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Without black people, the success of modern day America would not have been possible
Downthread there is a comment from @RandomRanger where he talks about how high income blacks are still just as criminal as low income whites, using this to argue that we shouldn't treat poor people of all races the same and that the negative effects of the black population today are so bad that putting them in the USA leads to social dysfunction as bad as that in modern day Russia.
It's quite heavily implied that blacks are a problem and their presence leads to a worse USA compared to a hypothetical counterfactual where they weren't there. I don't think this is quite right, I actually think an even stronger argument can be made for the exact opposite belief, namely that it is a direct consequence of having so many blacks that the USA is as advanced and developed as it is today and that a USA which never had them would be one where everyone (including whites) was much poorer today.
The argument itself is simple. Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK. This comparative lack of "democratic socialism" and a much lighter touch of the government on private enterprise has paid off in spades for the US which has gone from being only slightly more prosperous than the UK/France/Germany etc. to being significantly more so over the last few decades.
One perfectly valid question to ask is why did the USA not follow in the same footsteps as Europe when it came to implementing a very high tax and spend redistributive economy, which consequently lead to it becoming significantly richer per capita as the virtuous cycle paid off. My answer is simple: the US had too many black people for this sort of redistribution to be palatable to the ruling white classes. Hence the US escaped the economic havoc and destruction (compared to the counterfactual) such policies lead to in the long term and was able to grow and expand unshackled which eventually lead to everyone's living standards improving massively. Indeed as the tastes of the ruling class have changed and become more accepting of the sorts of behaviours displayed by low class black Americans so too have we heard louder and louder calls to redirect more and more money to the poor from those who might do something useful with it.
By now it's very well established empirically (just look at Europe) that when white people as a class get governmental power and there aren't too many lower class people around who have a very dissimilar modus vivendi that your average high status white would find disagreeable to fund they introduce "democratic socialism" and start taxing people/companies/transactions (discouraging innovation and hard work) and use the money to set up a welfare state (discouraging innovation and hard work). This predictably leads to less innovation and growth, which leads to large scale economic welfare loss for the population as a whole. The final result of this is that everyone ends up poorer and worse off, little different from the purported negative impact blacks have of the population as a whole.
Just like how blacks (as a class) have a direct negative impact on societal welfare through their elevated crime rate etc. wherever they are, whites (as a class) have a direct negative impact on societal welfare through their very high propensity to introduce "democratic socialism" wherever they are. Now of course there are lots of whites that don't think this way and are honest to goodness capitalists, but equally lots of blacks never steal or otherwise commit crimes. Just like the existance of such blacks doesn't mean blacks as a class don't cause large scale social damage through elevated crime incidences, the existance of such whites doesn't mean whites as a class don't cause large scale social damage through promoting bad economic policy.
Indeed because economic growth is contagious and spreads its boons all over the world, it's not just Americans who would be worse off if there were no blacks and consequently American whites had fallen to their instinctive impulses of taxing the productive to give to the unproductive. A lot of the high living standards around Europe and the rest of the world are due to techonologies that were developed and matured and brought to market due to substantial efffort from Americans safe in the knowledge that they would stand to personally benefit from its successes. Without this engine of growth and productivity in America it is well possible that the developed world in this alternate universe 2024 would still have living standards no higher than our world managed in the 1960s.
Many white nationalists are perfectly at home with noticing the bad consequences of black people as a class on the sum economic welfare of the USA. However they fail to notice the more pernicious but potentially even worse consequences of letting white people with their "lets minimise harm, even if it scuttles the economy" approach run rampant over the country like it would have done had there not been a large class of black people 100 years ago the whites were less happy to redistribute money towards.
The US does have a Europe level welfare state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending
We just choose to fund this through deficit spending, but that's how Americans pay for everything, both individually and collectively.
