The super-polluter social contrast

In my previous post, I noted how the US states of Wyoming and North Dakota rival the three super-rentier Gulf petromonarchies of Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates as “super-polluters”. “Super-polluters” are political entities whose [extraction-based] greenhouse gas emissions per citizen are (roughly) at least 1½ orders of magnitude greater than the global average. Put plainly, citizens of super-polluters profit immensely from runaway global warming, via rents and/or job opportunities unavailable in states without these resources, and via not having to pay taxes.

What is strange when comparing the two sets of “super-polluters is that”:

1. both groups have a very restricted number of local “citizens”, which accounts for the super-polluter status, but
2. the Gulf petromonarchies have imported huge amounts of expatriate labour, but foreign labour is remarkably absent from the worst-polluting US states
• Wyoming and North Dakota have for many decades been amongst the bottom six US states in terms of proportion born outside the country, and this has not changed even with the oil boom and resultant glut that occurred in the 2010s.
• Moreover, Montana and West Virginia — two other very large polluters — are the very lowest two states by proportion born outside the US
• Alaska and New Mexico, two other great polluters (both among the most sui generis US states it should be emphasised), have larger proportions born overseas but these are still below to the US mean

In his landmark 2005 Sundown Towns, the late James Löwen noted that North Dakota — the second worst polluting state in the US today — was a sundown state for blacks during minimally the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Census data from 1970 suggest the only place in the state a black family might live remotely safely was the military town of Minot. The exclusion of blacks in the rural Northwest was in fact so complete as to make research virtually impossible. The same is true of Montana, and marginally less so Wyoming, as can be seen below:

Counties with no or very few black households in 1970 mapped. Taken from https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1973/dec/population-volume-1.html. Note the huge area without black households in the Plains — and note that essentially all the rural Northwest was a sundown area for blacks.

The explanation can, I think, be found in the 2007 thesis ‘Measuring Ancient Inequality’ by Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Although in a revised edition of the thesis that team says it is not likely that any society’s subsistence minimum can be lower than $PPP 300 [1990 US dollars] and that it is possible that in the most exploitative societies a proportion of the population could not afford the subsistence minimum, what is critical is how the team noted the likelihood of lower subsistence minima for tropical and subtropical climates compared to temperate zones. It is likely that in climates as cold as North Dakota’s, requiring extreme shelter, clothing and food, the subsistence minimum would be not merely greater than the $PPP 300 used in their second edition, but significantly greater than the $PPP 400 used by Angus Maddison in The World Economy: Historical Statistics. No society in so cold a climate is analysed and my earlier post aims to explain why finding one is naturally difficult if not impossible. Although the team implies that one needs to be cautious re differences in subsistence minima, it is logical and likely that the subsistence minimum in North Dakota, Wyoming or Montana would exceed $PPP 500 and could reach $PPP 600.

The fact that bosses in Wyoming, Montana or North Dakota must provide workers a substantially higher subsistence income than in the Persian Gulf undoubtedly affects ruling class thought. Whereas in the Persian Gulf the ruling class brings in vast numbers of domestic and other low-skill workers, in the above-mentioned US states this would be too expensive as they require so much protection from frigid weather. Hence, the ruling classes of these cold super-polluters desire to completely exclude undesirable people — most especially and emphatically blacks — to limit the numbers of the lower class they must sustain at the elevated minimum. This, paradoxically, substantially lowers prices for those able to live in these regions below those of many hotter climates. Fewer buyers means less competition, with the result that buyers become more able to exert downward price pressure. This can be seen in how, despite the almost certain high subsistence minima, one’s dollar goes further in North Dakota than in Florida or Arizona.

Purchasing power of $100 in US states compared (2024). The subsistence minimum theory of Milanovic, Williamson and Lindert (2007, 2008) would predict a steady decrease the cooler the climate; however, historic sundown laws and related factors distort this

The basic conclusion is that climate affects the social structure of super-polluting states greatly. Only when subsistence minima are sufficiently low will the wealthy use their wealth to invest in exploitative labour practices: otherwise they are more likely to simply exclude others from it.

The “Australia shock”

Following on from his Commerce and Coalitions, of which I wrote several discussions earlier in 2023, I have recently been looking at the preview of Ron Rogowski’s new book Shocking Contrasts: Political Responses to Exogenous Supply Shocks.

In many ways Shocking Contrasts is intended as an expansion of what Rogowski discussed over three decades earlier in Commerce and Coalitions. His earlier book looked at how endowment affect politics in differently-endowed societies, whilst Shocking Contrasts deals with changes in national and global endowments of important production factors. The book covers chiefly the Black Death in late medieval Europe and the blockade and quest for Lebensraum in interwar Germany, but also looks at the post-Máo Zédōng “China shock”, the fifteenth-century invention of the printing press, and the “railway revolution” of nineteenth-century Russia.

Some years ago, my mother liked to say that “the world is made in China”, upon seeing

“Made in China — Fabrique en Chine [French]”

on virtually every product we bought from stores like Myer and David Jones.

If China has a unique abundance of labour, Australia has an even more unique abundance of land. On page 162 of Handbook on East Asian Economic Integration (edited by Kimura Fukunari, Mari Pangestu, Shandre M. Thangavelu and Christopher Findlay), it is noted that World Bank statistics reveal Australia to possess:

1. twenty-nine times the global average of agricultural land per capita
2. sixteen times the global average of mineral resource endowments per capita
3. eighteen times the global average of land per worker

Page 94 of Commerce and Coalitions revealed Australia as having the second-lowest population per unit area of agricultural land, behind only Botswana.

Thus, the opening up of Australia’s land — preindustrially useless because of extreme deficiency of essential nutrients in its ancient soils and absence of the advanced technology required to smelt the lithophile metals (aluminum, manganese, titanium) in which Australia is so rich — would be expected to constitute a shock of increased land supply. This process began in the 1850s as new land was opened for grazing and continued intensely until at least 1975. In many ways, especially in Queensland where new land is still being cleared for farming, this “Australia shock” (as I will call it) continues to the present.

