Robert Heinlein and the basic theorem of population mechanics.

It’s been a project of mine, over the last few months, to catch up on some of Robert Heinlein’s less-famous books that I never got around to reading as a youthful sci-fi fan. That’s how I happened to be reading his 1950 novel Farmer in the Sky on the same day that I saw this Jordan Weissmann article on the Atlantic website about solving America’s demographics problem.

The problem is that the fertility rate in the United States has recently fallen below replacement level. That level in developed countries is around 2.1 children per woman – one baby to replace the mother, one to replace the father, and an extra fraction of a baby to cover accidental deaths. Below that level, barring immigration, a population will gradually contract. The problem isn’t contracting population per se. It’s that as fewer children are born, the ratio of working adults to non-working senior citizens tips toward the latter. With fewer workers, the economy can’t produce enough wealth to support its growing complement of seniors in the state of comfortable retirement they’ve come to expect.

Weissmann’s solution is straightforward – America just needs to bring in more immigrants. He needles the New York Times‘ Ross Douthat for his recent musings on the fertility problem which declined to endorse the open-borders approach Weissmann favours.

If America wants to stay productive, it’s hard to see how it (and other developed countries in the same demographic boat, like Canada) can avoid taking in more newcomers. As Weissmann argues, in the short run it’s probably necessary. But in the long run, reversing demographic decline isn’t a simple matter of slapping a welcome mat by the abandoned border checkpoints. First off, the decline isn’t limited to the developed world. The United States, Canada, and Western Europe are joined on the vanishing side of the 2.1 cutoff line by traditional people-exporters like China, Vietnam, and Iran. India’s fertility rate is 2.58 and falling fast – that’s about what the U.S. rate was in the 1960s. Mexico’s is down to 2.27.

In the past these countries were happy to watch their surplus population drained off via emigration to the West. If current trends continue, it won’t be long before they feel the demographic crunch too. They’ll begin offering incentives to keep their brightest and most ambitious young people at home. America will be obliged to compete against other rich countries, most of them in much direr demographic straits, for a shrinking pool of potential immigrants.

The West will have no difficulty recruiting newcomers, not anytime soon. But these newcomers will be harder to assimilate than ever before. If we want to bring them in sufficient numbers to counter demographic trends, there will simply have to be more of them than we’re used to – a larger lump dropped in the melting pot all at once. And the composition of the lump will resist mixing. Up till now we could take our pick of striving geniuses stifled by a lack of opportunity in their crowded home countries. Increasingly we’ll have to hustle for a share of the dissatisfied B-students whose countries couldn’t be bothered to make an effort to retain them. The easiest to recruit will be those from the poorest, most chaotic, and most fecund countries. They’ll be less literate, slower to pick up the language, more alien to the existing culture than previous immigrants. Being generally ill-educated, they’ll compete for jobs with the poorest slice of the native-born population, driving down the cost of unskilled labour and exacerbating income inequality.

Eventually, most likely, the West will absorb and be fortified by the immigrant wave, as it has previous waves. But it’s not such a cost-free operation as Weissmann implies. And once fully assimilated, the newcomers will be just as apathetic about reproducing as the rest of us.

What does all this have to do with Robert Heinlein? Here’s Paul du Maurier, an incidental character in Farmer in the Sky, discussing population projections with a fellow colonist on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. They’re debating how many ex-Earthlings their growing colony can accommodate:

“Studied any bionomics, Bill?”
“Some.”
“Mathematical population bionomics?”
“Well – no.”
“But you do know that in the greatest wars the Earth ever had there were always more people after the war than before, no matter how many were killed. Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive. The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to the extent of the food supply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life – the ragged edge of starvation. In other words, if we bled off a hundred thousand people a day, the Earth’s population would then grow until the increase was around two hundred thousand a day, or the bionomical maximum for Earth’s new ecological dynamic.”

This lump of unleavened Malthusianism represents the best wisdom of the forward-thinkingest slice of the American intelligentsia circa 1950. In science-fiction from that era, unconstrained population growth is simply assumed. That was why all those intrepid space cadets blazed their trails to the stars in the first place – so that humanity’s teeming hordes could be deposited on the snowy plains of Ganymede, making room for more babies back home. It would never have crossed Heinlein’s mind that the Ganymede colony might have trouble attracting qualified geo-engineers because the aging home planet refused to let them emigrate.

I don’t read enough modern fiction to know if Heinlein’s successors are contemplating, as he did, the dystopian possibilities of current population trends. My sense is that the so-called demographic death-spiral has been relatively neglected, compared to the attention the population bomb got fifty years ago. I can think of a couple of recent-vintage sci-fi stories that are still built around population-bomb assumptions, but the only death-spiral story I know of is P.D. James’ allegorical The Children of Men, discussed in the article linked above. (I reviewed the entertaining but largely off-point film adaptation a few years back.)

Why has the death-spiral been neglected? For starters, many well-informed people seem oblivious to the direction the demographic arrow is now pointing. Secondarily, there’s an ideological bias at work. While death-spiralers are noticeably clustered on the political right, population-bombers tend to be on the left. Among the latter, there seems to be a widespread feeling that if we do dwindle away, hell, who’d miss us. Take this recent article in the New Yorker on the ethical implications of having children. Elizabeth Kolbert blandly quotes the philosopher David Benatar, who is untroubled by the prospect of human extinction:

“Humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth,” he writes. “The amount of suffering in the world could be radically reduced if there were no more” of us.

