Alex Tabarrok on Canada's two-tier health care system; Nicholas Ebersadt on demographic projections; Russ Roberts and Yossi Klein Halevi; Graham McAleer on Robert Kaplan
It seems that I have much to learn from the Israelis. Here is an excerpt from Rabi Abba Hillel Silver’s speech at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1943. The last sentences is the most important. It tells me that sometimes I must go forward in faith; that I must empower myself through deep introspection and consideration of the facts. Is this not a Christian perspective?
“The reconstitution of the Jewish people as a nation in its homeland is not a playful political conceit of ours.... It is the cry of despair of a people driven to the wall, fighting for its very life... From the infested, typhus-ridden ghetto of Warsaw, from the death-block of Nazi-occupied lands where myriads of our people are awaiting execution by the slow or the quick method, from a hundred concentration camps which befoul the map of Europe ... comes the cry: "Enough, there must be a final end to all this, a sure and certain end!" How long is it to last? Are we forever to live a homeless people on the world's crumbs of sympathy? ... Should not all this be compensated for finally and at long last with the re-establishment of a free Jewish Commonwealth? Is not this historic justice, and is this world today not reaching out so desperately and so pathetically for a new world order of justice?.. Are we not deserving of it?”
"Are we going to take counsel here of fear of what this one or that one might say, of how our actions are likely to be misinterpreted, or are we to take counsel of our inner moral convictions, of our faith, of our history, of our achievements, and go forward in faith?"
I am surprised that the Kaplan review doesn't mention the Habsburgs, given how outsized a contribution the Austro-Hungarian Empire made to world culture and science. I am probably biased by my own ancestry there, but still the overall production of just the city of Vienna alone seems formidable, and basically all of it happened in the imperial period.
On the other hand, Walter Scheidel would remind us that the danger of empires is that they tend to overcentralize and suppress Tiebout competition. Modernity would probably have been stalled, not speeded up, if the Pax Romana had survived. Maybe Kaplan addresses this, but the review doesn't AFAICT. Ethnostates are generally bad, but the city-states of the Renaissance were great. How might we build a future with more of the latter and less of the former?
The achievements of the A-H Empire as it actually was (as opposed to how it once used to get absurdly villainized in American public high school history classes) makes a strong case for their kind of empire. Even today it's easy to do a kind of on-the-ground "difference-in-differences" analysis to compare the look and feel and patterns of life in the borderlands of their imperial influence weighed by how long that influence persisted. And when you do so, even despite everything that has happened since, it's still easy to see the signature of their efforts and to know what's due to them, and to walk away so impressed that you start to wish that "Habsburg Restorationism" was still a thing.
But their kind of empire was not an ideologically intolerant "Hazonian Empire", like some Caliphates, the Soviet Union, or the United States of America. American empire is only a good thing when American regime-elites believe in good things, which they stopped doing a long time ago.
"Every country has a two-tier health care system. Anyone can get the medical procedures that government will pay for. Additional services go to those who can pay for procedures themselves."
In some ways it's even trickier than that; there's a multi-tiered healthcare system, not just a two-tiered system. I'm thinking specifically of clinical trials: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-too-quickly, which are more available to those with money, but they also depend on learning how the system works and, sadly, how to work the system. My wife wrote the linked essay / guide, which describes both; I've never seen anyone attempt to comprehensively describe how clinical trials work, which is why I encouraged her to write it.
“The problem for Jews has always been that they are “the other.””
This seems to me an over-generalization. If you draw a line between observant Jews and secular Jews (who are largely indistinguishable from their non-Jewish counterparts), then I think it eliminates the over-generalization. It also seems to me to make clear that there is nothing particular about observant Jews in this respect, and it is really true for the religious, who will always be the “other” in society, since they put into practice their allegiance to a higher authority.
"Imagine if the Arab immigrants in France wanted to carve out a separate state that included part of Paris, and this state would have its own religious and cultural norms."
This is the future, and probably not even a half century away.
The future? I saw this with my own lying eyes over 20 years ago as the de facto state of affairs in a Parisian banlieu where a distant relation once lived. On a map, """France""". In terms of "Who owns the streets?", not France. I ain't talking "little Italy" or "Chinatown" either; "separate state" was closer to the mark than "ethnic enclave".
The Danes are currently making a big push to prevent this through explicit forced residential integration. It seems a promising approach for countries with lots of government-built housing; Singapore has been doing it for decades with great success. If Denmark makes it work, France might be spurred to follow.
As Houellebecq and Steyn have written, there's no need for that. The Banlieu will just grow until it is in effective control of the the whole territory and is descriptive of - indeed simply becomes - the thing called "France", though one that is no longer French. There's a reason why the term "Great Replacement" has that Gallic origin.
