Obesity in Germany: The fault-line divides the nation again

The civilizational fault-line that cuts Germany in half has more on-the-ground effects than what type of folk culture the people adopt, or what their religious history has been. It turns out that the stereotype of "fat Germans" or "fat German tourists" is another example of outsiders observing only one half of "Germans," and applying what they see to all of "Germany."

Hilly/mountain country is more suitable for (agro-)pastoralism, while the vast lowland plains can support large-scale agriculture. If the local diet reflects the local subsistence mode, then we'd expect folks in the west and south to rely more on animal products than they do in the north and east, where we would expect grains and other plant crops to play a larger role.

Obesity, and other symptoms of metabolic syndrome, is primarily caused by an overly high amount of carbohydrates in the diet. Digestible carbs are burned as glucose, which is metabolized by insulin. And insulin is the only hormone that locks fat in the fat cells, rather than release fat into the blood to be burned for energy. So, a long-term reliance on a high-carb diet will tend to lead to the symptoms of metabolic syndrome -- not only obesity, but also diabetes, hypertension, insulin resistance, etc.

Metabolic syndrome is a "disease of civilization," a consequence of agriculture.

Now let's look at a map of the prevalence of "overweight" and "obese" people across the various German states (sources cited here). The top one shows the percent of the state that has a BMI between 25 and 30, the bottom one a BMI over 30. White means low, light blue means intermediate, and dark blue means high compared to the national average.

Looks like a pretty good fit with a topographical map, especially the bottom one showing obesity. The obesity rates for whites in America reflect the topography in a similar way (see this map), with folks in the hilly/mountain parts being slimmer than the "corn-fed" people from the Plains and Mid-west or deep South.

Combining both categories gives the following ranking from heaviest to slimmest. (Here is a map showing which states are where).

64.4% - Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
64.3% - Saxony-Anhalt
63.5% - Thuringia
62.8% - Brandenburg
61.2% - Lower Saxony
60.7% - Rhineland-Palatinate
59.9% - Saxony
59.3% - Bavaria
59.2% - North Rhine-Westphalia
58.8% - Schleswig-Holstein
57.8% - Hesse
56.9% - Baden-Württemberg

(I omitted the city-states of Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen because they're urban centers and not representative of the general area around them. Like how D.C. often gets left out of state comparisons in America. I omitted Saarland for the same reason -- in area and population, it's like the three city-states.)

The only major exception to the north/east being the fattest is Schleswig-Holstein. Saxony is not as fat as the rest of the eastern states, but the article says that the obesity rates do not tell the whole story about Saxony. In the nation as a whole, half of obese people also have diabetes, whereas 3/4 of the obese in Saxony do. So for overall metabolic disorders, it is probably not unlike the other eastern states.

The differences are not huge -- not even 10 percentage points between the fattest and slimmest states. Turning percentages into z-scores, we find a 0.2 standard-deviation gap between the top and bottom states.

But those small differences in the average can lead to dramatic differences in the tails of the distribution. For example, the really tubby Germans we see on beaches are probably from the north/east. And lithe people like supermodels are probably going to come from the west/south. Indeed, both Claudia Schiffer and Heidi Klum hail from North Rhine-Westphalia. (In fairness, Tatjana Patitz comes from Hamburg.)

Tacitus said that the Germanic tribes ate mostly meat and milk (being nomadic pastoralists), and that their bodies were large and strong compared to the wheat-eating Romans. In fact, the barbarians truly were taller than the civilized agriculturalists. This was probably due in large part to diet, because among the Romans themselves, their heights showed a high-low-high pattern over time that reflected their reliance on pastoralism-agriculture-pastoralism. Man does not live by bread alone.

Once the Germanic groups who occupied the lowland plains began to use the land more for sedentary agriculture than for grazing their livestock, that set them off on a different evolutionary path. That is only within the last 2000 years, but natural selection can work fast when the pressure is strong. And being thrown into a strange new subsistence mode would definitely qualify.

I wonder how much Viking influence remains in Holstein, whether genetic or cultural. They are pretty slim, and they're world-famous for their local breed of dairy cattle, the Holstein Friesian. So they might not have gotten pulled toward the adaptation to agriculture as strongly as the rest of their northern neighbors, and stayed a bit closer to the nomadic pastoralist roots of the Vikings. But that's just a hunch.

Generation gaps in selfishness among bosses: Millennials worst, Gen X the least bad, Boomers in between

Via Paleo Retiree, here is an article about a report that I can't find online by the EY Group, showing that managers from the Millennial generation "are widely perceived as entitled, and score significantly lower as hard-working team players." It also says that "68 percent of that age cohort is perceived as 'entitled and concerned primarily about individual promotion,' " although it's not clear whether that means 68% of Millennial managers or Millennial workers in general.

Either way, sounds about right -- maybe a bit of an underestimate, if anything. They include anyone born in 1981 or after as a Millennial, so those early '80s births are making the whole group look a little better. If you restrict it to true Millennials, the numbers for selfishness would look even worse -- more like 80% or more being entitled and self-focused. *

How do they compare with other generations?

The next older cohort, Gen X, ages 33 to 48, were perceived as the strongest managers by 70 percent of survey respondents, Twaronite said.
"That's even more than boomers," she said. "Only 5 percent said Gen Y was prepared to lead."

No surprise that older and more experienced managers are perceived more favorably than younger and greener ones. But if that were all there was to the story, then Boomers should be rated even higher than X-ers -- yet they weren't. And the Millennials shouldn't be scoring that low due to lack of experience alone. These are enduring generational differences that do not go away with age.

