JailBreak

This article presents the 2020 version of the Shithole Country Index, memorializing Donald Trump’s famous remark from January 11, 2018: “Why do we want all these people from ‘shithole countries’ coming here?”

The Shithole Countries list combines two indexes compiled by the World Bank: GDP per capita, and ease of doing business. One list indicates economic success, the other indicates level of effort. To be classed as a shithole country you must appear in the bottom twenty on BOTH lists. In other words you are at the very same time both a world class failure, and not trying to do anything about it.

The third annual Shithole Country List follows. The rank numbers are compiled simply by adding the ranks in the GDP and ease of business indexes. For example Somalia is 20 + 19 = 39. A high number indicates you’re at the bottom of the list, which is not preferred. Italic text indicates countries that appear in each of the three annual Shithole Countries list.

Congratulations to Haiti for exiting the list; sympathy to Eritrea and Afghanistan for joining as new members.

What is it that makes some counties successful and others not? I’ve been thinking lately about The Enlightenment, the European philosophical movement that was the root of many of the ideas of the American Revolution. Countries that hosted the Enlightenment or adopted its ideas are successful. But then, what about Asian countries? Maybe the key factor is respect for property rights? Why is Singapore successful, and not Laos? Why Canada, and not Brazil?

The Bottom Line
Appearance in the Shithole Country List indicates epic cultural/civilizational failure. Note that the only non-African country to appear on the list this year is Afghanistan.

Shameful, but compared to what? Yes, African-Americans suffered horribly during slavery, reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Yes, slavery and the treatment of African-Americans is a stain on our history. But African-Americans never were the group suffering the worst treatment.

To get an idea of the scale of the inequity involved, do a couple of Web searches, one for “how many slaves in the US” and the other for “how many native americans died”. Academics’ best guess is that around 130 million Native Americans died, through disease or murder, while the number of African slaves as counted in the 1860 census is just under four million. What happened to Native Americans is generally understood now to be a genocide; plus they lost possession of the entire continent of North America. The change in ownership is my nomination for ‘greatest wealth transfer ever’, symbolized by the purchase of the island of Manhattan for $24.

Hispanic Americans are now more numerous in the US than African-Americans. Hispanics did not suffer genocide but they did suffer military conquest and lose their sovereignty. Do some research on the Mexican-American War of 1846. You can make a case that California and the American southwest were stolen from Mexico with the loss of political and cultural heritage to all the residents of that area. Without compensation.

Regardless, African-Americans are the favored community of the progressive left and big media. A casual survey of media coverage on the weekend before Martin Luther King Day in the year 2020 showed the following: Martin Luther King is featured on the cover of the 1/20/20 New Yorker magazine, he’s featured in a front page article in the Seattle Times newspaper, and dawn-to-dusk broadcast of a memorial program on the local PBS channel; plus of course he gets his own Federal holiday.

What kind of recognition do Washington and Lincoln get on President’s Day? Close to zero. What standards justify giving more recognition to Martin Luther King than Washington and Lincoln? The justification is simple political expediency: African-Americans vote in great numbers, and they tend to vote as a bloc. For example, according to the Roper Center, in the 2016 Presidential contest African-Americans voted in greater numbers than Hispanics, and gave a greater share of their vote to the Democratic candidate than Hispanics.

The crisis progressives face now is that their great project to elevate African-Americans to parity is failing. See two recent articles: African-American Students Lagging Far Behind, and Five Bleak Facts on Black Opportunity. Increasingly desperate measures are called for. Objective performance measures of performance and intelligence are now labeled as inherently racist. We’ve gone from ensuring fairness in employment (equal employment), to ensuring extra access to higher education (affirmative action), to a recent proposal to simply pumps tens of billions of dollars into African-American communities. Social credit scoring is now used in hiring university faculty.

Fairness is no longer the goal, because fairness doesn’t achieve equality. The goal is equality, using main force where needed.

