That seems a bit too simple. I saw one particular graph [0] once that really stuck with me illustrating just how decisively Europe was ejected from the semiconductor market. It takes more than just inaction to achieve results like that. In many ways it could be called an impressive feat that only the Europeans could achieve. 44% of production to 9% - losing a steady 1% of the market every year, largest to smallest player. No other region is even in a position to do that badly even if they tried.
It is possible. But that seems out of character for the Europeans, they're pretty consistent about going the distance to make absolutely sure that the next new thing doesn't happen in Europe.
It seems much more likely they had a suite of environmental, social and trade policies carefully calibrated to move semiconductor manufacturing somewhere else.
Part of it is simply the Euro being too strong. Taiwan has a (deliberately) undervalued currency that makes exports a lot more competitive, the EU does not.
It's a super simple strategy with profound effects but somehow still very underappreciated
> Individuals don’t demand solutions to diffuse problems
Markets solve diffuse problems really well, people signal how much their section of the problem is worth solving and the market judges whether the overall problem can be solved cost effectively. Getting food to everyone is a diffuse problem for example.
Tragedy of the commons is different. Markets don't solve how to solve owning things in common and the usual market recommendation is not to do that.
It isn't actually all that scary; humans cope pretty well over a wide variety of temperatures. If the change caught everyone by surprise it'd be a huge problem but it seems to be fairly well understood and there is lots of time to adjust.
Worst case scenario seems to be that people will stop migrating to Europe.
The ignorance of this comment is breathtaking. How are the crops going to grow if the temperature drops by 15 degrees Celsius? What marine and terrestrial ecosystems can survive a sudden catastrophic change like that? What’s going to happen to the weather patterns after this planet-scale shift? How do you “adjust” to the collapse of your food supply and entire ecosystems?
Grow the crops somewhere else? The earth's climate has always changed - the sea was 100m lower 20k years ago and much of Europe covered by ice. But it doesn't change so much over one human lifetime.
20k years ago, humans hadn't invented agriculture. Our whole civilization has existed in one particular geological time, an exceptional one. There is absolutely no indication that it's flexible enough to be transposed in another, and particularly not at that speed of transition, which is, in geological time, exceptionally fast.
It's still ~1C over a human lifetime which gives you a fair bit of time to adapt. I mean I may fly to Bali next month due to climate but that's just London being crap in winter as usual.
This is like saying fish can survive around 21C so the lower temperature of 19.8C that is keeping it in a -4C freezer for 3.5 hours before searing it for 30 minutes at 200C is fine.
A 1C rise means hotter hots, colder colds, stronger storms and longer or more frequent droughts as well as the general climate of a region possibly changing.
Yes you can find crops that will grow in specific conditions, but you need to know those conditions and if you have a day that kills a crop that can mean you need to wait for the next season. That 1C rise corresponds with a lot more of these crop damaging events as well as changing the efficiency and possibly infrastructure needed in an area.
I'll also note that the last 1C rise is over a generation not a lifetime i.e. 25 years not 80.
Europe is one of the world's largest agricultural producers and exporters. France alone is one of the top grain exporters globally. The EU exports massive quantities of wheat, barley, dairy, and processed food to North Africa, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Countries like Egypt, Algeria, and Nigeria are heavily dependent on European grain imports. An AMOC collapse would devastate growing seasons, slash yields, and potentially make large parts of Northern Europe unsuitable for current agriculture.
And it's not just food. Europe is a major producer and exporter of fertilizers. If European industrial and agricultural output collapses, the ripple effects hit global food supply chains hard. Countries that depend on those imports will face famine.
Then there's the knock-on, hundreds of millions of people in food-insecure regions losing a key supply source, simultaneous disruption to Atlantic weather patterns affecting rainfall in West Africa and the Amazon, potential shifts in monsoon systems affecting South and East Asia. It's a cascading global food security crisis.
> lots of time to adjust
This assumes a gradual slowdown, but paleoclimate evidence suggests AMOC transitions can happen within a decade or even less. The idea that we'd just smoothly adapt to one of the most dramatic climate shifts in human civilization is not supported by what we know about how these systems behave.
Some humans will very likely survive. Millions, possibly hundreds of millions, will die.
Life as it has been known for hundreds of years will change dramatically.
An unwillingness or inability to conceive of this possible future as anything more than “it’ll be colder, but fine” would make it vastly worse for many people.
