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I think it would also be fair to say that the US has moved to the right. Part of this was because of failures on the left but I also say Musks buying twitter was a big boost and COVID had a great deal of just be nice to the crazies thru the pandemic. It’s not just Motte going right. Maybe I’m in a bubble but I’m basically expecting as close to a landslide for Trump as possible for tribal America.
A second point for violent crime isn’t a real risks is it negates all of the costs society bares to mitigate violence in the US. We spend a lot of money on prisons. And a lot of money trying to boost black schools. Chicago’s economics would be a lot different without these costs. You also would not have had the ghettoization of the southside of Chicago. More urbanization does increase agglomeration effects. If America never had slavery I am fairly certain we would have universal health care. I don’t know if on net this would be a good thing because I think we would be less FU capitalist which probably hurts growth in other ways. Without black people American politics would be a lot more like Canada, but a super power.
Violent crime is the biggest converter from lib to con because it disproportionately affects affluent urban liberals (who are more likely to live in big cities, donate to political parties, be involved in politics, be involved in media etc).
If you live in a distant outer suburb of Dallas or Phoenix it’s unlikely that the Summer of Floyd had much personal effect on your neighborhood, which had no homeless people or significant crime before and after 2020.
If you live in Manhattan, or Georgetown, or Santa Monica, or the Mission, or in the Loop, you will 100% have seen a significant decline in the ‘social fabric’ / urban quality of life since 2020. There are many reasons for Reagan’s landslide victories but a part of them were that rich urban Democrats had gotten very fucking tired of decay. Sure, Mondale still won NYC (although not the state), but Reagan got 40% of the vote in the city.
Even in Manhattan Reagan got close to 30%, Donald Trump got 9%. And Reagan wasn’t merely charting the decline of the GOP in NYC; he got like 50% more of the vote in Manhattan than the several previous Republican candidates. And that discounts the big shifts the Dems made on crime too.
Hanania has written about this, but big cities becoming shitholes is one of the surest ways to shift the country to the right.
I am in Argentina now for a bit. And being here makes me more racists. Salaries are down like 20% in a few months in real terms and farther away from where I am at I am fairly certain there is real poverty. Yet things feel chill and feel safe. I see far fewer cops than I would in any major city in the states. In the states I have had lunch with literal army vehicles and national guard on the street corners. It keeps making me think is this what society would be like in a 100% European ancestry country.
From a HBD perspective it seems safe to say Italians have proven themselves to be incapable of managing a central bank.
Buenos Aires had a homicide rate about the same as NYC in 2022 (so post-Floyd).
One of the truly interesting things about Argentina is that they actually got many more of the good kind of Italian (northern) than the US did. Only about half, possibly far fewer, of Italian Argentines were from the South - more than 40% were from the north, 10% from the middle. Meanwhile almost all Italian Americans are from Campania, Calabria and Sicily.
It’s Italian-Americans who, if you look at the regional performance of Italy, should be in the shit. Yet the Italian Argentines, many of whom are descended from northern farmers and merchants who left in the mid-19th century, seem to have been unable to arrest the decline of their country.
The Spanish genetics are also broadly from the highest quality regions of that country (still with the highest incomes), like the Basque Country. Argentina doesn’t merely have mediocre PIGS EU handout genetics, it actually has cradle-of-the-Renaissance, competent-Milanese-industrialist genetics. It shouldn’t just be first-world, it should be rich.
If Milei ends up building a durable political coalition my guess is the country becomes very talked about in right-wing circles. It’s big weakness is geopolitically its very isolated.
I have been thinking about how would this country develop in the global economy of the 21st century as it is a country that HBD models would predict to be rich but is not. It does fit the communists exception to the model in a lighter firm of Peronism/Kirchnerism.
For what I know about trade economics though it’s not in a good place. They speak the wrong language for entry into the elites of the global market - English. Geographically isolated so it is difficult for them to plug into a larger industrial clusters (Poland entering the German industrial machine). Commodities only get you some wealth and they aren’t as well positioned as Australia to be a Chinese mine. Time zone does seem to be an advantage. Probably not enough true Brahmin types to compete in big tech or chip making which are industries where geographical location matters less (not bulky). Northern Italy does plug into the larger German industrial base and has a lot of machine tooling industry.
The country still feels like it should be carving out niches in the global economy and perhaps this will happen if the politics are truly changing. One or two Skype level tech firms would make a lot of sense. Something like a high-end state consumer good company too. A firm comparable to Sub-Zero.
The isolation is an excuse, come on. Singapore is rich despite being surrounded by much poorer countries, a rich and competent Argentina would have replaced/supplanted Miami as the center of Latin American finance, all global corporations in the region would have their Spanish-world HQs there etc. Uruguay is in a tough spot because it’s small. Argentina is large enough to do well.
Isn't the point that Singapore is the opposite of isolated? It's in one of the most strategic locations on the planet and is a massive shipping hub on the way to very wealthy places. Argentina is on the way to where? Miami is the Latin American finance hub because it's on the way to... in the Estados Unidos.
Miami is the hub because it’s the only Latin American city that’s a nice place to live. It’s actually not geographically more efficient that deals between, say, a Colombian and a Peruvian investment fund needs to be conducted via Miami than that they should be conducted via Buenos Aires. The problem with LatAm is instability and a lack of places the global PMC want to live, which is why Miami is the capital of Latin America. It’s not that it’s in the US except in that the US is safe and stable; if it was about the US market or access to Wall Street they’d be based in NYC, but they’re not. They wanted a Hispanic city that was nice (and Spain was too far).
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