2013-05-21T15:24:26-04:00 Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=eric-kaufmann Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Eric Kaufmann Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3106787 2013-04-18T04:17:20-04:00 2013-04-18T05:38:07-04:00

Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kaufmann/ Yet even if net immigration is reduced to 100,000 a year, ethnic change in Britain will remain brisk: minorities are considerably younger and still have somewhat larger families than the white British. If white anxieties are powered by the sense the white British are becoming a minority, then the challenge will not abate and far right support will remain buoyant. No amount of talk about the sunlit uplands of a new Britishness can conceal the fact that being a member of a dwindling ethnic majority is conducive to alienation: just look at the mood of Northern Ireland's Protestant working class in depopulating areas like Belfast's Shankill.
Upwardly mobile whites can identify with their achieved status, but the working class cannot, and therefore remains more committed to English ethnic nationalism. How can one reconcile Britain's growing ethnic minorities with its often-alienated white working class? Is trampling on the white nationalism of the ethnic majority and the multicultural comforts of minorities in the name of integration really the way forward? Perhaps there's an alternative that can better satisfy everyone.
Here a powerful insight in Goodhart's book caught my eye: there are many different ways to be British. I would go further - there are many ways to think about what England is now and what it ought to be tomorrow. Everyone, I argue, sees their nation through a different local, ideological and ethnic lenses. In short, it's time to localise the national identity debate.
If you are a white Briton in a market town, your England will be a green and pleasant land with a white British character. Minorities are at the fringes of this picture, associated with London and other cities. This is not just your perception of your village but of England and Britain, since, as a number of leading historians point out, your lived experience is the prism through which you view the nation as a whole. In rural England, this means you imagine an ethnic geography looking pretty much the same in the future as it does today and has in the past.
Yet if you are a Bangladeshi Briton from Tower Hamlets, your England is a multicultural community of communities, and only becoming more so with new waves of immigration. If you are mixed-race and living in London, your imagined England may well be a melting pot and you may glimpse a future when minorities and majorities have blended to form a new compound.
Broadly speaking, less mobile whites, conservatives and those from homogeneous parts of the country are attached to England through their ethnicity, and perceive the country as a largely white nation continuous with that of their forebears. Minorities, liberals and those from diverse areas like London understand England as polyglot, and are often advocates of multiculturalism or, like Goodhart or Trevor Phillips, a colour-blind civic nationalism.
Partisans of the three positions battle it out on the opinion pages and in the media, each wishing to give the full force of state backing to their one-size-fits-all national story. But what if the nation can be all at once - if politicians can, through ambiguity and symbolism, recognise the validity of several hopes and dreams?
For instance, David Cameron might laud the unrivalled mix of cultures in London one moment, the magic of integration and intermarriage the next, and still comment favourably, as did John Major, on the settled ethnic continuity of England's villages. Each message will be eagerly received by those attuned to its frequency and ignored by others. People generally hear what they want to hear. Political parties thrive on this, adopting a constituency-based form of organisation which mobilises groups with widely differing views - think Muslim traditionalists in East London and trade unionists in Lancashire. They overlook their differences to coalesce behind Labour's anti-Tory message. In Northern Ireland, the 'constructive ambiguity' of the Good Friday Agreement permitted each side to convince themselves the Agreement was advancing their communal aims.
Therefore, so long as clear red lines safeguard women's rights, freedom of expression and other basic liberties, politicians could remain elusive on national identity and tolerate wide differences in the way the nation is perceived around the country. People can form attachments to as many different Britains as they wish: regardless, Britain benefits. A unitary approach based on a fixed set of characteristics, by contrast, flattens and alienates both minorities who wish to maintain their culture and white British who seek a timeless continuity between past, present and future Englands.
The multicultural, colour-blind and ethno-nationalist visions coexist, and point to distinct national utopias. A multiculturalist's England seeks an increasingly multi-ethnic kaleidoscope like the island of Mauritius. Here ethnic boundaries multiply and persist through time. Against this, an integrationist idyll sees groups melting to produce a 'new man', a hybrid of influences never yet seen. This model was propounded in America by Crèvecoeur in the eighteenth century, Emerson in the nineteenth and Zangwill in the twentieth. In England, it is associated with Daniel Defoe's The True Born Englishman (1703).
Finally, a version of white nationalism that respects basic liberties is possible, in which the white majority absorbs minority blood - perhaps overshadowing the contribution of the initial white British population - while imbibing only the most superficial cultural influences along the way. In the England of the 2200s, what Michael Lind terms the 'beige' white population may, like today's racially ambiguous American Indians or Hawaiians, narrow the focus of its ancestry myths to a narrow set of founders - even as its actual ancestry goes global. Anglo-Saxons, Normans and Celts will prove a lot more useful in setting the English apart from the similarly dusky whites of continental Europe and the United States than England's post-1900 waves of superdiverse global migrants. This selective reading of the past will link the future English majority to its forebears, whose phenotype has, after all, been immortalised on canvas, film and statuary. Furthermore, 'whiteness' may matter more in an Asia-centric world where Europe feels smaller, accounting for a tiny 5 percent of the globe's population and output.
This vision won't allay the anxieties of the fringe of race purists, but it offers hope to many white British people that they will remain the ethnic majority in England. Importantly, it avoids the alienating narrative of 'get used to it' ethnic demise that fuels far right popularity. The truth is nobody knows what will come to pass, but it makes sense for politicians to adopt a hands-off approach, setting basic liberal parameters while tipping its cap to a wide range of competing visions: ethnonational, hybrid and multicultural. With localism and mutual respect, each can flourish, producing both greater liberty and a more powerful attachment to the country.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2472480 2013-01-15T13:45:27-05:00 2013-03-17T05:12:01-04:00

Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kaufmann/ Ukip is tapping into popular fears that there will be a new wave of east European migration to Britain. It may increase the pressure David Cameron faces from backbench MPs to call a referendum on Europe in his speech this Friday. The immigration and Europe questions reflect a distinct new English nationalism, which is opening up a rift between cosmopolitan London and the rest of England.

