Bad Arguments About Global Poverty

I agree with some of what Jared Diamond has to say here but simply because it's imperative for the rich world to adopt more ecologically sustainable practices and it's also imperative for us to do what we can to help ameliorate extreme poverty in the non-rich world is no reason to just throw any old argument into the mix. For example:

People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn’t specify that it’s by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.

There's just no evidence of this. You don't see people growing up in Congo and launching terrorist attacks on Switzerland. Terrorists don't come indiscriminately from the poorest countries, and they don't seek to target the wealthiest countries. After all, terrorism's not a good way of making money it's an act of political violence and it's mainly perpetrated by people who think they have very serious political grievances. Israel's not richer than Norway, but it sure gets attacked by a lot more terrorists -- ideology and grievance are the key, and opposition to foreign occupiers is almost always the issue. Curbing global poverty is a good cause, but so is developing a more sensible foreign policy and we're not going to get that done unless we're clear on the actual sources of terrorist violence.

Comments

You are right, of course. Alan Krueger (an economist at Princeton) has a book that has lot of data to support your point:

http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/WhatMakesaTerrorist/WhatMakesaTerrorist.html

Posted by sherwood | January 3, 2008 5:48 PM

What about Mao's sea? I mean, yes, the terrorists themselves tend to have specific ideology and grievance, but is it possible to address the attitudes of the public in terrorist-harboring countries without addressing the political grievance? i.e. if we had better trade relations with pakistan, foreign aid in Waziristan that actually did something, etc., would it matter that we didn't do more to kick India out of Kashmir or whatever?

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | January 3, 2008 5:54 PM

Terrorists don't tend to be all that poor. What sherwood said.

Posted by Antid Oto | January 3, 2008 6:06 PM

Terrorists don't tend to be all that poor.

No, but without the logistical and political support of the very poor, terrorist movements would not be possible.

Posted by Freddie | January 3, 2008 6:09 PM

Doh!

Whazzit with some of these anti-poverty activists that they think anyone who has read any little bit on terrorism of the last couple of decades will buy that? Nathan Newman tried this one, to my surprise, at TPMCafe in August. I thought he was savvier than that.

It just hurts the credibility of their other arguments to use the "they hate us because we're rich" theme (it's not 1848 any more, sorry.) Plus, it can lead one ultimately into lending support for some very faulty neo-conservative principles about how they just really want to be happy little capitalists, give 'em a small business or a job and a nuclear family with values, they'll be too busy and happy to find time for terrorizing.

Posted by artapppraiser | January 3, 2008 6:22 PM

What Matt said.

And to Nick Beaudrot, while it would certainly help the US a lot if it could get India to leave Kashmir, the truth is that it is what we do, and not so much what we fail to do, that fuels this. Norway, after all, isn't trying to kick India out of Kashmir either.

What we need to do is something that a lot of Americans seem constitutionally incapable of doing-- admit that we can't dictate terms to the rest of the world and base our troops everywhere. To sustain that, we have to play favorites and make war, and playing favorites and making war are what engenders the terrorist blowback.

Posted by Dilan Esper | January 3, 2008 6:23 PM

Oops here's a properly formatted link to
Nathan Newman's "Economic Desperation Drives Terrorism".

Posted by artapppraiser | January 3, 2008 6:26 PM

Also, it needs to be kept in mind that the perception of differential only causes problems if people do not think their lot is improving.

If people are confident that their children are likely to have a better life than they are having, and their grandchildren better than their children, then awareness of a massive discrepancy in standards of consumption simply are not going to rankle.

Its only when people think that they are mired at the edge of survival, with little hope for progress, that the fact that there are some who have such excess starts to bite in a serious way.

So in that respect, the several decades long process of enforcing the Washington Consensus for a couple of extra percentage points of GDP growth all up seems likely to have been a serious blunder, even in a purely selfish cost-benefit analysis for the high-income nations that imposed it on low-income nations.

Posted by BruceMcF | January 3, 2008 6:30 PM

The biggest expanse of really poor people is in sub-Saharan Africa, and they commit very few anti-American terrorist atrocities. Indeed, polls tend to show that the American government is much more popular in sub-Saharan Africa than in just about any other part of the world.

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 6:32 PM

Good post, Matt.

"No, but without the logistical and political support of the very poor, terrorist movements would not be possible."

Freddie,

This is completely false. Don't worry though: it's still OK to want to help the poorest people in the world even if they don't want you dead.

"Indeed, polls tend to show that the American government is much more popular in sub-Saharan Africa than in just about any other part of the world."

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. The more active Western power there, France, is considerably less popular.

Posted by Fred | January 3, 2008 6:42 PM

One word: Gaza.

