White Ethnic Cleansing

Via Steve, a WaPo article on white flight from diversity:

More than half of the United States’ 100 largest cities relied on Hispanics and Asians to grow and would have seen their populations decline without them over the past decade, a Washington Post analysis shows.

What seems lost on the WaPo is that these Hispanics and Asians have driven out the extant White population or deterred them from moving there.  Had there not been immigration, the opportunities these cities afforded would have been snapped up by Americans.

The article continues:

“The real energy in cities is going to be from Hispanics coming in,” said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. “Cities in the industrial Midwest could use an infusion of new immigrant minorities coming in. Cleveland and Detroit haven’t done well; they’re not attracting enough Hispanics.”

This has cause and effect exactly backwards.  The job growth drives the influx, not the other way around.  But if the WaPo is so sure of itself, then let’s make a law forcing immigrants to move to Detroit and Cleveland, just to see what happens.

Do Schools Gentrify?

A friend of mine attended Decatur High School some 25 years ago. Back then, he told me, the school's student body by reputation was 80% black. (Although to a 120 lb white freshman from the sticks, it looked closer to 95% black.)

Not anymore. Decatur High School's student body is now only 47% black . . . and 46% white! It has a respectable 8/10 rating from GreatSchools.net.

How did this happen? Normally among families with school-aged children, blacks are displaced by Hispanics, not whites. And while neighborhoods can gentrify, they are usually gentrified by homosexual or otherwise childless whites. People contemplating families usually move to the 'burbs, of which the Atlanta area has an abudance. Once schools become "black", no white family wants to send their kids there, even if whites are a majority in the community.

Consider, for instance, the Buckhead area (of A Man in Full fame) in north Atlanta. Overwhelmingly rich and (~85%) white, Buckhead's public high school is nonetheless only 13% white and scores a dismal 3/10 from GreatSchools.net. Clearly, even with per pupil expenditures in excess of $12k, white families have written off North Atlanta High.

Decatur, meanwhile, is presently 65% white. I have no knowledge about its demographics over time, but as the longtime home of Agnes Scott College and Columbia Seminary, it certainly has its share of white pointy-heads. But how did white students achieve parity at Decatur High?

Any ideas?

Scary Demographics

H.T.: The Elusive Wapati.

Demographic Redux

Rod Dreher speaks favorably of David Goldman's article on America's demographic decline. While Goldman calls the problem exactly right, I am somewhat less sanguine about either the efficacy or the political feasibility of his one innovative idea.

• Shift part of the burden of social insurance to the childless. For most taxpayers, social-insurance deductions are almost as great a burden as income tax. Families that bring up children contribute to the future tax base; families that do not get a free ride. The base rate for social security and Medicare deductions should rise, with a significant exemption for families with children, so that a disproportionate share of the burden falls on the childless.

The obvious problem is that this impedes family formation. People don't get married to get rich. They get married because they are rich. Yes, this is an artifact of female economic emancipation. But since feminism isn't going away, we have to understand that heavy taxes on single men mean that they will have the harder time reaching a financial status where they become viable marriage partners.

Dreher favorably quotes Phillip Longman in this vein:

Other sectors of society have effectively appropriated for themselves much of the value in human capital created by families, contributing to the strain on parents and a decline in overall fertility rates. Public policy and current law stacks the odds against those who choose to raise children. We need to make major adjustments to the social contract in order to allow parents to retain more of the return that comes to society through their investment in children. Because having and raising children is a public good, the next social contact should focus on supporting parents and children as early in life as possible.

Having and raising productive children is a public good. And productive children tend to be born to productive parents. The only method politically available for providing support to productive parents is a tax deduction: it only works for those earning enough money to pay taxes, and with progressive income taxes, the more you earn, the more the deduction is worth to you.

But we are already doing this. Otherwise, it's well nigh fanciful to imagine that our low-human-capital population breeding dysgencially can be much deterred from their behavior with politically available means. Even if I did favor cutting the social safety net, this is unlikely to be successful politically, and unlikely to work: plenty of starving countries make lots of babies. And, say, paying welfare recipients to accept sterilization is the kind of thing that only gets traction at Half Sigma.