…But she’s openly skeptical of the economist Bryan Caplan’s suggestion that maybe having kids is, you know, a good thing:

“More people mean more ideas, the fuel of progress.” In a work that’s full of upbeat pronouncements, this is probably his most optimistic, or, if you prefer, outrageous claim.

Until recently that “outrageous claim” was held nearly universally. In a few rich countries it appears already to be the minority view. How much longer will it hold sway in the rest of the world?

The United Nations’ 2004 report World Population to 2300 projects the planet will peak at 9.22 billion people in 2075, then stabilize at around 9 billion. But that projection assumes fertility rates will do something weird:

[F]ertility will fall in all countries below replacement (in the medium scenario) and rebound to replacement after a period largely similar across countries of a century or so.

It’s obvious enough why the UN is projecting fertility rates to fall – that’s what they’re doing already, pretty much everywhere; the only question is whether they’ll plummet in the developing world to the depths they’ve reached in the rich countries. But what about the UN’s assumption that after a seemingly arbitrary period of “a century or so”, fertility will “rebound”? Is there any reason to suppose this will happen in the countries that have already fallen below replacement level?

Is it reasonable to expect fertility to rise from current levels? It is impossible to tell, but one can consider the implications if it does not. … By 2300 … [a]bout half the countries of Europe would lose 95 per cent or more of their population, and such countries as the Russian Federation and Italy would have only 1 per cent of their population left. Although one might entertain the possibility that fertility will never rise above current levels, the consequences appear sufficiently grotesque as to make this seem improbable.

As near as I can tell, this is the only explanation in the report for the assumption that in the long term, fertility rates will “rebound” to replacement level: It would be “grotesque” if they didn’t. Well, there you go.

The UN recognizes, and Farmer in the Sky demonstrates, that you can’t simply project current trendlines until they slope off the edge of the graph. Who knows, maybe there’s another baby boom right around the corner. Or maybe not. Robert Heinlein imagined that mankind was cursed with a biological imperative to overbreed, and that with a little gumption we would escape this curse by conquering the stars. But what if our imperative is nothing more than a polite suggestion, and our real curse is that, given the choice, few of us bother to heed it?

M.

–

I’ve been kvetching about this issue for years, most recently in a 2010 post about how the future will belong to fast-breeding religious conservatives.

Um, has anyone noticed this Muhammad video is hilarious?

The sadly unsurprising lunacy on display in the Middle East over the last couple days has cast a morbid shadow over the online artifact that supposedly triggered it all, Muhammad Movie Trailer.

That’s too bad, because if the video hadn’t gone viral in the course of triggering demonstrations, riots, and maybe the killing of the American ambassador to Libya, it deserves to go viral for being hilarious.

Muhammad Movie Trailer supposedly shows highlights from a feature film called Innocence of Muslims, which presents a silly and sensationalized account of Muhammad’s rise to power.

Germany’s Foreign Minister calls the trailer “unspeakable”. Hillary Clinton says it’s “disgusting and reprehensible”. Bloggers and journalists are examining it with the same solemn rigour they’d apply to documentary footage smuggled out of a war zone. I guess that’s their job; the trailer is news now, and it’s associated with some very grim events. But all this fake seriousness is counterproductive, because it reinforces the idea widespread in the Muslim world that the movie is something not to be giggled over.

But how can you not giggle? The makeup, the costumes, the special effects, the acting, and especially the script attain such heights of unbelievable badness, I’m half-expecting a sheepish announcement that the whole thing was actually the work of some alternative comedy troupe. In a more sensible world, we’d all be celebrating the emergence of a classic of found comedy – the Birdemic of religious satire.

I like to think Muslims would acknowledge its ridiculousness, too, if they simply allowed themselves to watch the stupid thing. Maybe once everyone over there is done breaking stuff – or rather, once they resume their customary posture of readiness-to-break-stuff-on-a-moment’s-notice – they’ll put aside their piety for a few minutes and we can all join together in mocking some of the most incompetent filmmaking ever seen.

But I’m not holding my breath.

***

It’s possible the trailer’s incompetence will actually make it more effective as anti-Islamic propaganda. I clicked to it out of curiosity, planning to watch just enough to get the gist, not expecting to actually sit through the entire 14-minute clip. But it was funny enough to hold my attention to the end.

Afterwards, curious to see how much this silliness really owed to the historical tradition, I flipped open my copy of H.G. Wells’ Outline Of History to the chapter on the life of Muhammad, and read the following:

Near Medina was a castle of Jews, against whom Muhammad was already incensed because of their disrespect for his theology. … Muhammad now fell upon them, slew all the men, nine hundred of them, and enslaved the women and children.
…
Nor was his domestic life … one of exceptional edification. Until the death of [his first wife] Kadija, when he was fifty, he seems to have been the honest husband of one wife, but then, as many men do in their declining years, he developed a disagreeably strong interest in women.
…
This led to much trouble and confusion, and in spite of many special and very helpful revelations on the part of Allah, these complications still require much explanation and argument from the faithful.
…
One of his wives was a Jewess, Safiyya, whom he had married on the evening of the battle in which her husband had been captured and executed. He viewed the captured women at the end of the day, and she found favour in his eyes and was taken to his tent.
…
These are salient facts in these last eleven years of Muhammad’s career. Because he, too, founded a great religion, there are those who write of this evidently lustful and rather shifty leader as though he were a man to put beside Jesus of Nazareth or Gautama, or Mani. But it is surely manifest that he was a being of commoner clay …

This critique, which sticks to the acknowledged facts of the prophet’s life, is a lot more damaging than Muhammad Movie Trailer, with its bedroom antics and goat innuendos. Wells goes on to say that in spite of all the above, Islam is in his view a pretty good religion, one which

created a society more free from widespread cruelty and social oppression than any society had ever been in the world before.