The Bottom Line
There are great moral errors here. First, as a matter of political expediency one abused group is moved to the front of the line for preference over others more deserving. Second, American ideals of fairness and equality are honored less often. As a citizen, your key attribute now is gender and ethnicity, not your personal ability and achievements.

We’re all opposed to political tests for employment, certainly for public workers. We should also be opposed to political tests for university faculty hiring and promotion, especially public universities. In the past this was a matter of course. See the following statement dated 1915 from the American Association of University Professors:

To the degree that professional scholars, in the formation and promulgation of their opinions, are, or by the character of their tenure appear to be, subject to any motive other than their own scientific conscience and a desire for the respect of their fellow experts, to that degree the university teaching profession is corrupted.

There’s a local history note here for UW alums: one of the authors of the previous statement is Frederick Padelford, Yale grad and English Department chairman at the University of Washington. Padelford Hall is named after him.

California has often been at the center of the fight for academic freedom. During the McCarthy era the state legislature tried requiring state employees to sign a loyalty oath (the Levering Oath). California teachers responded with this:

The Levering Oath is in contradiction to the Federal Constitution since it imposes on public workers a political test for employment, deprives them of equal protection under the law as guaranteed in the 14th Amendment, and exposes them through its ambiguity to self-incrimination and perjury.

The University of California is the most prestigious of the two public university systems in California. The Regents are the governing board, and their web site includes a series of Standing Orders, including this: “No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee.” At the time the order was written it may have seemed self-evident. The order is still in effect, but they’ve managed to find a way around it.

Times have changed. Eight of the ten campuses of the University of California system now require use of a “Statement of Contributions to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)” in hiring and promotion decisions. Briefly a DEI statement is where a candidate summarizes their “contributions to … diversity, equity and inclusion”. In plain English, it’s a political loyalty oath.

For more information on DEI statements I particularly recommend the UC Berkeley document titled “What is a Statement of Contributions to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)?”. To make things clear, at the bottom of the first section just before the FAQ it includes this promise: “Only those candidates with a strong and compelling Statement of Contributions to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will move forward in the evaluation process.” In other words, if you’re not on board you’re not moving forward.

It’s not only the University of California system:

• Oregon
• University of Texas at Austin
• Vanderbilt University

There have been objections. The Vice President of the American Mathematical Society in the society’s Notices wrote opposing use of DEI statements: “In reality it’s a political test, and it’s a political test with teeth….The idea of using a political test as a screen for job applicants should send a shiver down our collective spine.”

A former Dean of the Harvard Medical School is quoted on the web site Inside Higher Ed: “As a dean of a major academic institution, I could not have said this. But I will now. Requiring such statements in applications for appointments and promotions is an affront to academic freedom, and diminishes the true value of diversity, equity of inclusion by trivializing it.”

Finally, reading through the U Cal Berkeley document quoted above it occurs to me that it is pitched to the sensibilities of a narrow slice of humanity: western, young, non-religious and left-leaning. You might say “woke”. It’s likely to be baffling and/or offensive to anyone outside of this narrow group.

Certainly anyone with conservative political leanings will have real problems completing a DEI statement. Does the University of California actively recruit faculty from other cultures, and isn’t such an applicant likely to be very confused by this document, and possibly offended? How is an applicant of deep Christian or Muslim faith going to respond to a demand that they demonstrate “awareness of inequities and challenges in academia faced by…individuals with nonconforming sexual or gender identity”?

Do any of these schools actively recruit faculty and staff for senior positions who are highly accomplished in their fields? Let’s say they want to recruit Akira Yoshino, winner of the 2019 Nobel in Chemistry. Will they dare to ask him to fill out this statement? After all, as they promised: “Only those candidates with a strong and compelling Statement of Contributions to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will move forward in the evaluation process.”

The Bottom Line
The advent of DEI statements seems to get little coverage in the news media. Am I wrong? Seems to me it deserves more notice.

In the past we agreed that political litmus tests are inappropriate in an academic setting. Why are they now appropriate?