Recently released 2011 census results show over 60% of England's population identify as English Only rather than British. In Wales, the comparable figure for Welsh Only is only 58%. The high Englishness score can partly be explained by question wording and ordering: in surveys which ask a more subtle question, there remains an even split between English and British identity. Nevertheless, to have English identity so boldly affirmed on the census represents a coming-of-age for a long obscured nation.

England's rise has not been uniform. Work that Gareth Harris and I are undertaking for our ESRC/Demos project shows that London, together with cosmopolitan college towns like Oxford and Cambridge, is standing against the English tide.

Source: Census of England and Wales 2011 (Office of National Statistics), own manipulations.

The most obvious reason for London's exceptionalism is its ethnic diversity. We won't know for sure until census microdata are released in 2014, but most ethnic minorities seem to have ticked the 'British Only' box while Europeans selected 'Other.' Some ethnic minorities have embraced English identity: the borough of Newham is 20.7% 'English Only' despite being just 16.7% white British. However, some of this could be down to people ticking the first box on their form. Effectively, most ethnic minorities and whites who lack British ancestry don't feel very English. This is obvious when we consider the least English areas of England, which are mainly ethnically diverse London boroughs.

But this is not the only factor. A quick glance at the figures shows that the difference between the most ethnically homogeneous borough, Redcar and Cleveland, and the least, Newham, is 80 points. By contrast, the gap between the most English Only borough, Castle Point, and the least, Brent, is just 57 points. Statistically, the share of ethnic minorities and Europeans in a borough explains much, but not all, the variation in Englishness around the country.

This brings us to an interesting quiz night question: where in England are people most likely to identify as Scottish, Welsh, Irish or Cornish rather than English? Corby, or 'Little Scotland', has a third of its population of Scottish descent, many more of Irish descent, a die-hard legion of Glasgow Rangers fans and an Asda that sells 17 times as much Irn Bru as the English average. But its white British folk are more English in their identity than those in parts of London. 20% of the white British and Irish-origin people in London's multicultural borough of Brent report Celtic national identity. This is well ahead of Cornwall's 16.6% and Corby's 14.45%. Chardonnay-swilling Islington, at 12%, is only slightly less Celtic. The rest of the top ten are all in London.

Celtic identifiers as share of white British and Irish population. Source: Census of England and Wales 2011 (Office of National Statistics), own manipulations.

While London is the capital of Britain and undoubtedly contains many aspiring folk from the Celtic periphery, the presence of actual Celts cannot explain the difference. Better here to invoke the late Bernard Crick, the founder of my department of Politics at Birkbeck, who identified as a Scot despite having no Scottish roots, not having been born there, nor having a Scottish accent. A Greater London Authority official whom I recently met reflects this outlook well: he considered himself a Londoner of Irish heritage. A multicultural environment can stimulate a defensive English identity, but for those with cosmopolitan or liberal-left proclivities, it prompts them to identify with the more exotic or oppressed bits of their heritage. The same is true among whites in the United States, a phenomenon known as optional ethnicity. Those on the cosmopolitan coasts and left-leaning Upper Midwest tend to identify with a European ancestry while most in Republican 'Red' states report themselves as white or 'American' on the census.

Finally there are white British people who prefer to think of themselves as British Only rather than English Only. This is extremely tricky to unpick without census microdata because minorities often identify as British. But the data reveal that southern middle-class places are more British, gritty northern ones more English. This difference matters less for Englishness than ethnic composition and Celticity, but it certainly counts.

As English nationalism comes out of the closet, cosmopolitan London increasingly appears a place apart.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2336699 2012-12-21T19:00:00-05:00 2013-02-20T05:12:02-05:00

Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kaufmann/ writes Peter Hitchens, echoing the views of many who digested the astounding 2011 census results.

Those of White British ancestry have declined from 87 to 80% of the population of England and Wales while the proportion of Christians has plummeted from 71 to 59%. For many, this signals the emergence of what Hitchens dubs an 'alien nation': a singular process of English decline. But the link between Christianity, religion and Englishness is not so simple. What if the demise of the white British is the salvation of Christianity, and the best hope for faith in England?

In my book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, I argue that 97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious.

On the other hand, the secular West and East Asia has very low fertility and a rapidly aging population. The demographic disparity between the religious, growing global South and the aging, secular global North will peak around 2050. In the coming decades, the developed world's demand for workers to pay its pensions and work in its service sector will soar alongside the booming supply of young people in the third world. Ergo, we can expect significant immigration to the secular West which will import religious revival on the back of ethnic change. In addition, those with religious beliefs tend to have higher birth rates than the secular population, with fundamentalists having far larger families. The epicentre of these trends will be in immigration gateway cities like New York (a third white), Amsterdam (half Dutch), Los Angeles (28% white), and London, 45% white British.

Let's take a closer look at the UK census figures. These show that the proportion of white British in the capital declined from 58 to 45% of London's population in ten years, twice the fall recorded in England. But hold on: the number of Christians nosedived by 3.8million in England but fell a mere 220,000 in London. In nine London boroughs, the number of Christians actually increased, with Hackney and Newham topping the list. Now let's add non-Christians to the picture. The number of religious people in England declined by over 2million in the past decade but grew by 440,000 in London. In seven London boroughs, reverse secularisation took place. In Redbridge and Newham, the share of nonreligious people in the population was cut in half!