One of the precepts of Islam in its currently ascendant fundamentalist form is that, in order to prevent idolatry, the human form must never be depicted. This taboo is particularly acute in the case of Muhammad, who was not a god or supernatural being, Muslims emphasize, but only a man. The antique term “Mahomedans” they reject because it implies they worship Muhammad.

But the violent obsession with defending Muhammad’s honour, on display yet again these last few days, is more idolatrous than merely setting up a shrine could ever be. It’s possible, in fact it’s essential, to separate Muhammad, the sometimes horny, sometimes vengeful human being, from Islam, the faith that he created. That faith ought to be strong enough for its adherents to shrug off petty insults to their prophet. Sometimes I suspect these dauntless defenders of Islam of being mere Mahomedans after all.

M.

–

In March 2005 I wrote a lengthier post on Wells’ Outline of History.

Noise pollution and negative externalities.

On a train journey across Austria this spring, seated in the “quiet car”, I found myself across from what I can only describe as the world’s gayest Chinese boy. Dressed in pink capris, with shiny waxed legs, he occupied a four-seater with his mother and sister and began unwinding an endless soliloquy in high-pitched Mandarin. His family sat nodding and smiling in an encouraging way as he piped his spiel throughout the carriage. After a few minutes I moved a few seats away, but his sing-songing voice continued to irritate me. I put in earplugs but they still didn’t muffle him. Finally I removed myself to the far end of the carriage where, with earplugs in, his chatter was muted enough that I could almost forget he was there.

It got me thinking about negative externalities. That’s the name economists have given to the costs of activities that are borne not by the people engaging in them, but by innocent bystanders.

The classic example is pollution. A guy builds a factory that pumps acrid smoke into the air. He enjoys the profits from the factory, but the costs of living with the pollution are borne by the people living downwind.

Another example occurred in the years running up to the 2008 financial meltdown, in which investment bankers trading in risky and poorly-understood securities enjoyed huge profits, while the costs of the resulting economic crisis were borne by taxpayers.

The thing about these kinds of negative externalities – pollution and financial risk – is that they are not entirely external. They’re shared, at least to some degree, by the people who generate them. Those people are therefore sensitive to suasion by moral or governmental authority.

The guy with the factory might not care about the people downwind from him, but he’s not enthusiastic about toxic clouds per se. They’re an unfortunate side effect of the profit he seeks. He might be convinced to sacrifice a part of his profit in order to create a cleaner atmosphere which he and his family can breathe along with everyone else.

Nor is the banker with his profitable but risky securities keen on destabilizing the whole economy. He doesn’t want vagrants throwing rocks at his BMW as he drives to work through streets lined with derelict shops. Nor does he desire the higher taxes that must eventually be implemented to pay for the bank bailouts his actions necessitated. He might be convinced to give up some profit now in order that in the future he and his children can walk the streets without fear of being mugged.

But then there’s the negative externality of noise pollution, as exemplified by that Chinese kid on the train.

The thing about noisy people is that they don’t regard noise as an unpleasant but unavoidable side effect of doing something else they enjoy. The noise is what they enjoy. They’re not just unsympathetic to the argument that their noise makes bystanders unhappy, but uncomprehending. To them it seems paradoxical. If the sound of my chattering voice is so pleasant to me, that Chinese boy would argue, how can it be unpleasant to everyone else?

If the sound of my motorcycle engine echoing down a city street gives me such a thrill, thinks the biker, mustn’t it give a similar thrill to that lady sipping tea on her balcony?

If the sound of my shrieking children fills my breast with maternal contentment, thinks the mother, mustn’t it have an equivalently heartwarming effect on everyone else in the restaurant?

If the sound of Blink 182′s Greatest Hits help me to concentrate on my homework, thinks the college student, mustn’t my stereo’s muffled reverberations be just as soothing to the folks in the apartment downstairs?

We can’t suggest, “Let’s all enjoy the silence together,” because silence is not something they would enjoy.

In the absence of arguments that appeal to their sense of rational self-interest, our only options are to wheedle or threaten the noisemakers. Naturally they’re resentful, and ignore or flout the rules whenever they can.

It’s therefore not surprising that in the last hundred years, while we’ve enjoyed considerable success at reducing pollution, and moderate success at regulating finance, the world has gotten noisier and noisier. I see no prospect of reversing the trend. As so often happens, the loudest voice wins.

M.

So did the Red Army really singlehandedly defeat the Third Reich?