Shocking Contrasts illustrates no example of a supply shock involving gain of land. The “Australia shock” is probably too prolonged to be sufficiently unexpected for inclusion. Gain of land via trade between 1850 and World War I has been noted by Jeffrey Gale Williamson and subsequently Kevin Hjortshøj O‘Rourke as radically reducing rents in land-poor trade-open European nations. However, both those authors focused on the “New World” as a whole, although this “New World” is comprises two radically different groups of lands:

1. the New World proper, or the Western Hemisphere of the Americas and New Zealand, which are fertile regions sparsely populated because:
1. they were peopled very late as either ice sheets or deep seas had to be crossed, and
   
2. outside the altiplano native large animals were invariably too egalitarian in social structure for domestication
2. Australia and Africa, more accurately named the “Ancient World”: early-peopled lands whose low fertility and ecological fragility inhibited technological or human cultural development

All the scholars noted previously demonstrate dramatic increases in inequality in the Ancient and New Worlds, and comparably dramatic decreases in the Old World. The situation before World War I is then contrasted with the interwar situation whereby the Ancient and New Worlds experienced egalitarian trends, and the Old World inegalitarian. Nevertheless, even admitting the importance of interwar deglobalisation, technological developments were continuously increasing Australia’s relative abundance of land: for instance, titanium metal could not be smelted commercially until the 1940s, and large areas of southern Australia could not be farmed until chalcophile micronutrient deficiencies were discovered in the 1950s. By then little potential farmland in the temperate New World remained uncleared as remaining land was invariably too wet, cold or steep for any sort of farming, while the hemisphere’s chalcophile ores were rapidly depleting. These trends have accelerated since the middle 1970s.

Evidence:

If there has been an “Australia shock”, we should see evidence that returns to land have demonstrably fallen. Rogowski shows re the “China shock” that wages have fallen and inequality risen even in other labour-abundant nations, suggesting that their labour is out-competed by China.

Falling Returns to Land:

Evidence of falling returns to land ever since the opening of Australia is very well documented for land-scarce Europe and East Asia. However, the trend can also be seen in the economic history of the New World proper, where areas least able to diversify beyond specialisation in agriculture have seen the sharpest declines in global economic rank, as noted by John Singleton for New Zealand, and much more widely for Argentina. Excluding probably Kazakhstan, no nation rivals New Zealand and the Southern Cone for high agricultural land value per capita (see page 162 of Handbook on East Asian Economic Integration and NationMaster’s comparison here for justification).

As Jeffrey G. Williamson noted in the 1990s, increases in total land value in the most land-rich regions under globalisation can reach orders of magnitude. Strong evidence of falling returns to land can be seen in the political strengthening of landless peasants in land-rich parts of Latin America under postwar rising trade, most notably in Nicaragua during the 1970s and Bolivia during the 1990s. This contrasts sharply with the weakness of labour in these regions during the pre-World War I globalisation, and on page 115 of Commerce and Coalitions Rogowski says:

“Nicaragua, as a thinly populated state, should have experienced a radicalization of land rather than labo[u]r”

Despite the growth of trade after World War II, landowners in Latin America were faced with decreasing returns due to to increased global abundance of land and their inability to own newly usable land and ores. Peasants in land-rich nations, who used but did not own land, would benefit from this trend and increasing returns to the labour they owned. Similar trends can be detected in other land-rich Latin American nations, most of which democratised late in the twentieth century, and also in Afghanistan, where the war between the PDPA and the mujahiddin can be understood as an economic conflict between:

• diminishing returns to land (via the “Australia shock”) and
• economic gains of abundant land against scarce capital and labour (via expanding trade)

Certain other land-rich nations — notably Algeria and 1970s Ethiopia — experienced similar effects as  users of land over owners became favoured by increasing global abundance of land at a time when climatic conditions in Australia were unusually favourable.

Impoverishment of Backward, Land-Abundant Societies:

More consistent than unpredicted radicalisation of landless peasants in some land-rich societies has been the plain impoverishment of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America since World War II. Previously, their per capita incomes and living standards were generally higher than labour-rich tropical Asia and even mainland East Asia. However, with the increasing supply of farmland and lithophile minerals from Australia, those regions became faced with a loss–loss scenario. Their comparative advantages in agriculture and non-lithophile minerals declined, whilst their comparative disadvantages in labour-, capital- or skill-intensive industries did not. The result, as has been noted by many economists, is an impoverishment that (as noted above) extended to what before the Second World War were some of the wealthiest nations in the world.

Rogowski in Commerce and Coalitions attributes some of this impoverishment to protectionist policies favouring the urban elite, but gives little idea as to why the free-trading rural sectors failed to gain political control, and zero idea of why they were challenged after they did in many Latin American nations (e.g. by Shining Path in Peru). Shari^ca Sudan under Omar Bashir and Iran under the ayatollahs, although imperfect cases due to US sanctions (which I previously argued to have only a minor effect), do not suggest “traditionalist” regimes would have fared better than those based upon the capital–labour coalition. If we assume a continuous gain of land from Australia, we do see that countries less land-surfeited than Australia, but unable to specialise elsewhere, will ipso facto be outcompeted and become poorer. Policies designed to increase competitiveness are likely to be difficult to implement. For instance, radical currency devaluations to make exports more competitive with more land-abundant rivals will be painful even for the very richest, and have never been observed even with IMF structural adjustment, as noted by the IMF’s own Independent Evaluation Office in 2007. Similarly, there are limits to which already low farming and mining wages can fall, and to how much these will restore preceding profitability.