This has ramifications for the religious geography of England. London, especially ethnically diverse boroughs like Newham and Redbridge, is where the faithful of England are congregating. Demography, in the form of immigration, religious fertility and a young age structure, is driving the shift. Several years ago, a study discovered that 60 percent of parishioners in London churches were nonwhite. Few were white British. In diverse North London, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Christians from the global South and Eastern Europe rub shoulders with an ultra-Orthodox Jewish population that has the highest birthrate in Britain. My colleagues who teach Sociology and Politics at diverse London Metropolitan University remark that the usual secular assumptions which lecturers bring to the classroom do not apply. African Pentecostalist and South Asian Muslim students agree on few points of doctrine, but both find fault with the secular public culture that prevails in Britain. In a map of nonreligion in England and Wales, London, especially northeast and northwest London, stands out as a religious heartland.




Global demographic shifts become amplified in immigration gateways like London. To see what this might mean politically, consider the long history of demographic change in America. At independence in 1776, 98% of Americans were Protestant. After 1840, Catholics began to pour into the northern states, and most supported the Democrats. The partisan battle lines pit 'old stock' Protestant Americans against the 'immigrant stock' Catholics or Jews. This is the position Britain is in today, with most non-Christians, apart from Jews, supporting the Left while the Tories remain a white British party. However, in the 1970s, the Religious Right emerged, and quickly began to bring conservative Catholics and evangelicals together behind moral crusades like abortion. Orthodox Jews and, before 9/11, conservative Muslims, started voting Republican.

The success of the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California in 2008 showed that Latino Catholics and African-American Protestants could successfully join in. In the new culture wars it didn't matter which religion you were as long as you were pious. With London becoming increasingly diverse and religious in relation to the rest of England, the Right may do the math and ditch an ethnic politics of white nationalism to appeal to minority 'values voters'. Might London mayoral candidates one day have to declare themselves 'faith-friendly' to get elected?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2343563 2012-12-21T05:14:06-05:00 2013-02-20T05:12:02-05:00

Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kaufmann/ ethnic composition of London's population. This has caught experts by surprise and reflects an underestimate of the extent to which white British people have opted to leave an increasingly diverse London.

Between 2001 and 2011, the proportion of white British in London's population fell from 58 to 45 percent. The share of ethnic minorities reached 40 percent of the total, a 39 percent increase, while whites of non-British origin grew by a whopping 52 percent. The share of minorities in London has increased by a percentage point a year since 1991. This has caught many by surprise. 'By 2031 39 per cent of London's population is projected to be from a BAME [minority] group,' a 2010 Greater London Authority planning report announced. Last year, a group of the UK's leading academic geographers took the GLA to task for overstating the pace of change and projected that in 2031, London would still be 64.5 percent white. The train has arrived 20-30 years early: in 2011, London is already only 59.9 percent white! Analysts implied that London would not become 'majority minority' in most of our lifetimes, but the latest census figures suggest otherwise.



How did the demographers, many of whom I know and respect, get it so wrong? Don't blame demography, which is the most predictive of the social sciences because the ethnic composition of today's 5-year-olds is mathematically linked to the population of 50 year-olds in 45 years. Though political considerations may have affected the projections at the edges, this cannot be the explanation since projections for England were largely accurate. Minority fertility is not the issue: if anything minority birth rates have probably fallen faster than predicted. Immigration underestimates may be a partial factor, but what is far more critical is that the experts misread white outmigration from London. One of those who got it right was geographer John Stillwell of Leeds University, who noticed there was large shift of whites from diverse wards in London to less diverse wards in the outer suburbs, and an even more dramatic white outlflow from relatively white wards of London to other parts of England and Wales. In Barking and Dagenham, to take an extreme example, a third of the white British population departed between 2001 and 2011. Since many lack the resources to move or are council tenants, this suggests that a majority of local white British who could leave may have done so.


Source: Office of National Statistics 2001 and 2011, own manipulations.

White British Population Loss, by Local Authority, 2001-2011 (lighter areas lose, darkest gain)


Source: Office of National Statistics 2001 and 2011, own manipulations.

Yet we should not jump to any hasty conclusions. In our Demos project, 'Diversity and the White Working Class,' funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Gareth Harris and I put the concept of 'white flight' under a magnifying glass by asking why there has been a disproportionate shift of white British people out of diverse areas. While white avoidance of ethnic minorities is the first thought that comes to mind, it's important to consider the alternative explanations. Most diverse wards are urban and poor. Whites may be leaving for better schools, cheaper homes, fresher air, or because they are more likely to be retirees, wealthier or better educated. Only a statistical approach which controls for these factors can tell us whether ethnic preferences are key. The UK's excellent ONS Longitudinal Study and Understanding Society longitudinal survey ask people about their political and ideological leanings, English national identity and other questions that will help us to compare white British people who remain in diverse areas with those who leave. During 2013 we hope to provide a definitive answer as to whether conservative, Daily Mail-reading whites who identify as English are more likely to leave diverse neighbourhoods than liberal whites who identify as British. We also look at interconnections between white working-class mobility, opinion on immigration and far right voting.

American and British research shows that minorities are moving out of their areas of concentration to better neighbourhoods. However, white Americans tend to leave or avoid 'majority minority' neighbourhoods and seek out areas which are over 70 percent white. Given the large increase in Hispanic and Asian populations in America, this is resulting in ever larger heavily-minority zones in America's most diverse metropolitan areas. Whether Britain will follow in America's footsteps is an open question: much will depend on the residential preferences of working-class British whites and whether they are able to realise them.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2120930 2012-11-13T05:47:53-05:00 2013-01-13T05:12:01-05:00

Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kaufmann/
Across the blogosphere, commentators of all political stripes are pointing to the advantage which the unprecedented minority vote gave to Obama in both presidential elections. Leading Republicans like House Speaker John Boehner and Fox News commentator Sean Hannity now endorse a pathway to citizenship.