This bugs me. It’s Geoffrey Wheatcroft writing in The National Interest:

The idea that the United States was the savior of Europe in World Wars I and II is popular in some circles on both sides of the Atlantic, but is demonstrably false. Between the formal entry of the United States into the Great War in April 1917 and the last German offensive in March 1918, hundreds of thousands of Entente soldiers were killed, mainly British in the summer and autumn of 1917 after the frightful slaughter of the French army in the spring; and in that period of nearly a year, fewer than two hundred Americans died. In the course of that war, the Frenchmen killed defending their country were twice as numerous as all the Americans who have died in every foreign war taken together from 1776 until today. As a matter of historical fact, the Third Reich was defeated by the Red Army and not by the Western democracies. Even though over one hundred thirty-five thousand American GIs died – a startling figure today – between D day and V-E day, more than half a million Russians were killed.

If Wheatcroft had expressed his point less categorically – if he’d written that the Third Reich was defeated primarily by the Red Army – I wouldn’t have blinked. I’ve read this before; I thought it was the conventional wisdom. But seeing it described as “a matter of historical fact” made me pause. How do we measure the “historical fact” of the Allies’ relative contributions to the victory over Nazism? [1]

According to Wheatcroft, it’s measured by counting the number of casualties each country suffered. The Soviets lost more soldiers than the Americans; therefore the Soviets deserve the larger share of the victory.

Strange, I would’ve thought the measure of military success was the number of enemy soldiers you killed.

It’s true that the Soviet Union sacrificed more to defeat Hitler than any other country. But much of that sacrifice was wasted. Millions of Soviets died through the incompetence and brutality of their own political masters. It was Stalin’s blindness to Hitler’s pre-invasion manoeuvres that allowed the Germans to occupy Russia’s industrial heartland at a stroke. Only then, with reluctance, did Stalin shift his attention from killing his own citizens to killing Germans. His tactics, if they can be dignified with that name, involved throwing masses of underequipped men virtually under the treads of invading panzers. To retreat was a crime against the motherland: in 1941 and ’42, according to the historian Dmitri Volkogonov, 157,593 men were executed for “cowardice”. [2]

(How many Americans were executed for desertion in World War II? One: Eddie Slovik. Were the Americans that much braver than their Soviet allies? Of course not – thousands in fact deserted – but the US Army was more prudent in its valuation of a soldier’s life.)

This doesn’t diminish the Soviets’ contribution to the war effort, which was vast and decisive. In fact it’s even more marvelous what they accomplished, given the handicaps imposed by their leaders. Without the Soviet contribution, the western democracies probably couldn’t have defeated Hitler’s armies on their own. But could the Soviets, fighting on their own, have defeated Hitler – say, if the democracies had capitulated after the fall of France?

***

Perhaps a better way to compare the effectiveness of the western and eastern armies is not to compare Allied deaths but to compare German deaths. Estimates vary widely, but since I’m looking for a ratio rather than a total, one source will do as well as another. For military deaths only:

Killed by Soviet Union	Killed by other Allies [3]
2,742,909	534,683

This limited comparison (which excludes casualties among Italian and other Axis forces, as well as Germans killed in the Balkans, Scandinavia, and Germany itself [4]) suggests that the Red Army was roughly 5.5 times as lethal as the other Allied forces combined. This is a somewhat more convincing argument for Wheatcroft’s claim that “the Third Reich was defeated by the Red Army and not by the Western democracies”.

However. At the end of the war, the Allied democracies held over twice as many German prisoners of war as the Soviets – 7.7 millions versus 3.1 million, according to this chart.  This makes sense, because the war in the east was far more brutal. Soviet soldiers were likelier to execute prisoners, and German soldiers were likelier to fight to the bitter end, knowing their chance of surviving Soviet captivity was slim. At the close of the war, as defeat became inevitable, German strategy was based partly on the recognition that their countrymen would be better off surrendering to the Americans or Brits.

Still, conceding that a POW has been removed from combat just as effectively as a KIA, let’s reevaluate those figures:

Killed or captured by Soviet Union	Killed or captured by other Allies
5,870,289	8,201,683

By this calculation, the Allied democracies were almost one and a half times as effective at neutralizing German soldiers as their Red Army counterparts.

But those POW figures are distorted by the fact that at the end of the war, most German military units surrendered to whichever occupying power they happened to find themselves facing. Maybe a still better way to compare Soviet and Anglo-American military effectiveness would be to add up casualties and POWs taken in action.

This page offers some insight. I’ve combined the data from Tables 5 and 6:

	Killed in action	Missing	KIA + missing
Eastern front:	1,105,987	1,018,365	2,124,352
West + southwest:	157,523	603,695	761,488

(These data omit the final months of the war, and also exclude Navy and Air Force deaths.) Note that on Germany’s eastern front the number of confirmed deaths slightly exceeds the number of missing, while in the west and southwest (i.e. western Europe, Italy, and Africa) the number of missing is almost four times the number of confirmed deaths. I interpret this to mean that the bulk of the missing in the west and southwest were taken prisoner. [5]

If that’s true, then about 26% of German ground troops were removed from action, one way or another, by the democratic Allies. Throw in naval and air casualties, most of which were sustained in western Europe and the Mediterranean, and you’ve got the western democracies responsible for perhaps 30% of German manpower losses through the end of January, 1945 – which doesn’t include the final push into Germany.

***

Of course, this is only one way to compare the wartime contributions of the Soviet Union and western Europe, and I recognize that it’s incomplete. Another way of looking at it would be to say, “Regardless of how many German soldiers the Soviets killed or captured, they tied up the bulk of the Third Reich’s military capacity.” It’s no great achievement to take a German bullet, but that’s one less bullet the Germans have to fire elsewhere. The Red Army held off the Germans at the critical point in the war, allowing the Americans and Brits to get organized and open up a second front.