Global Warming:

A third aspect of the “Australia Shock”, more obvious than the previous two, is global warming. Australia, is, of course — excluding the Gulf States — the worst offender in greenhouse gas emissions, with per-citizen emissions ten times the global average. However, Australia’s role in global warming is even greater than this because:

1. it has been documented that Australian flora is the most efficient in the world at storing carbon
2. increasingly intense forest fires as observed in 2019 and last September are likely to severely effect carbon storage be removing even small areas of fire-sensitive rainforests
3. Australia has the largest total area of agricultural land in the world and thus the largest area of native vegetation cleared for farming or grazing
4. the superabundance of land in Australia has led to protein production increasingly using Australian land instead of Asian or European labour
5. the extreme abundance of lithophile metals whose smelting is extremely energy-intensive has caused them to substantially supplant scarce easily smelted chalcophile metals, and likely eliminated incentives for recycling chalcophiles
   

The global temperature graph shows a continuous long-term cooling from peak Holocene warmth in the ninth millennium BC until World War I, followed by slow warming during the long mid-century (between the Bolshevik Revolution and 1973 oil crisis) and rapid accelerating warming since the middle 1970s. This does not agree with the peaks in land clearing in Australia — which occurred in the last half of the nineteenth century and the postwar era. However, it is certainly possible that a side-effect of land-clearing in Australia may have been a shift towards land-intensive protein production in the New World, as observed after World War II, for the following reasons:

• as noted in Richard Seymour’s The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism and Barbarism, the US government subsidised beef production massively.
• it is certainly likely that this demand for animal sources of protein would have been less if labour-intensive plant proteins in the tropics were not rendered so uncompetitive by Australia’s superabundance of grazing land
• the same increase in beef production took place even in land-poor Europe, based on US government policy with the Marshall Plan

It is also true that the supplanting of chalcophile elements with Australian lithophiles — largely smelted via coal — coincided with global warming accelerating. This also happened immediately after fear of exhaustion of chalcophile “base metals” became acute in the early 1970s.

Thus, even if the raw temperature figures do not imply immediate direct causation, the role of the “Australia shock” in global warming is almost certainly significant.

Secularisation:

Another effect I suspect from the development of Australia’s pre-industrially unusable land is the disappearance of the influence of Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism on societies previously dominated thereby. Secularisation is a logical effect of any large gain of land, because land is the only factor of production religious institutions can own. Hence, if previously scarce land becomes abundant, religious organisations’ returns will fall dramatically.

The evidence here is highly supportive. The major opening of Australia in the late nineteenth century coincides well with the growth of anti-religion sentiment within the working classes of Europe. The second major “opening” of Australia in the postwar era coincides very well with the complete disappearance of Christianity as a force in Europe, and of Hinduism and Buddhism in land-poor monsoon Asia (where Stalinism and similar ideologies came to dominate). As I noted earlier, even the land-rich New World was by no means exempt from this trend: it simply could never be so land-rich as Australia was.

Also, perhaps more controversially, I can argue that the unpredictability and relative aseasonality of the Australian climate might make religions substantially based upon the very regular (although it must be acknowledged that in places like Gujarat rainy season rainfall is as variable as rainfall in Australia) seasonal cycles of the Levant and monsoon Asia less relevant. Outside the southwestern quarter Australia’s climate is largely controlled by the El Niño Southern Oscillation, which is a highly irregular nonannual cycle with periods as long as seven years and large fluctuations in strength. The climate of the non-ENSO southwestern quarter is vastly less well understood but appears to be most sensitive to acyclical changes in high latitudes like polar ozone depletion and Antarctic pressure and sea surface temperatures. Under such conditions, religious systems developed in Eurasia lose their critical connections to the land and nature upon which their cosmology was based. Because farming in Australia required and requires highly advanced technology to combat ancient soils and a frequently erratic climate, there could never be a replacement religion of a traditional type. Although Australian farmers do speak of attachment to the land, it is extremely important to recognise how unnatural this is because productive crops and livestock require the chalcophile elements so deficient in Australia.

“Australia shock” or European subsidies?

One question I have asked with my putative “Australia shock” is how much its effects are due not to the expansion of land clearing in Australia, but rather to European farm subsidies. Historians such as Jeffrey G. Williamson note that before World War I, although protection of manufacturing was greater than today, agricultural protection was much lower. As noted throughout this post, European and East Asian workers were empowered by nineteenth-century globalisation, and because land was the pillar of ruling class power, subsidising farming became a tool to preserve the influence of farmers against manufacturing workers desiring radical social revolution.

European farm subsidies would logically be expected to have similar global effects to development in Australia. In an artificial manner, they increase the global land supply, and would be expected to reduce returns to land elsewhere in the world, and impoverish backward, land-abundant societies specialising in agriculture. The question is whether European subsidies would have more effect than opening of new land in Australia.

I would argue that this is a debatable question. The critical issue is disincentives to use land efficiently. These are often argued to be a direct result of farm subsidies. Nevertheless, as Wadham Wilson Wood noted in his 1957 Land Utilization in Australia, such disincentives apply equally to superabundant land under a free market, because such land is too cheap and the increase in rent would have to reach extraordinary levels to counter the problem. Politics may be one reason why rent increases have been very limited in rural Australia: Martin Taylor’s Bludgers in Grass Castles from the late 1990s notes how the political influences of pastoralists has made rents “token” in his words. However, limits to productivity on most Australian farmland are severe, with maximum yields for no crop so much as one-half the global maximum, and for some they are as low as one-seventh the global maximum due to the extreme antiquity of Australian soils. This would mean that land values in Australia would never rise nearly so high as in the New World, even under free trade without farm subsidies. Moreover, even if European (and East Asian) farm subsidies do not encourage globally efficient use of land, without the continual opening of new land in Australia up to the twenty-first century the previously noted disincentives would be absent. Hence, the “Australia shock” has itself produced the lavish farm subsidies we see today even in the New World: we cannot entangle it from modern farm subsidies.

Conclusion:

The previously argued points provide substantial evidence for global effects via continued clearing and development of Australia’s superabundant flat land for agriculture. Calling it a “shock” in the sense of Rogowski’s Shocking Contrasts is somewhat inaccurate because the gain of land from opening Australia has occurred over too prolonged a period, but that does not deny its effects.

