much closer to the free market
ideal.
Is this system sustainable? It
is … for some people. As is often the case, the system is most sustainable for
those who benefit the most and who have the power to prevent change. For them,
life is great and couldn’t be better, at least for now.
The system is less sustainable
for the remnants of the old working class. For them, the outlook is especially
bleak. They are caught between the anvil of stagnant wages and the hammer of rising
costs—in part to support the growing population of net tax consumers and in
part to insulate themselves from the latter … and an increasingly dysfunctional
social environment.
In the end, however, the
current system is not sustainable. The problem isn’t just that globalization
will level the wages of Western working people down to the global average. In
that scenario, the system could be sustainable. Indeed, the new gentry would
have the best of both: a nice first-world lifestyle and cheap third-world
labor. The world, as a whole, would be wealthier, even though people in the
West would, on average, be poorer. And the top 1% would probably be richer than
they are today.
That scenario ignores one
thing, however. The market economy, and its power to create so much wealth,
came into being because of certain cultural, psychological and, yes, genetic
characteristics. Those characteristics are not distributed uniformly around the
world. In fact, for a long time they didn’t even exist. They gradually evolved
and came together in certain human groups, particularly in northwest Europeans.
Yes, there were similar
evolutionary processes in other human groups, notably East Asians, Ashkenazi
Jews, Parsees, and so on. But those groups, too, will form a diminishing
proportion of the world’s population. The cultural, psychological, and genetic
basis for the market economy will therefore regress as time goes on.
The most likely scenario is
that the market economy will likewise regress. We will return to a low-trust
world of spatially localized markets with no market economy, at least not one
that will self-generate without coercion. We will all be poorer.
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