Posted by Rickm | January 3, 2008 6:44 PM

The biggest expanse of really poor people is in sub-Saharan Africa, and they commit very few anti-American terrorist atrocities. Indeed, polls tend to show that the American government is much more popular in sub-Saharan Africa than in just about any other part of the world.

Right. It's the focusing power of American manipulation of these countries, with the zeal of religious fundamentalism, that creates terrorist movements. Contra Fred, while terrorist leaders are largely bourgeois, suicide bombers overwhelmingly tend to be poor. Which makes a certain degree of sense.

Posted by Freddie | January 3, 2008 6:49 PM

After watching Republicans use "It'll help us against terrorism!" as an effective justification for things they wanted to do that wouldn't actually help, I'm not surprised that Jared Diamond feels that the good guys ought to get into the game.

Posted by Neil the Ethical Werewolf | January 3, 2008 6:49 PM

The US has repeatedly intervened on behalf of the welfare of Muslims -- to help Afghans throw out the Soviets, to free Kuwait, to feed starving Somalis in 1991, Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999. But it just made Muslims resent us more because it just showed we have the power to do them favors.

American strength and prosperity tends to rub Middle Eastern "honor" cultures the wrong way.

Why are we so strong and they so weak? It must be our fault, because the alternative is that it's their own damn fault, and that's an intolerable concept to them.

The Middle Eastern cultural matrix predates Islam, but Islam provides a semi-coherent vehicle for their resentment and rage.

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 6:54 PM

"I'm not surprised that Jared Diamond feels that the good guys ought to get into the game."

That represents a general pattern in Diamond's writing (following his excellent first book, The Third Chimpanzee) -- "The moral superiority of my opinions justifies me cutting lots of ethical corners in how I argue for them."

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 6:57 PM

Is that Steve Sailer talking again? About all the world's Muslims as if they were a coherent faction? It's so hard to pin down what particular form of crypto-bigotry he's slinging this time. Is it jingoism, ethnocentrism, or plain old racism? I like that "helping" the Afghanis throw out the Soviets bit. Yeah, that's what we were doing. Helping.

Posted by gerontion | January 3, 2008 6:59 PM

Steve Sailer had an interesting post about the sub-Saharan African country where Barack Obama has familial ties: "Kenyan tribalism explains why Barack is so black".

Posted by Harry | January 3, 2008 7:06 PM

The lament that poverty and misery cause terrorism is met with the response that many of your average run of the mill terrorists are middle-class and well educated. The latter argument is supposed to refute the former, but I don't think it does. Doesn't it make sense that the middle-class and well educated see the misery around them and form a grievance on behalf of the miserable, and that this grievance, exacerbated by extremist ideology and extremist religious interpretations, leads to terrorism?

Posted by bobbo | January 3, 2008 7:07 PM

To steal a line from Roger Waters, I think they want us to get our filthy hands off their desert.

Posted by handy | January 3, 2008 7:08 PM

The differential itself is so suspect that it shouldn't be the basis for an argument. It ignores the enormous differences in wealth within nations, and it only measures wealth that has a cash value in a modern economy.

I probably "consume" more each day than entire villages in the Amazon, but I'm not sure if most Amazonian Indians want to give up their lifestyle or exchange it with mine. Most seem to want nothing more from the modern world than to be left alone. Also, almost a tenth of my "consumption" is to purchase the services of the federal government so it can attack other countries, I'd rather cut this out of my lifestyle but don't seem to be able to.

Posted by Ed | January 3, 2008 7:11 PM

If terrorism and poverty aren't correlated, how do you explain the fact that the new "Awakening" movement in Iraq is successfully drawing former Sunni insurgents and sympathizers "into the fold" as viable security forces?

The fact is, terrorism originates disproportionately from underdeveloped nations, or at least nations with large numbers of the desperately poor living alongside the wealthy. While ideological and political differences usually serve as the catalysts for specific acts of terrorism, the pervasion of terrorism as a means of resistance is aided by the continuation of extreme poverty. After all, it's a lot easier to commit an act of final desperation (suicide bombing, for example) when the perception is that you have nothing to live for. People who are content and materially secure tend to be more difficult to whip into blinded frenzy of hatred than those who are destitute.

But I turn my relatively uninformed opinion over to those more knowledgeable than I: Susan Rice (of the Brookings Institution) articulates a persuasive case for the threat of global poverty here: http://www.brookings.edu/articles/2006/spring_globaleconomics_rice.aspx

The report is worth reading in full, and if you follow the link to the PDF file, there is a section dealing specifically with terrorism.

Posted by Nathan | January 3, 2008 7:32 PM

Well, I think Matt is just too quick to dismiss Diamond's thoughtful arguments about the root causes of terrorism.

Remember, Diamond teaches at UCLA, and by some measures, California's border with Mexico constitutes one of the sharpest "income gradients" anywhere in the world. And furthermore, California---as its local place-names indicate---is very clearly just the sort of foreign-occupied territory which should accentuate the psychological spur for mass terrorism.