To admit that the Nazis were defeated by the efforts of all the Allies doesn’t take anything away from the sacrifices of the Soviet Union in its Great Patriotic War. Millions of Russians died so that millions of Americans didn’t have to. But the suggestion that the United States was somehow an idle bystander in the conflict is nonsensical and offensive. [6]

Am I being too hard on Geoffrey Wheatcroft? He’s only trying to debunk the myth that American GIs dealt Nazism its greatest blow on the cliffs of Omaha Beach. The specific comment that he’s responding to comes from Pascal Bruckner in his book The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. Bruckner writes (as quoted by Wheatcroft) that

without American help in 1917, and especially in 1944, [Europe] would have been purely and simply wiped off the map [...]

Obviously Bruckner is being hyperbolical here – even a Nazi-dominated Europe would still have been Europe, “purely and simply” in the geographical sense. But Bruckner doesn’t attribute the entire victory to the Americans, he only says their help staved off certain defeat. I think this is a less disputable position than the one Wheatcroft is advancing as “a matter of historical fact”.

What’s more, a peek at the original text (courtesy of Google Books) reveals that Wheatcroft is leaving a crucial clause out of Bruckner’s argument. Here’s the sentence in full (emphasis is mine):

Europe suffers, with respect to its American cousin, from the debtor’s complex. It is clearly understood, at least in Western Europe, that without American help in 1917, and especially in 1944, it would have been purely and simply wiped off the map or permanently colonized by Soviet troops.

Bruckner’s untruncated point is that a western Europe left to shift for itself in the 1940s would have been screwed either way – if not screwed by Hitler, then screwed by Stalin, like Poland and Czechoslovakia and all the other countries “liberated” by the Red Army. The presence of three and a half million American servicemen and women (and billions of dollars of aid) helped assure the survival of European freedom, in its western half at least.

It bugs me that this truth bugs Geoffrey Wheatcroft so much.

M.

–

1. I’m not going to analyze Wheatcroft’s comments about World War I, because I know less about that conflict, but I suspect he’s on firmer ground there.

2 This and other details of Stalin’s ghastly war leadership can be found in Martin Amis’ Koba The Dread (pp. 195-212). See also Part I, Chapter 6 of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

3. “Killed by other Allies” includes all German deaths in France, the Low Countries, Italy, and Africa, plus those killed in the Battle of the Atlantic. “Killed by Soviets” includes figures from the eastern front only. I’ve excluded deaths in the Balkans and Scandinavia as they don’t fall neatly into either column, and anyway the numbers aren’t big enough to significantly skew the totals.

4. This is a big caveat. According to the same chart, 1,230,045 German soldiers died in the defense of their homeland in 1945. Assuming they died in the same ratio as those killed in the wider war – about 5.5 killed by Soviets for every 1 killed by the other Allies – then the totals look something like this:

Killed by Soviet Union	Killed by other Allies
3,772,297	735,340

Killed or captured by Soviet Union	Killed or captured by other Allies
6,899,677	8,402,340

5. It’s possible I’m misinterpreting these figures. If you can think of another explanation for the far higher rate of “missing” troops in the western and southwestern theatres, please let me know.

6. I’ve left out of this discussion the armaments, food, and other assistance supplied to the Allies by the United States under the lend-lease program. I can’t find a webpage that discusses in any but the vaguest terms what percentage of Soviet, British, and other Allied war materiel was provided by the USA. This page – the third chapter of a pamphlet called How Shall Lend-Lease Accounts Be Settled? published by the US Army in 1945 – provides an overview of lend-lease, then adds:

This does not mean that our major allies – except for the revived French army which was almost completely equipped under lend-lease – were mainly dependent on American supplies. It has been estimated that lend-lease provided only 10 percent of British war equipment, and certainly a lesser proportion of Soviet materiel.

But in 1945, for domestic political reasons, the US government had reason to downplay how much the Soviet Union’s military capabilities had been augmented by its support. According to this page, the United States provided $11 billion worth of supplies to the Soviet war effort, in the form of locomotives, tanks, aircraft, trucks, and artillery, amounting to “almost 10% of all Russian war materiel.”

Flemings and Quebeckers, united in resentment.

So I’m sure your workplace has been buzzing with the news that the New Flemish Alliance won the most seats in the Belgian election this weekend. No? Anyway, the New Flemish Alliance is dedicated to breaking Belgium into its constituent French- and Dutch-speaking parts.

I find this interesting because Flanders, the richer, more populous, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, is the part that wants to leave, while the French-speaking Walloons are trying to keep the country together. The Flemings are tired, they say, of propping up the backwards economy of their Walloon neighbours.

In Canadian terms, it’s as if the English-speaking provinces were trying to separate from Canada, while Quebec desperately offered constitutional reforms to try and entice us to stay.

The Flemings have been running Belgium for the last thirty years – there hasn’t been a Prime Minister from Wallonia since the 1970s. Therefore you’d expect the Walloons to be the disgruntled ones. (By contrast, we’ve had Prime Ministers from Quebec for about 35 of the last 40 years.)

I guess the Flemings are still mad because back in their grandparents’ day, the Walloons were on top. The king spoke French, the government was conducted in French, the top universities taught in French. In the 1960s, around the same time Canada began to promote the inclusion of French at the federal level, Belgium did the same for Dutch. But unlike their counterparts in Quebec, who continued to lag behind the rest of Canada in the production of wealth, the Flemings were already well on their way to becoming their nation’s economic elite.