How big a problem is that over a multi-decade time horizon?
There is a pretty big variation in average temperatures by country [0]. Somehow People everywhere from Thailand to Greenland manage to find food. All else failing it is a possibility to trade for calories. Let alone technology improvements that might save the day by accident.
I mean, it might make places uninhabitable over the course of a few generations, but things that change so slowly are't actually much of a threat on an individual level. Worst of the worst cases people can move or not have children - the statistics suggest that is an acceptable option to a lot of people.
Right, and we know that modern human societies are really good at planning for a major disaster on a multi-decade time horizon! Look at how well we've dealt with the climate cri—oh, wait.
This won't end humanity, no. But it is likely to cause absolutely catastrophic levels of upheaval and probably billions (with a b) of deaths—from famine, disease, exposure, and war.
> Multi-decade time frame can only be thought of as catastrophic when it comes to change of this magnitude.
If someone moves from Singapore to Poland is that a catastrophe? We'd be talking a smaller temperature delta than that and this is still a theoretical risk. That isn't necessarily something that people worry about beyond saying "it is very hot" or "it is very cold". It doesn't have a lot of implications beyond needing to move crops around and changing building standards (which is achievable over long periods of time).
Now just a 10-15 degree swing isn't the end of the story because if the average temperature crosses 0 that might well be a big problem. I dunno. But it sounds solvable, these aren't particularly scary scenarios being put forward. They're more of the expensive and inconvenient variety.
Livestock, staple crops, and pollinating insects cope pretty well over a wide variety of temperatures. Some specific crops don't, but that's not a problem as long as changes are predicted.
That seems pretty reasonable, yes. That is like asking if putting a low-cost Ops Research specialist in every company could make a 5% difference in operations - yes it could. Making resource-efficient decisions is not something that comes naturally to humans and having a system that consistently makes high quality game-theoretic recommendations would be huge.
Bunch of tiny companies would love to hire a mathematician to optimise what they are doing to get a 5-10% improvement. Unfortunately a 5-10% improvement in a small business can't justify the cost of hiring another person, and good mathematicians with business sense and empathy are a rare commodity.
Lots of jobs like daycare, teachers, cleaning, the material costs are near zero and your ability to increase productivity using technology is very low.
You can reduce quality of cleaning. But it's very hard to clean faster and better at the same time.
These industries are not going to be optimized by an AI. The only optimization is lower overhead or lower salaries.
Sure, we could have robots in daycare, but I don't think lack of AI is why my wife would have concerns :)
Of course there's jobs that don't have a productivity boost from AI. The question is whether across the entire economy there will be a 5% GDP boost.
Teachers, cleaners, and daycare workers may see 0% gains, but don't be surprised if that is made up for by 10% gains the productivity of tech, law, marketing, advertising, manufacturing, government, etc. (okay maybe not government).
How can advertising and marketing become more profitable from this? It's a genuine question, but I don't see how making advertising and marketing easier for everybody and hence flooding the already flooded market would result in increased productivity.
By significantly reducing the cost of creating the advertisements. Want to air a commercial? You no longer have to have actors, sets, designers, costumes, etc. just ask AI to make you a commercial and describe what you want it to look like.
Consider all the labor and capital spent across all the advertising real estate in the world. Commercial, online ads, billboards, labeling. The inputs to make all these things are now greatly reduced. To increase productivity, it doesn't matter that the market is flooded, just that it's much easier to make these things.
If that seems reasonable to you then you don't know anything about residential construction. The problems that homebuilders face aren't amenable to mathematical solutions. They have to deal with permitting issues, corrupt / incompetent government officials, supplier delays, bad weather, flakey workers, etc. The notion of a 5% improvement from LLM is ludicrously naive.
The first 2 are very LLM amenable, the last 3 are very mathematical-solution amenable (optimising around issues like that is basically what Ops Research does). I don't see what your argument is here.
The list of people claiming that maths won't work who then get bulldozed by mathematicians is long.
Because they make it much easier to audit what decisions are being made and how reasonable they were. Corruption relies on not being too well known - once people can start pointing to specific decisions rather than a general "we know there is corruption here somewhere" it is hard to sustain.
It's not like people don't know who they are though? It's not some secret formula of who is corrupt. It's everyone that's been in position for any length of time. If you don't yield to the corruption you won't be in your job long. The degree of corruption is variable and perhaps the LLM could find the most efficient wheel to grease and person to lean on but then you just have the next company doing more of the same.
