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This tweet from an economists caught my eye.
“One of the biggest gaps in economics is explaining why outcomes differ across countries.
Why is homeownership lower in Germany? Why do the rich live the center of the city in Argentina, but in the suburbs in America?
We don't have great frameworks to answer these Qs.“
https://twitter.com/arpitrage/status/1786042798275277144?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Is this a question we really don’t know the answer to or a question that good people have learned to not consider the frameworks that are explanatory? I feel like the white nationalist and the woke can easily answer this question. One side will say racism and the other side will say diversity is not our strength and people fled from crime.
Wikipedia has the Great Migration occurring 1910-1970. And White Flight as occurring 1950’s-1960’s. Cities largely built before then have dense urban cores . Those cities built after are endless suburbs. Of course cars took off as a middle class thing around this time period too. Argentina might be a higher percent European ancestry than any country in the world.
How many other question have solutions to them that aren’t analyzed because the researcher starts with the wrong frame.
Two somewhat related examples are liberals who believe that "the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice" being confronted with what in their mental framework are inexplicable political reversals such as the election of Trump or the repeal of Roe v. Wade and (I imagine this one might be a bit more controversial here) economists who don't connect the economic malaise in the US after 1971 with the peak in domestic oil production and subsequent higher energy costs because their thinking has become almost entirely divorced from the actual material inputs that drive the production of goods and services.
The peak of US crude oil production seems to have been a few months ago, but as far as I can tell "wtf happened in 1971" style rhetoric is still in full effect.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus2&f=m
I thought it was pretty obvious, even a given, that the "what happened in 1971" site had chosen the year 1971 deliberately to imply that the only/chief reason was that US scrapped the gold standard for good then.
Yes, but also because it's damn close to so many things shifting. Maybe it was gold, maybe it was oil, but by god something changed.
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It's eerie to see a twitter thread like that one these days that isn't overflowing with noticeposting. It's easy to forget that the Austrian School focus on individual human motivation and action is by no means universally held. To see concepts like "white flight" or "the car lobby" tossed out as explanations as if they are fundamental forces of society, and not simply the aggregate preferences of individual actors, is jarring. The real questions are, why are the white people fleeing? and why was the car lobby so popular?
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Disparate impact is the metastasized final form of the academic postmodernism/marxism cancer that festered after the students of the 70s survived to be the administrators of today. The powers have a set view and anyone that goes against the Message is to be shut down, see the unpersoning of Roland Fryer for the best example.of this.
As @jeroboam states, blank slatism is prevalent and the mirror to blank slatism means that all outcomes for all peoples must be equal with the same inputs. The end effect is that anything that has a race or class component show up anywhere must automatically presume the unequal outcome is because of SOMETHING LARGER that maps back to greater discrimination of some sort.
This is super funny because obvious answers become deliberately ignored. Urban communities in the USA could not keep blacks out, and as the blacks came in so did crime and therefore diminishing property values + white flight. Urban communities in Argentina and other capital cities with high crime have private police to kick out criminals, criminals who have no champions at the top to force society to accept them. That the criminals are black/mestizo is irrelevant: no one gives a shit about racial sensitivities and so the criminals have no free pass.
Also Argentina is something like 97% white. I don't know what portion of Argentine racial minorities are criminals. But I don't suppose it matters since there are almost none of them.
Argentina is not 97% white, it’s 97% white and mestizo combined. ‘Mestizo’ is Spanish for mixed and tends to be used mostly in reference to people with obvious white ancestry who can’t just pass as white. The actual breakdown is unknowable because in Latin America whiteness is high status, and so everyone downplays their non-white ancestry.
I don’t have a link right now, but IIRC the whitest parts of Latin America, based on hospital phenotypic data, consistently have parts of Mexico in the top ten. Clearly HBD does not dominate Latin American crime rates.
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Argentina’s demographics are difficult to estimate because the percentage indigeneity is very widely disputed and seemingly hard to estimate.
I see. But to be fair, a significant minority of white Americans are not 100% European but they're still white. If 97% or so of Argentines self identify and pass as white then I'd say that counts, despite stray native chromosomes here and there.
I think the thesis is that very few native Argentines still exist and so the percentage native is much more broadly distributed among the white population than it is in, say, the US (where most whites have no native ancestry).
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It's always been funny to me that you very seldom see anyone question this with regards to NBA basketball.
Noticing is one way. Besides sportsball is ick so why would women care about that sort of nonsense. In the mind of the progressive the black man is a loyal slave to the black woman, subservient to her 'sexualized black body' and incapable of independent thought.
This is a boo-outgroup generalization that needs a lot more behind it than you dropping it as a sneer.
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This does not comport with progressives I know. Black women are higher on the progressive stack than black men because black men are still men, you are much more likely to hear about how black men oppress black women, than progressives saying they think black men are subservient to black women. Though likely it would take a black woman to start that conversation because white progressives would see themselves as punching down if they were to critique black men generally.