Now admittedly, we don't hear a great deal about endless Latino terrorist attacks against the hated Anglo occupier, and the relative silence can't entirely be blamed on the PC dishonesty of the mainstream media.

But that's just the point---it's quiet, TOO quiet.

I have little doubt that at the trigger of a coded phrase broadcast on Radio Aztlan, every Latino gardener and nanny in the Golden State will pick up a butchers' knife and do a Sicilian Vespers on the Gringo occupiers.

I'm sure that Jared Diamond has heavily fortified his home bomb-shelter against just that inevitable Day of Reckoning...

Posted by RKU | January 3, 2008 7:47 PM

"If terrorism and poverty aren't correlated, how do you explain the fact that the new "Awakening" movement in Iraq is successfully drawing former Sunni insurgents and sympathizers "into the fold" as viable security forces?"

This doesn't make any sense at all. It sounds like a point, the way Letterman utters punchlines that sound enough like jokes that the unattentive listener might accidently laugh at them.

The brain is a pretty complicated organ which probably does not possess a terrorism gland that is activated by malnutrition. How about we accept that there are as many reasons to blow up an embassy as there are angry Arab xenophobes with access to dynamite? That even within the tiny ranks of terror, there is a veritable rainbow of human diversity? I can see the impulse to blame poverty, since it's hard for us to otherwise understand why people would blow themselves up, but the fact is that perfectly comfortable, relatively well-off people seem as eager to kill themselves for Allah as their poorer counterparts. The 9/11 hijackers, for instance, were well-educated members of the middle class. I don't have any particular sympathy for anyone who would commit murder to demonstrate their piety, but it is condescending to assume that all they do this shit out of desperation.

Posted by gerontion | January 3, 2008 7:48 PM

"Doesn't it make sense that the middle-class and well educated see the misery around them and form a grievance on behalf of the miserable, and that this grievance, exacerbated by extremist ideology and extremist religious interpretations, leads to terrorism?"

No, it doesn't make sense. Is it too hard to accept that Muslim terrorists might not share the same priorities and grievances as American liberals? Mohamed Atta wasn't motivated by the poverty in Haiti or Malawi. The Muslim doctor/terrorists in London weren't either.

Posted by Fred | January 3, 2008 7:52 PM

"Now admittedly, we don't hear a great deal about endless Latino terrorist attacks against the hated Anglo occupier, and the relative silence can't entirely be blamed on the PC dishonesty of the mainstream media."

I know you're trying to be funny, but aren't you missing something? What would the point be of the Mexican immigrants chasing out the gringos? The gringos are the reason why they are coming to California in the first place. You can find a similar climate and coastline in Mexico, after all. If Mexican immigrants ever wrested control of California, they would turn it into Mexico North and start emigrating from it to the U.S.

Posted by Fred | January 3, 2008 8:07 PM

Actually, Jared Diamond is deeply unenthusiastic about foreign immigration into Southern California, for environmental and other reasons. In Diamond's 2005 bestseller "Collapse," he writes:

"I have seen how Southern California has changed over the last 39 years, mostly in ways that make it less appealing… The complaints voiced by virtually everybody in Los Angeles are those directly related to our growing and already high population… While there are optimists who explain in the abstract why increased population will be good and how the world can accommodate it, I have never met an Angeleno … who personally expressed a desire for increased population in the area where he or she personally lived... California's population growth is accelerating, due almost entirely to immigration and to the large average family sizes of the immigrants after their arrival."

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 8:38 PM

Re RKU's comment "I have little doubt that at the trigger of a coded phrase broadcast on Radio Aztlan, every Latino gardener and nanny in the Golden State will pick up a butchers' knife and do a Sicilian Vespers on the Gringo occupiers."
---------
Only if we try to interfere with their drug smuggling.

See http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2839120

"A recent standoff between National Guardsmen and heavily armed outlaws along the Mexican border has rattled some troops and raised questions about the rules of engagement for soldiers who were sent to the border in what was supposed to be a backup role.

Six to eight gunmen possibly heading for Mexico with drug money approached a group of Tennessee National Guard troops at an overnight observation post Jan. 3 on the U.S. side of the Arizona-Mexico border. No one fired a shot, and the confrontation ended when American troops retreated to contact the Border Patrol. The gunmen then fled into Mexico.

But the incident made some National Guard commanders nervous enough to move up training dates for handling hostage situations...

...Texas soldiers will undergo additional training on what to do if they are separated from their teams or taken hostage or kidnapped.