The issue divides those who believe that hard-working undocumented Hispanics have earned a right to citizenship from others who claim that an amnesty rewards people who break the law and will encourage further illegal inflows.

At the back of many Republican minds is the changing ethnic composition of America. Already, one in three Americans has a minority background, rising to 51% among those under five. In the sixteen years between 1978 and 1992 the share of minorities in the electorate barely budged, from 11 to 13%. In the following sixteen years it doubled, to 26%, reaching 28% in this election. Much of the increase was powered by Hispanic growth. Among those under five, they form close to 30% of the population.

There are two Democratic identifiers for every Republican in the Hispanic electorate and 72% went for Obama in 2012. The inexorable rise of Hispanic voters helped shift California from the battleground state of Ronald Reagan to a safely Democratic stronghold. Might it do the same for the country as a whole? This is Ruy Teixeira and John Judis' contention in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority.

So what will the Republicans do? On the one hand, an amnesty may convince some Latino voters that Republicans are receptive to their concerns. But against this, it remains the case that a majority of the up to 10 million new citizens will probably vote Democratic. In addition, many in the Republican base are strongly opposed to an amnesty. Finally, it is in the Republicans' long-term electoral interest to reduce levels of low-skilled immigration and naturalization.

Projections which I published recently with Vegard Skirbekk and Anne Goujon in Population Studies show that the level of immigration will have a significant effect on Republican vote share in the next three decades. Assuming a 70-30 Democrat to Republican split in the immigrant vote, reducing current immigration by half will halve the projected growth in Democratic partisan share to 2040. Doubling the inflow will produce the opposite effect. Though a significant share of American immigration already consists of the legalization of the undocumented, an amnesty for millions will hasten the process.

An amnesty is also not an obvious way to appeal to minorities. Some 40% of the growing minority population is Asian or Black, few of whom have a connection to undocumented immigrants. Canada's largely Asian ethnic minorities are more likely than white voters to support the Conservative Party: the Canadian right has managed to woo them with a platform of social and fiscal conservatism. The Conservatives' tough talk on illegal immigration generally went down well with these immigrants who resented queue-jumpers.

But more is at stake than appealing to voters' interests. The political scientist Donald Green and his colleagues argue that partisanship is deeply bound up with who we are in terms of age, ethnicity, gender and region. Might an amnesty help Hispanics to identify with the Republican brand?

The problem here is that American Hispanics are a disparate group consisting of the native and foreign-born, Spanish and English-speakers, Catholics and Protestants, and those identifying as white, other race and black. Broadly speaking, white, native-born, English-speaking, middle-class and Protestant Hispanics are more likely to identify as Republican.

History teaches us that a group starts to tack toward the Republicans as its members assimilate into the majority group. For instance, during the last great wave of American immigration in the early twentieth century, the historian Brian Gratton finds that immigrants and their children from the previous wave in the mid-nineteenth century voted in favor of the Republicans' restrictionist stance, handing the GOP victories in the 1920s.

On the census, half of Latinos describe themselves as white. John Iceland finds that these Hispanics are much less residentially segregated from Anglos than nonwhite Hispanics. Meanwhile, Hispanic citizens are becoming more Anglo as a new generation emerges which is largely US-born and English-speaking. Native-born anglophone Hispanics are as much as ten points more Republican than their Spanish-speaking counterparts. The feeling is mutual. Rene Rocha and Rodolfo Espino show that Anglos are much more politically sensitized to Spanish-speaking Hispanics than to English-speaking ones. On top of this, a third of Hispanics marry whites and the political loyalties of 'Spanglo' offspring like Jeb Bush's son George Prescott Bush may lean in a more Republican direction than that of the average Latino.

Finally, Hispanics are becoming more Protestant. Furman university political scientist James Guth and his co-authors discovered that in the Latino population there is one Protestant for every two Catholics. Hispanic Protestants split their vote evenly between the Democrats and the GOP in 2004, with conservative Hispanic evangelicals backing George W. Bush to the tune of almost 80%. This, rather than Latino Catholic support, is what accounted for much of Bush's 40% support among Hispanic voters. The ranks of Protestant Hispanics are growing: work colleagues and I have done with the General Social Survey (GSS) shows that as many as 10% of Hispanics raised as Catholics had switched to Protestantism by 2006.

As the self-confessed "English-dominant, light-skinned" Hispanic Slate correspondent Matthew Yglesias recently commented, "endorsing immigration reform now might make things worse for [Republicans], by enlarging an electorate that's fundamentally hostile to their worldview." Given the electoral arithmetic, the Republicans will probably seek to water down an amnesty while running growing numbers of Hispanic candidates like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Such figureheads may help connect the GOP to a growing cohort of Americanized Hispanics who consider themselves distinct from recent arrivals. Despite the conciliatory talk of several elite Republicans, don't expect the GOP to suddenly go soft on immigration.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1726129 2012-07-31T18:49:40-04:00 2012-09-30T05:12:04-04:00

Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kaufmann/
This caused a great furore in the press, especially in the US, and Romney swiftly disavowed the comments. However, there are a number of reasons why these sentiments might resonate with Mitt.

First of all, Romney, like most Mormons, is of predominantly English ancestry. This is rare in a country where the proportion of whites of British ancestry - Scotch-Irish and Scottish as well as English - is no more than a quarter. In fact Salt Lake City, capital of Mormon-majority Utah, is the only city in the US where those of English descent form close to a majority of the population. What the Mormons (Latter-Day Saints) and Utah in fact represent is a time capsule of New England society before the Irish Catholics and other non-WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) immigrants began arriving in force. The coastal South, the other main region of the country where there is a concentration of ethnic English, was a plantation society. There African-Americans are close to a majority.

