net tax contributors in italy

northern italian regions or southern italian regions? what do you think?

stolen from zero hedge:

hmmmm. now where have i seen this north-south divide in italy before? oh yeah!:

- Mapping the 2009 Pisa Results for Spain and Italy – @a reluctant apostate
- Chalk and cheese – @those who can see (come back to us m.g.! =( )
- inbreeding in italy
- democracy in italy
- more nepotism in southern than in northern italy…
- news from italy

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random notes: 11/02/12

some eskimo groups engaged in blood feuds. ruh-roh. from Eskimos and Explorers about the mackenzie eskimos (mackenzie inuit) [pg. 195]:

“Murders committed in anger were relatively common, and blood revenge led to further retalitory murders and family feuds. In one instance a woman’s rejected suitor killed her as she slept. In another a man who refused to sell his belt was stabbed in the back and killed by a person who hoped to buy the belt.

“A feud that erupted about 1860, soon after intensive historic contact, was recorded by Nuligak, a Mackenzie Eskimo. One man hoped to marry the daughter of another, but the father of the girl refused to permit the match. The rejected suitor took a valuable steel-bladed knife from one of the father’s younger sons, and the father was furious. At the first opportunity he killed not only the thief but one of his companions. As the feud spread, a cousin of the original murderer allied himself with the thief’s relatives, and more people were killed. Finally the father of the girl and the betraying cousin killed each other, but the feud continued on. As Nuligak wrote, ‘In the olden days the Inuit slew those who killed their kinsmen. One vengeance followed another like links in a chain.’

“Terrible feuds have been reported among most Eskimos, and they often spanned a number of generations….”

dunno about the mackenzie inuit, but the yupik eskimos (are mackenzie eskimos yupik eskimos? i didn’t figure that out…) have one of the highest incidence rates of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) — and carriers of CAH alleles can show “symptoms of androgen excess” — like being more aggressive, perhaps? dunno. melykin pointed out that there are high rates of violent crime in areas of canada populated by eskimos.
_____

from ed west in the telegraph u.k.:

“The EU was dreamed up in French and German. That’s why the British have never fitted in”

“The European project developed in the region between Paris, Brussels and the Rhineland, the heartland of the old Frankish Empire….”

isn’t THAT curious?! the modern european feudal project (for what else is the e.u. apart from feudal with a bunch of local [i.e. national] politicians playing vassals to the eurocrats?) had its origins pretty much right where medieval feudalism got going — austrasia. what is it about those people in that region?
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more on extended family human traffickers (can’t we just call them slavers?) from the balkans:

“Police bust Balkan child trafficking ring in Nancy”

“French police have arrested seven people for running an international child trafficking ring in Nancy, north east France.

“The ring is thought to have bought children from Macedonia or Kosovo for €1000 to €1500 and then sold them on to Belgium and Germany for €10,000.

“Seven members of a family originally from the Balkans were arrested on Tuesday after a month of police investigation.

“According to local paper Est Républicain, several other members of the family had also been arrested in Germany in relation to the ring.

“Police took in two girls, both about 12-years-old, for questioning. They say they do not believe the girls were subjected to sexual abuse or used as slaves, but traded in line with ‘local customs’ in the traffickers’ home countries.”

in line with WHAT “local customs”?!
_____

corruption in china — it’s a family affair. from the nyt:

“Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader”

“[N]ow 90, the prime minister’s mother, Yang Zhiyun, not only left poverty behind, she became outright rich, at least on paper, according to corporate and regulatory records. Just one investment in her name, in a large Chinese financial services company, had a value of $120 million five years ago, the records show.

“The details of how Ms. Yang, a widow, accumulated such wealth are not known, or even if she was aware of the holdings in her name. But it happened after her son was elevated to China’s ruling elite, first in 1998 as vice prime minister and then five years later as prime minister.

“Many relatives of Wen Jiabao, including his son, daughter, younger brother and brother-in-law, have become extraordinarily wealthy during his leadership, an investigation by The New York Times shows. A review of corporate and regulatory records indicates that the prime minister’s relatives — some of whom, including his wife, have a knack for aggressive deal making — have controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion….