"It mainly encompasses how to treat your captors, what to think about when you are in that position and what to do when you are being rescued," Staff Sgt. Henry Aguirre said "

Posted by Don Williams | January 3, 2008 8:43 PM

The reason I give Jared Diamond a hard time is because he really is smart enough to figure out the truth. But he decided to sell out for the big money that comes with promoting political correctness in "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Amusingly, he still gets smeared as a racist by true believers in PC, like the pathetic-sounding anthropologists who were denouncing him in the NYT recently:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/12/almost-makes-you-feel-sorry-for-jared.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 8:45 PM

Also, Diamond endorsed immigration restrictionism in Australia in "Collapse."

Unfortunately, he's too aware of which side of his bread is buttered to actually speak up with his heretical thoughts.

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 8:47 PM

"I know you're trying to be funny, but aren't you missing something? What would the point be of the Mexican immigrants chasing out the gringos? The gringos are the reason why they are coming to California in the first place. You can find a similar climate and coastline in Mexico, after all. If Mexican immigrants ever wrested control of California, they would turn it into Mexico North and start emigrating from it to the U.S."

Look, I don't want to come out and say this is idiotically racist, because I don't think the idea was expressed intentionally. But it doesn't seem to me that the big draw of the United States is all the awesome white people we've got over here. It seems as if it's the economic opportunity, and there is nothing inherent about that opportunity that demands that it is maintained by individuals of European descent.

What if, due to the gradual replacement of the mostly white population of California by Latinos, that California remained mostly the way it is? I mean, this is a complicated question, and we can't really run experiments, but presumably it isn't impossible for a large section of the country to be mostly non-white and still remain economically on par with the rest of the country. On what basis would a person predict the economic collapse of California? It seems like it's got good educational institutions, it's the eighth largest economy in the world, it's got a lot going for it. I can't believe all that would be destroyed merely because of a shift in the ethnic demographics.

Posted by gerontion | January 3, 2008 8:47 PM

Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, right? Saudi Arabia isn't a poor country. But the Saudis were aware they didn't do anything to earn their wealth -- it was all the work of American oil companies. That makes a certain kind of person very resentful.

As Ben Franklin pointed out, doing people favors doesn't make them like you because it just shows them you can do them favors. Instead, to get somebody to like you, have them do you favors.

It's like how the French loved us after they helped us get our independence at Yorktown, giving us the Statue of Liberty, until we finally repaid Lafayette in 1917-1945, and they've been mad at us ever since.

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 8:52 PM

Re Matthew's comment "After all, terrorism's not a good way of making money it's an act of political violence and it's mainly perpetrated by people who think they have very serious political grievances. "
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Er..yes. One of the "serious political grievances" being that most people in the Middle East don't have a pot to piss in because of predatory acts by some fuckers from the other side of the world.

This bullshit discussion can be settled very easily -- LOOK at what Bin Laden said were the reasons why he was declaring war on the USA.

Of course, our President, corporate news media, and the 911 Commission have been too fucking dishonest to discuss that with the American people.

Hasn't anyone at this allegedly "progressive" blog/magazine read "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"?

Posted by Don Williams | January 3, 2008 8:53 PM

Re: No, but without the logistical and political support of the very poor, terrorist movements would not be possible.

The very poor are irrelvant. They have no money to donate to any cause, not even to their own survival, and they tend to be severely disenfranchised. Support for terrorism, and for radicalism of all kinds, tends to come from a frustrated middle class.

Re: That represents a general pattern in Diamond's writing (following his excellent first book, The Third Chimpanzee)

I thought Guns, Germs and Steel was excellent. When Diamond writes about things in the distant past he's an innovative thinker. When he addresses the present he can't seem to get past a lot of tired, old platitudes. Even in GG&S, it was the parts that focused on the Neolithic revolution and the very early Bronze Age that were insightful. When he tried bringing it all up to later eras, his geo-ecological thesis got lost in a welter of knee-jerk cant.

Re: terrorism originates disproportionately from underdeveloped nations, or at least nations with large numbers of the desperately poor living alongside the wealthy.

On a global scale, the people of the Middle East are not "desperately poor". Compared to people in, say, Sierra Leone or Haiti the rubish-combers on Egypt are living like God on a holiday.

Re: Remember, Diamond teaches at UCLA, and by some measures, California's border with Mexico constitutes one of the sharpest "income gradients" anywhere in the world.

Mexico is also not a particularly poor country. It is in fact in the richer one half of nations. And how many Mexican terrorists are there?

Re: And furthermore, California---as its local place-names indicate---is very clearly just the sort of foreign-occupied territory which should accentuate the psychological spur for mass terrorism.

Um, by that standard the whole US is "foreign occupied". For that matter is there any place in North or South America that isn't?

Posted by Jonf | January 3, 2008 8:58 PM

First of all, let's point out that in the 70's, most terrorism - aside from the PLO - was occurring in Western nations such as Germany, France, Italy, and England and most of it was being conducted by the middle-class people who were the members of the Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof, the IRA, the Angry Brigade, and the like.