A half century on, the old grievances have long since ceased to be relevant, but the Flemings continue to nurture them – the same way many French-speaking Quebeckers are still convinced that they’re being oppressed by rich Anglos.

Less than one per cent of French-speaking Quebecers believe francophones out-earn anglophones, according to the poll…

Yet it’s a fact: If your mother tongue is French, you earn $2,000 a year more, on average, than an English-speaking Quebecer.

Most Quebeckers seem to have concluded that independence would be more trouble than it’s worth, what with haggling over the debt, setting up their own currency, renegotiating all their trade deals, and so on. But let me make a bold prediction, based on the Belgian example. Should Quebeckers ever become wealthier than English Canadians – wealthy enough that they can plausibly argue we’re dragging them down – they’ll be gone faster than we can say Pierre Eliot Trudeau.

M.

In defense of the beauty bias.

From a review by Lindsay Beyerstein of Deborah Rhode’s The Beauty Bias:

It should go without saying that discrimination on the basis of appearance is unjust, especially when it comes to features individuals have little or no control over.

Should it really “go without saying”?

Why is discrimination on the basis of appearance more unjust than discrimination on the basis of, say, personality or intelligence?

In the opening paragraph of her review, Beyerstein concedes that discrimination may be permitted in situations where “looks are directly relevant to…job performance”. I assume she’s referring to jobs like modelling, or acting, or stripping.

But if it’s true that people are more comfortable around attractive people, wouldn’t appearance always be relevant to job performance?

When building a workforce, it’s considered normal to screen out employees based on an intuitive sense that their personality will be a poor fit in the office. If a boss can reject me because I’m too shy, or too brassy, or too socially awkward, isn’t it just as logical to reject me because my misshapen nose will make my co-workers uncomfortable?

Perhaps Beyerstein would say that I can change my personality, but not my misshapen nose. I would say just the opposite. It’s much easier for an ugly person to get a nose job than it is for a shy person to get a personality overhaul.

What about intelligence? Once again, I don’t see how discrimination against the dumb is less unjust than discrimination against the ugly. Beyerstein points out that,

Obese women earn 12% less than their thinner counterparts with comparable qualifications. Obese women are more likely to live in poverty, even after controlling for other factors.

I’m pretty sure if you subbed in the word “dumb” where “obese” appears in the preceding paragraph, it would be equally true. In fact I’d venture that low intelligence is an even greater predictor of poverty than obesity. Why is it fair that dumb people are allowed to languish in menial jobs while smart people enjoy scholarships and high-paying careers?

Intelligence is not evenly distributed. Some people are born with a great deal of it. Most of us have to make do with a little. Sure, I can compensate by hard work and study, but no matter how earnestly I plow through A Brief History Of Time, I’m never going to be Stephen Hawking.

How, then, can a meritocracy based solely on intellectual capacity be just? Why should I earn half the salary of my smarter friends, solely because of an accident of birth?

If I were a dumb, good-looking person, I would resent the attempts of smart people like Lindsay Beyerstein (Master of Philosophy, Tufts University) and Deborah Rhode (Doctor of Law, Yale University) to take away the one competitive advantage I’ve got.

M.

The MetaFilter sex slavery story: can anyone actually verify this?

Last week a bunch of bloggers linked to this now-famous Ask MetaFilter thread where a guy enlisted the online community to help him save two Russian friends from “a dangerous situation”.

The young women had paid a travel agency 3000 bucks to set them up with jobs on their arrival in Washington, DC. The job placements failed to appear and they were redirected to a late-night meeting at a bar in New York, where they were promised “hostessing” jobs.

A commenter named nadawi summed up what everyone was probably thinking:

if they get to nyc tomorrow, they are signing up to be prostitutes. they will get their passports taken, they will probably be beaten, and the only way to get out will be to die or to become too old to be of use to them anymore.

After much discussion, a MetaFilter user agreed to meet the girls at the bus station in NYC and talk them out of going to the bar. The intervention was successful, and as of last Friday the girls were housed snugly in the apartment of the MetaFilter samaritan.

So far so good. The situation was clearly dodgy, and the girls had been rescued from possible peril. I awaited the follow-up investigations into the travel agency that had brought the girls to America and the bar that had attempted to hire them.

A week passed, and no follow-ups have appeared. Meanwhile this bar and this travel agency have been nationally publicized as front operations for an international sex slavery ring.

Clearly if they are front operations someone should shut them down. But maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re just ill-organized immigrant-run businesses. Maybe the travel agency found itself unable to deliver on the jobs it had promised, and called in a favour from the friends or relatives who ran the NYC bar. Maybe the meeting was scheduled for the middle of the night because, you know, it’s a nightclub, and the manager wouldn’t be around earlier in the evening.

I can’t say whether this is true or untrue. But after confidently blaring headlines like MetaFilter Saved My Pals From Sex Traffickers and The Internet Rescues Two Russians From Sex Slavery, I would like to see bloggers and news organizations invest some effort into verifying the calumnies they’ve directed against these business owners.

But my suspicion is that the story will quietly fall into obscurity. It’s too good to fact-check.

