Socialdem. 21st Century

The science of genetics has been coming along by astonishing leaps and bounds in the last 10 years, and you can read some of the fascinating research findings in Gibbons (2014), Allentoft et al. (2015), Günther et al. (2015), Mathieson et al. (2015) and Hofmanová et al. (2016). Many of these studies are based on gene sequencing of ancient DNA in the remains of people who died thousands of years ago.In terms of its population movements and descent, the facts appear to be that modern Europeans...

Posed on Twitter here.It is this: Also, let us say – for the sake of argument – that the Soviet Union had much better GDP growth than it actually had, and was an attractive destination for Third World and First World immigrants. Should the Soviet Union have had an open borders policy that allowed a flood of people to overwhelm its welfare state, its public infrastructure, its housing capacity and social cohesion? Or should the government have allowed huge, unending, yearly mass immigration...

Sir Humphrey Appleby, from Yes, Minister, explains:[embedded content]And now the EU is a right cock-up, it’s time for Britain to leave!!* Therefore if you are British, vote Brexit on June 23.And, moreover, it looks like the “Leave” camp may have taken the lead in the polls.*P.S. for the blockheads this post is in a facetious spirit – though not the plea to vote Brexit.

Thomas A. Boylan and Paschal F. O’Gorman’s paper “Kaldor on Debreu: The Critique of General Equilibrium Reconsidered” (2009) makes rewarding reading.Boylan and O’Gorman review Kaldor’s work on general equilibrium in, for example, Kaldor (1972) and (1985), in which Kaldor had argued that the repudiation of Walrasian general equilibrium theory, especially as newly expounded in the models of Debreu and others (e.g., see Debreu 1959), was a precondition for any proper and truly empirical...

This much should be very clear if you have bothered to engage them at length, as was clear to me in a recent debate on Twitter. The Pro-EU left is now the TINA of the Left!These people are beyond contempt. Why can’t European states return to national political and economic sovereignty with reformed parties of the left?

He rarely criticises it, but this is surprisingly blunt:“Each time labor has been attacked—and as I said, in the 1920s the labor movement was practically destroyed—popular efforts were able to reconstitute it. That can happen again. It’s not going to be easy. There are institutional barriers, ideological barriers, cultural barriers. One big problem is that the white working class has been pretty much abandoned by the political system. The Democrats don’t even try to organize them anymore....

Some people on the left are screaming with horror at the rise of Donald Trump and utterly unable to explain his popularity.Well, perhaps they should look at certain bizarre sections of the regressive left infecting the universities. In its obsession with Postmodernism, extreme social constructivism, anti-racism, Postcolonialism, diversity and identity politics, we have people like this:[embedded content]This is Noel Ignatiev, a left-wing professor at Massachusetts College of Art, and...

The man was a great boxer and athlete and who would doubt it, but have people ever listened to what he actually thought about race? You listen for yourself; you decide for yourself.[embedded content]Of course what we have now is a flood of liberal and left-wing people rushing to praise Muhammad Ali while airbrushing his – umm, somewhat controversial? – opinions out of history. If only Christopher Hitchens were still alive, since he was wonderful at deflating our modern cult of celebrity and...

From Catherine Hakim’s Feminist Myths and Magic Medicine: The Flawed Thinking behind Calls for Further Equality (Centre for Policy Studies, London, UK, (2011):“One indicator of women’s lifestyle preferences is found in patterns of educational homogamy: whether women choose husbands with equal levels of education, or prefer a better-educated and higher-earning spouse.Women’s aspiration to marry up, if they can, to a man who is better-educated and higher-earning, persists in most European...

Is it the collapse of socially-conservative religions?Just a quick survey of the specialist literature on population dynamics suggests to me that, in addition to increasing wealth, the biggest causes of falling birth rates – no matter how religious a society is – are as follows:(1) women’s education and participation in the labour force, and(2) access to birth control.Both of these factors seem to overcome most conservative religious attitudes to high birth rates. What is more, even highly...