While immigrants, initially Irish and German, diluted the Anglo-Saxon inheritance in the northeast, midwest and west, Utah stood apart. The oddness of the Mormon (LDS) religion, and Utah's geographic isolation, helped preserve a vanishing Anglo-Saxon heritage - a fragment of old New England and English immigrant ancestry. In much of America, white Protestants with Anglo-Saxon surnames identify themselves as simply 'American' or 'white' on the census. Yet the Mormon fascination with saving the souls of the deceased, which is responsible for the LDS church's fascination with genealogy, makes Mormons more aware than other WASP Americans of their Anglo-Saxon ancestry.

But if this were the end of the story, the American commentariat would not be in such a tizzy over the Anglo-Saxon comments uttered by a Romney advisor. To understand the emotions Romney evokes, one has to appreciate that there have always been two sides to American identity. One is the universalism of the American Constitution and the idea of America as a beacon to immigrants. The other is the quieter belief that the United States is an 'Anglo' country. Many of the Founding Fathers, notably Thomas Jefferson, believed that Americans were descended from the freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon yeoman farmers who had been oppressed under the Norman yoke in England after 1066. In the late nineteenth century this Anglo-Saxon myth was pervasive among top American historians. So much so that Frederick Jackson Turner's view in 1893 that the frontier environment and not Anglo-Saxon genes lay behind American greatness was deemed revolutionary.

From the 1840s until the election of America's first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, in 1960, a simmering culture war pitted the white Protestant majority in the countryside and provincial cities against the 'foreign', Catholic-majority cities of the eastern seaboard. Reflecting the views of president Teddy Roosevelt in the early twentieth century, the Dutch and Scotch-Irish were considered Anglo-Saxons or 'old stock' Americans, though Germans and Irish Catholics were not.

In the North, the old stock voted Republican and Catholics largely Democrat. The Prohibition of alcohol in 1920 and the upsurge of the multi-million member, northern-based Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s can only be understood in this context. In literature and in film, lead characters were uniformly WASP well into the 1960s, even where, like John Wayne or Captain Kirk, they were played by Irish or Jewish actors. So pervasive was this that the countercultural Bob Dylan likewise saw fit to anglicise his name. Only radical pluralists sought to purge the nation of its Anglo cultural core while both New Deal liberals like Franklin Roosevelt and conservatives like Sam Ervin defended the validity of this aspect of national identity.

Today, the WASP ethnic core has transmuted into the white 'Anglo' core. Membership criteria have been relaxed to include those of any European ancestry bar Spanish, and Catholics and Jews are as welcome as Protestants. Hispanics, Asians and blacks, however, can only gain entry through intermarriage. Yet the battle lines remain: the Left seeks a multicultural America shorn of Anglo roots while conservatives like Mr. Romney would defend America's Anglo culture as essential to the country's essence.

As the late Samuel Huntington, a descendant of New England Puritans, opined, Creed or no Creed, if the United States was settled by Spaniards it would be Argentina or Mexico, not America. Huntington didn't mean that all Americans had to be Anglo-Saxon, only that the culture of the country into which immigrants assimilate was largely established by the colonial settlers, of whom 65%were English, rising to nearly 100% in the influential New England region.

Meanwhile, it has yet to be conclusively demonstrated that Anglo-Saxons have released their grip on the White House. John F. Kennedy was and remains an anomaly among 46 presidents, since Reagan, George Bush Senior and Junior, Clinton and yes, Barack Obama, are all of WASP descent. So - despite Mitt Romney's advisor - regardless of who wins the presidency, the Anglo-Saxon connection will triumph.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1662634 2012-07-10T14:00:39-04:00 2012-09-09T05:12:04-04:00

Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kaufmann/
The delay in bringing population into the climate and poverty equations stemmed from prejudice on both the Right and Left. On the Right, moral conservatives jump on those who oppose unrestricted population growth as being 'anti-people'. Neoconservatives claim that the Malthusians were forever proven wrong by the Green Revolution and the demographic transition. The free market, like God, 'will provide' for as many humans as we care to give birth to. Malthus was alarmist, but so too are the anti-Malthusians. And the latter, whose mantra has been swallowed by global agencies for decades, has wreaked far more havoc. Consider the fact that a billion people - 20% of the world, rising to 40-50% of sub-Saharan Africa - continue to live a precarious existence on less than a dollar a day, with many starving when crops fail.

On the Left, there is a reluctance to criticise developing countries' lack of family planning facilities for fear of being branded racist. Some feminists, strangely, also seem enamoured by the idea that the aim should be to focus solely on women's health without considering the family planning question. Sadly, this logic has also emboldened self-appointed leaders of the dispossessed in the developing world, notably Islamist firebrands Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad in contemporary Iran or Abu Ala Maududi in twentieth century Pakistan, who excoriated family planning as a western plot designed to control the numbers of Muslims or nonwhites.

The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development nicely brought the vanguard of left-wing feminism and anti-racism together with the agents of neoconservatism and the religious right. Sunni Salafists from the Gulf rubbed shoulders and traded memos with emissaries of the Vatican, American evangelicals and Mormons and Shiite mullahs to oppose family planning. The compromise position, cooked up between the extreme Right and loony Left, seemed to be that women's reproductive rights would be enshrined with little emphasis on offering contraceptive services.