I like it. There is something subtle here that marks Nadella as a pretty good senior manager (assuming the paraphrase is accurate). He explained what the job is and how to do it in a simple and concise way.
Now you'd think that would just be normal practice but I have witnessed a disturbing number of leaders who either never got this talk or lack the empathy to realise that you have to explain to people what they should be doing. I will single out "leaders" who demand people get vague (or even specific) results and they have to figure it out. That is the extent of the leader's communication. All too common a practice, that can work with the right people but it is bad management.
Nadella isn't doing that here. He is still asking for vague (or specific) results, but he is including a "with these tools and by doing these things" part that is quite important and makes the whole talk actionable.
So just circling back to the Korea example, does this imply that in the Cold & Korean wars, South Korea was exploiting the US to become rich? What exactly does the word "exploit" mean to you here if the US had to cross an ocean and to get themselves exploited by some minor power?
> The US kind of exploits Korea, Taiwan for cheap labor.and goods.
So we had a period where Korea was exploiting the US, then the US somehow broke their chokehold and started exploiting them? And if the Koreans improve their standard of living that mean they've regained exploitation dominance over the US? Or is Korea exploiting someone like the Chinese (a nation that I, naively, feel is a bit stronger than Korea)? Or who are they exploiting?
I'm not sure how this plays out to be internally consistent. It seems like being wealthy has more to do with internal policy than external exploitation or even resource availability.
I do not say anywhere Korea Exploiting the US. I am saying the US and a few other nations used many countries to gain power and use that as chess games against each other. Without US support, S. Korea and Taiwan would not exist. The US is/has used these countries against China and the USSR.
Yes, they got better off due to it, but the US gets a bit more benefit from the arrangement. Fun fact, until about the 1980s, N. Korea had a much stronger economy that S. Korea due to support from the USSR.
The growth of a welfare system seems like the major change. How does that plan interact with the welfare system? If someone is impoverished in Asia can they get a plane ticket to the US and expect to eventually be entitled to a state-sponsored minimum standard of living? Maybe healthcare if the left's plans for that get through eventually?
The welfare system requires a stable population pyramid and currently the US is under-reproducing for that to happen. Without some immigration, the existing welfare system will become impossible to maintain.
The reality is that many rich industries are built on the backs of illegal workers. If countries would punish those who hire illegal workers more than they do the illegal workers themselves, the resulting collapse of the agricultural and food industries alone should prove that the current systems are already being held up by people who do not participate in the welfare system.
The people who would've come through Ellis Island are still coming in, they're just not getting registered anymore, and the people and government have turned a blind eye so they can cheaply dismiss them when they're no longer necessary/when they need to act as a scapegoat.
So, based on this chart, only migrants from "MENAPT" countries are a net negative in terms of contributions irrespective of age?
It's difficult to evaluate on others.
For example "other non-western immigrants" are net positive during their work years, but net negative in their ols age. But people typically don't become migrants in their 70s, they become migrants mostly during work years.
This chart is bad for multiple reasons. It does not separate migrants by type of visa - are they on some sort of critical skills visa? Are they undocumented? It doesn't say.
It also does not indicate the proportions. If 99% of migrants are on their working years and only 1% of migrants in their old age, then in general it is a net positive even if some are a strain on welfare.
Any evaluation on migrants that don't account for the type of migration going on is very flawed. Are we talking about refugees? engineers? medical doctors? nurses? academic researchers? low-skilled undocumented migrants?
All of those will be dramatically different in terms of how they integrate into society, how they contribute to the welfare state, how mucch they pay in the taxes, etc.
Painting it with broad strokes sound to me way too much like fear mongering.
> should prove that the current systems are already being held up by people who do not participate in the welfare system.
Well, yes. If there is a pool of workers who aren't covered by the welfare system then it would work out fine to just let them migrate. Big wins for everyone. Probably works great every time it is tried. And if you're arguing that in practice there is an underclass in the US that isn't getting welfare and that works then sure, easy to see.
But, and I'm just going by vague rumours from reading US political news, there seems to be a significant number of people who would want US citizens covered by a welfare system. Phrases like "Universal" and "Basic Human Right" turn up from time to time. The people arguing against offering everyone in a country general support have lost a lot of arguments in parliaments around the world since ... around the late 1800s with Bismark as I vaguely recall. It comes off as unfair and unreasonable.