It is also true that I am uncertain about other effects I expected, chiefly reduced inequality in backward, labour-abundant economies, which I could not relate to the opening of Australia. However, many other predicted effects seem on at least a superficial study to be relatable thereto.

Addendum to “Sundown versus consistent GOP by county”

In my previous article “Sundown versus consistent GOP by county”, I noted my intention to discuss a number of counties in the northwest of West Virginia that were discussed barely or not at all by the late James Löwen in his Sundown Towns. Three of these, Ritchie County, Doddridge County, and Tyler County, I noted as among the most consistently partisan counties and as typical of fiercely Unionist counties in antebellum slave states (in effect, slave state counties without slaves).

Upon studying census data for the region surrounding these three counties, I noticed an almost continuous sundown area surrounding these three rock-ribbed Unionist GOP strongholds. The apparent sundown area extended as far east as heavily secessionist Webster County, which was only once won by a Republican before 2012, and also includes two counties in neighbouring Ohio.

Map of West Virginia and neighbouring areas with labelled counties showing the continuous sundown area around Ritchie, Tyler and Doddridge Counties. Dark red are likely or known sundown counties, red are highly possible sundown counties, and gold are counties that have had a population over 75,000 in at least one census.

County	State	Census
		Total black population									Number of black households
		1880	1890	1900	1910	1920	1930	1940	1950	1960	1970	1980	1990	2000	2010
Monroe	Ohio	80	102	84	90	62	37	45	21	7	2	2	3	9	19
Noble	Ohio	94	37	37	44	24	28	24	9	3	1	0	4	6	4
Wetzel	West Virginia	22	36	439	57	89	53	29	33	5	0	3	6	3	5
Pleasants	West Virginia	26	9	6	9	7	0	0	3	8	0	8	0	2	5
Tyler	West Virginia	6	2	94	115	52	35	27	20	12	1	4	0	0	1
Ritchie	West Virginia	64	36	26	26	13	7	9	5	1	0	0	2	7	8
Doddridge	West Virginia	54	131	25	8	1	20	5	2	1	0	0	0	0	2
Wirt	West Virginia	13	24	64	40	35	25	38	20	13	0	0	2	4	4
Jackson	West Virginia	103	87	115	26	12	4	1	3	6	0	5	9	8	24
Roane	West Virginia	39	29	32	18	12	14	3	23	17	0	0	0	12	9
Calhoun	West Virginia	74	81	83	80	36	12	7	10	12	0	0	0	1	2
Gilmer	West Virginia	47	50	36	17	38	21	2	24	1	1	0	5	12	28
Clay	West Virginia	0	0	18	5	147	170	201	58	66	0	0	0	1	2
Braxton	West Virginia	104	134	187	221	273	188	160	111	119	22	28	29	28	27
Lewis	West Virginia	323	261	178	239	291	122	93	62	95	19	17	8	8	13
Webster	West Virginia	2	11	12	8	0	9	1	4	1	0	0	0	0	2
Nicholas	West Virginia	58	21	19	48	68	65	24	32	6	0	4	1	2	10

Of the counties shown above, there is some discussion of Pleasants County here, but the fact that census data for surrounding counties indicates they were probably sundown is not noted. New Martinsville, the seat of Wetzel County, is also discussed here, but that Wetzel County was probably sundown throughout is never noted. It is worthwhile to note that in the 1860 census, the last before slavery was abolished, Ritchie County had no free blacks at all. The table above suggests that most of the counties in this sundown area got rid of their black populations in the 1900s, with this date being most apparent for Doddridge County, and not improbable for Wetzel, Ritchie, Roane and Jackson Counties. Some other counties — such as Calhoun and Gilmer — may have got rid of their black populations around the Depression era. (Tucker County, an isolated probable sundown county on the map, appears to have got rid of its African Americans only after Brown v. Board of Education. The same is true of Highland County, and possibly of Nicholas and Wirt).

In order to establish this as a distinct area of sundown or probably sundown counties, I have compiled census data for surrounding counties that have never had a population of 75,000 or greater in any census. (As I noted earlier, this cutoff may in fact be too large). Upshur County’s figures were already shown in the previous post, but Upshur is unlikely to have been a sundown county.

County	State	Census
		Total black population									Number of black households
		1880	1890	1900	1910	1920	1930	1940	1950	1960	1970	1980	1990	2000	2010
Greene	Pennsylvania	503	445	313	389	300	516	417	450	360	98	95	77	61	81
Marshall	West Virginia	223	236	499	575	502	882	881	323	360	36	45	41	41	50
Guernsey	Ohio	586	496	472	489	456	571	596	622	688	166	196	233	235	208
Morgan	Ohio	193	160	131	147	233	275	377	361	500	122	162	209	204	184
Washington	Ohio	1,243	1,412	1,597	1,378	1,165	1,185	1,143	865	843	205	299	291	244	265
Meigs	Ohio	1,798	1,405	969	690	631	596	507	415	339	72	109	65	68	93
Mason	West Virginia	859	759	537	349	227	692	670	755	529	58	37	32	44	45
Putnam	West Virginia	355	237	378	435	397	124	145	12	13	27	18	41	99	173
Greenbrier	West Virginia	1,981	1,993	1,829	1,779	1,726	2,329	2,430	2,014	1,879	483	516	508	487	445
Pocahontas	West Virginia	334	353	625	445	558	638	646	628	373	56	30	30	21	12
Randolph	West Virginia	112	262	519	376	431	342	391	385	260	61	51	38	41	44
Upshur	West Virginia	201	256	221	226	196	201	155	92	71	19	20	29	22	27

Whilst most of these figures do suggest a definite boundary of the sundown area, it might be noted that most of Randolph County was probably sundown and may still be, although the county seat of Elkins and unincorporated parts of its associated district have always had at least thirty black households. Six of Randolph’s nine districts had no black household in 2010. Guernsey County shows a somewhat similar pattern: almost all the black households were and are in county seat Cambridge and the surrounding township. Mason County and Point Pleasant are similar though less extreme, as thirteen of 45 black households in the county lied outside its district. (That boundaries of large sundown areas do not correspond with county lines is the rule rather than the exception). Whether the apparently sundown part of Randolph became so before 1940 as the group of counties tabled above did, or with Brown v. Board as Tucker County apparently did, it is difficult to check with census data.