In fact, if you look at what Gen X managers were like back when they were the same age as Millennial managers are today, you'd find much friendlier and more competent bosses. When Starbucks and other coffee shops began exploding in the '90s, those 25 year-old managers weren't naked self-promoters, showed basic respect for the workers, and still knew enough to make sure that shit got done around the workplace. Otherwise none of those companies would have taken off as successfully as they did during the booming Nineties.

You know, Generation X caught a lot of shit back then for their slacker attitude, but I think that was mostly a phase they were going through in the early '90s, maybe petering out into the mid-'90s. After that, the slacker thing was done. It was a combination of the early '90s recession, plus having to shift gears from the fun-loving zeitgeist of the '60s through the '80s, and now into the cocooning and sarcastic Millennial era.

In fact, maybe a little dose of the slacker attitude when you're young makes you more humble and likely to take the larger picture into account when you're older. The workplace was made for man, and not man for the workplace. That sentiment may dampen down in intensity now that you're not 19 years old anymore, but the basic guiding principle continues to steer your economic behavior. Taylorism must be lowest among Gen X bosses.

And before the early '90s grunge influence, there was an even longer and stronger influence of the '70s and '80s on Gen X, when they were children and adolescents. Every other high school kid used to have a job back in those days, and not a very glamorous one either, nor one with high potential for career advancement. Try taking orders at the pizza parlor. Or changing the oil at the local car garage.

Those kind of shit jobs build character, though -- they're like boot camp, breaking you down so that you can be built up afterward. If you coast through childhood and adolescence without ever working for real, and then go after an internship or whatever during college, you're trying to skip over the whole introductory stage of working with others and working for others.

Moreover, you won't have an empathetic connection with any workers you may be in charge of later on -- you got to bypass all of the miserable crap that they're going through. "And I mean, they're being paid, aren't they? So why are they complaining?" The Gen X manager who, whether consciously or viscerally, remembers his first couple of bullshit jobs is going to be more understanding and respectful of his workers, where the Millennial boss would not get it and act rude.

Aside from their economic experiences, there was just a broader culture of informality, looking out for each other, and playing down your own egocentrism in order for the group to really come alive and have fun. Whether that was attending church services or hanging out with your buddies. Social interactions were not so formally regulated and micro-managed as they had been in the Fifties (or as they have returned to being these days). And when you're developing in a world that stresses informality, you're guided more toward an ethic of camaraderie rather than authority.

These formative factors on Gen X also applied to the Boomers, particularly the later ones, but not quite to the same extent because they might also have grown up during the '50s or even the '60s when the society was only beginning to make the turn toward informality that peaked in the '80s.

What about that mini generation born in the early '80s? Well, when I was just out of 4th grade, my best friend and I took up a door-to-door sales job offering the service of spray-painting a house's address on the curb to make it more visible (that was a thing back then). It kept us pretty busy that summer. In 5th grade, I helped my dad out with his comic book selling business. And in 6th grade, my best friend roped me into helping him with his arduous paper route, splitting his paycheck with me. And so on afterward -- but it all got started pretty early. I know I'm not alone in my cohort, since two of those three cases involved my friends.

Interestingly, my mini generation kept working as teenagers about at the rate that Gen X did, even though it was now the second half of the '90s and the society was well into the cocooning phase. It's only with Millennials that teenagers stopped working. Here are two graphs showing employment of 16-19 year-olds from the late '70s through today:

There are dips during recessions, and upticks during recoveries, but basically no pronounced long-term change from the late '70s through the late '90s. The peaks go from 49% to 48% to 46%. However, when the next peak occurs with Millennials during the mid-2000s bubble, it's only about 36%, and during the current "recovery" it's only ticking up toward 26%. Damn kids just don't want to work like they used to. And again there is a huge chasm between those born in the first and second half of the '80s.

How did early '80s births escape the cocooning trend of the '90s, and find work about as successfully as Gen X did back in the '70s and '80s? I think it's because our parents based their parenting strategy around the time we were born, and kept it frozen in place for the rest of our lives. Otherwise they would've begun to helicopter parent us in the '90s and 2000s, but I never really smelled that personally or from anyone else I knew. Our parents didn't hound us on the phone once we left for college, unlike the smothering psycho parents of Millennials -- always asking where they are, where they're going, and "just touching base."

In matters that were more up to us alone, we did start to show signs of cocooning, like the declining interest of teenagers in getting a driver's license since circa 1990. But when it comes to work, that's something that isn't totally up to you -- your parents have a strong say in pushing you to start earning rather than keep hitting them up for money. And again, parents of teenagers in the late '90s had formed their parenting strategies back in the early-mid-'80s, when autonomy and character were more important.

If only the Millennials were out and about doing something interesting, fun, and furthering their growth and development, then I might give them a pass about not working so much as teenagers. But when all they do is sit around listlessly scrolling through pointless text messages, joylessly swiping a screen, and getting more touchy-feely with their keyboard than with their peers, I can't cut them some slack.

It's not just the disgusting sight of it all, here and now, but seeing where it's leading them as they age (not mature). Some of them are 25, 26, 27 years old and still have zero experience being healthy and normal. I feel sorry for how much their parents sealed them off from all non-nuclear family contact growing up, and stunting their maturation.

But after they're out of the house (big if, perhaps), they ought to celebrate their freedom and start trying to make up for lost time, whether that will fully make up for their sheltering before age 22 or not. At least try. And yet you continue to see few signs of them stirring awake, fighting for something, or being driven toward anything other than a more padded cocoon and pure self-promotion. It's not just their helicopter parents who are to blame for how they're turning out well into chronological adulthood.

