On the Left right now they’re passing around a paper which suggests that immigration boosts median income. Since the modern American elite Left is pro-immigration they naturally take a shine to such papers, and my own impression from talking to economists is that a “pro-immigration” position is mainstream within the discipline. Fair enough. But how many liberals would accept the mainstream position on the minimum wage? Now all of a sudden I suspect you’d be hearing objections based on what the economic models leave out, how they’re oversimplified, etc.
Or, consider what happened with Ross Douthat’s column on assimilation, nativism, and anti-Catholicism. An individual who I was discussing the issue with pointed me to a historian who “debunked” Douthat’s assertion in a few sentences, stating plainly that Douthat was simply wrong. Stop!!! If a historian gives you a straight, black & white answer, without nuance, he’s telling you what you want to hear! Or, he’s telling you what he believes for normative, not positivist, reasons.
Recently on bloggingheads.tv Michael Brendan Dougherty, a professing Catholic, suggested that anti-Catholic movements in 19th century America had a point. In this Dougherty seems to be aligning with Ross Douthat’s implication, that American reaction drove American Catholicism to counter-reaction, and through the synthesis emerged a genuine American faith. But, there is one aspect of what Dougherty is saying which I think we should be cautious of: he observes that the process of assimilation of Islamic religiosity into the Protestant-Catholic-Jew trichotomy will result in recitations of unpleasant verses of the Koran, just as Protestants quoted back some of the less liberal declarations of the Papacy in the 19th century.
Kingmaker: Why Sarah Palin’s Endorsements Really Are That Big A Deal vs. Romney’s Problem in a Nutshell. I estimate that Mitt Romney’s IQ is around two standard deviations above Sarah Palin’s. That’s democracy.
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Why Obama is likely to be privately irreligious
13 Comments · Posted by David Hume in culture, politics
The heritability of religiosity is modest in the American environment. In some environments, such as Saudi Arabia, a normal range in variation in religiosity obviously can not express itself. But under more relaxed conditions it seems that around half of the variation in religiosity in the population can be traced to variation in genes; in other words, the trait value runs in families. Obama’s father was born a Muslim, but was an avowed atheist. I couldn’t find survey data from Kenya, but I did find some from Tanzania. According to the World Values Survey 8 out of 1171 respondents did not believe in God in Tanzania. The equivalent figure for the United States was 51 out of 1200. And his mother, from what we can tell, was also an atheist. The United States and Kenya are not, and were not, Saudi Arabia, but neither were they Sweden or Japan. Though one had license to be an atheist, it was certainly culturally atypical, and all the pressures would have gone in the other direction. From this I conclude that Barack H. Obama lacked a natural disposition toward supernatural belief.
Christianity · Islam · Obama
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Having our way with the past, for it has no honor!
16 Comments · Posted by David Hume in culture, history
Ross Douthat’s new column, Islam in Two Americas is getting a lot of play. Douthat has to constrain his prose to make it suitable for a print column…I can almost see the excisions of nuance and subtly necessitated by the word length cap. Consider what Douthat says about Mormons and Roman Catholics:
…The first America celebrated religious liberty; the second America persecuted Mormons and discriminated against Catholics
…
The same was true in religion. The steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul, eventually persuaded the Mormons to abandon polygamy….
In my post below I made a distinction between a set of actions and behaviors arising from a particular situation, and those arising from an attribute. Psychopaths may behave totally normally and ethically in a situation where deviation from the norm would have negative consequences. A more psychologically normal person would behave ethically even when “no one is watching,” especially with the proper cultural condition. The latter issue is why I am very skeptical of religious conservatives who tell me personally that they would go on a raping and killing spree if they lost their faith in God.
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Since Andrew noted a revision of the name for the “Cordoba House,” I thought I would discuss something which has alway bothered me: the perceptions of Muslim Spain by both the opponents and proponents of the project. The opponents argue that Muslim Spain, itself a category encompassing seven hundred years and a variety of polities, was characterized by the domination of Muslims over Christians and Jews. The proponents of the project suggest that Cordoba as the capital of Al-Andalus was a brilliant example of the efflorescence that can occur in a climate of cultural pluralism. Both are strictly true. The problem occurs when we interpret the past through our own particular normative lens.
Over at Discover Blogs a comment I thought of interest:
Most of the sensitivity/grievance culture of the Right is purely fabricated – we (including me as part of the Right) only do it to point out the hypocrisy within the Left at showing outrage, etc., only when it benefits the Left’s cause, or to create cognitive dissonance within the Left or the left’s media. Even the demands for “ideological diversity” within academia are a rhetorical gambit rather than a real demand – aimed at diminishing the prestige of Leftist academics and reducing the authority of their pronouncements, rather than actually getting more conservative academics. (However, if a conservative grad student demands “ideological diversity”, he probably means it, in the “give me a job” sense.)
Unfortunately, some people on the right, particularly the more Christian sort, have actually started to take this stuff seriously instead of understanding that it’s all just a put-on to embarrass the Left.
I agree with this in the generality. When libertarians argue against social security because it discriminates against blacks males, who have shorter life expectancies and may never reap benefits from a system they’ve paid into, they don’t really oppose social security because of disparate racial impact. That’s just an argument which might appeal to liberals.
On the other hand, I do think that some Christian conservatives sincerely accept the validity of grievance and sensitivity as organizing principles of discussion. I suspect this is a feature of the evangelical Protestant subculture in the United States, which has long been oppositional, and felt dismissed and condescended to by the mainstream society.
Over at Discover blogs I have two posts up, Republicans, the middle class party and Republicans still the party of the rich. Also, if you want to talk about limousine liberals, note that there is only one precinct in Manhattan where Republicans outnumber Democrats, the downtrodden southwest corner of the Upper East Side.
Poking through the GSS I will tell you what I’ve stated before: wealth/income and education have opposite independent effects when it comes to politics. All things controlled those with more money are more conservative and/or Republican. All things controlled those with more education are more liberal and/or Democrat. As a rule economic class status is much more salient as a predictor of politics for those without college degrees than those with college degrees. In plain English there’s a really strong tendency of those without college degrees who are in the upper income brackets to being conservative, and those in the lower income brackets to being liberal (at least in their voting patterns and alliances). The distribution is more uniform for those with college degrees.