Frankly I imagine the US political process will start asking why undocumented migrants aren't getting welfare of some sort fairly soon if it isn't already resolved that they get something. That seems like it'd be in line with the general trends. If they are there to stay they're locals.
How does all this square up with easy, formal migration? In a practical sense? Rough numbers?
I've heard this argument going back to Milton Friedman, but the immigration discourse these days is quite detached from any economic concerns. Forget impoverished people; there is rabid opposition to pretty much all immigration including, for example, investor or employment categories. It's a lot more tribal than rational.
Sure. But hypothetically, if we pretend people are rational for a few minutes here, how does the Ellis Island idea interact with a functional welfare system?
I would imagine more young, ambitious working age adults would help the welfare system, not hurt it.
If you look globally at countries which have issues with their large social services, they're almost all mostly homogeneous and declining in population, especially among the young. Which makes sense if you sit back and think about what social services are typically offered and where the money comes from.
Friedman's argument was more so to just keep them as illegals but not deport them. That way they can support the welfare system but not use it. Friedman didn't want to make them legal until the welfare system has been crushed.
Of course that might require some changes to make it actually true illegals don't use state benefits. You need to cut off WIC for illegals, public schooling for illegals for instance before they will actually not be using public benefit. Also their children become legal via jus soli.
The obvious down-side is that those citizens / legal residents who have the skill level of illegal immigrants (sad, but commonly true) will see their real wages depressed and more competition for the job.
Man I'm ashamed that I wanted to see H1B reformed and was a part of this crowd.
I want more immigration I just don't want companies able to abuse people/people be treated any different/having less rights/power than anyone else in American. I think I'm just going to be full 'open borders' now because otherwise it always ends up with trash manipulating things in racist/corporate power way.
High skill immigration still brings cultural change. My parents came here from Bangladesh, and while they superficially assimilated, they’re still culturally Bangladeshi. They, like virtually all the Bangladeshis and Indians I know, still overvalue formal education, undervalue risk taking, elevate familial over civic obligation, don’t value economic modesty, believe elites should rule over “the common people,” etc. And this was despite spending 35 years almost completely isolated from other Bangladeshis. Culture is very deep and not easily changed.
Libertarians assign culture zero substantive value, viewing people as fungible economic actors. Like many libertarian assumptions, that one isn’t grounded in empirical observation.
The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.
We have strong evidence that deeper cultural, everything from attitudes towards saving, government, and social trust, persists for generations after immigration: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/2/rethinking-immig... (“The authors found that forty-six percent of home-country attitudes toward trust persist in second- and fourth-generation immigrants—in the adults whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants. People from high-trust societies, like Sørensen, transmit about half of their high-trust attitudes to their descendants, and people from low-trust societies do the same with their low-trust attitudes.”).
You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy.
These deep-seated cultural variations, in turn, have a strong impact on societal prosperity: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric... (“One of the points I want to make is a lot of the big institutions we think about, like Western law or representative government, actually flow, in part, from the way people think about the world.”).
> You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy.
OK, that's interesting, I'll have to look into that book.
I can see that (as you said) the Nordic countries have much more trust than Italy, and Italy, Spain and France are similar (along with a similar language and large inter-mixtures over time).
However, look at Ireland vs the UK. Basically the same genetics, an extremely similar culture (particularly given the amount of cross migration back and forth), and yet very divergent amounts of social trust (I'm sceptical of the metric here, would like to see it very density as I suspect that drives a bunch of the results).
> Think about your own life. How important is food to your family and friends as a way of social bonding? Do you think you’d be able to change that easily?
In terms of my parents/culture, not at all. It was much, much, much more about drinking alcohol rather than food. And yet, while that part is still there, there's far more emphasis on food as a socialisation tool in my generation.
Some of that is because of drink-driving laws being enforced, but some of it is definitely a cultural change which would seem to argue against your suggestion of long-term impacts due to culture.
> The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.
Again, I'm not convinced this is true. Like, if a company in Ireland has majority European employees but American leadership, what culture will it have?
> You can see this just by going around the country
I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.