Ever since I started ranting about this Millennial generation, I made it clear that you ought to care, too, since they're going to be rising up the ranks in all sectors of society pretty soon. And that article confirms that -- way more of them are assuming new managerial responsibilities than are older generations. Welcome to the new brat-ocratic workplace.

And of course, their poisonous influence extends far beyond the economy. Any other social or community setting is going to start taking it good and hard with the Boomers phasing out and the Millennials phasing in. And the tireless Gen X-ers holding up the fort there, too, man.

If you look at where in the zeitgeist cycle the X-ers were born, they're the reincarnation of the Greatest Generation. Now, we imagine them being given that honor because of WWII, but that must have been just the icing on the cake. They would've been remembered that way even if we hadn't gotten involved in the war. It used to sound strange, but perhaps it's making more sense -- that posterity will look back on Gen X the way that we do on the Greatest Gen. Stranger things have happened before in the history of history...

* As I keep saying, Millennials as a cohesive group don't start until about 1985 births, and certainly by '87 births. Births from the first half of the '80s aren't quite Gen X, but not Millennial either, though much closer to Gen X. It's like births from the first half of the 1920s, who are a bit too young to be Greatest Gen but a bit too old to be Silent Gen.

Mini bridge generations like that form when a cohort goes through puberty during a shift in direction of the social-cultural zeitgeist. Their formative childhood years pull them in one direction, while their formative adolescent years pull in an opposite direction. Folks born in the early '20s or early '80s grew up with outgoing childhoods, but saw the first stages toward cocooning as they entered adolescence. It gives the generation a split personality -- some people are definitely toward the earlier norm, some people definitely toward the later norm, with some people fluctuating from one norm to the other in phases.

You also get the mirror image, folks who were going through puberty circa 1960. Their childhoods pull them in the sheltered, pampered, and naive world promoted by Dr. Spock, while their adolescence unfolded as the society was moving in a more free-wheeling and hard-nosed direction. Those Boomers born in the late '40s bear the stamps of this dual inheritance.

Why fly swatters don't work very well, and faith in pointless technology

Apropos of nothing, I've been busy killing flies every day for the past week at the local Wendy's when I drop by for lunch or dinner. Normally not a problem, but during a hot summer day, they can get everywhere. And all it takes is one of those suckers landing on your food, and you might as well eat it off the bathroom floor.

The weird thing is that I can land direct hits without even using a fly swatter. Come to think of it, those damn things rarely do what they're supposed to. In fact, you feel a real sense of triumph when and if you finally manage to kill a fly with one of those things. So why do we keep buying them? "Just to have it handy," even if it does a crappy job.

Instead I improvised a "rolled-up newspaper" thing, only using napkins. Wendy's has fairly thick napkins, not flimsy ones, so that may make a difference too. Take a stack of three of them, roll them up slightly on a diagonal, so that one end of the roll is thinner and the other wider. About 1 inch across at the wide end. Pinch the thin end to make it more compact and easy to use as a handle, and flatten the wide end so that it isn't so loose and circular. Then get close enough and give it a good flick of the wrist.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to whap those fuckers on the first hit. Sometimes it may take several tries, but I'll get at least over half of the ones there, with no real practice and without having to chase them all over. Once I nailed one on the first try while jumping to reach it high on the wall. Yeah, I know, but sometimes you have to look a little weird to clean the place up and make it nice and enjoyable for everyone.

So why does this improv device work way better than common fly swatters? I think it's because the large perimeter of the swatter gives the fly a huge advance warning that something's moving toward it. It doesn't matter if those holes reduce air resistance -- it's feeling moving air within a certain rectangle, with or without holes. And that rectangle is about 3" x 3", or 9 square inches -- pretty big compared to the fly's body.

The rolled up napkin thing is only 1 inch at the widest, and tapers toward the handle. The fly doesn't sense the thing coming as easily. And you don't need those air holes anyway -- as though it were some billboard-sized banner that you need to cut wind vents in, or like you'd need to be Hulk Hogan to swing the swatter if it didn't have those perforations.

Frog tongues are designed by adaptation to hit flies, and they look about as far away from a fly swatter as you could get. They're thin, not shaped like a broad paw. But what does millions of years of natural selection know, that a bunch of 20th century engineering nerds couldn't improve on by brainstorming from square one? "Look -- it's got holes to reduce air resistance! The fly will never see it coming!" Guess again, dork.

The faith in engineering, and ignorance or dismissal of design by natural selection, is one of the clearest signs of how autistic modern people are becoming. Don't bother checking how well the fly swatter does its job -- if it's pathetic, then we'll just have to live with that. I mean, you can't get any more optimally advanced than WIND HOLES, people. You're just going to have to wait around until the next quantum leap in bug-killing technology.

It's like people eating vitamin supplements rather than vitamin-rich food, and thereby not absorbing any of the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K). Or pumping their legs on a stairmaster while wearing cushioned shoes, and wondering why their proportions look weird (an identifiable, unnatural "gym body"). Or sitting in so-called ergonomic chairs with this shock-absorbing mesh stuff, and wondering why their legs feel strangely both stiff and mushy when they get up to walk around. Gee, maybe sitting down in a zero-stress environment could cause bone loss like it does for zero-gravity astronauts? Fuck all these bone-weakening Aeron chairs.

Pay no attention to how technology is getting in the way -- it's the new and improved model, designed by a team of experts, say goodbye to bla bla bla.

Mother nature knows better than some bunch of nerds.