Workers in interwar Europe were likely more “deviant” than “media people” in 1990s America

In my previous post, I noted that it is likely that the threat posed by an activist working class to the Catholic Church was likely a very important driving factor behind stigmata stories in the southwestern quarter of Europe during the interwar period. This is true even if my original imagination — that the stigmata stories were designed to directly convert the workers — is unlikely to be true because the Church viewed converting the working classes as a fundamentally hopeless cause. The fact that the Church made few efforts other than by political power to do so suggests that no belief existed within the Catholic hierarchy that European workers could be converted from their fundamental anti-religion stance.

Indeed, the evidence I can gather reminds me of Peter Kreeft’s article ‘A Defense of Culture Wars’, which I read as a young man in the late 1990s as part of his book Ecumenical Jihad to a mixture of utter ridicule and some agreement. Kreeft used a poll by the supposedly secular Wirthlin Agency — of whom I have not heard from any other source so I can doubt how secular it might have actually been — to illustrate differences in belief between the general population and “media people” (whom Kreeft defined as those involved in any of journalism, public education, or entertainment):

Issue	Support by general population		Support by “media people”
Cheating sexually upon spouse is wrong	>90		50
Regular attendance at religious services	50		9
Abortion should have minimally some restrictions	72	(Wirthlin)	3
	80	(other sources)

The impression one obtains from church and other political histories, however, I have always envisioned as implying that the industrial working class of Europe between about 1860 and 1945 was even more “deviant” from the opinions and practices of the remainder of society. Pat Buchanan in his The Death of the West doubted this — indeed suggesting the working classes even in Europe were socially conservative — but he is unsupported by other sources. During periods of weak class struggle European workers accepted passively  the system as it was, but when the gains mass class struggle could potentially produce were revealed, European workers always constituted the vanguard of social change.

Almost certainly, the proportion of industrial workers in Europe over this period who attended religious services was extremely small, probably 5 percent or less. Contrariwise, amongst the ruling and middle classes, and the rural population, church attendance was typically very widespread (with some exceptions, for example the latifundia regions of interior Spain). From what I can gather, the proportion of all Europeans between 1860 and 1945 attending religious services was reasonably similar to 1990s America. This would mean Europe’s industrial working classes stood much further apart from the rest of society. Although abortion was not legalised outside the USSR and Scandinavia until the 1960s or 1970s, it is probable that the great majority of Europe‘s industrial workers had long supported eliminating restrictions upon it (and upon homosexual relations) since before the Bolshevik revolution.

Moreover, if we extended the survey beyond sexual issues to economic ones, the views of media people in 1990s America would become less “deviant”, whereas those of workers in Europe between 1860 and 1945 would undoubtedly remain equally or more so. Additionally, because media people lack power to transform society — they have zero control either as bosses or producers over fundamental mechanisms of production — their deviant views and practices are extremely unlikely to transform society. Contrariwise, after World War Two the Boom Generation of Europeans (born after the war) confirmed in its social beliefs and practices to that which European workers had established within their own cultures as early as 1860, but was radically different to the remaining sectors of European society in this period.

The localisation of “dangerous” academics

During the middle 2000s the seemingly — and in some ways actually — inadequate and unconvincing responses of groups like Socialist Alternative, Socialist Worker and Resistance to the September 11 terrorist attacks turned me somewhat away from these groups. Unfortunately, what I turned to as an alternative was much, much worse than any flaws in the radical left — into reading, on the assumption of “true unless refutable”, the propaganda of the anti-democratic Republican Party.

Republican propaganda is not ipso facto internally consistent. I early on noted contradictions between The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the later Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East, accepting the former’s much more convincing view that Saudi Arabia was an extremely dangerous ally of the US. However, one of the worst examples of Republican propaganda that I partially took on board during this period was David Horowitz’ 2006 The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. It was a standard mantra of the Republican Party that American universities are hotbeds of left-wing radicalism, and as a lover of lists I used my brother’s card to borrow The Professors from Monash.

Even reading when less critical of the extreme right, I saw many flaws in The Professors despite possessing little knowledge of the vast majority. What Horowitz’ said that I did know something about seemed extremely flawed, sometimes to the point of being absolute errors. Re-reading when one learns more has made me far more disbelieving of Horowitz’ claims, which sources like the World Socialist Web Site have demonstrated as contrary to fact.

What is really revealing is that Horowitz’ “dangerous professors” are geographically remarkably concentrated, as can be seen from the table below where the 101 “most dangerous” academics are listed by the state they worked in. In order to account for bias from institutions with many “dangerous” academics, I have included an additional column listing how many different institutions in each state had professors profiled in Horowitz’ book. Different campuses of the same university are counted as one because they are likely to be politically similar and might work together.