“Unlike most new businesses in China, the family’s ventures sometimes received financial backing from state-owned companies, including China Mobile, one of the country’s biggest phone operators, the documents show. At other times, the ventures won support from some of Asia’s richest tycoons. The Times found that Mr. Wen’s relatives accumulated shares in banks, jewelers, tourist resorts, telecommunications companies and infrastructure projects, sometimes by using offshore entities.

“The holdings include a villa development project in Beijing; a tire factory in northern China; a company that helped build some of Beijing’s Olympic stadiums, including the well-known ‘Bird’s Nest’; and Ping An Insurance, one of the world’s biggest financial services companies.

“As prime minister in an economy that remains heavily state-driven, Mr. Wen, who is best known for his simple ways and common touch, more importantly has broad authority over the major industries where his relatives have made their fortunes. Chinese companies cannot list their shares on a stock exchange without approval from agencies overseen by Mr. Wen, for example. He also has the power to influence investments in strategic sectors like energy and telecommunications.

“Because the Chinese government rarely makes its deliberations public, it is not known what role — if any — Mr. Wen, who is 70, has played in most policy or regulatory decisions. But in some cases, his relatives have sought to profit from opportunities made possible by those decisions.

“The prime minister’s younger brother, for example, has a company that was awarded more than $30 million in government contracts and subsidies to handle wastewater treatment and medical waste disposal for some of China’s biggest cities, according to estimates based on government records. The contracts were announced after Mr. Wen ordered tougher regulations on medical waste disposal in 2003 after the SARS outbreak.

“In 2004, after the State Council, a government body Mr. Wen presides over, exempted Ping An Insurance and other companies from rules that limited their scope, Ping An went on to raise $1.8 billion in an initial public offering of stock. Partnerships controlled by Mr. Wen’s relatives — along with their friends and colleagues — made a fortune by investing in the company before the public offering….”

tptb in china NOT amused by nyt story.

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clannish dysgenics

here’s another example of potential clannish dysgenics — from Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 [pg. 205]:

“[T]he lack of primogeniture and the working of the clan system proved to be great leveling factors in the Chinese economy. The virtue of sharing one’s wealth with one’s immediate and remote kinsmen had been so highly extolled since the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries that few wealthy men in traditional China could escpae the influence of this teaching. Business management, in the last analysis, was an extension of familism and was filled with nepotism, inefficiencies, and irrationalities. These immensely rich individuals not only failed to develop a capitalistic system; they seldom if ever acquire that acquistive and competitive spirit which is the very soul of the capitalistic system.”

previously: a sense of entitlement and inbreeding and iq

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more nepotism in southern than in northern italy…

…in ACADEMIA! heh.

in all likelihood, anyway:

“Measuring Nepotism through Shared Last Names: The Case of Italian Academia”

“In Italy, nepotism is perceived as a cancer that has metastasized, invading many segments of society, including academia. The figure of the ‘barone’ (baron), the all-powerful senior professor who can, with a stroke of the pen, make or destroy careers, has permeated popular culture and is frequently represented in novels and movies. Nepotistic practices are especially damaging in a situation in which there are very few new positions (e.g. in Italy, for several years, all academic hires were put on hold). Despite legislative efforts aimed at eradicating nepotism, the general perception is that the practice is alive and well. The more blatant cases have gained the attention of the public, but the magnitude of the problem is unknown, as all the evidence is anecdotal….

“Recently, Durante et al. performed the first large-scale survey of co-occurrence of last names among Italian academics, and compared it with detailed geographical data on last name frequency. Their analysis showed that the degree of homonymity in academia is much higher than expected at random, especially in some disciplines and institutions. Moreover, they showed that a high degree of homonymity negatively correlates with several indices of academic performance. Although sharing last names does not necessarily imply family affiliation, it can be used as a proxy for nepotistic relations. If anything, the number of cases is going to be largely underestimated, as in Italy women maintain their maiden names, and children take their father’s last name. Thus, using last names one can detect nepotism associated with father-child and inter-sibling relations, but not mother-child cases and those involving spouses. Considering that in the sporadic documented cases the majority of hires involves spouses, and that women constitute about a third of the professors, one can conclude that such an analysis can detect roughly half of the cases of nepotism within the immediate family, not to mention lovers, domestic partners, pupils and more distant relatives….”

oops!

previously: inbreeding in italy and all i want for christmas

see also: chalk and cheese @those who can see.