Today, six million children die of hunger each year, equivalent to an annual Holocaust. Yes, food and health security is largely a redistribution problem, but, no, this does not mean that the same numbers would have died in the past few decades. Exactly how many avoidable deaths cornucopianism caused is impossible to specify. It is safe to say that at a minimum it killed in the millions as excess numbers of people overwhelmed local resources. In addition, population pressure on food supplies combined with large numbers in the 15-30 ('youth bulge') age bracket is associated with elevated levels of civil war and a delay in the onset of democratisation. These factors exacerbate the redistribution problem, compounding the silent holocaust of malnutrition and insufficient healthcare.

Paragons of Left and Right sit contentedly in their comfortable offices, from San Francisco to Riyadh, preach and moralise to Malthusians and suggest that all is well because fertility rates are declining in much of the developing world. They convince themselves that matters will inevitably go in the right direction as technology improves and family sizes come down. Yet how much suffering and death might have been averted by a more robust voluntary family planning programme, advanced early on and backed with sufficient resources? This is the real human rights tragedy, which every anti-Malthusian ideologue should consider when they next look themselves in the mirror.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1648467 2012-07-04T05:00:39-04:00 2012-09-02T05:12:16-04:00

Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kaufmann/ Spain's economy has few of its football team's advantages. The media and other players lack faith in it, forcing the Spaniards to run harder, cutting spending to prove they are worthy of a bailout and low borrowing costs. This reduces the amount of money in circulation and lowers consumer and investor confidence, further damaging the Spanish economy. Confidence in team sports, as with trust in marriage, tends to build up with success but can crash spectacularly. Confidence is also contagious, so its effects become amplified in an economy in which everyone assesses everyone. Money, meanwhile, consists of numbers in balance sheets and on computer screens, resting only on the confidence of others. Remove this magic substance and depositors will flock to withdraw their cash. Robert K. Merton, the sociologist who first unpicked the mechanics of self-fulfilling prophecies, explained that people lining up at a bank unnerve others and draw them to the door. Lack of confidence weakens the bank which further unsettles investors and depositors, creating a death spiral. Magnified by the media and social networks, this market psychology can grip an entire nation, or even the world economy, as in 1929 or 2008.
Confidence, according to Robert Shiller and George Akerlof, is central to behavioural economics and finance. But it is also key in politics. Clausewitz placed morale at the centre of his theory of war. If an army loses confidence, it may suffer a string of self-fulfilling defeats. If two countries lose confidence in each other, this creates what political scientists call a security dilemma. One side begins to amass weapons 'just in case'. The other side responds, setting off an arms race that can produce a Cuban Missile Crisis or even a pre-emptive strike. Media talk of inevitable war transforms beliefs into reality. At home, a lack of confidence in politicians, fanned by the media, reduces leaders' scope to think long-term or experiment with innovative policies. In developing countries, mistrust in political elites becomes self-fulfilling as expectations fall and people seek to exploit the system, driving further corruption. In business, as in the classroom, it is well known that lower expectations produce a 'Pygmalion Effect' of lower results.
Scaled up to the level of society, the confidence-performance feedback produces seemingly puzzling phenomena like winning and losing streaks, booms and busts, poverty traps and persistent inequality. This is especially marked over the short term, but also lurks behind long term trends. The relative wealth and poverty of nations has changed little in a century. There are numerous material explanations for this, but confidence, which is woven into the national identity of countries, plays a part. Successful countries gain confidence in their collective economic prowess, drawing in capital and encouraging enlightened economic policy, which locks in success. Poor countries are despondent, which inclines them to downplay values conducive to economic reform. Even the Germans, when confronted with French power in the early nineteenth century, turned their back on modernity. In place of French rationalism came German romanticism, instead of urban sophistication, peasant authenticity. Today's equivalent is the Islamic revival: unable to best the West at its own game, the Muslim world turns inward to laud its spiritual virtues, as did the German Romantics. This compounds the economic woes of the underdeveloped, reinforcing inequality. Asia has chosen to compete, and the general view that power is shifting from west to east helps drive capital to Asia and stimulate enlightened economic policies, accelerating the power shift.
Some countries break out of the poverty trap. The Irish in America, buoyed up by new waves of despised European immigrants entering beneath them, moved up the social ladder. After JFK's election as the first Irish Catholic president, his portrait hung in many an Irish living room, inspiring a new 'can do' generation to demand reform and usher in the Celtic Tiger. Once success breeds confidence, a winning streak is set in motion which produces economic takeoff. Spanish victory will barely register in the markets, but if it can shift the perceptions of Spain's creditors long enough to reverse its confidence spiral, Torres may yet save his country.

Eric Kaufmann is a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth: Demography and Politics in the 21st Century (Profile Books, 2011) and Political Demography (Oxford, 2012). He has written for Foreign Policy, Prospect, Newsweek and Huffington Post, among others. He is presently working on a book on confidence. He may be found on the web at www.sneps.net.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1633224 2012-07-01T19:00:00-04:00 2012-08-31T05:12:07-04:00

Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kaufmann/
During the Arab Spring, the spotlight was dominated by secular urban activists. Religious conservatives lent quiet support, if at all. But those who make revolutions rarely benefit from them. The Arab Spring is a triumph of democracy, a shift from minority to majority rule. Less noticed is that it represents a victory for demography: the ascent of people power over military hardware. This point is tragically driven home by exceptions like Syria, where weapons continue to defy numbers. Yet raw populations are not always progressive forces: they may spawn nationalist and religious populisms which infringe on civil liberties.

The success of the Arab Spring in bringing democracy to the Arab world has rightly been celebrated. However observers need to realise that democracy and liberalism are only loosely related. The first refers to majority rule, the second to protecting the rights of individuals and minorities. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton warned in the Federalist Papers that there is always a potential for democracy to produce a tyranny of the majority.