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I think this can be better explained by the Constitution, which heavily values individual rights, specially property rights . America has always been an ownership society first, not a redistributive one or egalitarian one, and even to this day despite wokeness, such differences persist between the US and Western Europe . Also, white rulers in Europe are perfectly fine with high taxes and redistribution to help migrants even if the money is wasted.
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I've been meaning to compose a small questions Sunday post on this topic but haven't really gotten my thoughts in order on it. But I think it fits here, so I'll try: does concentrating wealth in the "innovators" at the expense of the lower classes to generate wealth on the "a rising tide lifts all boats" theory actually work? My particular concern is that "technology level" is not a scalar; just because a civilization puts more effort towards developing technology doesn't mean they're developing the right technologies. And what are the "right" technologies is always going to vary based on who you ask, and in an unequal society, who you're asking is whoever has the money (relative weighting here; obviously no real society is going to be 100% exactly equal in wealth across its population).
We see this in the pre-Civil-War South where there was no economic incentive to automate labor that could be done by slaves, probably hurting them economically in the long-term. Did/do we have a similar lack of emphasis on labor-saving devices for domestic work because that was seen as the domain of women, or did things like the washing machine and various kitchen tools really get invented more or less as early as they reasonably could have? Another angle on this is the general tendency of tech companies to make their products in a way that makes money for VCs, not to be useful to consumers (see "enshittification"). I've seen this proposed as a fully general argument against capitalism: innovations that solve problems are greatly disfavored over innovations that allow for rent-seeking / produce profit.
... as you can see, this isn't a top-level Culture War Roundup post because my thoughts on the matter are not well-organized.
I haven't read it yet, but this is much the argument of Acemoglu's new book "Power and Progress," that it's perfectly possible for technological innovation to not spill over into benefits for normal people.
Before him, the tech history Joel Mokyr argued that the middle ages were more technologically innovative than classical Rome, but of course quality of life was very low.
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That's easily disproven by the widespread adoption of the cotton gin and sawmill.
This is a fascinating question. There were washing machine designs which didn't reduce the amount of work involved to where it is today but were a significant improvement over a washing board in... wait, really, the 1790s(https://infogalactic.com/info/Washing_machine)? Yep, massively labor-saving devices for laundry were first patented in the 1790s and there was an electric version in 1904. But it seems like washing machines caught on about as quickly as people could afford them- infogalactic says 60% by 1940.
Now I want to put a pin in it there, because permanent press fabric(another innovation that greatly reduced women's household work dramatically) wasn't a thing yet, and before it you had to iron everything extensively. And I don't know if anyone here has extensive experience ironing but it's not a quick process and I'm given to understand that before electric irons it took much longer. Of course infogalactic says(https://infogalactic.com/info/Clothes_iron) that the first popular electric iron was introduced in 1938 and became widespread over the course of the 40's and fifties, so we're talking about roughly the same timescale.
Back to the pin, I don't think that to a middle class or richer family(and poorer ones wouldn't have been early adopters of washing machines for obvious reasons) would have avoided buying a washing machine because "eh, the Mrs. stays at home, and I don't care how hard she has to work", but that labour saving devices, if they caught on slower than was reasonable to expect(although it doesn't seem like they did), did so largely because, well, generally high income inequality made servants cheap for anyone who could afford one. And IIRC most middle class families in the era before washing machines hired out their laundry for poor women to take home and bring back cleaned and ironed; that's why washerwomen are such a cliche in older literature. Middle class families had servants at least part time because that's pretty doable when income inequality is extremely high. Poor women obviously worked much more under this system, but, uh, so did their husbands, I think the balance of the evidence suggests that being poor in the past just involved a lot more work.
That points to a different hypothesis, that husbands love their wives and are willing to spend a reasonable portion of the household budget to make their lives easier, but that they prefer to do so in ways which make economic sense.
So, I think what we have here is evidence that income inequality has clear net negatives and people in the past weren't pointlessly evil or oppressive. But we already knew that.