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assimliation is a two-way street (or why endogamy means mexicans will find it hard to become middle-class anglos)

ron unz is at it again — arguing that, given a little time, hispanic immigrants will assimilate into american society just like non-anglo europeans did a hundred years ago. from his latest article in The American Conservative [sic] entitled “Immigration, the Republicans, and the End of White America” (the front page description of the article says: “Ron Unz asks whether mass immigration will destroy the GOP—and our middle-class society“):

“Similarly, there is overwhelming evidence that today’s immigrants want to learn English, gain productive employment, assimilate into our society, and generally become ‘good Americans’ at least as much as did their European counterparts of a century ago.”

well, perhaps they want to become good, middle-class americans, although i’m not convinced of that; but another critical question is are they able to? as steve sailer has repeatedly pointed out, there’s actually a real-life experiment on hispanic assimilation into middle-class american society that’s been running for 150+ years called new mexico and, so far, mexican-americans there have failed to become like your average minnesotan suburbanite — but mr. unz is obviously not bothered by mundane facts like that.

what really irritates me about the thinking of someone like mr. unz, tho, is that he seems to be under the impression that assimilation means that whatever immigrants we happen to be talking about will miraculously drop all of their traditions and (innate) ways of behaving and just become like the population in whatever country they’re migrating to — and that the culture of a receiving country will somehow be left unscathed by the addition of a new, unrelated people with a dissimilar culture.

i mean, does mr. unz really believe that america before and after all of the late nineteenth century immigration from non-anglo european countries is the same? did the italians and the irish and the swedes and the norwegians and the jews start behaving exactly like the founding anglo-americans — even after a few generations? to be blunt, only an idiot would think so.

no. the late nineteenth century immigrants might’ve changed their ways, some of them even becoming quite american-like in their behaviors and culture after a few generations (altho the process was arguably a struggle) — but the newcomers also altered america. many people today might like the changes — but many of the anglo-americans at the time prolly did not. and many of us today might not like some of the changes they brought: the mafia by the italians, for instance, and tammany hall-style politics thanks to the irish.

the italians (very much southern italians) have mafioso tendencies in large part because of their history of and particular pattern of inbreeding; same with the irish and their liking for machine-politics. these two groups are more given to corruption and nepotism than, say, the english simply because they have a longer history of inbreeding (which, due to inclusive fitness-related drives, leads to nepotism); the southern italians also have a very recent history of inbreeding. anglos, on the other hand, have a long history of outbreeding which has lead to an individualistic society based on middle-class values and trust between non-related individuals, a preference for democracy and little nepotism.

so, what are tens of millions of mexicans and other hispanics going to bring to the table? a lot more than tacos, i can assure you. in addition to whatever innate behavioral differences mexicans have compared to europeans (iq, temperament, etc.), there’s also all the stuff related to mating patterns and genetic relatedness that i’ve been exploring on this blog to be considered.

first of all, just looking at mexico alone, if we factor out the more recently arrived spanish and african mexicans for a sec, the base population of native mexicans is not one entity. there were (and still are) mayan mexicans, aztec mexicans, mixtec mexicans, and a myriad of other peoples in mexican that i’ve never even heard of. so, right there from the start, you’ve got relatedness differences that are bound to lead to discordance between so-called “mexicans” (and i’m not even dealing here with all the other hispanics from central america — guatemalans, salvadorans, costa ricans…).

on top of these ethnic differences — and this will not come as a surprise to regular readers — most of these groups also practiced endogamous mating. yes, even cousin marriage. most or all of it seems to have been cross-cousin marriage, the most common form found in the world — like amongst the chinese. the result? societies based on extended-families and clans — not nuclear families espousing middle-class values. here’s a little bit about aztec society, for example:

“Family and lineage

“Family and lineage were the basic units of Aztec society. Ones lineage determined ones social standing, and noble lineages were traced back to the mythical past, as the nobles were said to be descended from the god Quetzalcoatl. Prestigious lineages also traced their kin back through ruling dynasties, preferably ones with a Toltec heritage. The extended family group was also the basic social unit and living patterns were largely determined by family ties, because networks of family groups settled together to form calpollis. Lineage was traced through both the maternal and paternal lines, although with a preference for paternal lineage.