It was only in the 80's and later that "terrorism" came to be regarded as a "poor nation" - and specifically Muslim - thing. Almost all of that grew out of the Iranian Revolution and the Afghan resistance against the Russian and the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

Obviously, it would nice if everybody had a house, a car, an income, a family, a personal computer, and a big-screen TV even in Uganda or Ethiopia. Sure, that would do away with terrorism - IF it was done by the efforts of the states and societies in all those countries. Meaning that the states in those countries became liberal, democratic, and spent some effort in economic development.

But when the states in those countries are oppressive monarchies or corrupt secular gangs and they extort money from their citizens and spend it all on the military and secret police to keep the population in line, obviously at some point those people who either have the wherewithal or those who have nothing to lose are going to engage in terrorism.

And in those situations, terrorism is utterly and completely justified (as long as the methods used are directed against the corrupt state and not against random civilians or on an ethnic or racial basis and as long as the intent is to establish a free society and not just replace one corrupt gang with another one.)

OTOH, the terrorism to which the US is subject is motivated totally by US policies with regard to those corrupt governments as well as US corruption itself in those areas of the world. Eliminate that US corruption and the US will not be targeted by terrorists.

It's that simple.

The problem is that the US corporate and political hierarchy believes that US "national interests" - in other words, their interests - require unending corruption on the part of the US.

And the US population has absolutely NO clue how to go about getting rid of this. In fact, most of the US population probably would think - if asked - that it's perfectly okay for the US to continue doing what it's doing as long as it has positive economic effects on their lifestyles. (And I'm not saying it necessarily would have negative effects not to be corrupt. I'm just saying a lot of people could probably be convinced that it does.)

The bottom line: in poor countries with oppressive states, terrorism is a reaction against poverty and oppression. For everybody else, it is a reaction against specific states and their policies.

The US cannot solve terrorism against it by improving the economies of other countries - if for no other reason then it can't improve other countries economies anyway. It can solve terrorism against it by stopping its economic theft and manipulation of other countries and the support of corrupt governments.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 3, 2008 8:59 PM

Re gerontion's comment "What if, due to the gradual replacement of the mostly white population of California by Latinos, that California remained mostly the way it is? I mean, this is a complicated question, and we can't really run experiments, but presumably it isn't impossible for a large section of the country to be mostly non-white and still remain economically on par with the rest of the country. On what basis would a person predict the economic collapse of California? "
--------------
On the basis that if you have 8 kids when you can only feed two, you are unlikely to send the other six to Stanford or MIT.

Unless you find some schmucks who are stupid enough to pick up your tab while their kids can only attend some third rate college because of affirmative action.

Which is Darwinian selection -- of a sort.

Posted by Don Williams | January 3, 2008 9:01 PM

Gerontion asks:

"What if, due to the gradual replacement of the mostly white population of California by Latinos, that California remained mostly the way it is?"

It actually helps to look up statistics.

California is already down among the bottom five states in NAEP test scores, and it's down with Hawaii and D.C. at the very bottom in standard of living (median income for a family of four adjusted for cost of living). If you stop and think, you'll notice that the state's 15 million or so Hispanics contribute very, very little creatively to its two big industries: Silicon Valley and Hollywood. For example, in California, Mexicans don't rank in the top 20 sources of immigrants getting technology patents. Turks get more patents in California than do Mexicans, yet I've never heard of a single Turkish neighborhood in California. (Yes, the CEO of AMD and Richard Rodriguez are typical Mexican-Americans, but they are close to the exceptions that prove the rule. The three fashionable Mexican directors are not Mexican-Americans -- they are from Mexico City's cultural elite.)

California has way too many assets (e.g., the climate) to collapse economically, but its future looks a lot like New Mexico's very inegalitarian present: very billionaires, some scientists, some celebrities, and a whole lot of below averageness.

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 9:05 PM

If you do a Census check, which is kind of interesting, it says the average family size of "All Hispanic or Latino" is 4. If you then check "Not Hispanic or Latino", which means everyone else, you get three. So, yes, Hispanic family sizes in the US are larger. But it doesn't seem as if they are catastrophically larger, eh?

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFFacts

Posted by gerontion | January 3, 2008 9:15 PM

It will be interesting to see what happens to California. There are obviously important cultural phenomena that play a role in, say, how likely the son of a a Mexican immigrant is going to pursue a college education, that sort of thing. But those cultural phenomena are not permanent features of the socio-economic landscape, are useless as predictors of individual behavior, and are only a part of the overall equation. It seems like it will be a good test of the notion of the importance of institutions, which is the usual general argument for why certain countries remain stricken by poverty and bloody political conflict. California has the necessary institutional backbone (better than New Mexico's-these states are not similar enough for the comparison to be reliable)-if the state really starts resembling Mexico then that will invalidate a number of assumptions about the importance of the state in the perpetuation of economic prosperity.

