Society

The ’60s: Feh (Counterpoint on Hunter Thompson)

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James, Captain Mojo and Lex have weighed in with eloquent posts about the late Hunter Thompson. I encourage you to read them if you haven’t. Lex is particularly insightful about where Thompson fit in the big social and political picture of the 1960s.

I confess to reading one of Thompson’s books and maybe a few articles, and to having read quite a bit about him over the years. He was brilliantly insightful in his day but didn’t seem to change much subsequently. I found him personally unattractive (and I seem not to be alone). It’s too bad he died but the muted burst of ’60s nostalgia that accompanied his passing got under my skin. ’60s nostalgia is a bit like humidity: frequently present, usually cloying and we’d be better off without it. It comes with qualifiers — yes, the war was bad, but the music was good; yes, the riots were bad, but people really got in touch with each other; yes, the drug culture was destructive, but there was real freedom of speech without today’s stifling political correctness. And so on. I always thought that most of this talk was either after-the-fact rationalization or coded nostalgia for high and licentious times. I think it was generally a lousy period. Many people disagree.

Lex and I were going back and forth on this topic by email. He announced that “it is time for post-revisionsism on the 60s,” and asserted that it was an age of “glorious music, terrific economic performance, beautiful automobiles, heroic achievements (space, civil rights) disastrous public policy, riots, our worst war.” This got me riled up and I responded that the ’60s were

More negative than positive. The music and pop culture were crap (sorry), the economy that boomed in the early 60s ended in a major and prolonged recession, stock market crash and inflation. The cars were stylish but far inferior to modern ones. The clothes and other fashions were ugly. Moral confusion was epidemic. The seeds of today’s academic anti-intellectualism were sown. The hippie drug culture was a shadow of earlier youth cults. I can’t fucking stand hippies, or for that matter anybody who would rather dope up and look in the mirror than learn about the world. The 60s were full of that kind of thing. The hubris of the hippies was at least as bad as that of the technocrats and generals. I think you are excessively nostalgic for that which you almost experienced. I am a few years closer to having experienced it, or at least to having seen some of it, and I think it mainly sucked.

There were some pretty bad wars too, not just Vietnam: India and Pakistan, the Nigerian civil war. Not to mention the Soviet suppression of the Czechs. And as I mentioned in a comment on the blog, most of the civil-rights progress was made before the 60s. During the 60s the civil-rights organizations started their long march to the leftist fringe, having achieved most of what could be achieved by govt.

[Tom] Wolfe was being kind to his old friend — de mortuis etc. Thompson was washed-up long ago and only stayed in the public eye because of boomer nostalgia and his outlandish behavior, not his ideas, which were tired and foolish.

Lex was apparently still in ’60s mode when he read this, because he responded that it was “raw and vital” and that I should post it on the blog. OK. That was a couple of days ago, and as I reread my email it seems a bit overdone, but only a bit. The 1960s were not as destructive as the 1930s, but they were a period during which the nation lost ground in many ways. We are still repairing some of the damage. (Would Saddam Hussein have invaded Kuwait in 1990 if we had not abandoned Vietnam in 1975 after mishandling the war in the 1960s?) Most people don’t think of cars and music first when they think of the 1930s. Part of the problem with some people’s opinions about the ’60s is that their nostalgia for the funky lightweight stuff overrides more-serious appraisal of the period.

Selling the Right to Immigrate to the USA

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That’s what Gary Becker suggests. I think he makes a good case.

Making the Private Public

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Ann Althouse disapproves of a politician who made a big public show of his marriage ceremony. “No word on how the wife liked having her private feelings turned into a giant political display.” That’s one way to look at it.

I never understood why women put up with men who put them on the spot by proposing marriage in front of large audiences. I assume that the men, by making their intentions public, and risking public rejection, think that they are declaring their love in a profound and courageous way, and they may have a point. But there is also something tactless and manipulative about such proposals, which are usually made in private for the same reasons that sensitive proposals of all kinds are usually made in private. Or maybe the women in these cases have already agreed privately, and are going along with the public show because it furthers their men’s (and hence, as partners, their) agendas.