Mormon missionaries less effective at conversion during cocooning times

I've been looking over the history of missionary activity, broadly speaking -- not just religious, but things like "spreading democracy," or Teach for America. It seems to thrive in periods of falling crime rates, when people switch from a humble/tragic view of human nature to a Panglossian/engineering view.

Rising crime rates make people withdraw their faith in social engineering because they are one of the most vivid and immediate experiences that prove how limited the social engineers are in their knowledge, power, and benevolence. Falling crime rates make people think, "Gee, whatever the social engineers are doing seems to be working," renewing their faith in planning and authority, even if they are not responsible for the decline.

One group that has kept at its missionary activity throughout these rising and falling crime periods, however, are the Mormons. In their Wikipedia article, I found the following chart, which shows how many converts were baptized into the Church, compared to the number of missionaries. This gives a rough measure of productivity or effectiveness -- for every missionary out there proselytizing, how many converts could he expect to win over? I can't immediately find data going back before the 1970s to give a longer-term picture.

Yep, that same pattern emerges again -- moving one way during the '70s and '80s, and turning around after that. Missionaries are sent to a great diversity of countries, and it's unlikely that their local trends for crime rates or cocooning are going to synch up with our own. So this rise and fall probably reflects a rise and fall within American culture -- something affecting the missionaries themselves, rather than how ripe the foreign cultures are for conversion.

From the same article, on the recent low levels of conversion:

Author David Stewart points out that the number of convert baptisms per missionary per year has fallen from a high of 8.03 in 1989 to just 4.67 in 2005. He argues that the number of converts would increase if Mormon missionaries made greater efforts in meeting new people; he points out that the average pair of missionaries spends only four or five hours per week attempting to meet new people.

If he's proposing a change in order to reverse a decline, he must have good reason to believe that the missionaries used to spend more time meeting new people during the '80s than they do in the 21st century. That would fit with the peak being in '89, after which time Americans began cocooning (according to various domains of life that I've posted on over the last several years).

Leading up to that, Americans were growing more outgoing and socially savvy, so missionaries were growing more and more adept at the people skills needed to convert others. But now that young people spend so little time interacting with each other -- or anyone else, for that matter -- while they're growing up, they aren't going to feel comfortable heading off to a foreign land to proselytize. They're too socially awkward.

This case provides clear evidence for what I've been saying about the stunting effects of helicopter parenting, and their near irreversibility when the parents finally decide it's OK for their little darlings to (try to) leave the nest. You have to give your kids experience interacting with genetic strangers, building a sense of autonomy, and honing a knack for social negotiation, when they're little and keep it going. That way, when they're 18 or however old, they're capable of getting by without social intervention from mommy and daddy.

In the mind of helicopter parents, they're only delaying the major milestones of development -- not preventing them altogether. Their kid will grow up normal, just at a slower pace than the parents themselves grew up. But there is a sensitive window of time for all things developmental, the obvious example being language. Don't talk to your kid until he's 12, and he won't master language ever.

Here, we see that just throwing a bunch of socially sheltered boys into a strange new place where they're forced to interact with strangers won't make up for their entire infancy, childhood, and adolescence being spent locked away from non-nuclear family outsiders (including peers). The missionaries have 2 full years to convert others, so if they could quickly make up for lost time, they shouldn't turn out too differently from the missionaries of the '80s, whose childhoods were a lot more inclusive of folks outside the nuclear family.

But the fact that they're less than 60% as successful as their '80s counterparts suggests that those two entire years away from the family are too little, too late.

You see the same thing when Millennials head off for college, at the same age as the missionaries. For their whole lives, they've been prevented from socializing with peers unsupervised, so how do you expect them to turn out when they're no longer under direct parental supervision? That they'll suddenly know how to give and take appropriately, that they'll have an instinct for where boundaries are, or that they'll know how to respond and adapt across a range of situations? They've only been told how to act by their supervisors, not discover it for themselves and develop an intuition.

It's no surprise that they remain locked in their own little world, preferring the familiar security of their cyber-cocoon, and tensing up with dread at the thought of really getting to know new people, in a more than superficial way.

What is the fate of young people with no intuition for where the boundaries are, and no intuition for what the norms are, once the parents are no longer there to provide direct instruction? Parents might worry that they'd go hog-wild and embarrass themselves. And certainly a tiny handful of college kids do that every year. But in general, a sense of bewilderment about social boundaries and norms leads a person to fear leaving the private sphere in the first place. It would be like sailing an ocean for the first time without a map, compass, or ability to interpret weather conditions.

If that means their kid will remain landlocked for life, well maybe that's the point all along. Helicopter parents have never trusted the outside world, so it's the lesser of two evils that their kid become stunted and dependent on the parents, rather than gain autonomy and venture off into the corrupting outside world.

Oktoberfest, lederhosen, dirndls and Germany's cultural fault-line

The great civilizational fault-line in Europe slices right through Germany, carving it into hilly/mountain country in the west and south, and lowland plains in the north and east. People adapted to the Saxon-Prussian half show traits like farmers show elsewhere around the world, while people adapted to the Rhenish-Bavarian half show traits more typical of (agro-)pastoralist folk around the world.

Perhaps the most familiar example to us of Germans who know how to have a rollicking good time is Oktoberfest. That sure doesn't sound like a ritual created by dour, nose-to-the-grindstone martinets. Incurious foreigners might try to spin some baroque explanation for this "counter-intuitive" fact. I don't know why people have such a problem with common sense. Maybe it's not so counter-intuitive, and you're simply missing a big piece of the puzzle.

