Demise of the West

Rachel Silverthorne's Ride (1938), mural by John W. Beauchamp at Muncy Post Office. Government-funded art used to promote love of family, community, and nation.

In my last post I discussed the uncoupling of gene-culture coevolution in the Western world. We are no longer co-evolving genetically with an environment where kinship matters less and less and where the market economy has become the main way we process social and economic transactions. Meanwhile, this cultural environment has continued to evolve on its own ... and at an ever-faster rate.

A lot of cultural change has happened since that uncoupling in the late nineteenth century. The extended family is gone—few young people have significant relationships with their cousins or grandparents … if only because most of the latter are already dead because of longer generation times. As for the nation-state, kinship no longer plays even a symbolic role—your "nation" is where you currently reside. Only the nuclear family remains as a kin group, and that last holdout is crumbling. A growing proportion of the population lives alone, and the families that do exist are increasingly "blended" or single-parent.

This liquidation of kinship is driven by the expansion of the market economy and its accompanying ideology of liberalism. This ideology allows some differences of opinion: Right-liberals wish to let kinship self-liquidate and wither away on its own, whereas Left-liberals want to use the State to accelerate the process. Both agree, however, on the end game. Once kinship has been reduced to a vestigial role, individual freedom will be maximized, and we will be able to do the most with what we have in a global marketplace.

So why worry? There may be bumps and potholes on the road to a better world, but we'll all be better off in the end. So let's stay the course and ignore the purveyors of doom and gloom. Such is the thinking that prevails among our elites.

I see fewer grounds for optimism:

Psychological mismatch

We are creating conditions of extreme social atomization that have never existed before and for which we are psychologically ill prepared. It's true that northwest Europeans have a long history of individualism, and this is largely why our ancestors were able to create free societies where the market economy replaces kinship networks as the main way for people to relate to each other. Nonetheless, we’ve freed ourselves from ties of kith and kin to a degree that would surprise even our recent ancestors, with no accompanying changes to our psychological makeup.

Some consequences are already visible: after decades of uninterrupted increase among white Americans, life expectancy is falling because of suicide and opioid abuse among the growing numbers of men who live alone. Those people are like canaries in a coal mine.

To make matters worse, we are exporting this societal model to the rest of the world. The psychological consequences will be much worse there, as can be seen with immigrants to the West. Typically, the first generation has low levels of dysfunction; the problems arise mostly in the second and third generations. 

You may ask: how can that be when the latter are more acculturated? To ask the question is to answer it. Non-Western societies keep people in line through multiple social, cultural, and ideological restraints. Migration to the West dissolves those restraints in an acid bath of personal freedom. The first generation will be OK, but the succeeding generations will have a serious mismatch between their genotype and our phenotype of extreme individualism. Some of them will become a caricature of Western dysfunction. Others will try to recreate the restrictive environment of their ancestors.

Decline of the bourgeois mindset

The market economy requires a certain psychological makeup. It will not, for instance, self-generate in a low-trust society where people are fixated on the present and prefer to settle personal disputes through violence. In that context, the market mechanism will be confined in space and time to marketplaces. It will not spread throughout society to encompass most of the transactions that people carry on with each other (Frost 2018).

This was the case for most of history and prehistory. It's not that people didn't understand markets. They did. It's just that they preferred to get most of what they wanted on their own or through people they could trust in their kinship network. Conditions were not in place for the market mechanism to break out of this straitjacket and create a true market economy.

It's no coincidence that this breakout happened in northwest Europe, where kinship networks were already relatively weak, where most adults remained single into their mid to late twenties, and where many never married. Once the market economy took off, people exploited its possibilities by pushing their envelope of phenotypic plasticity—by living, thinking, and behaving in new ways. Then, through selection over succeeding generations, the mean genotype followed this evolving phenotype, thus allowing people to keep pushing the envelope farther and farther. 

In sum, this market-driven environment favored the survival and reproduction of people with a certain psychological makeup. Such people were more future-oriented, less willing to settle personal disputes with violence, and better able to process numerical and textual data. In other words, this was the bourgeois mindset of thrift, self-control, foresight, numeracy, and literacy (Clark 2007; Clark 2009; Frost 2011; Frost 2017; Frost and Harpending 2015; hbd*chick 2014; Rindermann 2018, pp. 86-87).

Cultural decline

This mindset has helped the market economy to work better, but there is no reason to think that the latter will return the favor. This was pointed out by Daniel Bell in his work The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). In it, he argued that the market economy encourages consumerism and desires for immediate fulfilment, thus eroding the values of thrift and delayed gratification that originally made it possible. Furthermore, since personal desires cannot be satisfied without effort, and since people vary in their ability to make the necessary effort, there will be growing pressure on the State to step in and satisfy those desires for everyone. The culture itself will become narcissistic.