***

I’m about as remote from the world of human trafficking as a person can be. I have no idea how often immigrant girls in New York are really stripped of their passports, beaten, and forced into prostitution. Sex slavery, like serial murder or child abduction or snuff filmmaking, is such a lurid and exotic crime that it overwhelms the imagination. Our grown-up cynicism disappears and we become children, listening in fascination to stories of witches and bogeymen.

Some crimes at least are susceptible to statistical analysis. We can calculate the real risk of having your kid abducted by a stranger; we can add up the number of annual axe murders. “Sex trafficking” is a fuzzy concept by definition – it encompasses gradations of coercion and consent that are impossible for outsiders to suss out. It can be stretched to include any prostitute who crosses an international border. And of course, we can only count the sex trafficking rings that are successfully broken up by police. This means that people are free to make up statistics:

In the run-up to the 2006 World Cup in Germany, some British journalists reported that thousands of women from across the world were going to be trafficked into Germany to work as sex slaves for football fans. The Independent reported that Germany was about to experience a “sex explosion”. In the Guardian, Julie Bindel said “Germany’s pimps are casting their eyes on poverty-stricken countries… in their search for women for the Cup”. As it turned out, German police uncovered just five cases of “human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation” during the World Cup – and one of the victims was a German. This did not stop Mary Honeyball from claiming two weeks ago that “thousands of prostitutes were drawn to Germany during the last World Cup” and that “trafficking is on the rise in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, which like all other international sporting events is predicted to effect a steep rise in prostitution”.

In the case of the MetaFilter story, precaution surely justified the effort that went into diverting these girls from their rendezvous at the bar. Whether or not the meeting was dangerous, it certainly sounded dangerous. But note how quickly the story changed from “We have to protect these girls from a sketchy situation” to “We have rescued these girls from a life of sex slavery.”

On a separate MetaFilter thread, when a commenter named bingo made the sensible offer to swing by the bar in question and check it out, other commenters immediately disparaged the plan on the grounds that,

[Y]ou’re poking at the Russian Mafia. And they’re probably already aware that at least one of the authorities is watching them.

Bingo made the trip anyway and wound up having a drink at the bar in question. He described it as “a nice, clean, fairly upscale place in a safe neighborhood.” He went on to point out:

A place of business with a previously small online footprint will soon have this thread associated with it as a primary search result.

***

As far as I can tell, the most complete listing of resources on what MetaFilter users have dubbed “The Russian Incident” can be found on this Wiki page.

I’m going to set myself a reminder to look into this topic again in a month. Maybe some more facts will have emerged by then. In the meantime if anyone happens by who can point to actual evidence – as distinct from speculation – that the businesses in question are involved in sex trafficking, that would be great. Or actually, I guess it would be awful. Anyway, it would be helpful to know, one way or the other.

M.

Update, June 1 2010: Somehow in my initial browsing of this story I overlooked this blog post by Mike Cohn, AKA bingo, the guy whose skeptical take on the proceedings upset so many MetaFilterites. Definitely worth reading for the splash-of-cold-water perspective.

Update, June 7 2010: Re-linked Mary Honeyball’s name (in the Spiked article quoted above) to the Guardian editorial where her comment appeared. Previously the link pointed to her blog, which is here.

Those fast-breeding religious conservatives again.

I’ve written before about the dim future of secular liberalism. Folks like me and my friends – and, in all likelihood if you’re reading this, you and your friends – can’t be bothered to have more than one or two kids, if we get around to reproducing at all.

Meanwhile the religious folks – Christians and Muslims and Jews of various stripes – are breeding their bellybuttons off. Today I learned (from an interview in the New Humanist with Eric Kaufmann, author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?) about an American religious movement called Quiverfull,

a coalition of neo-fundamentalist protestant denominations and communities, dedicated to biblical literalism, deeply patriarchal and morally conservative and separatist in mindset, [with] a 200-year plan, a “self-conscious strategy for victory through fertility”, as Kaufmann calls it. “They look around and see the low birth rate amongst the secular population, and the success of the sects, and they say, ‘Hey, we can take over here and quickly.’”

Consider the stunning population growth of Orthodox Jews in Israel:

From a trace element of the Israeli population in the 1950s, one out of three children in grade one are now Orthodox. They have achieved this with a fertility rate of 7.5 babies per  woman.

The Israeli experience suggests that though fundamentalist sects might start out “uninterested in politics or imposing their values on others,” as they get bigger they will eventually awaken to their own political clout, and begin to vote and lobby for more socially conservative policies. A few tens of thousands of Hutterites or Amish we needn’t worry about, but when in fifty years or so there are dozens of Quiverfull adherents sitting in Congress, we shouldn’t be surprised when they start telling the rest of us what to watch, where to pray, and who to screw.

The article goes on to ask what I think is the key question: What the heck can we do to prevent this? Kaufmann’s answer – paraphrased by the interviewer – is that we

need to displace the multicultural “celebration of difference” model of toleration with one that contains a far more robust sense of common values and a far more stringent rejection of reactionary fundamentalism. “We need a stronger sense of liberal values,” Kaufmann told me. “We should answer back to all fundamentalisms.”

Frankly, I think we’re doomed if that’s the best we can come up with. But I haven’t got any better ideas, and I’ve been grousing about the problem for years. Since my comments are buried in the archives, for the benefit of newer readers I thought I’d reprint them here:

March 16, 2006.