That's what's going on here -- Oktoberfest comes from one half of Germany, while those other stereotypes come from the other, opposite half. No contradiction to resolve. It would be like a clueless outsider trying to explain how Los Angeles stereotypes ultimately and tortuously derive from American Puritanism -- wrong part of the country.

I got to wondering, given how deep this divide runs in Germany, and given all you hear about Bavarian separatism (if you're tuned in to those kind of things), will the west/south of Germany begin to rally around symbols of their distinctly fun-loving half of the country? Even if they're not exactly near Munich, and their local culture might not include those symbols? It would be like Americans out west rallying around L.A. cultural symbols (back when it was worth rallying around), and those back east rallying around New York symbols. Or if you live in Maine, should you root for the Red Sox?

With clothing and appearances, the personal is often political. Around the world, people dress a certain way to show their membership in a certain ethnic group. The clothing items most identified with Oktoberfest are the lederhosen for men and the dirndl for women.

I used Google Trends to see where in Germany people search the web for these items. Below are maps showing the popularity of searches for "lederhosen" and "dirndl" (normalized for overall number of web searches), from January 2010 to August 2013. I chose more recent dates to allow for a trend to have caught on. German national pride seems to have really taken off after hosting and taking 3rd place in the 2006 World Cup, for instance. I looked at the level of cities to get fine-grained resolution.

No surprise that the epicenter of interest for Oktoberfest-related items is Munich, but it fans out into the rest of Bavaria and even into the Rhineland. The northern and eastern Germans couldn't care less about such alien clothing. (That tiny blip for "lederhosen" in Berlin is probably a weird fetish thing.)

Is this just showing interest in Oktoberfest in general? Apparently not. Here's how popular searches for "oktoberfest" are across the country:

Now we see much less concentration in the south, more in the west, and suddenly some interest up north and east. I take this to mean that northern/eastern Germans are interested in taking a trip down to Oktoberfest as tourists, but no deeper or more enduring connection to the culture down there. Whereas a Bavarian or Rhinelander might want a pair of lederhosen or a dirndl for other occasions throughout the year, or to wear once in awhile in normal situations -- as an expression of cultural pride and belonging. Kind of like how folks out west are into designs and patterns that come from the Southwest Indian tribes, or how folks back in New York, Boston, and D.C. wear black head-to-toe in honor of their severe, Puritan heritage.

Munich is seeing heavy immigration from across Germany, as people flock there in search of jobs. Evidently, though, they don't have any interest in looking the part before they leave their northern/eastern homeland. Akin to a Bostonian studying out in California who would rather die than buy (let alone wear) a Hawaiian shirt during warm weather.

It would be interesting to see if there are key cultural symbols from the Rhineland that their Bavarian neighbors are beginning to show interest in, as some of the former are interested in lederhosen and dirndls. Unfortunately I don't really know that much about what makes Cologne Cologne, but it's something that someone else could look into.

It also makes me wonder whether "Bavarian" secession will be broader and include the Rhineland, and whether the leftover half would cohere into a single Saxon-Prussian region rather than fragment even further. It seems like a single split along the fault-line is the most likely. Somewhat like a secession in America would preserve the two similar regions of the Mid-west and the Northeast, while another cluster would include both the Pacific and the Inter-mountain West.

The future promises to be interesting. Looking at trends within pop / folk culture would seem to have better forecast value than political trends, which are slower and more of a jumping-on-the-bandwagon kind of thing.

When did white people stop listening to rock music?

What I mean is, when did black music overtake white music among white audiences themselves? The purpose here is to clarify the shape that white music tastes took after Baby Boomers and even some Gen X-ers stopped paying attention to popular culture. I've read or heard things to the effect of white people these days having their own music, and blacks their own music.

The most recent was the comments at this post at Steve Sailer's about the Ramones, punk, who removed black influences from white music, and what's happened since. The end result being whites with really white-sounding rock music (indie), and blacks with really black-sounding rap music (gangsta / braggadocio).

It's easy to understand why the folks in these discussions tuned out of pop music during the '90s, early 2000s, late 2000s, and this decade -- it's all been downhill since the peak in the '80s. They probably tuned back in for a little bit during the mid-2000s, when there was a brief revival of styles from the late '70s and '80s. But that would leave a mistaken impression that those songs were the dominant ones of the time, or that they'd been around for awhile before and have stuck around since.

That post-punk / new wave revival only left one hit among the top 20 on the Billboard Year-End singles charts -- "Mr. Brightside" by the Killers in 2005. The rest of the mid-2000s is Rihanna, Beyonce, Usher, Nickelback, Evanescence, and other boring 21st-century-sounding junk. That sound wasn't there at all in the '90s, and had already burned out by 2008.

So then -- when did white people switch over to mostly black music? The year-end charts for 1992 show rock music still doing well. In the top 20, we find two power ballads -- the stereotypical '80s sound -- in "To Be with You" and "November Rain". Heartland rock, made famous by John Cougar Mellancamp also in the '80s, is hanging on with "Life Is a Highway". Michael Jackson's representing pop rock with "Black or White". And alternative rock scores its highest hit ever, very early, with "Under the Bridge".

All of a sudden in 1993, rock disappears completely from the top 20. Everything is now R&B, rap, reggae, and new jack swing (a kind of mix between R&B and rap). The sole exception is a pop ballad from the Aladdin soundtrack, "A Whole New World". Things hardly let up in 1994, where "Wild Night" is the only rock song to crack the top 20. In '95, there's one pure rock song ("Always"), with another Latin rock song ("Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?"), and the biggest blues rock hit since rock 'n' roll began -- "Run-Around" by Blues Traveler. The Gin Blossoms barely broke into the top 20 in '96 with the watered-down "Till I Hear It From You".