You are 100% right that black men and women are in tension with each other, which is an interesting topic onto itself, but your point about requiring a black woman to start that conversation first is the key factor to note. White progressives do not care or consider that blacks are not a unified voice, and suborn black male interests to black female ones. The only vector I have seen progs be critical of black men is in the context of Trump, where increasing black male support for trump is viewed as black support of white supremacy.
Some black women and black men are in tension but its highly variable. My wife's friends range from those who refuse to date out, to a very small minority who are Black women divest aligned. But that is still very much the minority.
Indeed one of the main arguments of BWD is that most black women are too lenient on and too supportive of black men.
White progressives are in my experience aware of tensions (given feminism they pretty much have to be) between black women and men, they just feel it is not their place to talk about it. That's different than not knowing or caring.
I don't really have much insight from the black womens perspective, my only real insight is how black men seem to really hold black women in contempt and at no level feel inclined to act in solidarity with black women focused interests. This is getting into too much speculative territory and personal anecdata, so I am not willing to posit too much. Happy to defer to established wisdom that black issues are a variable intersectionalists are aware of but prefer to keep silent on.
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I am actually not sure if this economists is blind. I think he might be asking the question when he can’t say the answer.
They do discuss this paper
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014292198000191
And he eventually says this.
"How different countries deal with race and ethnic differences more broadly" is very much an example of the cross-country differences I think are interesting!”
I am updating my priors to he knew he was posting bait in a completely innocent way. My guess is he’s not woke. He chose Buenos Aires for the comparison when I think he could have chosen many other comparisons. Even I think Mexico City would work as I know plenty of rich Mexicans who live there. Argentina even seems to the average person to have some Nazi/fascists connotations. So he picked a country without diversity to beg the question why is their urban core different.
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Pretty much the entirety of sociology is based on the faulty blank-slate premise.
For example, we see that boys participate in sports at a higher rate than girls. And so we say "how can we increase girls in sports". But that's the wrong framework. In fact, girls sports participation is far too high. Girls and women don't spontaneously play sports. Seriously, have you EVER seen a group of women playing pickup basketball or soccer in the park? I never have. Literally never. (Although sometimes one or two bold women will join the guys).
While girls enjoy being part of a team, they would have a lot more fun participating in something besides sports.
I have seen plenty of instances of this happening with badminton and to a lesser degree frisbee, and that's probably not a modern aberration.
The most obvious explanation is that, due to widely discussed gender differences in attitudes to open competition, sports that are essentially about putting a number on your relative skill level - counting goals etc. - are the ones that are less popular with women. Badminton certainly stands apart from sports like football in that play without explicit scoring is quite normalised (and implicit scoring like subtle social censure for those who disproportionately interrupt the flow of play is more in lines with covert competition preferences).
In that sense, I think "sports" is a misleading descriptor for what it is that there is a gendered difference in preferences for; and at least some of the cognitive dissonance surrounding this problem domain must be attributed to the core demographic of male sports players. Reality looks something like men play certain sports because they have a biological need to quantify their exact rank relative to other men, and women don't because that's not how they organise their status hierarchy and have nothing to gain from trying to insert themselves directly into the men's ranking. The social fiction instead says that men play those sports because something to do with sportsmanship, camraderie and cultivating the beauty and strength the human body is capable of, while women are turned away because men gatekeep these universally good things from them. If you rewrite the last fragment to say something that amounts to "out of their own lack of interest in these things, because there is actually no sexist gatekeeping", you have to conclude that women are moral mutants who do not care for sportsmanship, camraderie, cultivation and beauty, but this is only because you left the other half of the lie unchallenged.
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Nor have I.
Closest to male/female parity I’ve seen or experienced would be in beach volleyball, where women may ask to join on-going pickup games so they can better teehee around in a bikini and bask in male attention.
I’ve played a lot of pickup basketball games growing up and as a young adult, but probably a single digit number of them included a woman on a squad that tagged in (usually of quite different aesthetics than the aforementioned volleyball women). And they’d be left generally unguarded by (us) men. I’ve never seen just women playing each other in a pickup basketball game In the Wild, ranging from 2v2 to 5v5.
Of course, one might counter that this is only due to societal factors and internalised misogyny that leave women too traumatised, anxious, and self-conscious to play pickup games against each other, that life as a woman is too exhausting and time-consuming as to leave mana for playing sports, or that men are always manspreading their way across courts and fields and crowding out women with their toxic competitiveness and rapey male gaze.
With regard to organised sports, my hypothesis has been that, given low birth rates among married Western couples, fathers with no or few sons have a tendency to treat their daughter(s) as the son(s) they lack as cope and compensation to keep the info-hazard Daughter Question thoughts at bay.
Thus resulting in higher female participation in sports than there would otherwise be. Of course, this is no guarantee that one’s daughter won’t do the usual thot-maxxing when it comes to her profession, hobbies, or “hobbies,” as Maycee Barber’s father was recently reminded.