Posted by gerontion | January 3, 2008 9:29 PM

"If you do a Census check, which is kind of interesting, it says the average family size of "All Hispanic or Latino" is 4. If you then check "Not Hispanic or Latino", which means everyone else, you get three. So, yes, Hispanic family sizes in the US are larger. But it doesn't seem as if they are catastrophically larger, eh?"

Well, they are 33% larger. That's quite a big number. If you have ten average single-family houses, that's 40 people in the Latino one versus 30 in the non house. Scale that up to a town of 1,000 houses and it's 4,000 people vs. 3,000 people. If all those extra people are kids, then you need extra kids, etc. And if the larger town isn't as well off economically, that puts a strain on the town's finances.

Not to argue one way or another, but 4 vs. 3 people per house CAN make a difference.

On topic: While Diamond may not be correct on poverty sparking terrorism, I think the rest of the op-ed seems to be rather agreeable, especially the part about oil-consumption and quality-of-life, and sustainable resource-management.

Posted by Jeremy | January 3, 2008 9:38 PM

Re Steve Sailer's comment "Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, right? Saudi Arabia isn't a poor country. But the Saudis were aware they didn't do anything to earn their wealth -- it was all the work of American oil companies. That makes a certain kind of person very resentful. "
--------------
1) Bullshit. The US government has supported a small kleptocracy -- the Saudi royal family -- for decades. The deal is simple -- Houston gets cheap oil, the Saudi princes get shitloads of royalties, and the people of Saudi Arabia get jack shit.

2) Maybe Steve could explain to us why Saudi Arabia, "liberated Kuwait" and the UAE are among the few countries who refuse to give the World Bank statistical data on income distribution??

3) Times were particularly hard circa 1999 -- oil was cheap because there was a surplus on the market. CEO Dick Cheney laid off a lot of workers at Halliburton. What happened to personal incomes in Saudi Arabia is left as an exercise for the reader. While some of the royals' wealth may trickle down to the casinos and whores of Monte Carlo, relatively little trickles down to the common citizen of Arabia.

4) PS When I said the US "supports" the Saudi royal family, I was NOT referring to mere lip service.
The US government stationed large number of troops in Saudi Arabia to protect the royal kleptocracy --one of the reasons Bin Laden gave for the 911 attack. Plus the US government gives the royal family massive amounts of advanced weapons systems.

5) A few years ago, the US news media reported that Al Qaeda had bombed the offices of Vinnell Inc -- without noting that Vinnell is the US corporation whose mercernaries have spent the last 35 years in creating the Saudi Gestapo -- see http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0513-06.htm and more recently, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0514-06.htm

For the economic interests behind this US support, see http://www.mapcruzin.com/news/bush121601a.htm

6) But why am I wasting my breath explaining this to Al, Fred and Steve? It would be a more productive use of my time to go out in a field and read Aristotle's "Politics" to a herd of fucking cows.

Posted by Don Williams | January 3, 2008 9:38 PM

Gerontion:

It might come as a big surprise to you, but there have been large numbers of Hispanics in California since before it became a state in 1851. The same with New Mexico. There have been Hispanics in Santa Fe since 1609.

We have many generations worth of data on the performance of American-born Hispanics relative to other groups, and -- guess what? -- nothing much changes.

Now, it could be that Hispanic relative average performance will suddenly begin changing. Anything could happen! But it's just as likely that it would change for the worse as for the better.

This is a good example of how so much of pro-illegal immigration thinking is based on ignorance and wishful thinking.

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 9:46 PM

Osama bin Laden's father was a billionaire who made his money building stuff for the Saudi royal family.

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 9:51 PM

Good comment, Don Williams, not a waste of time. Cheers.

Posted by robuzo | January 3, 2008 9:52 PM

What if, due to the gradual replacement of the mostly white population of California by Latinos, that California remained mostly the way it is?

Well, one would certainly expect *some* significant changes, though hardly the cataclysmic ones predicted by the excitable anti-immigrationists.

For example, today's Los Angeles is very heavily immigrant/Latino/non-European, and during 2006 the serious crime rate continued to drop, finally reaching levels last seen fifty years before, during California's Golden Age. Now, 1956 LA was almost 90% white-European, while today's LA is almost 90% non-white-European, so this is an interesting data-point.

They have now just announced---surprise, surprise!---that the crime rate during 2007 then fell *another* 8% or so, pushing it far below that of 1956. Based on the way the figures were presented in the LA Times story, the current rate may either be the lowest in recorded LA history, or perhaps the crime statistics from the early years of the 20th Century just weren't recorded in sufficiently comparable methodology to determine another matched year.