> However, look at Ireland vs the UK. Basically the same genetics, an extremely similar culture (particularly given the amount of cross migration back and forth), and yet very divergent amounts of social trust
Ireland is culturally distinct from the U.K. For example, the U.K. is historically predominantly Protestant, while Ireland is historically strongly Catholic. That manifests in many ways. For example, the Anglosphere tends to have the latest gestational limits on abortion among European and European-derived countries. By contrast, abortion was illegal altogether in Ireland until recently (2018).
There is also the fact that the Irish were brutally colonized by England and Irish society developed a strong cohesiveness from that external pressure. The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed 3 million people out of a population of about 60 million. The Irish Famine, by contrast, killed 1 million people out of a population of only about 8 million. Indeed, the Irish population peaked in 1841, a few years before the start of the Great Famine and never returned to that peak.
> I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.
According to official stats, 16% of Irish residents are citizens of other countries. Keep in mind that this number will exclude foreign nationals that got Irish citizenship through naturalization (and therefore became Irish citizens).
Most recent numbers from the UK list 16% of the population being "foreign-born". While this number may be similar to Ireland, it still counts someone as foreign born even if they became UK citizens by naturalization.
Also, consider that one of the most prominent migration sources for the UK is of Irish nationals (that can live and work in the UK even after brexit). Irish culture is not too dissimilar to UK culture (especially considering that Northern Ireland is currently part of the UK).
If anything, Ireland experienced more foreign culture immigration than the UK, not less.
Do they count North Ireland as 'foreign born' even though they are notionally Irish and born in Ireland (but not RoI)? Those have got to be one of the major 'immigrants' to RoI.
> The Good Friday Agreement, which was signed between the Irish and British governments in 1998, confirmed that people born in Northern Ireland could choose to be either British or Irish citizens.
> Since 1 January 2005, if you are born in Northern Ireland, you can claim Irish citizenship if your parent (or parents) are either British or Irish citizens, or one of them has lived on the island of Ireland for at least 3 out of the 4 years immediately before your birth.
Are you of Aboriginal extraction? Otherwise, I'm not sure an ethnic homeland for you would be Australia, right?
This stuff is so weird, as basically all humans migrated to wherever they are now. Like, I'm pretty sure that I have Celtic, Norman, Viking and other ancestors, despite my official ancestry being Irish (and all of my last 3-4 generations being born in Ireland).
Is it culture? That would seem to be what people are actually looking for, and I can definitely see the appeal, but culture is something that is generated from interaction with other members of a culture, and isn't dependent on genetics (consider how you or I might behave in OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Goldman Sachs).
Yes it is culture. The desire for an ethnostate is a proxy desire for a monoculture, somewhat easier to implement because it's easier to see someone is white than to see their behavior patterns. There are also studies that show most people have subconscious tension among other races even from the same culture, though.
But the outright desire for an ethnostate or a monoculture are both politically untenable in the West. Never mind that every country we idolize, e.g. Japan, Scandinavia, are essentially that.
America is not a good candidate for that for various reasons, but I see no reason that Denmark or Japan shouldn't be able to codify their ethnic makeup and adjust immigration policy accordingly. As a Korean, it is really nice to visit Korea and feel among 'my people', even though culturally I'm an American. I've heard very similar things from my white friends who move to Utah or visit Scandinavia. It's a feeling that seems to be deeply embedded in the lizard brain, to be among your tribe, identified visually and then culturally. Countries have the right to cultivate this feeling among their citizens.
Okay, but those are very recent developments to which the historical sentiment hasn't fully caught up. To the extent it has, it's via negative memetic sentiments, e.g. "Stockholm is now the rape capital of the world!" Sweden, at least, also, doesn't capture racial demographics, so we don't know the makeup of the foreign born population. Walking around Helsinki, you don't need statistics to notice the homogeny.
Didn't have time to check Norway and Denmark before, but looking now it seems most of the foreign born population is still white/European.
> figures from World Population Review suggesting around 83.2% are Norwegian, and another 8.3% are other Europeans, totaling roughly 91.5% of European descent, though exact "white" percentages vary by source and definition, with estimates often placing the broader "white" or European-origin population well above 90%.
Another source I found puts non-Danes in Denmark at 9%, putting their white/European percentage at 95%.
For approximate parity comparison, Japan is 98% Japanese, UK is 82%, and France is 71%, all falling. Imo Norway and Denmark still qualify as ethnostates, though maybe not for much longer.