It's not until 1997 that whiny-dorky rock comes into its own, with "MMMBop" by Hanson and "Semi-Charmed Life" by Third Eye Blind both entering the top 20. That's about where it's stayed ever since -- a couple of dull rock songs at best, and mostly R&B, rap, and pop. And it's not uncommon for the rock songs to have a heavy rap, reggae, or other black influence -- especially in the late '90s and early 2000s with that whole rap-rock fusion phenomenon. Just outside the top 20 in 1999, Everlast scored another blues rock hit with "What It's Like". (To underscore the black influence on the white man's music, the album's title is Whitey Ford Sings the Blues.)

In hindsight, the mid-'90s hegemony of R&B, rap, and new jack swing seems like an overshoot of the "ditch the white music" impulse that whites themselves began to feel. That time in general was a great big divorce period from the New Wave Age and the Eighties in particular. When you're going through a divorce, you exaggerate how much you hate the other side, just to ensure a permanent break with no hesitation. Once you've been separated for awhile, the hostilities die down somewhat, and you can at last occasionally speak to each other, though with the upper-hand party never forgetting to remind the lower-hand party that they're never going to accept them back. Such was the fate of rock music over the past 20 years.

If this painfully awkward trip down memory lane serves to correct the Boomer perception of white kids listening to uber-white music these days (aside from a handful of SWPL indie nerds), it should also correct the misperception that Millennials and perhaps even some Gen Y folks have about this always being the state of affairs. You guys have no idea how culturally assertive and cohesive white America was back in the '80s. And it lasted right up through '92, even if that year represents a grinding-to-a-halt more than a final victory lap.

Let's end with a reminder of how healthy, bouncy, and CATCHY rock music still was in '92:

Reluctance to read new authors, '80s vs. the 2000s

This NYT article discusses the smashing success of the new book The Cuckoo's Calling -- which only started selling like mad once it was revealed that the author was none other than J.K. Rowling, founder of the Harry Potter colony.

Several sources are quoted to the effect that a book needs instant brand recognition these days in order for it to make it big time. They all avoid pointing their finger at today's conformist risk-averse audiences, and treat it like some new constraint on the industry that came from who know's where, but that we've all just got to adapt to.

You see the same thing when music, movie, and TV people talk about the same phenomenon in their own industries. No one wants to see the big picture because blaming the consumer would be bad for business. Still, you'd think at least the critics would point this out -- that folks today are so disturbed by novelty that they won't take a chance on anything unfamiliar. It's not that they're afraid. More like suspicious, not trusting... but also OCD. "Wait, there's something new here -- that messes up the old inventory!" It's like being a picky eater -- OCD to the max.

We're supposed to live in a fascinating new era where so many options are at our fingertips, and everyone is dipping into this and then dipping into that -- a crazy world where no one commits to anything. In reality, people these days rigidly adhere to what is familiar, forever. The utter lack of novelty and variety, the never-ending reign of blandness, is a world apart from cultural life in the good old days.

To put some hard numbers on this, let's stick for now with book publishing (although the same approach will work for pop music or movies, and I'll get around to those later). We want a statistic that will capture how dominant the top authors are over time, vs. how easy it is for new authors to break into the big leagues. So we'll look at Publishers Weekly list of best-sellers by year. Dominance, hegemony, etc. -- these all refer to a certain author appearing time and again, or having multiple hit books in a single year.

Therefore, we'll look at a consecutive 5-year period, and take the top 10 best-sellers in each year. Then ask: how many distinct authors are represented among these 50 best-sellers? Or even better, how many authors had just 1 hit, 2 hits, 3 hits, and so on? Then summarize that distribution with something like the average or median number of hit books by an author of that time period.

Ideally, I'd do this for every 5-year period in the data source. But this is just a pilot study to quickly prove a point (how much things have changed since the '80s). Let's contrast the period of 1984-1988 to 2004-2008. Only 20 years apart, not even a full generation. Mature industries like book publishing couldn't change very much in so little time, right?

Well, in the period centered on 1986, there were 28 distinct authors who wrote the top 50 books, while in the period centered on 2006, there were only 22. The average author in the '80s period could have expected to have 1.8 hit books, while his counterpart in the 2000s period would have had 2.3 hit books. Even looking at the median, which is much more resistant to change than the average, increased from 2 books to 3 books by best-selling authors. In the '80s period, only 2 authors had more than 3 hit books; by the 2000s period, it had risen to 6 authors who were that dominant.

The maximum was, however, the same in both periods -- 7 hit books (Danielle Steel claimed the prize in the '80s, James Patterson in the 2000s). The mode (or most common) number of hit books in both periods was also the same -- 1 book. As in other domains where eminence has meaning, the distribution is geometric -- most have only 1 hit, fewer have 2, fewer still have 3, and so on, until there's only a small elite who have lots of hits.

So, indeed readers have become more reluctant to take a chance on new authors since the 1980s. It would probably look even worse if I chose the late 2000s/early 2010s as the end-point. You'd see the same thing if you looked at how many artists are responsible for the top 10 songs across a 5-year period from the '80s vs. the 2000s. And the same for how many movie stars were in the top 10 movies at the box office. There are so few fresh faces these days.