	Professors	Institutions
Alabama	0	0
Alaska	0	0
Arizona	0	0
Arkansas	0	0
California	16	6
Colorado	6	4
Connecticut	0	0
Delaware	0	0
District of Columbia	4	1
Florida	1	1
Georgia	1	1
Hawaii	1	1
Idaho	0	0
Illinois	7	4
Indiana	3	3
Iowa	0	0
Kansas	0	0
Kentucky	1	1
Louisiana	0	0
Maine	0	0
Maryland	0	0
Massachusetts	6	5
Michigan	2	1
Minnesota	0	0
Mississippi	0	0
Missouri	1	1
Montana	0	0
Nebraska	0	0
Nevada	0	0
New Hampshire	0	0
New Jersey	2	2
New Mexico	0	0
New York	25	9
North Carolina	3	2
North Dakota	0	0
Ohio	3	3
Oklahoma	0	0
Oregon	1	1
Pennsylvania	10	5
Rhode Island	1	1
South Carolina	0	0
South Dakota	0	0
Tennessee	0	0
Texas	5	3
Utah	0	0
Vermont	0	0
Virginia	0	0
Washington	2	2
West Virginia	0	0
Wisconsin	0	0
Wyoming	0	0
TOTAL	101	57

Although I was unable to draw a precise map as I intended when planning this post, it is striking that thirty of fifty states are not home to a single one of these academics listed as “dangerous” by Horowitz. Apart from four universities in Colorado and three in Texas, the entire area between the Mississippi and the Cascades is entirely unrepresented, as is Upper New England and even Connecticut. The Deep South has only two academics, and including Texas the remainder of the South has just eleven.

The Northeast, contrariwise, is academically home to forty-eight of the 101 most dangerous academics. More than that, a quarter worked in New York alone, and sixteen (one-sixth) in New York City alone. What this confirms is that opposition to the policies of the Republican Party is massively concentrated in a few areas, and is exceedingly weak elsewhere. For Americans who have no exposure to the ideas offered by so-called “dangerous” academics, Republican propaganda constitutes an unchallenged message, regardless of what Republican spokespeople and think tanks say.

Revealing how a resource-surfeited country has stayed democratic

Although it is popularly believed that Australia’s longstanding, stable democracy is simply a reflection of an advanced level of economic development, with age and reading about Australia’s unique ecology and observing its dreadful environmental record, I have come to believe that this generally-held hypothesis is entirely wrong.

As Gallup and Sachs (2000) discuss, countries in low latitudes have low incomes with a few natural-resource-rich exceptions, and almost all the poorest countries are tropical. Although Australia is more than half outside the geographical tropics, as Huston (2012) demonstrates, it is pedologically entirely tropical. In fact, Orians and Milewski (2007) demonstrate conclusively that all of Australia uniformly surpasses all other extant continents in oligotrophy, but there can exist no doubt Australia stands less distant ecologically from the tropics than it is from the Enriched World, simply because:

1. Enriched World soils are distinctly more fertile on average than the soils of non-Australian humid tropical and arid outer tropical and subtropical landmasses
2. Paleopedology (Retallack, 2001, p. 285) gives clear evidence that even the least fertile of the dominant Enriched World soil types were exceedingly rare until the great glaciations began five million year ago

Accepting Australia as a “natural-resource-rich exception” (à la Gallup and Sachs) remains the only logical conclusion.

When we study the other “natural-resource-rich exceptions” – New Caledonia, Brunei and the Arab Gulf States – popular conclusions about Australian democracy are in no way supported. Excluding New Caledonia, which remains a French colony, all these other nations remain absolute monarchies with no evidence of large-scale democratisation. Given that Australia is even poorer in nutrients and animal protein, and has a much wider range of natural resources than the Middle East – which aside from its dominance of world oil and phosphate rock reserves is extremely natural-resource-poor – it would be expected that the political power of its mineral industry would be greater.

However, today, looking for books on democracy and its evolution, I found Dietrich Rüschemeyer’s 1992 Capitalist Development and Democracy today and was impressed (if not to an extreme degree) at his analysis of how democratic and authoritarian regimes evolved in early twentieth-century Europe, the Western Hemisphere and Australia. Rüschemeyer gave a convincing argument that the presence of powerful large landholding classes in Central, Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America and the American South precluded democracy prior to the “Green Revolution” shifting comparative advantage in agriculture to Australia and Africa. By contrast, northern Europe, Canada and New Zealand were able to maintain stable democracies under these conditions as they were almost entirely smallholding. Rüschemeyer views the only exceptions as Britain and a number of British colonies, including Australia and the British Caribbean islands. Rüschemeyer shows that large landowners in these cases did not control the state and could not enforce authoritarian regimes.

Given that many of the nations discussed by Rüschemeyer – New Zealand, Switzerland, all of Central America – are exceedingly natural-resource-poor, it is understandable that the political influence of mining capitalists would be irrelevant in most of the cases discussed by Rüschemeyer. However, I possess little doubt that a powerful class of mining capitalists would tend to be extremely hostile to democracy, because, by analogy with Mickey (2015, p. 10) we would expect capital-dependent mining elites to be even more hostile to democracy that labour-dependent landed elites. Since mineral resources are completely fixed in location underground, they are harder to move than farming operations, and much harder to move than industrial labour. Thus, a mining capitalist’s wealth should theoretically be more vulnerable to taxation from a politically embittered lower class than even a large landowner’s.

The history of the oil states of the Gulf and Brunei, and the erosion of popular participation in the United States during and after the “System of 1896” do perhaps support this conclusion. However, in the United States the role of mining elites in reforms such as personal registration, literacy tests and residential requirements is doubtful, with the exception of Arizona and New Mexico where mining elites undoubtedly restricted political participation until the 1970s by completely excluding Native Americans whose participation threatened mineowners’ interests. Nevertheless, it does seem highly logical that Australia’s powerful mining capitalist class would be hostile to democracy, and have desire to roll it back as its power increases via advances in lithophile metallurgy – lithophile metals being a natural resource Australia is rich in almost proportionately to its nutrient poverty, owing to the low solubility of most lithophile elements and that their extremely strong bonds with oxygen precluded preindustrial smelting. Nevertheless, such rollbacks have never occurred because of the conservatism of Australia’s working classes – substantially opposed even to a moderate “mining tax” – and the related fact that the mining capitalists do not have their wealth threatened by democracy and can substantially control democratically elected politicians.