The Arab Spring has created a situation in which mass sentiment counts as never before. Public opinion in many Arab states combines illiberal social attitudes with a democratic political stance. In Egypt, the UN's 2009 Arab Human Development report revealed that 96% of Egyptian women aged 15 to 49 had undergone genital mutilation. In a 2005 ARDA youth survey, 94% of young Saudis favoured a system of government where 'religious authorities have absolute power.'

Roughly 90% of Muslim respondents who support shari'a as the exclusive law of the land in the 2000 World Values Survey also preferred democracy over other systems of government. In effect, a mood of illiberal democracy prevails in much of the Arab Middle East.

Many in Arab countries emerging from dictatorship believe that secularists and minorities were protected by strongmen and their western allies. As politicians compete to embody the popular will, they may advance religious platforms that reduce safeguards for the marginal voices in society. The judiciaries whose task it is to uphold individual rights are weak and associated with a westernised elite. In Egypt, as in non-Arab Muslim states like Pakistan, liberal judges are being challenged by a new generation of upwardly mobile Islamists and may be unable to hold the line much longer.

Demography is key to this equation. Algiers, Casablanca, Tehran, Baghdad, Istanbul and Cairo, among others, long housed a politically-active secular middle class. This is the group that spearheaded most of the region's revolutions, including the Arab Spring. Even the Iranian Revolution and abortive Algerian revolt benefited from secular liberal and leftist organising.

Yet these groups were defeated at the ballot box. A popular western perception is that Egypt's secular parties lost because they are disorganized novices. This is only part of the story. Since the late twentieth century, population explosion in the pious countryside has flooded Muslim cities with migrants sympathetic to Islamism. The first phase of Islamic revival saw the Muslim Brotherhood thrive in the fertile soil of the Middle East's expanding slums. Though they made dictators like Mubarak take notice, their influence in authoritarian contexts could only be partial. Democratisation, by contrast, translates the demographic heft of mass piety directly into political power.


This path is a familiar one. In the twentieth century United States, evangelicals increased from barely one-third of young white Protestants to nearly two-thirds. As Andrew Greeley, Mike Hout and Melissa Wilde demonstrate, high evangelical birthrates - mainly in rural southern heartlands - accounted for three-quarters of this growth. In the late 1970s, the Republican Party woke up to the potential of this large constituency. Today, no Republican candidate can afford to alienate evangelical voters. The same development, on a larger scale, is underway in Israel. The ultra-Orthodox have three to four times the birth rate of other Jews. They now form a third of Jewish first graders while religious zionists make up a growing share of the Israeli Defence Force's officer corps. Ultra-Orthodox activists rip away faces of women on Jerusalem's billboards and are challenging the legitimacy of the Israeli Supreme Court. Secular judiciaries such as Egypt's are succumbing to Islamism as a new generation takes the reigns.

How will the combination of demography and democracy play out? The most likely development is the emergence of a region-wide, Saudi-style religious right. This conservative force may steer society away from freedom of expression and minority rights. There may also be foreign policy consequences. In countries like Egypt where authoritarian rulers enjoyed cordial relations with the United States or Israel, we may see a nationalist U-turn. A scenario in which Israel and its neighbors pursue cultural puritanism while behaving pragmatically is possible. Yet policymakers must also recognize that rival conceptions of sacred nationalism, buoyed by religious population growth, may be on a collision course. This makes it urgent to secure a Middle East peace deal while there is still time.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1532186 2012-05-21T19:00:00-04:00 2012-07-21T05:12:12-04:00

Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kaufmann/
The long-term increase in inequality between the university-educated and the rest, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, is rightly seen as a pressing concern. Economists cite 'skill-biased' technological change. The computer has automated repetitive clerical skills and manufacturing jobs require fewer hands. The net result is more demand for sophisticated thinking, which favours the cognitive elite while deskilling clerical and manual workers. This is a familiar story, and one that accords with our unexamined instinct that rewards continually move in the direction of brains over brawn.

Is this correct? If so, how do we explain the fact that in the United States, between 1970 and 1997, the lowest tenth of college graduates saw their income drop 29% while the top tenth earned 28% more. Among high school graduates, George Neumann and Beth Ingram also reveal that the bottom tenth experienced a drop of only 5% in these three decades while the top decile gained a mere 5% more. This points to a widening chasm in earnings opening up between the left- and right-brained, and between the optimally-educated and overeducated.

Why? History tells us that different eras reward different skills. As a caveman, you need brute strength and cunning. At court, charisma and social skills. Prior to the industrial revolution, power was the key to controlling wealth so courtly skills still counted. Even capitalism was often mercantilist: the British East India Company used its guns as much as its bookkeeping to monopolise markets and resources. With secure property rights and the rise of the modern state, disciplined, rational capital accumulation took over. Thymotic man gave way to Nietzsche's dull, bourgeois Last Man and Scrooge outshone Napoleon. Since the 1960s, the era of heavy industry has been superseded by an information society in which theoretical knowledge, cognitive skills and symbolic manipulation are prized. But is it really the case that knowledge is power in today's digital economy?

Where this story goes off the rails is in its presumption that everything moves in a linear direction towards more information and greater creativity. When mass production using unskilled workers displaced craft-dependent manufacturing, fine skills were lost and brawn replaced brains. Today, it is increasingly evident that 'creative' types at the highest end of the informational spectrum are the craft workers of today, flattened by the decline of the welfare state and the internet revolution.

Richard Florida's oft-cited Rise of the Creative Class (2002) makes the case that innovative professionals spawn economic growth in 'creative cities' like San Francisco or Boston. These cities tend to be diverse in ethnic and lifestyle terms, thus a city's 'gay index' or 'bohemian index' score is held to predict higher per capita income. However, Dr. Florida's own figures reveal that his avant-garde, the 'super-creative core' actually earn significantly less than their more practical, less dynamic managers. Other work shows that the gay and bohemian indices are not significant predictors of cities' average income when other factors are taken into account. This should have raised the alarm that there are limits to the financial benefits of critical thinking.

