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Americas Bad Cities are costing you
This is where Cremieux goes through the loss of agglomeration effects due to American cities being awful low density places. The loss of the American City he largely blames on the Great Migration and the associated crime waves. He then goes thru how white flight has mostly only occurred with black populations especially ADOS and occurs less with immigrants from Africa.
One of the things with woke is it made people think about ways to refute their ideas. One of them is that white people just hate black people so they did white flight. Turns out the data and original source material people started to look rediscover showed a rise in crime before white flight. People accepted those narratives for decades because we had already mitigated the costs and it was just easy to go with the old narratives. We also accepted a narrative that Americans just liked to live in the suburbs. The actual answer for the preference is crime was too high in cities.
The costs of mitigation Cremieux lists is likely not the full costs. It’s likely everything about city design has been done to allow for unofficial segregation. Often this has been done thru zoning to keep prices high. High home prices means high prices for everything in safe cities as your working class either needs to be able to buy housing in the community or compensated for a long community.
Not being able to do official segregation has basically made the American urban lifestyle very expensive and even more expensive if you have kids. You can’t just buy a cheap house and send your kids to public schools because of the demographics. Which forces you to either live in an expensive suburb or use private schools. This also means you largely can’t be poor in your nice community because your community refuses to have low costs of living options because that would allow the more criminally inclined people to move in.
Today we talk about foreign migration and not domestic internal migration. Once you do mass migration you can’t unring tbe bell. You are now stuck with new demographics. In the case of the great migration I think it basically destroyed Americans urban environments. And now American cities suck. And we had to convince ourselves that we loved living in the suburbs instead of the suburbs being a mitigation for good schools/safety.
I am also open minded that the Great Migration led to increased American wealth because people opposed sharing economic resources and it had a macro effect of limiting socialism in the US and the political paths Canada/Europe went down.
I really wish people were more capable of noticing, let alone publicly agreeing, that the presence of substantial numbers of blacks is just generally a social catastrophe. How many prominent men in American history had great compassion for the negro and despised slavery, but were straightforward in their belief that sending them back to Africa was best for everyone because an integrated society could not possibly work out? Have they not been thoroughly vindicated? And yet the position is so far outside the overton window that afact it's literally unimaginable to most whites. I'm not even sure I'm allowed to propound it here without any amount of pussyfooting. But in this case I think consensus is appropriate.
At some point we need to be prepared to call a spade a spade.
And the social damage whites inflict upon ourselves as we struggle to reconcile our high-minded optimism with reality is likely even worse. I'm in mind of Dan Carlin's point about how 9/11 was as a flea biting a dog, compared to the unbelievable amount of damage the dog then did to itself tearing at the itch.
I'm not sure the West was long-term viable after the decision was made to keep millions of blacks in the US. We simply cannot be ourselves with them here, and they're not going anywhere. I don't think segregation was long-term viable either but golly it sure did help!
What now? I guess at this point every thought experiment gets derailed by the AI wildcard, and bracketing that out for the sake of conversation seems masturbatory. It's just so unbelievably tragic, how this has all played out.
IDK, if you think I should be more nuanced about this by all means let me know.
Even granting, arguendo, everything in your first paragraph, by what mechanism do you see the presence of a large number of blacks in America dooming the entire West, including in Europe, South America, the Commonwealth, etc? It seems to me that the West either committed suicide in 1939–45 or failed in more recent decades (whether due to Communist influence, a superabundance of empathy, etc.).
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I feel like the vagueness of your pronouncements here ("social catastrophe, "we" cannot be "ourselves", lack of imagining a counterfactual to some of the historical gestures you're making) weakens this to the point that it's hard to reply.
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Thats a nice idea but the timeline here is basically backwards.
Sweden started liberalising its economy well before the period of mass immigration you’re talking about. A lot of it came out of the broader liberalising trend of the late 80s and 90s, and the Swedish 90s financial crisis accelerated it significantly. This was the period when Sweden deregulated, reformed taxes, cut spending, balanced the state budget, reformed pensions and introduced things like the school voucher system.
At roughly the same time, migration policy was actually being tightened, despite migration still being comparatively low.
The next major wave of economic liberalisation came under Reinfeldt’s centre-right government, which won in 2006. That government pushed further labour market and tax reforms, and then also liberalised immigration, including the major labour migration reform in 2008 and further liberalisation later on.
That, combined with wars and chaos in the Middle East, helped drive immigration much higher in the following years. So again, the economic liberalisation being pointed to here had already happened before the large migration wave.
And after immigration peaked, the political direction changed again. The centre-left returned to power in 2014, the pace of economic liberalisation slowed considerably, and after 2015 migration policy itself became much more restrictive.
So I don’t really see how the Swedish case supports this argument. The sequence is wrong. Economic liberalisation largely came first, with its ideological baggage arguably even enabling the large wave of immigration that came later.
If anything, the actual chronology points causality the other way.
Interesting, thanks for replying.
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America’s social spending is not an outlier compared to European countries:
European countries are a very diverse basket but countries like France and Belgium have figures of ~30% of GDP on public social spending, 50% more than the US. The OECD fakes the difference with a ‘private social spending’ metric but this is very questionable.
The US’ far higher absolute wealth, far higher growth rate and much higher disposable incomes (compared to fixed costs for many imports that, for example, both the US and Western European countries and consumers rely on) also distort spending; the French don’t cut because they’re structurally incapable of it without the end of the fifth republic; Californian cities can spend $100k a year per homeless person because they’re so rich that they don’t really even have to care.
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American conservatives have an allergy to having the state give money to the poor which they know is going to disproportionately go to blacks. But it certainly didn't stop America's penchant for shoveling money to the Olds through SS + Medicare. It might have even supercharged that to some degree as a replacement for typical socialism. America isn't that much less socialist than the rest of Europe.
Blacks die earlier too. So funneling money to old people would disproportionately favor whites over blacks. If this was not true and SS benefited blacks more then potentially we would have killed SS in the ‘90s and gone to a 401k for all system.
Though Europe does a lot of old people stuff too so I don’t think that’s the driving force.
As a percentage of taxes paid, who gets more from social security, white people or black people?
Social security is screwing over one group in particular, but its not blacks. The group that loses out the most is men in blue collar jobs earning wages near the cap. Low earning women are the greatest beneficiaries.
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I think some of this has arisen from the K-shaped economy. Any cities that survived the general contraction of manufacturing and industry this are now bimodally organized: either a neighborhood is well-to-do with white-collar/tech/service jobs and the resources to match, or they're blighted, decaying, and continually downtrodden.*
*I don't think gentrification and the proliferation of "artsy" neighborhoods represent a meaningful alternative. They're too few and far between and often fail to generate much economic growth.
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My armchair urbanist take is that exclusionary zoning (rather than density) is much more of a detriment to walking and other use cases, though I'm not sure how much this links directly with white flight and de facto segregation. I do think there is a significant potential connection, in that by making it so there's no legitimate reason for an outsider to be in your neighborhood, it makes it easy to call the cops on anyone who isn't a neighbor walking his dog or baby or something. If there's a shop in the neighborhood it brings in lots of people just coming through or loitering.
Honestly at this point I'm not even racist anymore when it comes to urbanism, I just want all the walking garbage on the streets to be rounded up and disposed of.
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