Charles Murray Amazed by What He Saw

Charles Murray has been doing some field research and here is his report:

I’ve been marooned in Paris the last three days, waiting for a plane home after the snowstorm. Last night, having been struck by how polyglot Paris has become, I collected data as I walked along, counting people who looked like native French versus everyone else. I can’t vouch for the representativeness of the sample, but at about eight o’clock last night in the St. Denis area of Paris, it worked out to about 50-50, with the non-native French half consisting, in order of proportion, of African blacks, Middle-Eastern types, and East Asians.

Mark Steyn and Christopher Caldwell have already explained this to the rest of the world—Europe as we have known it is about to disappear—but it was still a shock to see how rapid the change has been in just the last half-dozen years.

Great minds work alike. When I was stuck at San Diego, Calif. airport, I too spent the time collecting data and making statistics. I found that only about 10% of the presents looked "Old Americans", that is, how I remember Americans used to look in my youth (sample: Benjamin Franklin, John Bunyan).Most people in San Diego looked nondescript, brandless, olive skinned European. It is true that artificial lighting made everyone look alike and they all dressed, had haircuts, walked and talked with an entonation that was standard. In my sample, Americans were shorter than I thought (about 1.65 m average all genders) and less obese.

I also tried to identify, classify and count people with character ie personality. Faces at San Diego were vanilla bland, featureless. I find that many Ashkenazi, German, Japanese and Chinese faces are strong, expressive, intelligent; most European historical portraits radiate willpower and character (see "Mangan"), but I met none of them at San Diego.