Home

A friend in Indonesia recently sent me a paper by Olena Antonaccio and Charles Tittle from North Carolina State University entitled “A Cross-National Test of Bonger’s Theory of Criminality and Economic Conditions.”  In 1905 the Dutch Marxist Willam Adrian Bonger had hypothesised that capitalism, by its de-moralisation (i.e., reduce the moral feelings that people had for each other) of the population, would increase the homicide rate (and other criminal activity.)  The task of the researchers was to a) see whether there was a correlation between capitalism and the homicide rate and b) find out why this was so.  Since Marxism is a favourite subject of mine, this was intriguing to me.

Let’s start by addressing the second point first: the researchers discovered that the main weakness of Bonger’s thesis was that, although there is some correlation, Bonger did not consider the effect of informal social controls, i.e. peer pressure, and its effect on behaviour.  The connection with capitalism is that “capitalist systems may generate crime because they flourish where social control, particularly informal social control, is weak.”

The whole concept of morality in a Marxist context is, for me at least, an oxymoron, and this alone makes Bonger’s thesis very non-Marxist.  However, as I discussed a year ago in The Trouble With Morality, whatever force morality has is connected with community standards.  (I would suggest that Christians read my original piece before blasting me on this statement.)  Marxism’s rejection of morality contains in it an underestimation of the power of community standards, which is one reason why Marxism hasn’t worked out the way it was supposed to.

Beyond this however is an intriguing statement:

Of particular note is the finding that in countries with a predominant Eastern religion, the direction of the association between capitalism and homicide rates actually is reversed…Our finding that in countries with predominant Eastern religions, capitalism actually is linked negatively to homicide rates seems to bear testimony to Messner and Rosenfeld’s argument, suggesting a clear route to synthesization.

This needs a little analysis, and I have two comments about this:

• Their definition of “Eastern religions” is very “Western centred,” i.e., “ABC,” “Anything But Christianity.”  The outlier in this is Islam.  It’s not clear to me that Islam is really an “Eastern religion.”  It would be interesting to see how the correlations work out if Islam was considered by itself. But such a consideration would have to include the significant Islamic countries which they left out of the study, such as Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and the “50/50” situation in Nigeria.  (Their country selection betrays an allergy for less developed countries overall, and even Brazil was left out.)
• Most countries where these “Eastern religions” are active have not experienced the assault of secularisation that has occurred in the West.  (Japan is an exception, and it comes out very socialistic in the ratings.)  How that assault will play out in these countries (especially the Islamic ones) remains to be seen.
• Another term that probably isn’t univocal here is “capitalism.”  As David Isenberg points out at Asia Times Online, “Generally, China, India and Russia are not following the West’s liberal model for self-development, but instead are using a different model, ‘state capitalism’; the system of economic management that gives a prominent role to the state.”  The researchers used four independent variables:
  1. social security taxes as a percent of revenues;
  2. private health expenditures as a percent of total
     health spending;
  3. union density, and
  4. the Gini index of income inequality.

It’s interesting to note that countries such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, China and even the Phillippines have a higher capitalism index than the U.S. using these criteria.  (My own experience in China teaches that the Chinese are very adept capitalists, even under state socialism!)  In a society with a high group cohesion, for example, unionisation may be less necessary to achieve workers’ goals.  Also, states with a high degree of state centralisation are a good opportunity to centralise the wealth, pushing income inequality upward.  (In the West, heavy state involvement is generally connected with wealth redistribution and income levelling, as this last election cycle witnessed.)  The level of social security taxation is not only related to the desire of society to provide for its pensioners but the rate of return on the investment, a sore subject in the U.S.

Although the researchers’ goals are admirable, their attempt to get a meaningful results is sidetracked by variable definitions which may not be as informative as they would like.  But that’s the way of research.  As I pointed out in my own master’s thesis many years ago:

In any investigation such as this the ideal goal is to come up with something truly novel, and many of such works emphasize their novelty to the denigration of those who have gone on before. While in some fields of endeavour this might be appropriate, in this case such sweeping novelty cannot be claimed. This work fits the mould as outlined by Pascal above: it takes the work that has been done before, advances it a step while realizing that there are many more steps before “perfection” is achieved.

The Fix’s Chris Cillizza evidently doesn’t have a lot to do with his time, since he is trying to figure out who are the “stars” is what’s left of the Republican Party.  So let’s look at his list from the criterion that has worked since 1988: who are the Ivy Leaguers in the group?