"He predicts that this will lead Israelis to examine fundamental questions about the meaning of life, just as this can happen to an individual who experiences a close encounter with death."
Do you think the hostility of its neighbors and its status as an ethno-state helps Israelis, even secular ones, to be one of the few high IQ groups with replacement level fertility?
Solving for why Israel is the one big outlier on this is important.
Recently I observed three reactions to people learning that someone had a large number of children. 1. Average DC-metro late 30s bureaucrat: utter shock, emotional equivalent of accidentally running into a raving schizophrenic. 2. College-aged American Christian missionaries, mild concern, desire for disengagement, eyebrow arching, "oh, eccentrics". 3. Hasidic Jew, "Wonderful! Great job! Keep it up! God Bless You!"
It's just one contributor out of lots of stuff, but that kind of thing all the time really makes a difference.
Modern states can’t afford the prestige hit needed to divest unsustainable provinces. They are defined by the borders of what they can conquer and hold. Imagine America declaring that Texas is just too much, the border is a problem we are incapable of solving, so we’re giving it back to Mexico. The legitimacy of our government would be (even more) in question.
An Empire has options. Divest, allow partial autonomy, trade away the meddlesome province at the next peace conference. Eh, good to see you Moldavia. I’ll probably gift you to Hungary in the morning. How you like that tartar sauce!!
I prefer to view Jew and Israel hatred as a harsh decree from G-d. I work with it, rather than trying to deny it or control it or mitigate it. People are people, and just like G-d made some of them have a lot of destructive energy, G-d made a lot of them hate Jews.
I wish G-d would decree that manna would descend upon my home so I don't have to make supper, but alas He makes the rules
"They discuss the Arab narrative, which is that Jews are aliens who settled within Arab territory and then had the gall to establish their own state within that territory."
Not that I think it matters or care much for the idea that ancestral claims have superiority over current possesion as the proper basis of title to land, but as an interesting contextual note, in a comment to another post I mentioned that among those aliens are apparently lots of direct-ish male-line descendants of Natufian Great(400)-Grandfather who plausibly invented the whole Neolithic Package to include beer (you're welcome) in that cave where they found his ten thousand year old bones just eight miles east of Ben Gurion Airport. So, yeah, """aliens""".
It seems that I have much to learn from the Israelis. Here is an excerpt from Rabi Abba Hillel Silver’s speech at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1943. The last sentences is the most important. It tells me that sometimes I must go forward in faith; that I must empower myself through deep introspection and consideration of the facts. Is this not a Christian perspective?
“The reconstitution of the Jewish people as a nation in its homeland is not a playful political conceit of ours.... It is the cry of despair of a people driven to the wall, fighting for its very life... From the infested, typhus-ridden ghetto of Warsaw, from the death-block of Nazi-occupied lands where myriads of our people are awaiting execution by the slow or the quick method, from a hundred concentration camps which befoul the map of Europe ... comes the cry: "Enough, there must be a final end to all this, a sure and certain end!" How long is it to last? Are we forever to live a homeless people on the world's crumbs of sympathy? ... Should not all this be compensated for finally and at long last with the re-establishment of a free Jewish Commonwealth? Is not this historic justice, and is this world today not reaching out so desperately and so pathetically for a new world order of justice?.. Are we not deserving of it?”
"Are we going to take counsel here of fear of what this one or that one might say, of how our actions are likely to be misinterpreted, or are we to take counsel of our inner moral convictions, of our faith, of our history, of our achievements, and go forward in faith?"
I am surprised that the Kaplan review doesn't mention the Habsburgs, given how outsized a contribution the Austro-Hungarian Empire made to world culture and science. I am probably biased by my own ancestry there, but still the overall production of just the city of Vienna alone seems formidable, and basically all of it happened in the imperial period.
On the other hand, Walter Scheidel would remind us that the danger of empires is that they tend to overcentralize and suppress Tiebout competition. Modernity would probably have been stalled, not speeded up, if the Pax Romana had survived. Maybe Kaplan addresses this, but the review doesn't AFAICT. Ethnostates are generally bad, but the city-states of the Renaissance were great. How might we build a future with more of the latter and less of the former?
The achievements of the A-H Empire as it actually was (as opposed to how it once used to get absurdly villainized in American public high school history classes) makes a strong case for their kind of empire. Even today it's easy to do a kind of on-the-ground "difference-in-differences" analysis to compare the look and feel and patterns of life in the borderlands of their imperial influence weighed by how long that influence persisted. And when you do so, even despite everything that has happened since, it's still easy to see the signature of their efforts and to know what's due to them, and to walk away so impressed that you start to wish that "Habsburg Restorationism" was still a thing.
