Mark Steyn's Europe

Mark Steyn is one of my favorite columnists.  I read everything he writes.  His articles on demographics have been enlightening and in the process of blogging, the crack research staff at The Scratching Post has started doing some thinking of our own on the subject.  

I’m not sure if we’re using the same metrics of good and bad or even concerned about the same kind of outcome.  My metric for the health and prowess of a nation is Per Capita Income (PCI).  I like that, because it’s one we can all relate to and it doesn’t need a scientific calculator to decipher.  My position is that while Europe will indeed become Eurabia, as a military or economic threat to the Anglo world, it will be no more or less potent than, say, South America.

In none of this am I disparaging any other country.  I’ve just had some fun playing with numbers and I thought I would share what I did.

Let’s take France as our baseline.  Let’s take per capita income (PCI) as our metric.  The higher a country’s PCI, the greater the threat it could be, should it decide to go bonkers and attack our interests.  France’s current PCI is $29,900.  The United States’ PCI is $41,800.  I discovered some statistics on earning power as a function of educational status and educational levels in the general population in the US.  I made a simple spreadsheet to look at the effects of changing education levels.  Here are the steps to my conclusion.  All are gross oversimplifications, but I would argue that the trends are accurate and trends are about as good as one can do for predicting the future.

1. As education levels rise, earnings rise.  More people with higher degrees mean a higher PCI.  More people with no high school diplomas mean a lower PCI.


2. As we discovered in the French riots, the Moslems in France are dropping out of school and are poorly served by the French school system.


3. The French workforce of whatever ethnicity is shrinking.  PCI drops as the percentage of working people drops.

The pressure on the French PCI, then, comes from a worsening educational picture and a worsening labor force picture.  My calculations indicated that when the Moslems become 50% of the workforce, the PCI will drop to 82% of its current value due to their lower educational status.  I also took a wild guess at the changing labor force and guessed that by then the labor force will be about 71% of what it is now.  That gives us a PCI of about $17,400.  That’s above Argentina, but below Puerto Rico.  Not exactly a world superpower, but comfortable for its citizens.

It gets worse than that.  An infrastructure must be maintained.  That’s fine for a growing economy as the infrastructure represents investments from the past, when money was less plentiful.  Repairs are easier as incomes rise.  If incomes are falling, the infrastructure becomes a dead weight and more money is required to keep it going.  You can figure that PCI is actually lower in real terms to account for the added costs of keeping up with yesterday’s fading glories.

In short, Eurabia will look a lot like South America.  We like South America.  We like to visit there and trade with them.  We respect them, but we don’t run in fear of them.  Sometimes they elect wacky people.  In the end, however, what affects us most is what we do to ourselves.