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The black population of the Union states was negligible in the late 1800s, but it was there that the U.S.'s great agricultural and industrial innovations were born and took root. The "Great Migration" of southern agricultural black laborers north to the booming industrial cities occurred after the great gilded age of American lassiez-faire capitalism, and well into the urban progressive movement (which itself smoothly transitioned, after flirtations with fascism and communism, into the FDR welfarist coalition that dominated the mid-20th century, and whose institutional bones we're still building).
This is a very doubtful proposition. The U.S. is several times larger than the other major industrial powers in the world (Germany, UK, France, Japan), significantly more diversified in resources, and - these are the big doozy - didn't get bombed flat or invaded during WWII, and didn't lose an entire generation of elite young men in WWI. Instead, WWI put America in the position of having the allies mortgage their empires to us in exchange for food, war materiel, and ultimately intervention (WWI debts to the US weren't fully cleared in the UK until I think 2003?), and then the physical destruction of Eurasia in WWII put us in a massive comparative industrial advantage.
We tried to. It led to the stagnation of the 70's and early 80's. We then elected Reagan (as the Brits elected Thatcher) to try and shake the system loose, to varying degrees of success.
And then also sucking up all the cognitive capital from the rest of world, which contributed to the creation of the tech and financial industries.
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Black people of course played an important part in America's success. But leaving that aside, the rest of your post assumes without making an argument that welfare and redistribution has a strong, negative impact on growth and innovation, which is far from clear cut. America has been richer than Europe for a while, but significant divergence is pretty recent and didn't happen at the height of European statism / redistribution, but rather in the past few decades, a period during which many European countries passed (some extent of) liberal reforms and America correspondingly increased its own welfare state and involvement in the economy. Likewise, highly redistributionist countries like the Scandinavian nations still top charts for most innovative in the world, have robust growth, etc.
It we're going to compare small, high-iq, high trust populations, if silicon valley, seattle, or nyc were its own country, it would surpass it.
Notably these are the highest tax areas in the United States. My point is redistribution has a pretty questionable impact on innovation and growth.
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You will find very few places in the world that don't follow this "empirically established model" despite having negligible white populations; in fact, this sort of thing is ubiquitous in the third world, just with much worse outcomes. Ghana cratered its own economy by abandoning the successful model left to them by the British and transitioning to a centrally-controlled, price-fixing regime set up in the name of social justice and wealth distribution; that decision was made by third-worldist hero Kwame Nkrumah, and persisted for decades until it was partially abolished by the coincidentally half-white Jerry Rawlings. India has a welfare state and affirmative action system that no Western state can match for its all-consuming presence in the lives of ordinary people. No one on Earth loves redistributionist politics more than black and brown people do. Europe is certainly more socialist than America, but relative to the rest of the world, not so much.
Affirmative Action? Sure, India Numba Wan 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳
Welfare? I don't really see that being the case. Both the quality and breadth of amenities available to many Western welfare states I can name, such as the UK, utterly dwarfs the kind of coverage an Indian can expect.
We have free public healthcare. It is not terrible, it manages to provide maybe 50% the care, if not the comfort, of say, the NHS. Medicine, in both senses of the word, has strong power laws. The easy and cheap (free) availability of say, the WHO's top 100 list of essential medications means maybe 90% of patients presenting with a disease can get curative treatment.
But healthcare isn't the only part of a welfare state. There's housing, and India doesn't have anything like free/extremely subsidized public housing, along the lines of council flats and so on.
Food? Well, if you really like rice and lentils. You might even stave off most of the obvious nutritional deficiencies.
The welfare system in India is, of necessity, the bare minimum needed to ensure nobody starves to death or dies without at least one disinterested, overworked and underequipped doctor laying hands on them. Maybe you get cheap electricity and water. Subsidized public transport. Education, and quality at that once you're past high school, IITs and AIIMS (or most government run medical colleges) are far more prestigious than their private, for-profit counterparts.