Probably our descendants, sitting in Bible-study class in their ankle-length skirts and kerchiefs, will look back on our licentious era with horror, as a dignified Victorian gentleman might have looked back upon the bear-baiting excesses of Shakespeare’s age. The Victorians of the future will regard their litany of petty taboos as signs not of repression but of enlightenment, and, just like every culture, will celebrate what stifles them. They’ll be content. But we don’t have to be. Although we won’t survive long enough to be appalled by the backwardness of those who come after us, we’re alive right now, and we have every right to worry that our cultural heirs might be a bunch of prudes and uptight a-holes. If only we could disinherit them, and pass on our culture – with all its kinks and perversions intact – to someone who could be trusted to preserve it – a race of space aliens, maybe, who would continue masturbating to internet porn, and quoting liberally from old Seinfeld episodes, and neglecting to procreate, just as we’d wish them to, beneath the surface of one of Saturn’s water-bearing moons.

But till those masturbating aliens come along, we’re stuck with the dilemma of how to preserve our culture here on the planet earth. As I see it, there are three possible strategies:

1) We outbreed the cultural conservatives.
2) We prevent them from breeding.
3) We corrupt their offspring before they get old enough to start bullying the rest of us around.

Option 1 is a non-starter, unless we develop new reproductive technology to enhance our fertility. Maybe if all the downtown-dwelling bachelors and bachelorettes could be convinced to clone themselves, we could keep pace with the rural South Dakotan housewife who thinks permanent pregnancy is her sacred duty to God and the Founding Fathers. But the technology isn’t developing fast enough for this solution to be viable. By the time I drag Michael v2.0 naked and shivering from his fluid-filled sac, the demographic battle will already be lost.

Option 2 isn’t really feasible, either. To coercively limit the birthrate, as the Communist Party did in China, goes against the very principle of liberty that we’re trying to preserve. Which leaves Option 3 – the one we’re already pursuing, by default – the corruption of the youth. This is a delicate operation. Obviously in order to coax the kids over to our side we need to make decadence and unrestrained free expression as attractive as possible – which isn’t difficult – but, if we go too far we’ll provoke a reaction from their vigilant parents, who’ll just lock their sons and daughters in the basement, slap a V-chip on the television and an internet content filter on the computer, and ignore the outside world as it parties itself to extinction. Also, we can’t cop to our strategy or else the parents will figure out what we’re up to – you can already hear them muttering about “activist judges” and the “homosexual agenda” – so it’s difficult to coordinate our scattered efforts to undermine the traditional family.

Unfortunately, we’re not likely to live long enough to see whether our plan has been successful. Or maybe that’s a blessing. If these really are the Last Days of the Roman Empire, as the survivalists and conspiracy theorists have been ranting for years, we can only hope for a pleasant death in a nursing home, with Seinfeld reruns on the TV, while the barbarians glower at us through the windows.

M.

Ryan Meili, guy I know, finishes a strong second.

Well, it turns out my – what’s the word, friend? acquaintance? – call him a friendly acquaintance, Ryan Meili, has turned in a pretty astounding performance in the Saskatchewan NDP leadership race.

Is “astounding” too strong a word? Granted, the convention process, with its preferential ballot, multiple rounds, and requirement that the winning candidate take at least half the vote, tends to inflate a second-place finisher’s results; the frontrunner’s opponents coalesce around the only alternative. But that doesn’t change the fact that Ryan, in his mid-30s, with no political experience, a minimal media profile, and – let’s be frank – a somewhat extraterrestrial public speaking manner, finished with 45% of the vote against a past cabinet minister.

Not to take anything away from Ryan, whose intelligence and work ethic I never doubted, but the main thing this result tells me is that it’s not only among the young leftyish New Democrats that I’m likeliest to know that there is scant enthusiasm for Dwain Lingenfelter’s leadership. He seems to be not particularly loved in his party as a whole. He might go over better in the general election, where moderate voters won’t begrudge his ideological flexibility, his support for nuclear power, or his recent decamping to Alberta to make some cash in the energy industry (what Saskatchewan resident doesn’t have a few good friends who’ve done the same?). Speaking as an occasional NDP voter, I have nothing against the guy on those grounds.

But if Link wants to become premier, he needs to – how do I put this? He needs to work harder to seem like an alright guy. Maybe he is an alright guy. Probably he is. But a lot of people who should be his supporters seem to think he isn’t.

I hope Link has been humbled by his narrower-than-expected victory. I hope he learns some lessons – and, if he’s smart, hires some organizers – from the second-place campaign. If he hasn’t, if he doesn’t, Ryan may find himself with another chance to run for the leadership, soon after the 2011 provincial election.

M.

Ryan Meili, guy I know, running for NDP leader.

I’m not really ideologically or temperamentally a New Democrat. And I have to admit that I haven’t paid much attention to provincial politics for the last couple years – the drama in the States has been so much more compelling. So it came as a surprise to me to find out that a guy I know, Ryan Meili, is running for the leadership of the Saskatchewan New Democrats.

I’m not going to “endorse” his candidacy (not that my endorsement would be worth a damn to him). But since I’ve met Ryan on numerous occasions, and been beaten at Scrabble by him once or twice, I think I’m qualified to observe that he’s an engaging, sincere, and frighteningly smart guy; and in a political process where sincerity and intelligence often seem depressingly undervalued, I hope he does well. I think he will. He’ll definitely work his nuts off.

M.