Whites visiting scandinavianis a funny one, because today we treat all white people as one race but unless that man was of origin from scandinavia it's most probable its the governance system and culture he likes not a racial kinship.
> Countries have the right to cultivate this feeling among their citizens.
I disagree, because what seems to always be the logical next step is "My monoculture is superior, and deserves dominion above your monoculture, which deserves eradication. And oh by the way, if you don't like our monoculture and try to escape it, we'll invade that place too."
That's kind of what the "mono" in monoculture implies. Multiculturalism isn't an asset because it's the most stable form of soceity, rather it's best we've figured out when the alternative is bloodshed between warring tribes.
I don't see it that way. From my perspective, America would be more stable socially if it balkanized. There is a lot of tension borne of cultural heterogeneity. Coasts vs South, most of Texas vs Houston, etc. Nothing about it is positive, except maybe economically.
I guess this might lead to wars via a more cohesive national identity, like how diversity in the workplace reduces unionization efforts, but I largely doubt it would turn out so poorly.
I don't necessarily think it would. But what makes you think that a hypothetical status quo will go any better than what happened in the Roman empire? There are no great options imo.
What is the Roman Empire worse than in your mind? It lasted centuries, its literally perhaps the longest running in history. If it's the fate of the Roman Empire we have to face, then I can't wish for anything better. You can of course say it slid into dictatorship, now prove it was due to the race admixture. Anyone can read anything into the transition and fall of the Roman Empire.
Suppose a future world where all the world, every country is thoroughly mixed up by today's racial standards. There is no "white" country, no "chinese" country, no "black" country. How do you think race wars would be organized, "Lets kill all the [racist slur] bastards of this country" wait what, there's no easy country to point to, already making race war quite difficult. Or do you like having race wars?
Again, I fail to see what exactly is the "loss" or "gain" of a race existing or not? What has it ever given us? It's like religion and nationalism, very little benefits and pure destruction and waste of human life in the balance of history.
I suppose you will then say, you fear your country would become "Muslim" or insert whatever religion you hate. But Muslim is an idea it's not a race. A religion can convert a country without even a single marriage or mixup because it's an idea, so tell me again how do you feel you are safe from a foreign religion just because your "race" is different? And the nice thing is the arabs or whatever race has you wetting your bed will also have had thoroughly had to mix up with the locals by that point, already rendering them "impure". And I have you covered with a great anti-democratic solution for that: forcible state mandated atheism.
If you do believe in anti-democratic system of governance, then I propose we force every person to marry a person of a different race and forcibly make every locality thoroughly mixed up using information theoretic entropy definitions. Why not, why's mine better or worse than your idea of anti-democratic rule?
Why do you feel among all the cultures there, you know which one among them would will out. I see no point in being among my race if it's a communist or fascist country. The race has already failed me then. Hell give me aliens from mars and I'd gladly live among them if they are liberal democratic and capitalistic. To me these three principles are paramount, the identity of the agents executing them is irrelevant.
I absolutely don't feel comfort based on common ethnicity. I find comfort more or less in any democratic, capitalist liberal society and I absolutely hate life in anything not this even if it may be my race people or anyone else.
Most countries in Asia already have universal healthcare so they definitely would not be coming to the US for that.
If anything, expats from Asia come to the US to make a higher salary to support their family back at home. They are not asking for a handout, they are asking for jobs.
It isn't quite that simple though - you're saying the standard is something like no danger of being a net welfare recipient. Apreche said he saw "no reason that becoming a citizen today should be any more difficult today than it was in the early 20th century".
Those are different. The standard of not being likely to be a welfare recipient is a much higher standard than what was around in the early 20th century. The US federal minimum wage came in in 1933 [0] for example following work that started in the 1910s. Ellis Island migration was completely finished fairly soon after that in the 1950s after what seems to be a wind-down period [1]. I don't know my US immigration history of when they started reviewing migration in relation to welfare but it'd be a complex question and it isn't obvious that the standards that were traditionally used on Ellis Island would even guarantee that the people migrating were skilled enough to be allowed to work in the modern era.
No, your assumption is false. Even if all those paper valuations, etc., were real money you could use to pay for school lunches today, a 100% tax on the total wealth of U.S. billionaires wouldn’t even fund the federal and state governments for a year.
Total US wealth is ~170T so obviously it will be enough to cover federal and state government for a year (and more like 20 years).
