Good article and comments. I think Chesterton is very relevant here too though, when it comes to explaining the actions of European and Irish: “When a religious scheme is shattered (…), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
Hope the relevance is clear. It’s a theological question in the end. (It often is.)
Also, I’m not completely convinced that there is a measurement deficit. Feelings among the population can be tracked (and put onto charts) through good polling data and voting patterns. I think the Chesterton quote may explain why these metrics are being ignored.
That’s superbly put Mick. Can’t believe I haven’t seen it before. Could you let me know which book it’s from? Have to confess I’ve only read the Father Brown series…
Hello, John. It's from early on in Chapter 3 of Orthodoxy (which, as it happens, for anyone venturing into Chesterton's non-fiction for the first time, is the book I'd probably recommend)
Good on the psychological consequences, but I think as a causal analysis (“focus on measurable vs unmeasurable blindness”) it doesn’t compute.
The actual migration Europe can attract, compared to other destinations, is of those who prefer higher welfare availability over lower taxes. Obviously this is biased towards those who expect to net receive!
Migration into Europe thus tends to depress per capita GDP; most extraeuropean immigration is received by countries having a hard time restricting the benefits package received by immigrants (duh):
Exactly the one that was not sustainable at the higher per capita net productivity of the autochthonous population, hence the GDP scramble.
Migration within Europe is more of a success story, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Now all of this would actually be easily measurable, but everyone except Denmark is studiously avoiding taking, let alone focussing, these obvious candidate KPIs, and France is even actively prosecuting those who try to measure them on their own. The problem here is clearly not what is measurable vs. what isn’t – because what’s measurable would point in the same direction, if only measuring it in a way that would allow gaining a holistic picture were not studiously avoided. It’s the literal joke of “we lose on every item, but we make it up in volume”, and it’s hard to take this refusal to look as an oversight.
Denmark looked at the actual overall picture, took action, and is now the ~only* West European country with a political system that is not permanently locked up in some version of cordon sanitaire and/or mutual radicalisation spirals on both sides. And yet nobody else seems to be imitating them. This is also hard to accept as an oversight.
* Except maybe here in Ireland – which has high discontent on this topic, as you have often noted, to no relevant electoral effect whatsoever, as you have often noted. We’re in a curious place.
France does make the collection and automated tabulation of ethnic data illegal per se, in a law with tons of exceptions and facially only applicable to statistics that may be traced back to individuals. Practically enforcement, as always, probably depends on the goal (and likely results) of the research but the law as written is so fuzzy that it can allow or prohibit anything. Vibe legislation! But I should have said “deter” rather than “prosecute” – I don’t know that there is no regular prosecution under the law, but neither do I know that there is.
Academics in my experience are pretty perfectly ideologically converged anyway, and otherwise are easily controlled by grant-giving, like everywhere. The only complaint from French academics about the lack of statistics that I know of was that it makes proving and combatting racial profiling difficult.
Independents who find and publish stuff on their own are occasionally prosecuted, but AFAIK mostly for inciting hatred as if they had just posted slurs. TBF this is no different than e.g. Germany where an AfD politician was convicted of incitement for accurately quoting official crime statistics. Having chilling effects in place for collecting the relevant statistics in the first place so that anything someone manages cobbles together is always fragmentary and easy to dispute can’t hurt though if you really want to not know things.
Funny non-judicial anecdatum of carefully not measuring in France:
France used to collect statistics on how many children were tested for sickle cell mutation, which was only done when both parents had ethnic origin from a region where the mutation is common (basically Sicily, Arabia, Africa) since you’d need to be homozygotic to get sickle cell disease, otherwise you just have sparkling Malaria immunity. This gave a proportion of children with two parents from the mentioned locales per region in France, and a corresponding map was shared widely, showing quite interesting proportions. Wikimedia still has one from 2018:
[As far as I know nobody has been prosecuted for these maps, to be fair. As an aside, this may also be pertinent information for people who note that France has strong birth rates for continental Europe, and promote copying this policy or that from them!]
So anyway, this screening was made universal in 2024, which I think can hardly be interpreted as anything but spending scarce resources to look for things where you know they cannot be, so that a proxy goes away.
“Not to curse, but to understand.” If only we had a political class that was as interested in public policy as this. On a related note (Conor F) - I hope you’re still reading Simon Harris’s Substack for us.
Update: He who presents a thesis is bound to find rich veins of counterexamples.
Just stumbled upon https://mafrance.app/, obviously a based indie pub since one of the top widgets is a http://fdesouche.com headline ticker. Found via @Asmy in his subscriber chat, he’s a good newsletterer.
There's a speech Tony Blair gave in the nineties where he basically told the British public they must accept the rigours of an open, globalised, rapidly changing world or be swept away by the tides of history. Even the Guardian's John Harris, who appears to be basically in favour of those things, recognised that most people aren't psychologically suited to the Blair vision of progress.
However, I have come to the conclusion that these predictable negative psychological effects are part of the objective - or that they came be used as an electoral advantage. An oversimplified example, mass immigration has become a wedge between native men and women, thought not that big it's enough to cobble a coalition of the fringes and use the primative coping mechanisms/overreactions against men, a reason to replace them. An elaborate baiting into hazard.
Good article and comments. I think Chesterton is very relevant here too though, when it comes to explaining the actions of European and Irish: “When a religious scheme is shattered (…), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
Hope the relevance is clear. It’s a theological question in the end. (It often is.)
