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By Root 587 0

within, these are the salad days of the West. Researchers at the University of British Columbia published an exhaustive analysis of all those stories you read in the paper that begin “A new study shows that....”2 In effect, UBC did a study of studies. They found that between 2003 and 2007, 80 percent of the population sample in the studies of six top psychology journals were university undergraduates, a demographic evidently containing many persons who would rather take part in studies than study what they’re supposed to be studying. But these same psychology journals had somewhat carelessly assumed that the behavior patterns of wealthy western co-eds speak for the wider world. In other words, studies show that people who take part in studies are not that typical. The UBC paper gave a cute name to this unrepresentative sample of humanity: WEIRDs—Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic. I’d have gone for Western Educated Idle Rich Deadbeats myself, but chacun à son goût. The researchers were concerned with a very specific point: How representative of humanity at large is a tranche of affluent western college students? But they may have stumbled on the key not just to “scientific” studies but to liberal foreign policy, domestic spending, and the advanced social democratic state in the twenty-first century. If you take the assumptions of almost any group of college students sitting around late at night having deep-thought-a-thons in 1975, 1986, 1998, and imagine what a society governed by that sensibility would be like, you’d be where we are now—in a western world in elderly arrested adolescence, passing off its self-absorption as high-mindedness.

How high-minded are we? After the publication of America Alone, an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to be stupid.” That, too, has about it the sun-dappled complacency of idle trust-funders whiling away the sixth year of Whatever Studies. But it’s an accurate distillation of a dominant worldview. Since 9/11, there have been many citations, apropos radical Islam, of Churchill’s observation that an appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping he’ll eat him last. But we have fed the crocodile at home, too: we threw money at the Big Government croc for the privilege of not having to think seriously about certain problems, and on the assumption that, whatever we paid to make him go away, there would still be enough for us—that we were rich enough to afford our stupidity. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, we have been less rich. But, if anything, even more stupid.

Nevertheless, a lot of people take my correspondent’s view: if you have old money well-managed, you can afford to be stupid—or afford the government’s stupidity on your behalf. If you’re a carbon-conscious celebrity getting $20 million per movie, you can afford the government’s stupidity. If you’re a tenured professor or a unionized bureaucrat in a nominally private industry whose labor contracts were chiseled in stone two generations ago, you can afford it. But a lot of Americans don’t have the same comfortably padded margin for error on the present scale. And, as our riches vanish, the stupidity pours into the vacuum.

In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents. What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it? The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work. The modern progressive has no urge to emulate those Victorian social reformers who tramped the streets of English provincial cities looking for fallen women to rescue. All he wants to do is ensure that the fallen women don’t fall anywhere near him.

So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to toss public money at it. You know how it is when you’re at the mall and someone rattles a collection box under your nose and you’re not sure where it’s going but it’s probably for Darfur or Rwanda or Hoogivsastan.