“Calpolli

“The calpolli (from Nahuatl calpōlli meaning ‘big house’) was a political unit composed of several interrelated family groups. The exact nature of the calpolli is not completely understood and it has been variously described as a kind of clan, a town, a ward, a parish or an agriculture based cooperative. In Nahuatl another word for calpolli was tlaxilacalli – ‘a partition of houses’.

“The calpolli was centered around the local chief (calpōleh), to whom its members were normally related and he provided the calpolli members with lands for cultivation (calpōllālli) or with access to non-agricultural occupations in exchange for tribute and loyalty….

“Altepetl

“The altepetl (from Nahuatl āltepētl ‘water-mountain’) was a citystate composed of several calpollis and ruled by a tlatoani. The altepetl was the unit that held sway over a given territory and defended and possibly expanded it by military might. The tlatoani was the head of the most influential calpolli, often because of having the most prestigious lineage. The word altepetl, however, did not only refer to the area but also to its population, and altepetl affiliation is thought to have been the primary criteria for ethnic divisions in Mesoamerica – rather than linguistic affinities.”

well, h*ck — change the wording a bit and that could be a description of almost any clan-based or tribalistic society from the clans of scotland to the pre-christian germanic tribes (whatever happened to them anyway?). the important thing to note about the mexicans, tho, is that they were marrying endogamously and living in these clan-based societies right up to first contact with the spaniards and, presumably, their conversion to christianity. so, native-mexicans, like the swedes, don’t have the depth of out-breeding that north-western europeans have, only much more so — mexicans inbred right up until at least the 1500s.

fast-forward to the 1950s and the mexicans appear to be very good catholics, hardly marrying their first-cousins at all. the rate of first-cousin marriage in mexico in 1956-57 (1.3% giving an inbreeding coefficient of 0.0003) is exactly the same as that for quebec in the 1960s-70s. and neither of these are really that far off the rate for catholics in the united states in 1959-60 (0.2%) [pg. 92] (click on chart for LARGER version):

while this might sound pretty good, it really isn’t all that hopeful because, while the mexicans dutifully refrain from marrying their first-cousins, they do have a tendancy to marry very locally — like the greeks — and we all know how well greek society works. greeks marry within their villages (i.e. likely to distant cousins of some sort, so still to family) — mexicans marry within their barrios, formerly known as calpollis (see the bit about the aztecs above — how’s THAT for continuity?!).

here is a quote from “The Barrios of San Andrés Cholula” in “Essays on Mexican Kinship” about the marriage patterns in the barrios of san andrés cholula in the 1960s. while mating patterns might’ve changed in mexico in the last generation or two, mexicans in their 30s and 40s today are the children of those who married in the 1960s, so the effects of endogamous mating in mexico in the 1960s are, no doubt, still very much in effect today [pgs. 78 & 80]:

“Today there is no rigid rule of mate selection in San Andres. Of the 385 married pairs for whom we have information on place of birth for both husband and wife, 35 (9.1 percent) have both partners originating from outside the community. In addition, 43 women have married into the community, primarily in San Juan, Santiago, San Adres, and San Miguel. Thirty men have married into the community, and they reside for the most part in Santiago, Santo Nino, and San Juan. Altogether, 18.96 percent of the married couple have one spouse from outside the community. These couples reside mostly in the natal barrio of the community spouse. The remaining 71.76 percent originated in the community.

“At the barrio level, however, of the 277 couples originating from San Andres, only 172 (62.09 percent) came from the same barrio, with 105 (37.91 percent) marriages uniting people of different barrios. Barrios with the greatest amount of land, cohesion, and traditional customes (San Juan, Santiago, and La Satisima) also exhibit a clear preference for endogamy. In contrast, the barrios of San Pedro Colomochoco, Santa Maria Cuaco, and Santo Nino share a strong tendency toward spouse exchange (see table 4)….