On the other hand, I'd be the first to admit that traffic has gotten steadily worse in Los Angeles due to population growth, and is certainly the source of endless complaint by everyone I know who lives there. On the other hand, LA traffic has been getting monotonically worse for at least around fifty years, so that's really nothing new.

As for those violent Mexican drug-dealers carrying AK-47s to protect the millions in cash they're carrying across the border, I'm totally shocked. Everyone knows that Anglo drug-dealers carrying millions in cash across the border just carry lollipops and ACLU cards...

Posted by RKU | January 3, 2008 9:54 PM

"What about Mao's sea? I mean, yes, the terrorists themselves tend to have specific ideology and grievance, but is it possible to address the attitudes of the public in terrorist-harboring countries without addressing the political grievance? i.e. if we had better trade relations with pakistan, foreign aid in Waziristan that actually did something, etc., would it matter that we didn't do more to kick India out of Kashmir or whatever?

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | January 3, 2008 5:54 PM"

I agree with the general thrust of your argument, just like how a child of privilege like Che became a Marxist revolutionary after traveling through Latin America and becoming more aware of the effects of white Latino discrimination against those with native and African blood. However, when Diamond makes the particular claim he makes, when someone like your or I make our argument, people are likely to misunderstand it and think we are making Diamond's argument. A lot of people have trouble processing information and arguments without using some easy, clear pre-existing schemas (i.e., if you are dismissive of Marxist arguments and you, truly or falsely, believe an argument to be based in Marxism, you are likely to dismiss it). It also becomes easier to smear liberals as the people "who don't get it" when smart liberals like Diamond (I'm assuming he is a liberal from what I know of him) make such claims.

""Doesn't it make sense that the middle-class and well educated see the misery around them and form a grievance on behalf of the miserable, and that this grievance, exacerbated by extremist ideology and extremist religious interpretations, leads to terrorism?"

No, it doesn't make sense. Is it too hard to accept that Muslim terrorists might not share the same priorities and grievances as American liberals? Mohamed Atta wasn't motivated by the poverty in Haiti or Malawi. The Muslim doctor/terrorists in London weren't either.

Posted by Fred | January 3, 2008 7:52 PM"

Atta was, however, known to be upset over the discrimination and relative poverty Muslims face in Germany, which helped to radicalize him. After all, at one point he was dating a German woman, he was looking for engineering jobs in Germany and they were looking for an apartment together when all of a sudden he changed his path. The discrimination South Asians and Muslims in England face did help to shape the worldview of the London bombers. After 9/11, a minority who could either be a Muslim or easily confused with a Muslim was more likely to be the victim of a hate crime in the UK than in the US, where the 9/11 attacks actually took place. The anger at racism infesting social relations among races in England is getting rather strong in places like East London.

Muslims in England do tend to be poorer, while Muslims in the US tend to be richer than the average American, which probably does help to explain in part why American Muslims hold more moderate views than British Muslims. After all, how many American Muslims have actually been terrorists? The London bombers were home grown, but the 9/11 attackers were mostly Saudis. This probably also helps to explain a big reason why there haven't been any successful follow-ups to the 9/11 attacks on American soil.

"But that's just the point---it's quiet, TOO quiet.

I have little doubt that at the trigger of a coded phrase broadcast on Radio Aztlan, every Latino gardener and nanny in the Golden State will pick up a butchers' knife and do a Sicilian Vespers on the Gringo occupiers.

I'm sure that Jared Diamond has heavily fortified his home bomb-shelter against just that inevitable Day of Reckoning...

Posted by RKU | January 3, 2008 7:47 PM"

Are you being sarcastic? If Zack de la Rocha couldn't inspire such a Mexican uprising in "War Within a Breathe," don't you think this just shows that maybe your garage needs better ventilation with all of the paint fumes?

Posted by Reality Man | January 3, 2008 9:54 PM

The bad news is that Arabs will continue to rage against us because they are too incompetent to compete with us economically or militarily and that fact drives them crazy.

The good news is that Arabs are too incompetent to compete with us, so we really only have to worry about them when we put ourselves in harm's way by invading their countries or letting them into our country.

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 9:56 PM

To document what Jared Diamond said, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, the total fertility rate of immigrant Hispanic women in California is 3.7 babies per lifetime, about 2.9 for all Hispanic women, 2.2 for American-born Hispanic women, 1.6 for American-born white women and 1.4 for American-born Asian women. And of course, Hispanic generation times tend to be shorter, so the overall impact is even greater.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/071125_iq.htm

Nationally, the number of babies born to unmarried Hispanic women increased 9.6% from 2005 to 2006, while the number of babies born to married white women dropped 0.4%. The illegitimacy rate among Hispanics reached 50% in 2006.