Even considering obvious issue of wealth going down like crazy in such hypothetical scenario in its ends this would be enough. Because in the end it’s all part of same economy.
That’s including everyone. The wealth of U.S. billionaires is about $8 trillion total, while the government at all levels spends about $10 trillion annually.
You missed the "total wealth of U.S. billionaires". The billionaires own a tiny fraction of total US wealth. Most of the wealth is owned by people like me, who own a house, and stocks in retirement account.
However billionaires don’t own tiny part of US wealth, more like 5%-10%. And top 1% (and grandparent was talking about rich people) own 1/3 of US wealth.
The point is that billionaire wealth is not that much compared to the government’s current spending, much less what you’d need to support large numbers of immigrants on welfare (as suggested by OP above).
The top 1% have a lot more, but the cutoff for that is $11 million, and that includes home equity, family farms, etc. The bulk of those people are retired professionals and small business owners. For example, 4% of 75-79 year olds are in the top 1% of wealth. These are rich people, but not the kind of rich that AOC is talking about taxing.
I’m a huge supporter of taxing upper middle class people, but we should just tax them instead of playing games about wealth. The top 5%, that is people making above $260,000 a year, have an income of $5.6 trillion a year. They only pay $1.3 trillion in income taxes. Just double that.
Doctorow makes a lot of good points and I get how terrifying the state is when it gets riled up like this. That said...
1) There seems to be an assumption here that everyone in the US agrees there should be brisk immigration. To me, if the laws in-practice make it impossible to immigrate then that would suggest that the polity might not believe that. There also seems to be a common belief that just because the laws are unfair, stupid, counterproductive or destructive that they can be ignored and that isn't how laws work. If the law is terrible it is still the law. If it doesn't let you do what you want to do then that desired course of action is not a legal option.
2) A big part of the reason that the US is engaging in this (rather terrifying) deportation is because of the appearance that process ran, came up with a basic agreement about how immigration would work and then people started ignoring it on the basis that it was inconvenient. I don't see how a country can be run that way, there has to be a hard choice made about open migration vs. a welfare system.
And while I'm commenting on the debacle that is the Trump anti-immigration campaign, I will just upset everyone and note that people have to accept that governments sometimes go on a rampage. It has happened before, it will happen again and it is really quite important to keep the reins on them and try not to give them control of important things like food, medicine, what people can say to each other, control of the financial system, etc, etc. A bit of principled strategic thinking goes a long way on this stuff.
> There also seems to be a common belief that just because the laws are unfair, stupid, counterproductive or destructive that they can be ignored and that isn't how laws work. If the law is terrible it is still the law. If it doesn't let you do what you want to do then that desired course of action is not a legal option.
Well then explain to me how the US Marijuana industry exists despite it being a schedule 1 controlled substance.
Laws are a social construct and their enforcement is based on what society thinks is ok. People don’t want to throw their community members is jail for marijuana. They do want to throw murderers in jail. They don’t want to throw upstanding community members who just don’t have the right immigration status in jail either.
> It cost the taxpayers nothing (in fact it made us money)
Pull the other one, it has bells on it. If the government is involved in a financial transaction it is because nobody in the private sphere with money wants to be involved. That means either the return wasn't commensurate to the risk or there was dodgy accounting going on that nobody would actually thought represented a reasonable real return. If there was actually a prospect of making a reasonable return, money would have been found. Even the creditors might have been willing to make deals.
I bet the average taxpayer would much rather have the money given to them in their capacity as an individual and would have profited off it more than the hypothetical return the US government may claim it made.
> What part of that are people mad about, and why?
The gross unfairness of it all. I mean, it is bad enough that the failures in charge of the banking system got bailed out despite being incompetent at their jobs, but the average person had to guarantee them their high status role in society? It is a sick joke.
It is a terrible idea to be printing money to prop up asset owners. If that is the basic plan anyway, it shouldn't be mandatory to have incompetents mediating the handout process.
And it isn't like bankruptcy is that terrible. All the physical assets still exist. There is still food. Maybe set up a special welfare system for people who lost their life savings if something has to be done, but for heavens sake, taking (and I repeat myself) known, verified incompetents and guaranteeing them ongoing control of the financial system is wildly stupid. It is on par with a scheme like mandating people all buy in to cryptocurrencies.
