There’s one major, unavoidable aspect of inequality that is almost entirely suppressed from debate, Ed West notes:
Last month in the New York Times Columbia Professor Alexander Stille touched on this strange paradox. He wrote:
It’s a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.
At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.
This is nothing new. A few years ago David Goodhart wrote a hugely influential article in Prospect pointing out that diversity and equality are in conflict, and David Willetts coined the phrase the “progressive dilemma” to define the same problem. However way, way before that, back in 2000, American journalist Steve Sailer noticed the link. He wrote:
The poorest poor in the country are in New Mexico, where the average income of the bottom fifth is only $8,700. The quite expensive state of Arizona, spiritual home of the $150 golf greens fee, has the eighth poorest poor people in America at $10,800. (But at least they make more than the bottom rung in immensely costly New York). In contrast, the wealthiest bottom fifth is in Colorado where they average $18,500 per year. Probably even more impressive, however, is the $18,200 average in Utah, since its cost of living is quite low.
This obvious correlation between immigration and inequality is little remarked upon in the press, for various reasons. One big one is that polite society has decreed that since Equality and Diversity are both Good Things, they must therefore be synonyms rather than what they are: antonyms.
Sailer is a popular blogger, rather like an eccentric but brilliant professor possessed of a vast breadth of knowledge, and would probably be a big thing in American commentary, producing those American polemics With Those Absurdly Long Subtitles that Explain the Entire Subject of the Book, but his views on the biology of race put him beyond the pale for mainstream conservative publications.
(Hat tip to Steve Sailer himself.)