I can't think of any aspect that makes the welfare state here more all-encompassing, and not just in terms of how much it can offer the average person. Western welfare states almost all offer better and more.
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Even if black presence lead to some opposition to welfare, it is anachronistic now to praise it since blacks have used their influence to promote more redistribution and have gotten a decent % of whites to go along with it, in addition to groups like Jews being supportive.
And then to add to those blacks and that share of whites have supported the party of mass migration and redistribution. We also had black nonwhites migrants who also support more redistribution and quotas.
The leftists who want mass migration for their goals are strategically smarter than a libertarian which believes it would benefit their political goals. Of course, the leftists are also wrong if they want certain societal metrics to improve. But in terms of more % of redistribution, then that is more likely to happen with more diversity. Maybe at best a small amount might lead to situations of limited welfare, but the coalition in favor of the specific diverse groups, did not only push for more goodies for their side, but also for changing the demographics as we have seen.
Plus, a right that tries to appeal to multiracial groups might become less anti welfare. And moreover, in a situation where such programs become entrenched and goverment is accustomed to high spending, who is to say that the eventual evolution of conservative establishment isn't to support more spending but with less racial criteria. Or at worst, to become the left as the Torries have done in Britain.
They are not increasing diversity -- they are increasing demographic groups which promote redistribution, the effect that in current USA it increases diversity is purely coincidental. For countries which already have demographics which promotes redistribution, they don't want to change demographics.
I disagree. Biden outright promotes as a good thing to reduce white %. Racial ethnic animosity is part of it. It is also about the left winning politically.
It is true that the goal isn't diversity per se. It is about groups that are desirable vs undesirable group. If a place is say 100% black, there wouldn't be calls to make it more white, for example.
I'm sorry, I don't get the part on which we disagree, I do agree with this your comment.
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The timing of this narrative isn't correct. By 1950, the United States was already much richer than Europe. Furthermore, the United States does have a massive redistributist state across multiple levels of governments. I don't think your premises are even in the ballpark of correct analysis.
Bombed to rubble Europe was presumably poorer than recent WW2 victor America in 1950.
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There are a couple of issues here.
First, seventy years is more than enough time for conditional convergence to work its magic. We saw this with the Asian Tigers. The reason that most European countries have not yet converged with the US is not that they need more time, but rather that they're not meeting the conditions required for convergence. In fact, in recent decades the US has actually been pulling away from Europe.
Second, saying that the US also has a welfare state is like saying that Europe also has fat people. Government spending is a smaller share of GDP in the US than it is in most Western European countries, by 10-20 percentage points. The main exception is Switzerland, which totally coincidentally is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, surpassed only by a handful of microstates and one quasi-petrostate (Norway).
Right, my point isn't that Europe is catching up, it's that it was already behind before either side of the pond had much welfare spending. We can even see that going back another 50 years. The United States has been more productive than Europe for a long time, shows no signs of that changing, and doesn't require welfare spending as a determinant to explain it.
And sure, the spending isn't as bad as it is in France, but it is comparable to Switzerland, Ireland, and Norway. Also of note is that in actual dollars rather than percentage of GDP, the United States is spending just as much on transfer programs, it simply has a larger economy. The United States shovels piles of free housing, medicine, food, and cash at its poor. In any case, the deviation between American and European productivity started way before this became a problem.
There were reasons for the US to be ahead back then that no longer apply, though. The two World Wars. The greater importance of land and natural resources to GDP back then. The US having a large internal free trade zone.
Currently the US operates with a pretty significant human capital disadvantage from the high black and indigenous population.
There's also a straightforward theoretical explanation for high taxation and welfare spending to reduce GDP level path: Diversion of resources away from investment and towards consumption, plus deadweight loss from high taxes. Why knock yourself out if it's only going to make a small difference in after-tax pay?
