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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31371 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Europe is a possible counter-example both to various naive forms of HBD and also to the notion that ethno-nationalism is an advantage.

Europe is much more white than the US and is also much more ethno-nationalist than the US, yet it lags the US significantly both in GDP per capita (although I am not convinced that this is a very good metric) and also, it seems to me, in economic innovation (Europe is responsible for almost no major software companies).

Some possible counterarguments:

  1. "The best talent of Europe came to the US." - But Germany, for example, has a higher average IQ than the US does. In any case, the IQ difference between the US and Europe, in either direction, does not seem to be large enough to be significant.

  2. "Europe has been dealing with the aftermath of WW2." - But that does not explain why Europe had WW2 to begin with, or why the US was not comparably harmed by its Civil War. The US Civil War killed a comparable fraction of the US population to what Europe lost in WW2, but the US Civil War did not fundamentally slow the trajectory of US economic or geopolitical rise.

  3. "Europe has been shackled by socialism." - But similarly to my objection to #2, this does not explain why Europe is, to begin with, more fond of socialism than the US is.

Am I getting something wrong? Is Europe more innovative than I give it credit for?

Europe is much more white than the US and is also much more ethno-nationalist than the US

I'd like to see some backing data to support this.

With regards to the first claim, is there a European country with a white population of only 59.3% Also do we count Hispanic whites or not? Because that changes a lot.

I mean, Spain is pretty much 0% non-Hispanic white.

The former is obvious. Per the 2020 census, non-Latino whites make up less than 58% of the US population. As for the latter, it is only slightly less obvious. Unlike the US, most European countries have historically defined themselves in ethnic nationalist terms; the "nation" in "nation-state" has historically been an ethnicity. Eg: In Germany until the 1990s, no one who was not ethnically German could become a citizen.

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