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 3, 2008 10:09 PM

Yeah, those incompetent Arabs in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates sure are incompetently buying up lots of American assets right now.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119932015772763671.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Posted by blah | January 3, 2008 10:16 PM

The US has repeatedly intervened on behalf of the welfare of Muslims -- to help Afghans throw out the Soviets, to free Kuwait, to feed starving Somalis in 1991, Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999. But it just made Muslims resent us more because it just showed we have the power to do them favors.

American strength and prosperity tends to rub Middle Eastern "honor" cultures the wrong way.

Why are we so strong and they so weak? It must be our fault, because the alternative is that it's their own damn fault, and that's an intolerable concept to them.

Thanks for the analysis, Bernard Lewis. Too bad Iraq and Palestine are ommited from your discussion.

Actually, your reference to Bosnia is incomplete. First, the United States, after supporting the cantonization of Bosnia along ethnic lines, imposed arms sanctions on warring parties after war broke out. Since the Serbians already had arms, that basically guarunteed the continued defenselessness of the Bosnians Muslims in the face of Serbian genocide. Then the Europeans & the Americans at the UN vetoed (well-armed) Iranian peacekeepers who might have actually protected Muslims.

Finally, after 3 years of broken promises (and apparently tacitly assenting to the Serbian take-over of Srebrenica), the US carried out an air campaign against Serbian targets in Bosnia and Herzegovina, bringing the Serbs to the negotiating table. But to give credit for the United States for "intervening on behalf" of the Bosnians is to totally ignore American (& Western) complicity in allowing the destruction of Bosnia to happen in the first place.

Posted by Peter H | January 3, 2008 10:22 PM

Hmmm, reading this thread after my last comment, I wonder, did I miss something in the news, was there a recent FALN suicide bombing or something?

I'm usually all for thread hijacking, but how the heck did it get to Latino immigration? Might as well take the hijack all the way full circle and mention that our Armed Forces these days seem to have a high quotient of Latino-Americans, and then inevitably someone would comment along the order of: yeah, they're over there in Iraq being the real terrorists terrorizing the Iraqi people, so then Steve Sailer and far lefties could have a meeting point of discussion: Latino-Americans, how are they the new real terrorists?

When Subcomandante Marcos followers car bomb the crossing booths at Calexico and race up the coast to take Maria Shriver hostage, and put the video tape of the slicing of her throat on Youtube, then we won't be talking apples and oranges.

Posted by artapppraiser | January 3, 2008 10:52 PM

Good post by Don Williams, short and sweet.

Gerontion - What if, due to the gradual replacement of the mostly white population of California by Latinos, that California remained mostly the way it is? I mean, this is a complicated question, and we can't really run experiments, but presumably it isn't impossible for a large section of the country to be mostly non-white and still remain economically on par with the rest of the country.

Data of Latinos since 1910 show them underperforming whites and Asians. And, while they were once well above blacks and close to whites and Asians in educational and income attainment, mass Hispanic immigration is divided into the early phase of mostly white highly skilled people coming here from Latin America, PR, Cuba - the current wave of low-skilled undereducated minority peasants fares far worse once they get into our country.

Areas where Asians have a heavy presence or even a sustained measure of political control like Hawaii show generally well-functioning society within America. Outside America, the Asian population of Vancouver Island is reaching near-majority, and it is a quite safe, booming, livable place.
The record of Native Americans is more mixed. Some tribes have done very well even without casinos, others are poor messes.

And unfortunately, some of the richest places in America even 50 years ago were the mostly white cities like Hartford, CT, Washington DC, Newark, Atlanta, Philadelphia that transformed into mostly non-white and under black control.
Which predictably also transformed them into dangerous, crumbling 3rd World shitholes. Just as Haiti and Zimbabwe did under black majority rule.

Posted by Chris Ford | January 4, 2008 1:32 AM

The discrimination South Asians and Muslims in England face did help to shape the worldview of the London bombers.

But this begs the question of why other groups, experiencing the same, or worse, do not take up terriorism. Caribbean Blacks do not have it easy in Britain, and German Turks are not well accepted in Germany. But how many suicide bombers do they produce?

Re: Data of Latinos since 1910 show them underperforming whites and Asians.

You can find similar data on all non-white groups. Certainly on American Blacks. Might it be that discrmination has has something to do with that? In 1910 or even 1970 I'd suggest that's a pretty likley culprit.

Re: The record of Native Americans is more mixed. Some tribes have done very well even without casinos, others are poor messes.

Indicating that ethnicity alone is a poor predictor. Cultural and socioeconomic factors are probably key.

Posted by JonF | January 4, 2008 6:39 AM

Terrorism results from a disparity of power between parties in a conflict. It is not necessary that the disparity be caused by poverty, but it is certainly possible.

Posted by Njorl | January 4, 2008 9:58 AM