Please read this post, because it explains everything that until now has been a mystery to liberal and conservative economists alike.
I recently pointed out that the primary reason why it sucks to be poor is that you have to live near other poor people. And the reason you don’t want to live next to poor people is because they have underclass values.
But, what would happen if poor people had the same middle class values as everyone else? Well, if that were the case, a major motivation for not being poor would be removed. People wouldn’t be motivated to work extra hard in order to insulate themselves from poor people. This explains why Europe is different than the United States.
The problem with the United States is that we have, for a long time, had a substantial minority of blacks who have an average IQ of only 85 and also have higher extraversion and aggression. The result is an underclass with far worse values than in countries without any low-IQ minorities. Of course there will always be inferior values among the poor than among the rich, but in homogenously ethnic countries there will be much less difference in values between the lower and upper classes. A poor person in Norway is living next to other white Norwegians who are part of the same Norwegian culture and whose values aren’t that much worse than wealthier Norwegians. In contrast, living in a housing project in an American city with a substantial black population is a scary proposition for a white person with middle class values.
In Europe, there is less of a penalty for being poor, therefore there is less motivation to work hard to move up a notch. This is why Europeans enjoy shorter working hours and get many more weeks of vacation. They don’t have to work their asses off in order to insulate themselves from the black minority. According to Wikipedia, Europe is only 1% black, and most of the blacks are more recent immigrants—the percentage of blacks was even less fifty years ago. European countries, such as France, which have let in a lot of low-IQ immigrants, will no doubt become more like the United States in their social attitudes.
There is a second factor which contributes to how much it sucks to be poor, and that is population density. In a heavily populated area, there is a premium placed on living in a central location, and this motivates people to make more money to avoid living some place where it takes two hours each way to commute to work. This explains why densely populated cities have higher per capita income, and it explains Japan, a very densely populated nation with a high per capita income. Although the Japanese have a high per capita income, their standard of living sucks relative to their income because the typical resident of Japan faces long commutes, tiny living spaces, and even more hours worked per year than in the United States. The same could be said when comparing the New York City metropolitan area to a part of the United States where there is low population density and a low minority population, such as the northern Midwest or Maine (which is the nation’s whitest state).
The genetic IQ of a nation’s residents also has a big impact on national income, a fact which has been well documented within the HBD community. See Steve Sailer’s review of the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations. But IQ doesn’t explain all differences. Until my blog post, it has been a mystery why the United States has much higher per capita income than Western Europe, despite the fact that Western Europe has a higher average IQ because of lack of dilution by low-IQ minorities. Conservative types have insisted that it’s socialism which is keeping Europe down. But in fact, socialism is a symptom of the differences between Europe and America, and not the cause. As Steve Sailer has explained quite frequently, there is a greater inclination to want to help out your fellow citizen with socialist programs when your fellow citizen is just like yourself. Our minority underclass causes people to work harder and make more money to avoid living near them, and it also causes people to be less in favor of socialist government programs.
The best place in the world to live would be a country with a homogenous racial population with a high IQ, and a low population density. That describes places like Sweden and Norway pretty well, places which liberals in the United States consider utopias to be emulated. All we need to do to get there is kick out the minorities and lower our population density—of course that can’t happen, they are citizens too, most of them anyway. The United States is forever doomed to be not like Sweden or Norway. But we could prevent our country from getting worse by halting immigration.
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The black minority in the United States also explains why the United States has grown to be more automobile dependent than Europe, an issue I discussed recently in my post on why it’s less expensive to own a car. Living in a community where you need to own a car is a great way to insulate yourself from people who are too poor to own a car. This is the reason why “walkable communities” are only for the rich, because a walkable community affordable to the average blue collar worker would attract undesirables.
