http://www.amazon.com/Thilo-Sarrazin-Bundesbanker-schafft-German/dp/6130108443/ref=reg_hu-rd_add_1_dp_T2


by

Graham H. Seibert (Kiev, Ukraine) -

This review is from: Thilo Sarrazin: Der

 

This book, "Thilo Sarrazin:The Bundesbanker does away with himself" is not even reviewed on the German Amazon site. The discussion is about Sarrazin's book, which is not listed for sale in the US. It is available from Amazon, Germany.

What is Sarazzin's work? It is a book of statistics put together by a central banker. It is reminiscent of "The Bell Curve," another statistically heavy work which was notable only in that it addressed topics that were conventionally beyond discussion, such as the correlations among race, poverty, and intelligence. As with "The Bell Curve," only a minor part of Sarrazin's book deals with the unmentionable, politically incorrect topics.

Sarrazin devotes most of his effort to talking about ethnic Germans themselves. Each succeeding generation of ethnic Germans is approximately 1/3 smaller than the preceding. They have that many fewer children. Stated another way, the replacement rate for ethnic Germans is something around 1.4, whereas it takes 2.1 (children per woman) to maintain a steady population rate. Extrapolating, and using round numbers, the number of grandchildren is roughly half the number of grandparents. He makes the commonsense observation that this is no way to sustain a country.

This book frequently makes reference to a set of tables in an appendix, showing projections for the number of people within each age cohort for the next half-century, plotting an inexorable decline. He shows that the ratio of retired people to workers will shrink to about 1:1 in that time, and almost untenable proportion. He also computes that Germany's Gross National Product will perforce decline as the number of workers declines, marginal improvements in productivity notwithstanding.

What appears to be his main theme, though certainly not the chief thread and discussion of his work, is educated women's absence from the ranks of motherhood. The more educated a woman, the fewer children she has. And since, of course, education is quite highly correlated with intelligence - a statistic that Sarazzin doesn't cite, but is rather well known - this means that Germany, like the rest of the Western world, is suffering from a dysgenetic secular decline in intelligence. Each generation is not only smaller than the preceding, but it is less intellectually capable as well, simply because the most intellectually capable layers of society are not having kids.

Nobody challenges this thesis. The feminists may not like to hear it, but they do not want to acknowledge any obligation to have children simply for the sake of society. Speaking of society, Sarazzin reminds one of the eugenics advocates, discredited since Hitler's time, who would encourage the best of the Aryan race to reproduce abundantly. No doubt that would be the best thing for the future of the German state, but it is antithetical to the sovereignty of the individual, which is now taken to be the highest good in society. Women, and men, now have an unchallenged right to put their own interests above those of the society that spawned them.

Sarazzin's treatment of Jews is entirely consistent with what one routinely reads in American publications, most recently Harpending and Cochran's "The 10,000 Year Explosion." The intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews is about 15 points higher, on average, than the average American or German. This claim is controversial only in Germany, which is so touchy about its historical treatment of the Jews. Gentiles in America except the statistic rather easily; it corresponds absolutely with our everyday experience. And, thanks to the Nazis and the Eastern European pogroms, we have contact with enough Jews to anecdotally validate the claim. The only thing that is novel in Sarazzin's book is that he published it in German.

Sarazzin takes on the wishful thinking that ethnic Germans unwillingness to reproduce themselves can be offset by immigration, and the fertility of immigrants. This is where he gets into another kind of trouble with political correctness. His discussion of Muslim and African intelligence is consistent with the findings (yes, frequently vilified but never refuted) of American, Canadian and British social scientists such as Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn and Hans Eysenk. It surprises me that Sarazzin does not credit them in his bibliography. He backs up claims with regard to their criminality and welfare dependency with statistics from the German state. It is interesting to note that the Germans, just like the French and Americans, obfuscate these statistics by using groupings that make it difficult to tease out the relevant conclusions. Both countries' statistical offices do not want to support politically incorrect uses of their data, such as observing inconvenient truths about Muslims or Mexicans.

Sarazzin concludes that the immigrants which Germany is receiving, primarily from black Africa and the Muslim countries, are a net drag on German society. They take more in social benefits than they contribute in wealth. They certainly will never be in a position to compensate for the absence of births among ethnic Germans. He claims that it is high time that Germany abandon its wishful thinking about immigrants and perform a statistical analysis of their actual performance. They have a 50 year history with Turks - enough time to draw some reasonable conclusions about the limits on their potential contribution to German society. It is time to do so, he would say.

In summary, the most earth shaking fact about this book is that it was written by a German, in the face of smothering German political correctness. The observations are well drawn and statistically supported, but nothing is new except their application within the context of Germany. His most original proposal is that university educated women have more children. He is certainly not the first to recognize the need - Carle Zimmerman made the observation in the 1930s - but he is one of the few to make the statement so boldly in the modern age. Bottom line, its greatest claim to being a great book is that it stirs an important discussion.