But their kind of empire was not an ideologically intolerant "Hazonian Empire", like some Caliphates, the Soviet Union, or the United States of America. American empire is only a good thing when American regime-elites believe in good things, which they stopped doing a long time ago.
"Every country has a two-tier health care system. Anyone can get the medical procedures that government will pay for. Additional services go to those who can pay for procedures themselves."
In some ways it's even trickier than that; there's a multi-tiered healthcare system, not just a two-tiered system. I'm thinking specifically of clinical trials: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-too-quickly, which are more available to those with money, but they also depend on learning how the system works and, sadly, how to work the system. My wife wrote the linked essay / guide, which describes both; I've never seen anyone attempt to comprehensively describe how clinical trials work, which is why I encouraged her to write it.
“The problem for Jews has always been that they are “the other.””
This seems to me an over-generalization. If you draw a line between observant Jews and secular Jews (who are largely indistinguishable from their non-Jewish counterparts), then I think it eliminates the over-generalization. It also seems to me to make clear that there is nothing particular about observant Jews in this respect, and it is really true for the religious, who will always be the “other” in society, since they put into practice their allegiance to a higher authority.
You might like this: https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/im-jewish-so-maybe-you-hate-me-2
"Imagine if the Arab immigrants in France wanted to carve out a separate state that included part of Paris, and this state would have its own religious and cultural norms."
This is the future, and probably not even a half century away.
The future? I saw this with my own lying eyes over 20 years ago as the de facto state of affairs in a Parisian banlieu where a distant relation once lived. On a map, """France""". In terms of "Who owns the streets?", not France. I ain't talking "little Italy" or "Chinatown" either; "separate state" was closer to the mark than "ethnic enclave".
De facto, sure, but I mean an actual new country carved out of France and recognized by the French government at some point.
The Danes are currently making a big push to prevent this through explicit forced residential integration. It seems a promising approach for countries with lots of government-built housing; Singapore has been doing it for decades with great success. If Denmark makes it work, France might be spurred to follow.
As Houellebecq and Steyn have written, there's no need for that. The Banlieu will just grow until it is in effective control of the the whole territory and is descriptive of - indeed simply becomes - the thing called "France", though one that is no longer French. There's a reason why the term "Great Replacement" has that Gallic origin.
"He predicts that this will lead Israelis to examine fundamental questions about the meaning of life, just as this can happen to an individual who experiences a close encounter with death."
Do you think the hostility of its neighbors and its status as an ethno-state helps Israelis, even secular ones, to be one of the few high IQ groups with replacement level fertility?
Solving for why Israel is the one big outlier on this is important.
Recently I observed three reactions to people learning that someone had a large number of children. 1. Average DC-metro late 30s bureaucrat: utter shock, emotional equivalent of accidentally running into a raving schizophrenic. 2. College-aged American Christian missionaries, mild concern, desire for disengagement, eyebrow arching, "oh, eccentrics". 3. Hasidic Jew, "Wonderful! Great job! Keep it up! God Bless You!"
It's just one contributor out of lots of stuff, but that kind of thing all the time really makes a difference.
Modern states can’t afford the prestige hit needed to divest unsustainable provinces. They are defined by the borders of what they can conquer and hold. Imagine America declaring that Texas is just too much, the border is a problem we are incapable of solving, so we’re giving it back to Mexico. The legitimacy of our government would be (even more) in question.
An Empire has options. Divest, allow partial autonomy, trade away the meddlesome province at the next peace conference. Eh, good to see you Moldavia. I’ll probably gift you to Hungary in the morning. How you like that tartar sauce!!
I prefer to view Jew and Israel hatred as a harsh decree from G-d. I work with it, rather than trying to deny it or control it or mitigate it. People are people, and just like G-d made some of them have a lot of destructive energy, G-d made a lot of them hate Jews.
I wish G-d would decree that manna would descend upon my home so I don't have to make supper, but alas He makes the rules
"They discuss the Arab narrative, which is that Jews are aliens who settled within Arab territory and then had the gall to establish their own state within that territory."
Not that I think it matters or care much for the idea that ancestral claims have superiority over current possesion as the proper basis of title to land, but as an interesting contextual note, in a comment to another post I mentioned that among those aliens are apparently lots of direct-ish male-line descendants of Natufian Great(400)-Grandfather who plausibly invented the whole Neolithic Package to include beer (you're welcome) in that cave where they found his ten thousand year old bones just eight miles east of Ben Gurion Airport. So, yeah, """aliens""".