I'm not sure it's true that the US spends as much on welfare as Western Europe. I've looked into this before, and IIRC several of those countries spend more. But even if it does, this doesn't contradict the claim that the US is richer because it spends a smaller percentage of GDP on subsidizing consumption.
Consider that if I consistently spend 50% of my income on consumption and invest the rest, eventually I will end up spending more on consumption than my coworker who has the same salary and consistently spends 90% and saves 10%, precisely because limiting my consumption spending to a smaller share of my income has enabled my income to grow faster.
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Also, there have been times when the Western European GDP-per-capita has been closer to US and times when it has been farther away, with the current day having the greatest gap during, at least, the postwar times, starting from 2008, even though the welfare state has at least not gone through extensive further development during that time (considering the ACA and the Biden admin projects, the US has probably been more active in welfare state development than Europe as a whole, during this period).
I think the argument is that the welfare state's consequences are more apparent in the long run, as you get e.g. intergenerational welfare dependency, people not saving enough for their own retirement, people choosing safe careers rather than taking risks (and getting taxed heavily on the rewards), people not having kids because they trust in the state to look after them in their retirement etc.
True, the US has some of these incentives, but arguably not to the same degree as Western Europe.
There's also the argument that the rising dependency ratio with an ageing population is when the welfare state really becomes a drag, and the developed world is facing a rising dependeyc ratio due to demographics. Most welfare states were created for completely different population structures. That's why, despite rising taxes, cuts to services, and reforms, the fiscal outlook in most of Western Europe is still bleak: no matter how you walk, it's going to be uncomfortable to walk in shoes that are too small.
I don't know exactly how I'd calculate it, but I'm curious what fraction of increasing worker productivity (or perhaps GDP) is effectively getting thrown at balancing (for now) the changing costs of the welfare state.
People talk a lot about what fraction of wealth generated goes to workers, but I've never seen what fraction over time goes to recipients of the welfare state (pensioners, disability, housing assistance, Medicare/Medicaid).
The data is there to be combined, I think, because data on levels of transfers/taxes is available due to this debate: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/measuring-income-inequality-a-primer-on-the-debate/
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Depends on what you mean by it. If you consider homicide ratios, US areas with Black population are much, much worse than modern Russia and similar to impoverished, hungry Russia in 1990ths.
Strong wellfare state is relatively recent phenomenon. And USA was already rich compared to Europe in mid-19 th century, almost certainly even before that.
I would agree on the point, thought, that many white nationalists would want to build "socialism for whites only" and make ruinous decisions regarding economy, and, not mentioned in your post, ignore dysgenics in white community.
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Counter example: Much of Latin America has had leaders far to the left of what the US has ever had, despite far more diversity.
Looking at IMFs map of government spending as a percent of GDP it is difficult to see a trend. Homogeneous Asian countries are low in government spending. Brazil is high in government spending.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND
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Blacks have nothing to do with avoiding the perils of 'social democracy'. It was Anglos who refined and upheld the ideas of limited government and laissez faire faire economics. That's why Canada, New Zealand, Australia, UK and the US did very well, even without diversity. The US is simply the best endowed with natural resources - of course a country the size of Europe is going to do well, given centuries to build up in peace. They had enormous amounts of farmland, coal, oil, two ocean access, great river networks and no strong enemies in their entire hemisphere - an absurdly good base for a country. And then there's demographics: majority-black countries do poorly. Countries like Brazil that got even more diversity than the US are mediocre at best. All the richest and strongest countries in the world stem from European or East Asian roots, including America.
The obvious conclusion is 'Europeans and East Asians are the best at running civilizations' not 'a certain proportion of blacks make the country more functional by constantly stressing its economic-political immune system'. Especially when there's huge evidence to the contrary for the second theory! One of America's most prestigious institutions just fired a black president for plagiarism - the harm to meritocracy is clearly severe. Enormous amounts of welfare and affirmative action go into propping up a dysfunctional group, lest they launch massive riots like in 2020. The cores of American cities are blighted and too dangerous for useful work, Americans don't feel comfortable taking public transport (which is normal in countries with less diversity). If America had no blacks, it would be a stronger, richer country.