However, if Australia had been unable to democratise before major interwar advances in lithophile metallurgy like the Kroll Process, there is no doubt it would remain firmly authoritarian even today. Under such circumstances, the mining elite would undoubtedly prefer an authoritarian regime to even Australia’s actual pliant democracy.

References:

• Retallack, Gregory John (2001); Soils of the Past: An Introduction to Paleopedology, ISBN 978-0-632-05376-6
• Gallup, John Luke and Sachs, Jeffrey D.; ‘Agriculture, Climate, and Technology: Why are the Tropics Falling Behind?’; American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Volume 82, Issue 3, 1 August 2000, pages 731–737
• Orians, Gordon H. and Milewski, Antoni V. (2007). ‘Ecology of Australia: the effects of nutrient-poor soils and intense fires’ Biological Reviews, 82 (3): pp. 393–423
• Huston, Michael A.; ‘Precipitation, soils, NPP, and biodiversity: resurrection of Albrecht’s curve’; Ecological Monographs, 82(3), 2012, pp. 277–296
• Micket, Robert (2015); Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972 (Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives); ISBN 978-0691133386

Longman reveals – unconsciously – the Enriched World as “circle of exclusive clubs”

Percent of mean national per capita income for each region of the US, 1929-1979

The now-veteran demographer Phillip Longman (he turns sixty in April), whose The Empty Cradle remains the best look – if without likely remedies – at the Enriched and Tropical Worlds’ severe demographic problems, has today showed, without having that aim, just how the Enriched World is becoming nothing except an exclusive club caught in a whirlpool of demographic suicide.

In November’s Washington Monthly, Longman in his new article ‘Bloom and Bust’, has argued that “regional inequality is out of control” after, as the graph on the left shows, having fallen for almost a century and a half until the 1980s. His data show that income inequality in the United States is increasing as

“geography has come roaring back as a determinant of economic fortune, as a few elite cities have surged ahead of the rest of the country in their wealth and income”

and

“only the very rich can still afford to work in Manhattan, much less live there, while increasing numbers of working- and middle-class families are moving to places like Texas or Florida... even though wages in Texas and Florida are much lower.”

Percent of New York mean per capita income for outlying US regions, 1969 to date

Longman then points out that the cities with highest per capita incomes have tended, in fact, to see large net out-migration, whilst areas where per capita incomes are not growing at all have tended to attract most in-migrants.

Longman’s primary argument is that looser enforcement of antitrust legislation and large amounts of financial deregulation during the 1980s and 1990s has led to the consolidation of extremely wealthy businesses in a small number of major cities on the East and Pacific Coast, notably New York, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington D.C., Los Angeles and the cities of the Pacific Northwest. He believed the dominance of what he calls “retail goliaths” has meant much less is invested in “flyover” cities of the Plains, Mountain West and the South, with the result that the economies of these cities have severely declined as even new entrepreneurs must move to technology centres like Silicon Valley. Longman quotes Bill Gates to the effect that patent holders’ monopoly power – which he notes was expanded in the 1980s before which the federal government refused to grant any patents for software – makes it more difficult for inventors not allies with the patent holders. (Whilst I understand the value of patents in the context of agriculture, where Australia’s farmers do not pay anything for fertiliser technologies patented overseas but used to farm inherently unsustainable and exceedingly ancient soils, Gates’ and Longman’s criticism has major value.)

The problem is that Longman gives much too little attention to how impossible it is for the middle class – let alone the working masses – to live in such wealthy cities as New York, Boston, the Bay Area, Seattle, Portland and Washington D.C. Demographers ought to know all too well that:

1. lowest-low fertility is a consequence of family formation being unaffordable due to limited housing space and consequent:
   1. simple unaffordability of housing for all but the very rich
   2. extreme lack of space in housing that is uncomfortable for all but one- or two-person houses and cannot accommodate families
   3. it is clear to me that, despite minor criticisms I received years ago Wendell Cox, many indices like fertility would correlate much better with:
   1. cost of housing per unit of housing space (relative to income) rather than actual total cost (because cheap housing is not useful for families if it be too small for comfort)
   2. cost of housing relative to each individual worker’s income, rather than with total household income (because a single income allows the mother to take more care of children)
   3. such criteria would show more accurately the problems Enriched World cities have with housing space and the need for women to work to gain basic sustenance – and of course this work tends to require high levels of education
2. that severe land-use restrictions – in lands devoid of unique biodiversity (ice-free only for 15,000 years) and/or low secondary productivity to justify restrictions – create a large part of this housing shortage
3. that politics in big “imperial cities” tends to be very left-wing due to the concentration of wealthy entrepreneurs there and resultant extreme levels of class resentment
4. a fourth insight, which Longman does give, is that as the public sector has retreated from providing transport, government regulation of land supply and roads in “imperial cities” has precluded the private sector doing anything to improve mobility
5. a fifth insight is that many regulations and much government spending in “imperial cities” is designed to help the very poor but:
1. exacerbates natural flat land scarcity by means of rent control, which often allows less wealthy people who initially lived there to pay very low rents compared to what the market would charge
2. create a culture of welfare dependency amongst these cities’ less wealthy populations, who obtain more from welfare than they could from modest-paying employment locally
3. reduces job and trade opportunities by placing wages far above theoretical market levels given the regions’ resource poverty and dense pre-industrial populations, and by means of extreme and usually unnecessary (vis-à-vis Australia or Africa) environmental regulations

Under these conditions, Enriched World cities have no choice but to compete for the most skill-intensive industries extant. Their lands are generally cool, mountainous and pre-industrially densely populated, so they have large comparative disadvantages in agriculture. Glaciers and the Alpine Orogeny have stripped the Enriched World of difficult-to-smelt lithophile metals and preindustrial mining stripped it of easily smelted chalcophile ores, ruling out mining as a long-term base. The dense population and demands for clean air make unskilled labour totally inadequate as an income even with two partners, so that labour- or capital-intensive manufacturing industries also cannot serve as a long-term base for Enriched World economies.