These negative effects were being noticed by the late nineteenth century, notably in Catholic encyclicals. In Rerum novarum (1891), the church stated that employers must see the worker "as a person ennobled by Christian character" and ensure that he "be not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away to neglect his home and family, or to squander his earnings."

In the United States, the Progressive Era of the 1890s to the 1920s reflected this same mistrust of the free market and individualism. Many movements for community or national improvement began in that era, particularly those for temperance, social hygiene, immigration control, nature conservation, urban beautification, and so on.

Genetic decline

Alongside this cultural decline, the bourgeois mindset also seems to have suffered genetic decline. There is growing evidence that people in Western countries are losing the gene-based improvements their ancestors had gained in cognitive capacity and other mental traits. 

The strongest evidence for this regressive evolution is seen in an Icelandic study that shows a steady decline since the early twentieth century in alleles associated with high educational attainment (Kong et al. 2017). Only a fraction of such alleles have been identified to date, but it is disturbing that the ones we have identified are being replaced by alleles associated with low educational attainment. There is also evidence that mean reaction time has increased since the Victorian era (Madison 2014; Madison et al. 2016; Woodley et al. 2013). Finally, the Flynn effect is leveling off and even reversing in some Western countries (Rindermann 2018, p. 88). The Flynn effect is itself illusory, being due mostly to increasing familiarity with test taking. With peak familiarity the genetic decline is now becoming visible.

At first, this decline was driven by a reversal of class differences in natural increase. Previously, the lower classes had failed to reproduce themselves and had steadily absorbed downwardly mobile members of the middle class, which at that time was much more reproductively successful (Clark 2007). In the late nineteenth century this situation reversed. The middle class had fewer children because they wished to pursue higher education and pay for the trappings of an affluent lifestyle. Meanwhile, working people were better able to settle down, marry, and have children. This was largely because industrialists began to recognize they had a vested interest in creating stable communities for their workers. Two English companies, Cadbury's and Lever Brothers, showed the way by providing their employees with housing, medical care, and recreational activities. Other companies followed suit, and this industrial paternalism became a model for the welfare state (Wikipedia 2019a)

These class differences in natural increase would eventually narrow, particularly after the Second World War. All classes participated in the postwar economic boom and baby boom, with fertility rising among middle-class couples. This leveling of class differences was further aided by greater access to contraception for people of all backgrounds.

Since the 1970s the IQ decline seems to be driven much more by decomposition of the nuclear family: proportionately more births are to single mothers who tend to have children by sexy men who are less intelligent and more prone to violence (see previous post).

The Indian summer of the mid-twentieth century

This cultural and genetic decline leveled off during the mid-twentieth century. On both the right and the left, people had become convinced that the market economy was fouling its nest through impulse buying, needless consumer debt, and erosion of community values. In response, a new societal model came into being.

That model took shape during the last great depression and lasted until the 1960s. Called the "New Deal" in the U.S., it was characterized by low immigration, particularly of unskilled, low-wage labor, by high unionization, by corporate paternalism (employee benefits, recreational activities for workers, etc.), and by the welfare state (pensions, health care, unemployment insurance). It was also characterized by propaganda to promote the family, the community, and the nation. Although this societal model is now branded as "fascist" it was present to some degree in all advanced societies, including America under Roosevelt and the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Indeed, Roosevelt's America was a lot less liberal than we like to think. The Hays Code, introduced in 1930 and strengthened in 1934, imposed strict moral guidelines on movie making. Meanwhile, Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor in the Roosevelt administration, brought in policies to encourage marriage, larger families, and population growth:

Maternalists would use the New Deal to reward the domestic woman and discourage the working mother. They expanded and nationalized existing state programs that protected mothers and created "new ones to deliver social benefits to the wives and widows of wage-earning men." They "prescribed domesticity to unemployed women in vocational programs that trained [them] for housekeeping and parenting," and they urged "counseling services for mothers tempted to work outside the home." Linking truancy, incorrigibility, and emotional disorders among children to a "mother's absence at her job," the Maternalists mounted campaigns to bring working mothers home. (Carlson 2002)

Under the New Deal, support was also given to artwork that promoted love of family, community, and nation. This was particularly so with "regionalist” artists like Thomas Hart Benton, Thomas Craven, and many others (Baigell 1974).

End of the New Deal and beginnings of globalization

The baby boom ended in the 1960s and the economic boom a decade later. To some degree both were victims of their success. As incomes doubled, and as unemployment remained low, people could more easily do as they liked. Many postponed marriage, either to pursue postsecondary education or simply to enjoy the pleasures of the new affluence. Sexual experimentation became widespread. Again, this was made easier by the success of postwar society, particularly in reducing STDs to a low level and in creating a safety net that could cope with broken homes and parentless children. Negative effects were less serious back then than they would be later.