Just look at the US right now - there is no shortage of redistribution! There's a huge amount of redistribution of both wealth and status flowing to blacks. Consider the discussion about 'reparations' or how Trump of all people promoted this half-trillion dollar platinum plan to give blacks more, better jobs and businesses. The thesis that 'blacks prevent redistribution' is clearly wrong.
And if you want to blame whites for this admittedly significant problem, India does just as badly if not worse. It's absolutely mired in ethnic spoils politics, as self-made-human has pointed out in the past. You can't say "the existence of such whites doesn't mean whites as a class don't cause large scale social damage" when whites have made the strongest and most functional civilizations in all history. Maybe if you were Chinese, you could get away with it, though I'd point out that China has its fair share of social problems and can at best be considered a peer of the Western, European world. China runs rings around India in all aspects of competence - manufacturing, development, military strength, safety, research, quality of life and so on.
Whites invented capitalism and industrialism. The Amsterdam stock exchange is the oldest in the world. Complaining that whites aren't pro-capitalist enough is ridiculous.
Also worth noting that the US had a national minimum wage long before many countries in Europe (e.g. the UK or Germany) and some European countries (I think Sweden and Denmark?) don't have national minimum wages.
The US beats Western Europe in many aspects of regulation, which is partly why the US economy does better, but there are exceptions.
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Based on my very layman understanding of the relevant research, this is entirely plausible.
And many more I don’t bother to quote now.
Increased ethnic diversity is ruinous for popular support of redistributive social programs.
I'd say the point of your post is a reasonable extrapolation from relevant recent publications.
I really think the key here is cultural diversity rather than racial/ethnic (though of course the two correlate strongly).
If we imagine Protestants and Catholics, or assistance going to the Irish or Italians (yes, different ethnicity, but still pretty white), or French and Spaniards, or squares and potheads, or broad-brush USA history and "approved work ethic" Jesús-loving Asians, I think only the last group is gonna get the government cheese.
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I'm not sure I buy this line of thinking.
The argument is that less distribution of resources (aka high wealth gaps) leads to a more productive society, yet if you look at the countries with the greatest gini coefficients there's a large overlap/correlation with the poorest countries and the countries with the largest wealth gaps.
There is also an argument to be made that slavery actually hampered the economic growth of the South. It may have made a few individuals very wealthy, but the reliance on slave labor in agricultural production led to a slower growth in industry and the development of cities. There is also a dispute that farms with slaves outproduced cotton relative to if those regions did not have slaves. So the economic condition of the South may have been better off if there was no slavery (and thus much less blacks).
Also, the USA's economic strength relative to Europe was already well ahead by the late 1800s, fueled by America's abundant natural resources, the development of railroads, increases in population and industry, and the development of new patents and technologies. Two world wars devastated Europe while the United States was left largely alone, putting the USA in a prime position to become even more dominant on the world stage.
Many modern technologies such as computers and nuclear power were developed/accelerated during the United State's rivalry with the Soviet Union. The space arms race during the late 1950s accelerated the growth of Silicon Valley. When the Soviet Union got an early lead in the space race with Sputnik, President Eisenhower created both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA would fund nearly 70% of computer technology research in the US in the early 1960s. NASA had huge demands for integrated circuits, which led to the explosion and growth of Silicon Valley. ARPANET was also developed as a way to mitigate the threats of Nuclear war by allowing a nationwide communications network, which would eventually lead to the creation of the Internet. In other words, the technologies that enabled the United States to greatly surpass its European counterparts were developed and created in response to the Soviet Union and had nothing to do with the fact that there were some black people in the United States.