I played tonight. So know the culture but yes it’s weird guarding a girl. But most major cities should have a large enough network of girls who played in college who should be connected and have their game?
Even at gyms for one offs I have never seen the college women players show up. I played at EBC in Chicago for a while (highest gym for Chicago) and we had from Simeon Rice to 70 year olds as regulars. A division one girl could be atleast regularly the 4th best player on the team. And after embarrassing guys who would take them easy for a 2 weeks I think that would end. But never happened. Chicago should have 20-50 ex Big Ten players. I’ve also ran into a lot of male college players who just quit playing.
It would be an interesting research project to interview ex-college or high school players on why they completely quit playing.
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Women don't want to spontaneously play pickup basketball because they will be criticised for doing it for 'attention' :/
You didn't read my comment. Women actually do play pickup sports (in very rare instances). They join men's games as I noted.
But women don't ever play pickup with other women. There are nearly 400,000 girls playing high school basketball in the U.S. right now. There are millions of women who played basketball in high school. And, yet, I have never once witnessed or heard about a group of women going to the park and playing basketball. Never. Not even once.
It's quite remarkable. Women just aren't that interested in sports for their own sake. What they get from athletics is different: team bonding, recognition, feelings of accomplishment, etc.. But they don't love to ball.
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Definitely no. Basketball outfits are no way as sexy as doing yoga on the beach or even any outfit I see a women wearing in the weight room.
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I'm almost afraid to ask. Is this just the "think about it logically" copypasta?
Googling seems to suggest yes. For the sake of not leaving anyone out:
I cannot think or comprehend of anything more cucked than having a daughter. Honestly, think about it rationally. You are feeding, clothing, raising and rearing a girl for at least 18 years solely so she can go and get ravaged by another man. All the hard work you put into your beautiful little girl - reading her stories at bedtime, making her go to sports practice, making sure she had a healthy diet, educating her, playing with her. All of it has one simple result: her body is more enjoyable for the men that will eventually fuck her in every hole.
Raised the perfect girl? Great. Who benefits? If you're lucky, a random man who had nothing to do with the way she grew up, who marries her. He gets to fuck her tight pussy every night. He gets the benefits of her kind and sweet personality that came from the way you raised her.
As a man who has a daughter, you are LITERALLY dedicating at least 20 years of your life simply to raise a girl for another man to enjoy. It is the ULTIMATE AND FINAL cuck. Think about it logically.
This is so silly. The thing that makes a cuck cucked is that the children he is supporting are not biologically his. But (absent certain modern reproductive technology that is in practice only used by the infertile) your daughter's children will always be your biological grandchildren.
If you think about the social scripts about how RealMenTM deal with their future sons-in-law, you talk to your daughters' dates while cleaning your guns in order to convince them that she isn't available for casual sex, but once it is clear that the young man is suitable and his intentions are honourable, you are on the same side.
The pop-cultural use of "cuck" seems to long have come detached from reproduction, to generally denote someone who would surrender what he cares for the most without a fight and perhaps derive masochistic pleasure from the process. (The accusation of being a "cuckservative" would not be dispelled by a credible claim that it helped the cuckservative get a liberal chick to bear his kids.)
The implication that the terminal value of incels with whom the copypasta resonates must be themselves getting laid, or at most getting laid vicariously through a hypothetical son who is just like them, rather than the preservation of their lineage, seems to check out against stereotypes too - at least to me the idea of a typical incel whose primary lament is that he will not be able to satisfy his parents' wish for a grandchild feels somewhat incongruous.
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I prefer the Peterson deepfake version.
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I mean, it's funny but it makes no sense; if you swap genders, you still don't actually benefit. And once I realize that, I remember that people just don't raise children for "the benefit." I mean, I guess your progeny can look after you in your old age, but a daughter can do that just as well as a son. I guess the joke is entirely the subtext that women are only valuable sexually.
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I've definitely seen girls playing foursquare spontaneously among themselves, and I think I've seen them playing soccer.
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I did pass by a group of women skateboarding and filming their tricks, so that's something.
My rule of them is ~20% of women do genuinely have similar interests and passion for those interests as the average guy, and we should be accomadating and not pretend those 20% of women don't exist in the sports world or video game world or whatever else world. But we also definitely shouldn't be trying to rearrange society to try to increase that 20% of women to match the % of men with those interests.
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Basketball it doesn’t happen. When I have played soccer there was often a few girls. My guess is it’s easier to play pickup soccer as a bad player than basketball as a bad player. And basketball is a bit more physical so it’s tough for the few to fit in.
But even small towns I tend to hear about a basketball game. So in a larger city like 100x you would expect enough people that even if female interest was 1/10th you would run across women only games and I’ve never seen one.
For the jogging comment below my guess is jogging is one of the more efficient ways to stay skinny.
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I see mostly women joggers though.
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