Also, I’m not completely convinced that there is a measurement deficit. Feelings among the population can be tracked (and put onto charts) through good polling data and voting patterns. I think the Chesterton quote may explain why these metrics are being ignored.
That’s superbly put Mick. Can’t believe I haven’t seen it before. Could you let me know which book it’s from? Have to confess I’ve only read the Father Brown series…
Hello, John. It's from early on in Chapter 3 of Orthodoxy (which, as it happens, for anyone venturing into Chesterton's non-fiction for the first time, is the book I'd probably recommend)
Thank you 👍🏻😊
Good on the psychological consequences, but I think as a causal analysis (“focus on measurable vs unmeasurable blindness”) it doesn’t compute.
The actual migration Europe can attract, compared to other destinations, is of those who prefer higher welfare availability over lower taxes. Obviously this is biased towards those who expect to net receive!
Migration into Europe thus tends to depress per capita GDP; most extraeuropean immigration is received by countries having a hard time restricting the benefits package received by immigrants (duh):
Exactly the one that was not sustainable at the higher per capita net productivity of the autochthonous population, hence the GDP scramble.
Migration within Europe is more of a success story, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Now all of this would actually be easily measurable, but everyone except Denmark is studiously avoiding taking, let alone focussing, these obvious candidate KPIs, and France is even actively prosecuting those who try to measure them on their own. The problem here is clearly not what is measurable vs. what isn’t – because what’s measurable would point in the same direction, if only measuring it in a way that would allow gaining a holistic picture were not studiously avoided. It’s the literal joke of “we lose on every item, but we make it up in volume”, and it’s hard to take this refusal to look as an oversight.
Denmark looked at the actual overall picture, took action, and is now the ~only* West European country with a political system that is not permanently locked up in some version of cordon sanitaire and/or mutual radicalisation spirals on both sides. And yet nobody else seems to be imitating them. This is also hard to accept as an oversight.
* Except maybe here in Ireland – which has high discontent on this topic, as you have often noted, to no relevant electoral effect whatsoever, as you have often noted. We’re in a curious place.
What does the reference to the French relate to? Are they jailing sociologists?!
No.
France does make the collection and automated tabulation of ethnic data illegal per se, in a law with tons of exceptions and facially only applicable to statistics that may be traced back to individuals. Practically enforcement, as always, probably depends on the goal (and likely results) of the research but the law as written is so fuzzy that it can allow or prohibit anything. Vibe legislation! But I should have said “deter” rather than “prosecute” – I don’t know that there is no regular prosecution under the law, but neither do I know that there is.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI000037090124/2019-03-18
Academics in my experience are pretty perfectly ideologically converged anyway, and otherwise are easily controlled by grant-giving, like everywhere. The only complaint from French academics about the lack of statistics that I know of was that it makes proving and combatting racial profiling difficult.
Independents who find and publish stuff on their own are occasionally prosecuted, but AFAIK mostly for inciting hatred as if they had just posted slurs. TBF this is no different than e.g. Germany where an AfD politician was convicted of incitement for accurately quoting official crime statistics. Having chilling effects in place for collecting the relevant statistics in the first place so that anything someone manages cobbles together is always fragmentary and easy to dispute can’t hurt though if you really want to not know things.
Funny non-judicial anecdatum of carefully not measuring in France:
France used to collect statistics on how many children were tested for sickle cell mutation, which was only done when both parents had ethnic origin from a region where the mutation is common (basically Sicily, Arabia, Africa) since you’d need to be homozygotic to get sickle cell disease, otherwise you just have sparkling Malaria immunity. This gave a proportion of children with two parents from the mentioned locales per region in France, and a corresponding map was shared widely, showing quite interesting proportions. Wikimedia still has one from 2018:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/11/Sickle_Cell_disease_screening_of_newborns_in_Metropolitan_France_in_2018.png/330px-Sickle_Cell_disease_screening_of_newborns_in_Metropolitan_France_in_2018.png
[As far as I know nobody has been prosecuted for these maps, to be fair. As an aside, this may also be pertinent information for people who note that France has strong birth rates for continental Europe, and promote copying this policy or that from them!]
So anyway, this screening was made universal in 2024, which I think can hardly be interpreted as anything but spending scarce resources to look for things where you know they cannot be, so that a proxy goes away.
https://mtrconsult.com/news/universal-neonatal-screening-extended-sickle-cell-disease-france
“Not to curse, but to understand.” If only we had a political class that was as interested in public policy as this. On a related note (Conor F) - I hope you’re still reading Simon Harris’s Substack for us.
Update: He who presents a thesis is bound to find rich veins of counterexamples.
Just stumbled upon https://mafrance.app/, obviously a based indie pub since one of the top widgets is a http://fdesouche.com headline ticker. Found via @Asmy in his subscriber chat, he’s a good newsletterer.
There's a speech Tony Blair gave in the nineties where he basically told the British public they must accept the rigours of an open, globalised, rapidly changing world or be swept away by the tides of history. Even the Guardian's John Harris, who appears to be basically in favour of those things, recognised that most people aren't psychologically suited to the Blair vision of progress.
I think a lot of the Harris-esque reads on the situation tend to be of the “you can’t blame people for being backward” type
Well put, thanks.
However, I have come to the conclusion that these predictable negative psychological effects are part of the objective - or that they came be used as an electoral advantage. An oversimplified example, mass immigration has become a wedge between native men and women, thought not that big it's enough to cobble a coalition of the fringes and use the primative coping mechanisms/overreactions against men, a reason to replace them. An elaborate baiting into hazard.