In terms of attitudes against redistribution hampered by the existence of a black population, what was stopping them from making a system of welfare just for whites? The more likely answer is that America's culture of individualism played a bigger role in slowing the growth of the welfare state relative to their European counterparts rather than racist attitudes against specific groups of people. I'd also like to point out that the richest cities and states in the United States also tend to have the greatest amount of welfare. Yes, you could argue that they would be even richer without the welfare, or that the welfare came after economic growth, but GDP per capita continues to grow in the US even with the vast expansion of welfare programs, while Europe has seen a stagnation since the early 2008s.
Here are some more likely explanations for the growing wealth differences between Europe and the United States. Americans also work more hours on average compared to Europeans (US: 1811 hours, France: 1511 hours, Germany 1341 hours per year). Furthermore, Americans are more entrepreneurial compared to Europeans. Here is a Gallup poll showing the difference in attitudes. A greater percentage of Americans start their own businesses, and an even greater proportion of Americans build billion dollar businesses compared to Europeans.
Maybe attitudes on race might play a factor, but it's insignificant compared to other factors.
This is very, very false equivalence. Wealth gaps are product of both policies and qualities of population. If you add low IQ permanent underclass to a country, keeping its economic policies same, then GDP per capita does down and Gini up. If everyone has same ability, then very intense competition doesn't create major difference in wealth. It's competition, not wealth gaps per se, creates economic growth.
I dont see strong correlation of what you claim on 2d plot: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gini-coefficient-vs-gdp-per-capita-pip Very low GINI index doesn't help Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia grow economically. It's just a reflection that these countries quite homogenous in regard to IQ.
Also obesity and number of HIV+ people in US continues to grow. Probably obesity is not harmful and even good for economic growth.
obese people have slightly shorter life expectancy compared to non-obese ppl but spend more on food and other services . Govt. spending on obese ppl good for healthcare sector but makes society worse and is misallocation of resources.
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I'm not claiming this, this was my summary of BurdensomeCount's argument. If it's an uncharitable summary of his view then fair enough but he literally said "Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK." A distribution of resources would lower the wealth gap.
Also, I don't see any reason to believe the bell curve of IQ distribution has significant differences between countries. The only statistics I've ever seen was on median/average IQs by country/race, not on the IQ distributions in each country. If you have any studies on this I'd be interested in seeing it, as I could not find anything. Regardless, there are literally 0 countries in the world where everyone has the same or similar amounts of ability. I don't see any reason to believe that Ukraine, Belarus, or Armenia is quite homogenous in regards to IQ. If you look at any IQ bell curve charts on race, you'll see that there is a common bell curve pattern. The best example of one bell curve being thinner or flatter on the tails is in regards to gender (women being more clustered around the mean) but even that gender difference still has gaps between the smartest and dumbest. You're claiming the bell curve of IQ in a place like Ukraine is extremely tight around the median but I see no evidence for it.
That's a logarithmic scale on the X-axis, most of the countries with a high Gini coefficient are quite poor. You can see the richer countries are clustered to the bottom right with the United States being the exception. I'll admit I didn't do a great analysis writing from my bed late at night and only spot-checked the map chart in my link, which showed that the countries with the largest Gini coefficients were mostly in Africa/South America which are poorer 2nd/3rd world countries. I took the data from your link and organized it by the most recent data for each country sorted by highest to lowest Gini coefficients (which you can see in the table below) and you can see the years vary, so doing any actual statistically valid analysis on this is quite difficult. A quick correlation on this data shows -0.36 which admittedly is a weak correlation, but this is by weighting each country equally regardless of population, and this is a univariate analysis which is not a good analysis for something as complex as this topic. As I pointed out earlier the dates aren't even the same, ranging from 1992 to 2021.