The educational requirements and demographic consequences of an economy based exclusively upon skill-intensive industries have been documented for over a century. In 1900, when among women generally fertility rates were five to six children per lifetime, those of educated women could be as low as a tenth of that: I recall that one survey estimated the few tertiary-educated women produced merely 0.47 children over their lifetime! The situation has changed little in modern times – the difference is that dependence upon skill-intensive industries is now no isolated phenomenon but characterises most corners of the Enriched World and many of the Tropical, making these regions exclusive clubs for the skilled 1 percent or, in the most mountainous or densely populated, much less than that. Even if they had large pre-industrial populations or rapid modern growth, these nations, as shows dramatically by Japan post-1990, will one by one decline in global importance.

Families – who form the next generation – are being forced to move to land-rich regions like the American South or suburban Australia, which is where the future of the world must lie. Despite these regions’ inherently low soil fertility and generally high species diversity, the former trait tends to enhance cooperation and solid families and minimise the class conflict that produces the excessive regulation in cool climates. This sense of community undoubtedly allows tolerance for much lower quality of life via greater emotional support during social or environmental crises, by avoiding heat-of-passion reactions that can disturb relationships even between those who deeply love each other. It is this family-friendly “community culture” that drives migration to places with poor economies, bad climates and low quality of life, and the politics of the cooler and more mountainous regions of the globe make it unlikely to change.

A “negative-negative” relationship between religion and animal cooperation?

Over the past few months, I have absorbed a study by Carlos Botero of belief in “moralising high gods” – largely because of my interest in why atheism and consequent demographic decline and big government have become so persistent in the urban Enriched World, leading to the region’s likely economic obsolescence as it becomes unaffordable to live in due to crippling taxes and regulations.

For many years, the main arguments for the urban Enriched World’s atheism have been somewhat contradictory:

1. the scarcity of natural resources and land in the Enriched World making family formation unaffordable (e.g. Mary Eberstadt’s How the West Really Lost God)
2. extreme abundance of water, nutrients and protein producing natural egalitarianism and atheism in the Enriched World, hinted strongly at (if not explicitly) by a variety of authors such as:
1. Tim Flannery in The Future Eaters
2. John Snarey in ‘The Natural Environment’s Impact upon Religious Ethics: A Cross-Cultural Study.’
3. Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel
4. Gordon Orians and Antoni Milewski in ‘Ecology of Australia: the Effects of Nutrient-Poor Soils and Intense Fires’

It was for this reason that I was strongly attracted to Russell Gray and Carlos Botero’s ‘The Ecology of Religious Beliefs’ when it was published last November. I had hoped to find explanations for the cultural differences observed in the so-called developed world between conservative Australia and Red America and liberal Europe, East Asia, Blue America, Canada and New Zealand (the Republican West is quite morally liberal though extremely individualist and free-market).

As it turns out, whilst there are some explanations given for the atheism of today’s Enriched and Tropical Worlds, which fits very well with theory 2) about abundance of resources tending to discourage cooperation between individuals, Botero’s study has serious problems.

Societies with moralising high Gods in blue (top; from ‘The Ecology of Religious Beliefs’) versus percentage of avian cooperative breeders (middle; broadly defined from Dustin Rubinstein’s ‘Environmental Uncertainty and the Global Biogeography of Cooperative Breeding in Birds’) versus coefficient of variation of annual runoff (bottom; from Thomas Aquinas McMahon’s ‘Global Hydrology Part 3: Country and Climate Studies’)

The most crucial problem, of course, is that European societies with moralising high gods inherited the Christian God from Southwest Asia – a region which ecologically, as suggested by:

1. Dustin Rubinstein’s study of cooperative breeding plus Holger Kreft and Walter Jetz in ‘A Framework for Delineating Biogeographical Regions based on Species Distributions’
   • (Southwest Asia is probably part of Afrotropical rather than Palearctic)
2. Thomas Aquinas McMahon in Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges
   • (Southwest Asia in part at least may share high runoff variability of Australia and Southern Africa)

is certainly closer to Australia and Africa than Europe. For an idea of the impact of European environmental conditions, it would be essential to study pre-Christian European societies, which Botero admits possible via written records.

A second point is that, since 1900 when the study was done, Indigenous Australians have become Christian to an extent greater than the European population, whereas indigenous Americans and Siberians have not accepted Christianity significantly despite longer efforts at evangelisation. Although one might sensibly argue conversions of indigenous Australians are analogous to those of Europeans and do not demonstrate suitability of Australia for moralising high gods, this does suggest that a map of moralizing high gods should focus upon indigenous populations and religion indigenous to a region much more than it is.

From the map, one sees that not all areas with frequent cooperative breeding (e.g. equatorial Africa) or high runoff variability (e.g. the Norte Chico in Chile) possess the other feature. It is, however, striking that several regions possess a distinct lack of all three traits monitored within the above charts:

1. temperate South America
2. Andean South America
3. the Amazon Basin
4. the Arctic Ocean drainage area
5. the North Pacific Rim
6. extratropical East Asia

In contrast, if we are careful about indigenous conversions brought about externally, only the Middle East seems to strongly possess all three traits, and does not do so to the most extreme extent with any single one. This implies that the three traits we have been studying may be much more linked by absence rather than by presence.

In my opinion, if absence of moralising high gods, absence of cooperative breeding in birds, and very low runoff variability are more closely linked than their opposites, it is likely that these three traits evolved in the Arctic and Pacific Rims in very recent geological times. Mountain uplift (which provides steep terrain that increases runoff ratios) and extreme oceanic enrichment (which provides animal protein in quantities unknown in previous geological eras) select very firmly against cooperation, especially in humid coastal lowlands adjacent to the mountains. Even when these regions have evolved agriculture and stratified societies, the underlying radical individualism has expressed itself – for example in emperor-worship and samurai culture where the law allowed the samurai to kill almost anyone he wanted to. It is seen even more clearly, as Rod Dreher notes, today.