“The present-day pattern of regulating marriage, inheritance, and barrio membership may have existed during the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods. Perhaps theres was a greater tendency toward barrio endogamy when there was a communal system of land tenure. Today, marriage and inheritance practices support the solidarity of barrios.”

72% of marriages in this mexican municipality consisted of couples from the municipality, and 62% of marriages were between couples from the same barrio (really extended family)? that’s huge! that’s some serious endogamy — and, if the rest of mexico is at all similar (and it’s my understanding that it is/was), it’s not surprising that the mexican corruption levels look like those in greece (and italy).

to sum up: you can’t take a clan- (or tribal-)based population with a long history of inbreeding and turn it into a population of individuals with a yearning for individualistic rights and middle-class american (anglo) values overnight. you prolly can’t even do it in a couple of generations of strong out-breeding. the (biological) process that turned a few germanic tribes (the anglos and the saxons and the jutes) into a hard-working, non-violent, frugal, literate population took aaaaaaages — and it started in the early medieval period with the church’s demands for out-breeding. from “The Tribal Imagination” [pgs. 69-70]:

“In the West we had to move from tribalism, through city-states and small nations, through empire, feudalism, mercantile capitalism, and the industrial revolution to reach our present state of fragile open universalistic democracy (shrugging off communism and fascism along the way). Athens and Rome had a period of republicanism and democracy — at least voting and elections for free males — but this did not last and succumbed to autocracy and dictatorship with the growth of empire. The English were helped in the shedding of dominant kinship groups by the relative individualism of the Angles and Saxons, with their emphasis on the independent nuclear family. (See Alan Macfarlane’s ‘The Origins of English Individualism.’) Christian monogamy and the banning of cousin marriages by the Catholic Church helped to break down extended kinship groups and encouraged even more individualism.

“This breaking up of tight kin groups by expanding ‘prohibited degrees’ (as far as third cousins) is perhaps not sufficiently appreciated. Think what it would have done to the Arab cousin-marriage system. In England the institution of primogeniture — inheritance by the eldest son — also helped prevent the dissipation of family fortunes produced by partible inheritance: division of the patrimony among all sons, common on the continent (and in China, but not Japan). It reduced the power of aristocratic clans by forcing the younger sons into the professions: the army, the law, and the church.

“This move away from kinship and into the world of voluntary and non-kin organizations was in turn infused with the Protestant work and reinvestment ethic, and the Miracle happened. It did not happen all at once, but over several centuries of cumulative effort that fed on the new humanism and the growth of science and industry. As labor became ever more specialized and more mobile, family groups became ever less self-sufficient, and individuals became more and more dependent on strangers and on the institutions that made dependence on strangers possible: in particular, the rule of law and the enforcement of contracts.

“And we had to do it by our own efforts, pull ourselves up by the social bootstraps, to make it stick. We have seen in Germany, in Italy, and in Spain how fragile this really is. Russia never did make it. France is always problematic. Latin America and the Balkans continue to be a mess. But in making this move we had to change the entire particularistic, communalistic, ritualistic, kin-dominated society that is natural to us, and we have to keep at it all the time….”

“It did not happen all at once, but over several centuries….”

exactly.
_____

p.s. – btw, endogamy in new mexico? h*ll, yeah.

previously: recap and “hard-won democracy”

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clientelism in greece

it’s big there.

what the h*ck is clientelism, you ask? from wiki-p:

“Clientelism is a term used to describe a political system at the heart of which is an assyemtric relationship between groups of political actors described as patrons and clients…. Those with access, the patrons (and/or sometimes sub-patrons or brokers) rely on the subordination and dependence of the clients. In return for receiving some benefits the clients should provide political support.”

in other words, normal chicago politics. (~_^)

i just got through reading a very interesting, but very amusing, article entitled: “Why Is There No Clientelism in Scandinavia? A Comparison of the Swedish and Greek Sequences of Development.” it was only amusing ’cause i could just picture all the sociologists throwing their hands up in the air trying to imagine why it could possibly be that there’s clientelism in one country and not in another. (~_^)

anyway. here are some interesting quotes from that article. basically, there’s clientelism in greece because (along with their average iq and typical behavioral traits) greeks are, as we’ve seen, pretty endogamous in their mating practices, marrying very locally, often preferentially third-cousins, and that has selected for strong inclusive fitness-related behaviors in greek society. i haven’t, yet, looked at mating patterns in sweden. maybe that will be tomorrow evening’s project. ok, here we go:

pg. 33:

“The Swedish language does not have an appropriate word for clientelism, and when journalists refer to clientelism in other countries, they usually have to add that this is a practice where politicians exchange favors for political support. Yet, on the whole, the practice of clientelism is relatively unknown in Sweden.