Anyway, I'm not making any claims in terms of the impact inequality has on economic growth as a whole, I'm providing some counter-evidence to BurdensomeCount's claim, which is that the lack of a redistributive welfare state leads to economic prosperity. I doubt any of the top 20 (or even top 50 except the United States) in the table below have a strong welfare system, yet these countries are not economic powerhouses. My rebuttal of BurdensomeCount's argument does not mean I believe a low Gini coefficient leads to economic growth. It should be clear from my points further down in my previous post that I believe there are other factors other than inequality that better explain economic growth and development.
In retrospect using the Gini coefficient alone is not a good analysis as it doesn't reveal much about welfare, and you'd want to look at changes in GDP per capita over time, but at this point to properly do a statistical analysis is a lot of effort for what is a rebuttal of an argument which in of itself doesn't even have statistical backing. I still think my general point here stands, which is that BurdensomeCount's argument is wrong.
What are you trying to say here? My point is that wealth redistribution is not a major factor in the economic growth of the United States compared to Europe and I'm not sure what your statement here either refutes or adds to the discussion.
If you actually believe obesity is good for economic growth then I'm genuinely curious as to why you think so.
Edit: Reworded my last point to be less antagonistic, I just assumed you were being sarcastic but I realized I don't know if that's true.
Table of Gini Coefficient Data
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This is correct, but I do not think BurdensomeCount's thinks redistributive welfare state and gini index are interchangeable (I don't). This is my main objection.
There are lots of countries with large percent of GDP in wellfare system having very high Gini index regardless.
adding individual bell curves with averages far apart does not look like bell curve.
Fair enough. But see my point on the correlation between welfare spending and Gini below.
I have organized and sorted the data for you in my previous post, can you pick out a few countries (other than the US) that are high on the list and has a large percentage of GDP in welfare system?
I've also tried to add some stats on welfare spending, there isn't much, so I put togther a new table below using what sources I could find. Newly added data in new columns is from here: https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social-spending.htm
If the country is missing that means there was no data on the percentage of GDP spent on public spending.
The correlation between Gini and % spending is -0.61, the correlation between % spending and GDP per capita is 0.36. Again, the same caveats as the previous analysis, except this time we also don't have much data on the highest gini coefficient countries so any analysis here shouldn't be used for any serious argument, but we now see a medium/strong negative correlation between public spending and gini coefficient. I mean is that such a surprise? If you don't like the use of gini coefficient then look at the correlation between GDP per capita and welfare spending and you see a small positive correlation. You could correctly point out that correlation != causation and the more likely explanation is that richer countries distribute after getting their wealth (to do a more appropriate analysis on this we would have to look at changes in GDP per capita over time) but my point is that welfare distribution is not a major factor in economic growth/development and there are more likely answers.
The populations are likely weighed heavily in one race or the other, not like those populations have equal distributions, and again this reveals very little about the tail end of the IQ distributions which is more important when we consider your argument on large gaps in ability leading to higher wealth gaps. Do any of the countries below have significant amounts of populations with differing means of IQ to properly explain the inequality outcome? I'm not saying your argument has no value, if we were looking at specific countries such as the United States there's definitely some merit, but as a general trend across all the countries, I don't think IQ gaps are the main or primary explanation for the higher Gini coefficient in these countries.
List of countries with high Gini index: Namibia Zambia Central African Republic Eswatini Colombia Mozambique Botswana Belize Angola Saint Lucia Zimbabwe
That is such an arbitrary cutoff that conveniently cuts off all the high gini coefficient countries, don't do this.
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Why do you assume the US would have similar politics to European powers?
Everywhere where whites are a large enough contingent and wield power and there is no smaller group they really dislike ends up with these sorts of politics. Canada is just north of you guys and has a large welfare state. Aus and NZ aren't that different either.
Of course, Canada”s elite were quite famously loyalist who hated the American experiment.
Is your contention that all white people are the same?
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Canada has a much larger native population than the USA, about 5% of the total population now, who have similar life outcomes to america's blacks. They also receive a huge amount of bespoke welfare. So I think that's some evidence against your theory.
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