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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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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.

good people have learned to no consider the frameworks that are explanatory

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.

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).