“Evidence from scientific research suggests that the Swedish bureaucracy works in a relatively universalistic manner.”

hmmmmmm. mysterious!

pg. 35:

“A detailed Greek historiographic study of work mobility of the urban poor reports, for instance, that about 80 percent of the time, people found jobs thanks to kinship networks and not to political intermediation (Pizanias 1993).”

pg. 38:

“In the Greek welfare administration, and in the public administration more generally, one does not find such a mixture; it is either remoteness or proximity. Access to familiarity inside the bureaucracy is possible only through personal, often family, networks; otherwise, Greeks face bureaucratic indifference to a degree unknown in Scandinavia. In other words, both friendliness and preferential treatment are assigned on a selective basis. This organizational culture results from the intertwining of kinship, or extended families, and bureaucracy.“

pgs. 46-47:

“As Nikiforos Diamandouros (1984: 59) pointed out, in Greece the family has been the major social actor, which operated on multiple levels and fulfilled many economic, social, military, and political functions. When liberation weakened the position of the noblemen, with many of them losing large parts of their fortune during the war, they turned inward toward the family, the main ‘capital’ at their disposal at that time. With politics as an imperative for survival and kinship as the only existing organization device, extensive family coalitions were built using the quite widespread institutions of adoption, marriage, fraternization, and god-fatherhood (Petropulos 1985: 69-73).

“Initially these family coalitions were horizontal…. At the interstices between state and local communities, the system of family coalitions found fertile ground in which to develop vertically, creating hierarchies of families with quite unequal power resources, but also relations of mutual dependence. Families at the top of the hierarchy drew their power through their intertwining with the state and access to its goods, and those at the bottom through their capacity to aggregate and deliver the votes of their members. Just like the families at the bottom were dependent upon the families at the top for access to state goods, the families at the top could not secure their position without the political support of those at the bottom.”

this dependency between the top and the bottom — that’s clientelism. and it’s all (or mostly) family-based in greece.

pg. 48:

“As well as the families, villages [which, as we've seen, are really just very extended families] became units for interest aggregation in Greece. Local cultures were never damaged by agricultural reforms, as they were in Sweden [long story]; rather, they were strengthened. At the same time, class division within the peasantry were weakened by the distribution of the cultivated land to all peasants, thereby creating a relatively homogenous village population with strong local identities…. Hence, in many parts of Greece, citizenship became relational and derivative, materializing through family networks and political parties and not as the effect of the direct integration of the people into the state….”

pg. 53:

“While in Sweden the realms of state, politics, and social life became differentiated with relatively clear-cut organization boundaries, in Greece these realms became partly overlapping and even intertwined with strong social ties. These same ties prevented the atomization of the individuals and the full development of categorical interests. They constituted the social ground for clientelism….“

no atomization of individuals in greece because there is (and has been for some time) too much endogamous mating there and, therefore, individuals are strongly tied to their extended families rather than being rugged individuals. clientelism is simply the obvious way to go for the greeks.

edit: boilerplate and boilerplate 2.0

update 10/07: regarding this quoted above: “Local cultures were never damaged by agricultural reforms….” the agricultural or land reforms referred to happened when greece gained independence from the ottoman empire in 1835. land that had been a part of turkish-owned estates was redistributed to greek peasants. however, it was done in such a way that the peasants did not have to leave their natal villages (the story was very different in other part of europe, like sweden, where peasants were actually shifted around on the land). for the purposes of this blog, this means that the endogamous mating patterns of the greeks — marrying locally within the village or neighboring village — could go waaaaay back.

previously: ελλάδα and more on greece

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