Meanwhile, the West opened up to globalization. This began in the late 1960s with outsourcing of textile production and some manufacturing to low-wage economies, initially the eastern fringe of Asia (Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea) and later, in the 1980s, the People's Republic of China, Mexico, and Bangladesh. Outsourcing soon spread through most of  manufacturing and even high-tech.

This period also saw a steady rise in the number of immigrants, principally from low-wage countries. The U.S alone went from taking in just under 300,000 a year in 1965 to over a million a year by 1990. Illegal immigrants also arrived in growing numbers, their estimated population in the U.S. now ranging from a low of 11 million to a high of 29 million (Fazel-Zarandi et al. 2018). Immigration to the United Kingdom has similarly surged from around 200,000 a year in the 1970s and 1980s to around 600,000 in the 2000s (Wikipedia 2019b). Most Western countries have followed suit, including many that had previously not received immigrants on a large scale.

Jobs have thus been outsourced to countries where labor is cheaper. Conversely, cheap labor has been insourced for jobs that, by their very nature, cannot be sent abroad, i.e., in construction, agriculture, and services. This two-way movement benefits business at the expense of workers. It is one of the reasons, if not the main reason, why more and more wealth is accruing to the top 1% (Roser and Ortiz-Ospina 2016). It is also the reason why workers in the West are getting poorer: median wages have stagnated since the 1970s and have probably fallen if we adjust for the decline in employee benefits and the decline in unpaid childcare by mothers and grandparents (Mishel et al. 2015; Semuels 2013).

The old working class also has to bear the cost of longer commutes as it gets pushed farther and farther into the exurbs by the rising cost of housing and by the new class of low-wage immigrants. The latter now dominate the suburbs and provide the gentry of the inner city with cheap services (daycare, food services, laundry and dry cleaning, landscaping, etc.).  A new social geography is being created, with high-income people in the inner city, immigrants in the suburbs, and the old working class relegated to the exurbs.

This pattern is key to understanding the gilets jaunes in France. Why are they so upset over a fuel tax? A big reason is the long commutes that French working people now have to make.

[...] employment and wealth have become more and more concentrated in the big cities. The deindustrialised regions, rural areas, small and medium-size towns are less and less dynamic. But it is in these places — in "peripheral France" (one could also talk of peripheral America or peripheral Britain) — that many working-class people live. Thus, for the first time, "workers" no longer live in areas where employment is created, giving rise to a social and cultural shock.

[...] This confinement is not only geographical but also intellectual. The globalised metropolises are the new citadels of the 21st century — rich and unequal, where even the former lower-middle class no longer has a place. Instead, large global cities work on a dual dynamic: gentrification and immigration. This is the paradox: the open society results in a world increasingly closed to the majority of working people.

The economic divide between peripheral France and the metropolises illustrates the separation of an elite and its popular hinterland. Western elites have gradually forgotten a people they no longer see. (Guilluy 2018; also see Caldwell 2017)

Why not build housing for them near the big cities? Well, such housing was built. It's now inhabited overwhelmingly by immigrants who provide the inner-city gentry with cheap services:

After the mid-twentieth century, the French state built a vast stock—about 5 million units—of public housing, which now accounts for a sixth of the country's households. Much of it is hideous-looking, but it's all more or less affordable. Its purpose has changed, however. It is now used primarily for billeting not native French workers, as once was the case, but immigrants and their descendants, millions of whom arrived from North Africa starting in the 1960s, with yet another wave of newcomers from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East arriving today.

[...] As a new bourgeoisie has taken over the private housing stock, poor foreigners have taken over the public—which thus serves the metropolitan rich as a kind of taxpayer-subsidized servants' quarters. Public-housing inhabitants are almost never ethnically French; the prevailing culture there nowadays is often heavily, intimidatingly Muslim. (Caldwell 2017)

Conclusion

We need to stop viewing the market economy as a self-correcting mechanism that works best if left alone. That view is best reserved for things that have proven themselves over the long term. That is not the case here. For most of history and prehistory we had markets but not a true market economy. It has only been over the past thousand years that this economic system gradually came into being among northwest Europeans and in the societies they founded. Its current globalized form is less than a half-century old.

Ironically, free market proponents often look back with nostalgia to the United States of the 1950s—a time of high tariffs, low immigration, high corporate taxation, and high unionization, not to mention the Hays Code and countless other restrictions on entertainment. The current system is actually much closer to the free market ideal.

Is this system sustainable? It is … for some people. As is often the case, the system is most sustainable for those who benefit the most and who have the power to prevent change. For them, life is great and couldn’t be better, at least for now. 