The fact that these trends span so many different industries means that we can dismiss any explanation that is idiosyncratic to an industry. My take is that this is just one piece of the larger pattern of the decline in novelty-seeking since the early-mid 1990s. That has both a physical side, where people don't go out joyriding, dancing (with another person), having casual sex, or hanging out in public places anymore. But even private consumption shows the pattern, where anything unfamiliar is either suspicious or throwing the existing order outta-whack. I can't tell whether mistrust or OCD is the dominant factor here. Whatever the case, it goes to show that cocooning is not only a spatial phenomenon.

Finally, I suspect today's pattern would also show up during the mid-century, another period widely regarded as one of cultural stultification. The approach used here would let us figure out whether that stereotype is deserved, or whether the Fifties just gets a bum rap. I plan to look into this in the future, for all three major industries (books, music, movies) that have some kind of "best-selling" lists. Stay tuned.

Jews and the European civilizational fault-line

The last installment in this series looked at how the great civilizational fault-line in Europe affected the spread of Christianity. Basically, on the more hilly/mountainous/pastoralist side, it spread early and eagerly, while it took far longer to spread across the farmland of the Great European Plain, and was more violently resisted.

I'll get to the Reformation and the fault-line in a future post. For now it's worth taking a look at how the fault-line affected the migrations and persecutions of the Jews. Most of the big migrations of European peoples ended with the Germanic and Slavic movements of the Middle Ages. The Jews were never that huge in numbers, but they do provide a more recent case of large-scale migrations, allowing us to see if the influence of the fault-line holds even later.

Jews had settled northwestern Europe by the Middle Ages, becoming specialized in white collar professional work, generally of a financial nature (such as money-lending and tax farming). I'll be talking about the Ashkenazi Jews of northern Europe since that's who we think of when we talk about Jews in European history.

There were both push and pull factors involved in their migrations toward the end of the Middle Ages and into more modern times. The biggest push you can get is expulsion from the country. Here are some maps showing when the Jews were expelled from various parts of Europe, and where they went, up through modern times (the red-shaded map is of the Pale of Settlement):

Out of all those arrows, there are basically two movements -- one toward Poland, and another toward the Ottoman Empire. The latter are the Sephardic Jews, and not who we're looking at. (They also have a small number who remained in Iberia, who went to Italy, and a contingent who settled in Amsterdam.) The bulk of the Jewish population, the Ashkenazim, were kicked out of one place after another, always moving a bit more toward the east and toward the north. Unless they were already very far east and somewhat south, like in the Ukraine, in which case they moved west and up north.

Why do the arrows tend to stop, or at least get a lot shorter, once they got into the European Plain? Why didn't they converge on Italy instead of Poland? Something about the ruling elite in the hilly/mountainous side of the fault-line made them willing to kick out the Jews, or to not find much of a point for them to stay, while the agrarian elites of the Plain were less hostile. In fact, the rulers of Poland and Lithuania welcomed them as an administrator middleman class.

I'm not sure the difference is so much between the elites in the west and east, but more among the common people who they ruled over. Like it or not, that's what the rulers have to respond to, lest they wind up on the wrong end of a revolt or regicide. Celto-Germanic people are more willing to let it be known if some outside group is not welcome. They try to give them unfriendly looks, or plain old chase them out of town, dust their hands off, and consider the job done. We don't forget a face, so don't bother trying to sneak back in.

The pastoralist way of life affords considerable mobility, just in case you felt like chasing after somebody for awhile, since your wealth is movable -- it walks on four legs. You can also leave your wealth alone by itself for awhile as you spend the day making outsiders feel unwelcome. You do have to worry about raiders and predators if you left your livestock unattended, but you wouldn't have to worry about it being able to tend to itself otherwise -- the sheep are perfectly capable of grazing on pasture without you there. Just hand them over to one of your kinsman to watch for the day.

Balto-Slavic people favor bottling up their emotions and opinions instead, and generally not being confrontational in personal affairs. Agricultural life is all about keeping your nose to the grindstone, so there's no time to make waves. Your land and crops need laborious tending to most of the day, day-in and day-out. If you wanted to set those chores aside and physically leave your plot of land to go chase off some unwelcome group -- someone else might be squatting on or taking over your land when you get back after a week, or your plants may be suffering from neglect because you couldn't bring them along with you, nor find someone to "plant-sit" for you because they would have their own plot of crops to laboriously slave over.

You need to hover over crops in a way that you do not need to for livestock, because you're not spoon-feeding the animals, or washing them or what have you, on an individual basis. You're mostly standing guard to ensure the safety of the collective flock. And one shepherd could stand guard for 1, 10, or 100 sheep. The more one-on-one tasks are relegated to women and boys, such as milking. The farmer's need to hover severely limits his ability to do as he pleases and pursue other projects should the fancy strike.

In short, then, I think the rulers of hilly/mountain country sensed that having a foreign ethnic group administer the peasants as a middleman group would have provoked their rowdiness. Can't even collect the taxes yourself, or send one of your own to do it, eh? You had to send some foreign group who feels nothing but contempt for us to suck our blood on your behalf, did you? Sensing the potential for rowdiness among their commoners, the Celto-Germanic rulers figured it was better to administer their realm by themselves, as much as possible.

The Balto-Slavic rulers figured, meh, these hardscrabble peasants wouldn't upset their monotonous lives just to chase off the Jewish tax farmers. That's good for our security, since the peasants won't associate losing money with us, but with the Jews. They'll either bear the humiliation of having a cold foreigner group take their money, or they might not even mind who takes it -- we ought to just keep our nose the the grindstone, don't cause a scene. Somebody's always going to be ripping you off, does it really matter if it's Jews or Poles? No time to worry about that -- back to sowing seeds.