Economists now possess data which allows them to dissect occupations according to the specific skills they require. This permits a more fine-grained distinction between forms of human capital and takes us beyond the simplistic world of high school versus university education. The picture that emerges is fascinating. According to Todd Gabe of the University of Maine, the occupations ranking highest on the creativity index - physicists, actors, artists, writers - are far from being the best remunerated. In addition, holding a creative job in an industry populated by lots of other creative people markedly depresses your earnings. The best situation is to be a creative person in a field well-stocked with uncreative people. In other words, actors and writers are lucky to earn a living wage while the few creative minds in the taxicab industry pocket high salaries.

This reflects the relatively new trend of growing wage disparities within the knowledge class that Newman and Ingram highlight. Only talent that can be captured by the market can earn large wage premiums and this means that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) skills pay more. The fact that recent Engineering graduates at Gabe's university earned $25,000 more than Liberal Arts graduates speaks to this phenomenon.

This extends to the level of entire cities. After controlling for general education level, Ryan Wallace shows that only specific talents can be exchanged for cash. Places with high concentrations of math skills are the wealthiest. Those with an oversupply of professors, teachers, librarians, writers and research scientists are significantly poorer, all else being equal. Once again, the lesson seems to be that creativity and knowledge pay, but only up to a point. Beyond a certain threshold, they become costly luxuries. You can be wealthy or creative, but not both.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1509283 2012-05-13T19:00:00-04:00 2012-07-13T05:12:19-04:00

Eric Kaufmann http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kaufmann/
Maybe not. Look at the candidates' family histories. Romney, from a family of six, has five children, while Huntsman has eight siblings and is the father of seven. Only the conservative Catholic, Rick Santorum, can match this: a major reason he offered for pulling out of the Republican race is the fatal condition of his seventh child, Bella.

Consider the power of population change to shape politics. With little fanfare, steady differences in birth rates between conservative and liberal white Protestants in the 20th century have virtually doubled the relative heft of evangelicals in the US. Conservative religious women and other Americans continue to change America as whites gradually become more evangelical and Mormon.

At the same time, Mormons have become solidly Republican. Though 70% of Jews back the Democrats, fully 75% of Mormons now tick the Republican box. With their conservative family values, Mormons are both natural Republicans and naturally growing. When demographers undertook a state-by-state plot of white birth rates against the vote for George Bush in 2004, they discovered an 80% correlation. Fecund Mormon Utah occupied the top right hand corner of the chart, followed by the evangelical states of the Deep South, with relatively infertile liberal New England holding down the lower left corner. As Michael Lind commented in 2005, "Among white Americans fertility differences reflect a gulf between the religious and the secular. In largely Mormon Utah, there are 90 children for every 1,000 women of child-bearing age, compared to only 49 in the socially liberal Vermont of Howard Dean."

Mormons have maintained a one or two-child fertility advantage over other white Americans for over a century, and as this growth compounds, they are slowly emerging as a political force.

Their membership has expanded at the rate of at least 40% per decade since their inception in 1830 to the point where sociologist Rodney Stark predicts they will become the newest major world religion. Natural growth has helped Mormons maintain their population share in their Utah heartland in the teeth of considerable non-Mormon immigration.

The share of non-Mormons in Utah peaked at 40% in 1920, declining to around 25% by the late 20th century. Today, Latino and Asian growth has reduced Utah's white share to 80 percent, but among whites, Mormons account for three-quarters of the total. Mormons are also a significant and rising share of the white population of nearby Idaho (27% Mormon), Nevada, Arizona and Wyoming. In contrast to the pattern among other denominations, highly-educated Mormons like Mitt Romney are both more religious and have larger families than less-educated Mormons.

As the community expands, they are beginning to flex their political muscles. Mormon activists have played important roles in anti-gay rights measures like Proposition 8 in California, and have joined hands with conservative Catholics, Protestants and Muslims to limit American support for worldwide family planning at the United Nations.

Nationwide, their six million-plus American members exceeds the country's four million Jews. Though less influential in the nation's culture industries than Jews, Mormons are wealthy, highly-educated and well-organised. As the proportion of non-Hispanic whites - the bedrock of the Republican Party - ebbs toward 50% of the American population in 2050, Mormon clout within the Republican Party is bound to rise. In this, they will be emulating or even exceeding the role played by Jews within the Democratic Party.

Can demography really shape a country's political destiny? Mormons feel notoriously warm towards the people of the Book, and a comparison with Israel reveals what is possible. There, the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews have three times the birth rate of other Jews.

In 1960, they made up only a few percent of Israeli Jewish first graders. Today they comprise a third. The 400 draft exemptions granted by David Ben-Gurion to them in 1948 have swollen to 70,000. Since the Haredim tend not to work, their projected increase has prompted Stanley Fischer, Governor of the Bank of Israel, and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, to issue warnings about the continued viability of the Israeli welfare state. Once content to keep a low profile, the ultra-Orthodox are increasingly assertive in challenging the declining secular majority. They have elected their first mayor of Jerusalem. Their activists rip away faces of women on Jerusalem's billboards, spit on short-sleeved schoolgirls, demand gender segregation on buses and are contesting the legitimacy of Israel's secular judiciary.

Meanwhile religious zionists, a group whose birth rates and sympathies lie between those of the ultra-Orthodox and other Jews, form a sharply rising share of the Israeli Defence Force's officer corps. Mormons are neither as conservative nor as fertile as the ultra-Orthodox Jews, but like the Haredim, their demographic and political ascent seems certain.]]>