I once saw a plane at the beach, pulling a banner that read something like:

“SUE, WILL YOU MARRY ME? – MIKE”

and followed an hour or two later by another plane (or maybe the same one) whose banner read:

“MIKE, LEAVE ME ALONE – SUE”

Supporting the Children of Deployed Military Personnel

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Here’s a worthwhile idea.

Demographic Speculations

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Via Powerline comes this remarkable Caroline Glick column about how the Palestinian Authority has been cooking its population numbers. These are the numbers that have fueled intense Israeli concern about how the Palestinian Arabs, though almost powerless against the Israelis militarily, might eventually overwhelm Israel demographically.

Glick argues that the Palestinians’ bogus population projections, by convincing a large and influential segment of Israeli opinion of the supposed peril awaiting Israel if it does not withdraw soon from Judea, Samaria and Gaza, have proven to be a much more effective weapon against Israel than have any military means. (Glick has long been critical of Sharon’s plan to withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza and forcibly relocate its Jewish residents.)

But now the conventional wisdom about Palestinian population growth has been turned on its head by the authors of this new report, which suggests that the PA’s numbers are significantly overstated.

The PCBS [Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics] forecast was further compared to Palestinian population surveys carried out by UNRWA and the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS) in the mid-1990s, and to World Bank Palestinian population studies. All of the [report] team’s comparative analyses led to the conclusion that the Palestinian population forecasts upon which Israel is basing its current policy of withdrawal and uprooting of Israeli communities in the territories are faulty in the extreme.

The PCBS count includes the 230,000 Arab residents of Jerusalem. Yet these Arabs are already counted by the ICBS as part of Israel’s population, which means that they are counted twice.

The PCBS numbers also project Palestinian natural growth as 4 to 5 percent per year, among the highest in the world and significantly higher than the natural population growth of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Yet Palestinian Ministry of Health records published annually since 1996 show that Palestinian natural growth rates in Judea, Samaria and Gaza average around 3 percent. In 2002, the Palestinian Ministry of Health retroactively raised its numbers and yet even the doctored figures never extended beyond 3.7 percent. The original data show a steady pattern of decrease in natural growth leading to a natural growth rate in 2003 of just 2.6 percent.

Indeed, the total fertility rate of Palestinian women has been trending downward in recent years. Palestinian women in Judea and Samaria averaged 4.1 children in 1999 and 3.4 in 2003. Palestinian women in Gaza averaged 5 children each in 1999 and 4.7 in 2003. The multi-year average of Israel’s compound growth rate from 1990-2004 is 2.5 percent. And even as Israel’s growth rate went down to 1.7 percent between 2000 and 2004, a similar decline occurred among Palestinians in Gaza, where growth decreased from 3.9 percent to 3.0 percent, and Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, where growth declined from 2.7 percent to 1.8 percent.

The PCBS also projected a net population increase of 1.5 percent per year as a result of immigration from abroad. But the study’s authors found that except for 1994, when the bulk of the Palestinian leadership and their families entered the areas from abroad, emigration from the Palestinian areas has outstripped immigration every year.

[and so on]

I have long been skeptical of alarmist demographic projections for the Palestinians, so the above-mentioned report doesn’t surprise me. The alarmist interpretations rarely seem to take into account either the likelihood of declining birth rates with increases in wealth or the observation that alarmist predictions tend to be wrong in general (it’s human nature).

What is at least as interesting is whether alarmist demographic projections for Muslim populations in Europe may be subject to adjustments comparable to the one that’s now being made for the Palestinian population. It seems likely that European demographic statistics are more accurate than those produced by the Palestinian Authority. However, is there any reason not to expect European Muslim birth rates to decline as European Muslims become wealthier and more integrated, even if not completely integrated, into European societies? And is it inconceivable that non-Muslim European birth rates will start to increase at some point during the decades-long period for which demographic predictions are made?

I am not arguing that current alarmist projections are necessarily wrong. I am arguing that long-range projections of complex social phenomena, extrapolated from statistical snapshots of recent trends, tend to be inaccurate and are a weak basis for policy decisions. Generally, the more dramatic the prediction, the more skeptically it should be treated.