These two opposite ways of dealing with their personal frustrations toward Jewish money-lenders and tax farmers led to drastic differences in how they sought to deal with The Jewish Problem as a group. On the Celto-Germanic side of the fault-line, they treated Jews like an acute infection -- a pesky group who needed to be sneezed out, and that would be that. Don't obsess about them afterward. There was very little virulent, bitter, enduring anti-Semitism in hilly/mountain country, and no feeling that the Jews needed to be hounded even when they'd left your territory, let alone tortured or killed en masse. Just kick them out and don't let them back in -- we know who you are and what you look like, and we'll be ready for you if you try to come back. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Like a healthy, normally functioning immune system.

Well, that assumes that you have a certain comfort with standing your ground, which pure farmers do not. The phrase "long-suffering" comes to mind. For them, the feeling slowly and slowly builds that the Jews are a bloodsucking foreign race, and if we could only get rid of them, we'd finally be able to breathe free. But we're tied to the land, and they aren't -- they're white collar professionals and can roam to whatever group of nobles will pay for their services. So what's to keep them from just coming back to suck our blood again even if we did manage to chase them out of town in the first place? I guess we'll have to really hit them hard so they don't ever feel like coming back. The longer they bottle it up, the more cataclysmic the explosion when it finally gives.

Now the immune system has switched over from run-of-the-mill expulsions and beatings, to the more aggressive all-guns-a-blazin' kind of immune response -- the kind that could go haywire and cause septic shock if it's not careful.

And sure enough, the Plain of Europe was the main stage for the history of pogroms. Sporadic mass violence against Jews was not unattested in the hilly/mountain side of Europe, especially in the Rhineland where a sizable Jewish population had remained uncharacteristically west/south of the Plain. But it was more like an occasional chasing-out than a momentous rising-up-against. In the Plain, it was more bitter, long-lasting, and took the character of an apocalyptic mass revolt against their oppressors, more or less from the 17th C. through the 20th. Knock them off their pedastal for good.

The greatest enthusiasm for the Holocaust was not surprisingly throughout the Plain, including the Baltic and north/east Germany / Prussia. Western and southern Germans were not very eager for the Nazis to rise to power, and were the main base of opposition -- another reflection of the great fault-line. Here's a map showing the percentage of each region's Jewish population that was killed in the Holocaust:

So far these are all influences of the fault-line on the host populations in their treatment of Jews. What about the inclinations of the Jews themselves? Again, when they were kicked out of England and Germany, why didn't they head gradually toward Italy and the Balkans? Why didn't they find Serbia as attractive as Poland? Both are "Slavic" nations, after all. But one is mountainous and pastoralist, while the other is on the Plain and agrarian.

If they sought to continue their unusual levels of wealth as financial middlemen and administrators, they had better seek out a large, sprawling, rigidly hierarchical economy. And you tend not to find those in hilly/mountain country. It's more likely to be located in the large-scale farming systems of the fertile Plain.

Also, middlemen minorities would prize protection from mob violence and retaliation as a job perk from their employers. That assumes more of an elite monopoly on violence, and that degree of concentration of power tends to be found in more hierarchical agricultural societies. Central authorities are more impotent in hilly/mountain areas where the masses herd livestock and are more mobile during the year.

Just imagine how Jews would feel settling backwoods Kentucky as tax farmers. Now you know why they flock to massive-scale, hierarchical cities like New York instead. There, they'll have a leader with concentrated power, whether Gentile like Giuliani or one of their own like Bloomberg, who can more or less suppress group-against-group feuding, even if it takes awhile like suppressing the mafia and later black gang warfare. Opportunistic, individual crime may still occur, but that's a risk everywhere -- what the middleman minority is really sweating about is that an entire group might band together as a mob and advance on their community in its entirety.

These various push-and-pull factors, operating on both the host and Jewish societies, seem to be most easily explainable as consequences of the fault-line between hilly/mountain country and the Great Plain in Europe. Lots of ink has been spilled over the topic of European Jewish history, but shockingly little of it has drawn attention to the differences between (agro-)pastoralism and sedentary agararian farming that have conspired to lead history on the course that it has taken.

Chinese morality: "Trafficker Gouges Out Boy's Eyes," "Teenager Sells Kidney To Buy iPad"

Reports here and here. Like I said before, East Asians don't feel disgust very strongly, and that removes one of the most powerful checks on sick and immoral behavior.

This isn't serial killer stuff, where the criminal is obviously fucked in the head. It's just some enterprising middleman who's simply doing his best for the greater good by raising the supply for a high-demand commodity. If that commodity happens to be human corneas, and if that means he has to gouge out the eyes of a 6 year-old child after drugging him out, leaving him for dead afterward, well, y'know...

It take tough person to survive in China! No eye build strong character! In fact, YOU pay ME for make your kid so strong!

Re-reading the report, it turns out the criminal was probably a woman. Newsflash / reminder to all you chink-loving HBD nerds out there and your fantasies about sweet, feminine Asian women (LOL).

As for the kid who sold his own kidney, notice the hard-luck story about how "The teen was from Anhui, one of China's poorest provinces, where inhabitants frequently leave to find work and a better life elsewhere." Poor baby, had to suffer the disgrace of not being able to diddle an iPhone and an iPad in public. But, y'know...

Apple very prestigious in China! No have Apple toy, very shameful! Dishonor family spirit! I make sacrifice to please ancestor -- unlike selfish American!

The notion that we have anything to learn from this irreparably rotten race is one of the most bizarre mass delusions in human history. China has always been a miserable shit-hole, and will stay that way. The only relationship we ought to have with it is one of quarantine.