The system is less sustainable for the remnants of the old working class. For them, the outlook is especially bleak. They are caught between the anvil of stagnant wages and the hammer of rising costs—in part to support the growing population of net tax consumers and in part to insulate themselves from the latter … and an increasingly dysfunctional social environment.

In the end, however, the current system is not sustainable. The problem isn’t just that globalization will level the wages of Western working people down to the global average. In that scenario, the system could be sustainable. Indeed, the new gentry would have the best of both: a nice first-world lifestyle and cheap third-world labor. The world, as a whole, would be wealthier, even though people in the West would, on average, be poorer. And the top 1% would probably be richer than they are today.

That scenario ignores one thing, however. The market economy, and its power to create so much wealth, came into being because of certain cultural, psychological and, yes, genetic characteristics. Those characteristics are not distributed uniformly around the world. In fact, for a long time they didn’t even exist. They gradually evolved and came together in certain human groups, particularly in northwest Europeans.

Yes, there were similar evolutionary processes in other human groups, notably East Asians, Ashkenazi Jews, Parsees, and so on. But those groups, too, will form a diminishing proportion of the world’s population. The cultural, psychological, and genetic basis for the market economy will therefore regress as time goes on.

The most likely scenario is that the market economy will likewise regress. We will return to a low-trust world of spatially localized markets with no market economy, at least not one that will self-generate without coercion. We will all be poorer.

References

Baigell, M. (1974). The American Scene. American painting of the 1930s. New York: Praeger.

Bell, D. (1976). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Caldwell, C. (2017). The French, coming apart. The Social Order. Spring

https://www.city-journal.org/html/french-coming-apart-15125.html

Carlson, A.C. (2002). Sanctifying the traditional family: The New Deal and national solidarity, The Family in America 16(5).

http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia_1605.htm

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.  

Clark, G. (2009). The domestication of man: The social implications of Darwin. ArtefaCTos 2: 64-80.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277275046_The_Domestication_of_Man_The_Social_Implications_of_Darwin

Fazel-Zarandi M.M., Feinstein, J.S., Kaplan, E.H. (2018). The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States: Estimates based on demographic modeling with data from 1990 to 2016. PLoS ONE 13(9): e0201193.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201193

Frost, P. (2011). Human nature or human natures? Futures 43: 740-748.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter_Frost2/publication/251725125_Human_nature_or_human_natures/links/004635223eaf8196f0000000.pdf

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe. Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

Frost, P. (2018). Evolution of the market economy. Evo and Proud, June 4.

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2018/06/evolution-of-market-economy.html

Frost, P. and H. Harpending. (2015). Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification. Evolutionary Psychology 13: 230-243.

http://evp.sagepub.com/content/13/1/147470491501300114.abstract

Guilluy, C. (2018). France is deeply fractured. Gilets jaunes are just a symptom. The Guardian, December 2

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/02/france-is-deeply-fractured-gilets-jeunes-just-a-symptom

Hbd*chick (2014). Big summary post on the Hajnal Line. October 3

https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-on-the-hajnal-line/

Kong, A., M.L. Frigge, G. Thorleifsson, H. Stefansson, A.I. Young, F. Zink, G.A. Jonsdottir, A. Okbay, P. Sulem, G. Masson, D.F. Gudbjartsson, A. Helgason, G. Bjornsdottir, U. Thorsteinsdottir, and K. Stefansson. (2017). Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(5): E727-E732.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/10/1612113114.full

Madison, G. (2014). Increasing simple reaction times demonstrate decreasing genetic intelligence in Scotland and Sweden, London Conference on Intelligence, Psychological Comments, April 25

#LCI14 Conference proceedings
http://www.unz.com/jthompson/lci14-questions-on-intelligence/  

Madison, G., M.A. Woodley of Menie, and J. Sänger. (2016). Secular Slowing of Auditory Simple Reaction Time in Sweden (1959-1985). Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, August 18

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00407/full

Mishel, L., E. Gould, and J. Bivens. (2015). Wage stagnation in nine charts. Economic Policy Institute

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive Capitalism. Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations. Cambridge University Press.

Roser, M. and E. Ortiz-Ospina. (2016). Income inequality. Our world in data

https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality

Semuels, A. (2013). The numbers behind the decline in workplace benefits. Los Angeles Times, April 7

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/07/business/la-fi-mo-numbers-decline-workplace-benefits-20130407

Wikipedia (2019a). Welfare capitalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_capitalism  

Wikipedia (2019b). Modern immigration to the United Kingdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_United_Kingdom  

Woodley, M.A., J. Nijenhuis, and R. Murphy. (2013). Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time. Intelligence 41: 843-850.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e8cc/634169c7c5d3e4738fe08091c86177be1380.pdf