I first set this criterion out almost two years ago:

The 2008 Presidential campaign has been underway since 2004, but only now has the list of candiates begun to congeal.  So how to winnow things down?  We’ve griped about the fact that Ronald Reagan was the last President that wasn’t a product of an Ivy League school, either as an undergraduate, a graduate, or both.  So it makes sense that candidates that are have a significant advantage.  Let’s see who these might be.

The Republicans start off at a disadvantage; of the major candidates, only Mitt Romney fits the bill (as one would expect a Governor of Massachusetts to.)  Although we have grave reservations about nominating him, doing otherwise will put the party at a handicap. That includes a “ring knocker” like John McCain.

The Democrats are in a better position with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Kerry.  (So much for the “Breck Girl!”)

As you can see, the only Ivy Leaguer left on either position of either ticket is about to become President of the United States.  The only one.  And the party with the most candidates to start with from the Ivy League won.

So let’s look at Chris’ list.  I agree with him to exclude Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee.  Both are great people IMHO, but neither is an Ivy Leaguer and both are Evangelical, which give them serious cooties with the Republican party’s elite.  This party elite can’t get you into the White House but it can keep you out of it short of the disaster that brought Ronald Reagan victory in 1980.

Having taken care of that, let me divide Chris’ field into the two camps.

People Who Aren’t Ivy Leaguers and Won’t Make It

• Steve Poizner: Not an Ivy Leaguer.  Since he went to the University of Texas, I won’t support him either.
• Haley Barbour: Even though he’s the only politician whose reputation was enhanced by Katrina, he’s still not an Ivy Leaguer.  It’s obvious too.
• Mark Sanford: Furman and UVa.  Forget about it.
• Bob McDonnell: He’s a great guy (he’s the only one of the group I’ve actually met,) but no Ivy Leaguer.  If the MSM finds out he went to Regent (his sister Maureen was advancement director there,) they will trash him, and the DC suburbs will abandon him faster than they did John McCain.
• John Thune: I didn’t know he was an Evangelical until I did the research for this piece.  Went to Biola some.  But the University of South Dakota doesn’t cut it in the land where Ivy League elitist snobs get a pass.

People Who Are Ivy Leaguers and Have a Future in the U.S.

• Jon Huntsman Jr.: Went to Penn, so there’s a possibility.  He is LDS, but more about that vis à vis Mitt Romney.
• Eric Cantor: He did receive a degree in real estate development at Columbia, so there’s a possibility, although real estate development will make him a bête noire with the left.
• Mitch Daniels: Princeton and Georgetown.  Don’t underestimate a Hoosier.
• Mitt Romney: An Ivy Leaguer, of course.  Huckabee managed to flush him because he’s LDS, but the LGBT community has gone a long way to solving that problem for him by the way they’ve trashed Mormons and their physical plant in the wake of Proposition 8.  If I were Mitt, I’d be putting videos of gay men protesting in front of Mormon wards and temples on YouTube.  Lots of them.
• Bobby Jindal: A very “hot commodity” indeed.  Brown and Oxford?  Quite a combo!  Non-white to boot!  From Louisiana–and Barack Obama thinks that Chicago is tough?

But stuff like this, boys and girls, is why the party’s over.  Perhaps for the country.

I’ve been making this connnection here and here since shortly after the election.

Now the International Herald-Tribune joins in:

A faltering auto giant whose brands are synonymous with the open road. Hundreds of thousands of unionized workers with powerful political backers. An urgent plea for the government to write a virtual blank check.

This is not the story of Ford and General Motors, but British Leyland, a car company that went through £11 billion of inflation-adjusted British taxpayer money, or $16.5 billion, in the ’70s and ’80s before going out of business. All that is left of the company now are memories of cars like the Triumph, and a painful lesson in the limited effectiveness of bailouts.

“It’s all too evocative,” said Leon Brittan, a top official in the government of Margaret Thatcher, the free-market-minded prime minister who nevertheless backed the rescue. “I’m not telling the U.S. what to do, but the lessons of the British experience is don’t throw good money after bad. British Leyland carried on for a few more years, but they’re not there now, are they?”

To be frank, I started this thought process half-satirically.  But at billions of U.S. dollars (or pounds sterling, take your pick) it really isn’t funny.

Mitt Romney is right on this one.  It’s time to pull the plug before Dodge, Chevrolet and Mercury join Austin, Morris and Triumph as historical marques.