We don't know what the other options look like. A broader collapse of the economy, runs on banks? If the government stayed out then the outcome could have been worse for the average taxpayer.
I do agree it looks bad if bankers can take huge risks and benefit (personally) from the upside without a downside risk. But it's not necessarily the bailout that's the problem here and the taxpayers do have the theoretical power to vote for people who can change this.
> We don't know what the other options look like. A broader collapse of the economy, runs on banks? If the government stayed out then the outcome could have been worse for the average taxpayer.
What courses of action does that argument not justify? "We had a predictable emergency and decided to panic and hand out money. Don't expect us to really think about alternatives." is not the course of action that really speaks to me for getting good results for taxpayers, or anyone except the people directly getting the money.
We have a playbook for getting a statistically good outcome when people run out of money. It is called bankruptcy. I can see how a banker could confuse that with a bailout because they both start with a "b" and there are a lot of letters - but the stark truth is they are different words.
But the issues here were systemic and there was worry of contagion. I guess a question would be whether the people who made the decision had conflicts of interest that impacted those decisions.
So this argument doesn't justify any course of action but is does justify a course of actions with poor optics that seems reasonable given the risks.
> The gross unfairness of it all. I mean, it is bad enough that the failures in charge of the banking system got bailed out despite being incompetent at their jobs, but the average person had to guarantee them their high status role in society? It is a sick joke.
This is a very valid narrative, although if you say it in public people will call you a socialist. It applies to people like Fred Goodwin of RBS (eventually stripped of knighthood) and Sean Quinn of AIB (who did actually serve jail time).
> And it isn't like bankruptcy is that terrible. All the physical assets still exist. There is still food
I think you're really underestimating how terrible "retail banking stops functioning" would have been in the short term. The loans allowed the problems to be addressed over the medium term. "Every retail bank has ceased trading" is a problem you have about three days to solve before the inability of people to buy food and petrol starts a much larger collapse.
Besides, some of the bailouts were very close to "flat-pack" bankruptcies. Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley were fully nationalized! Equity holders lost everything, that's a bankruptcy!
(Americans will say "who" there, but again: it was a global crisis. It more resembles climate change. It's very difficult to say that any individual is responsible for it, but somehow Australia ends up on fire as a result of unsustainable emissions, and the banking system collapsed as a result of unsustainable lending emissions.)
So your argument to the valid narrative of gross unfairness and people being above the law is to look the other way because you are afraid of being called a "socialist"? Holding criminals accountable for bad and reckless behavior is not socialism by any definition of the word.
It's not my solution, I'm not in charge of the SEC! I'm broadly supportive of anti-inequality measures against the financial industry. It's just that if you say that the peanut gallery will call it socialist.
I would however like people to be a bit more specific about what they think the crime was, who specifically committed what, and whether it was actually illegal at the time. It's a word people love to throw around. It's not actually illegal to make poor business decisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%A1n_Quinn for example, while his misconduct cost the collapse of AIB, the thing he was actually jailed for was failing to comply with court orders.
Corporate bonds were simply not being bought, at any price. Same with commercial paper. Nobody knew what firms were going to still exist in a week so nobody was willing to lend any money at all.
> Nobody knew what firms were going to still exist in a week so nobody was willing to lend any money at all.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this another way of saying it was too risky for people to invest? That seems to be the same concept as the quote you cited from the parent comment: "either the return wasn't commensurate to the risk".
I guess you could say that but the underlying problem was that the risk was entirely opaque so it couldn't actually be quantified and hedged against. The TARP loan ("shakedown" might be a better term honestly) gave financial firms time to sort out what their actual positions and exposure were; there wasn't time to let the market sort that out over months and at the cost of every major company (even non-financials) failing because of lack of access to credit.
Yeah it seems there's a bit of asymmetry between a normal lender and the federal government here where as a normal lender you might not be able to lend enough to guarantee the debtor survives. Also what the gov decides to do may significantly influence the lender's behavior. If the lender thinks there's a chance the gov will bail them out, they would probably prefer that and not give a loan.
Whereas the federal government can write a check for $633.6 billion and be much more certain the debtors will survive and pay it back.
So the government has negotiated from a position where the average taxpayer could be buying $10 worth of assets for $1 and have a go at managing it properly and creating some wealth, to a position where the taxpayer pays $1, the government buys the $10 in assets and gives it to some wealthy idiot, and there is a nominal return which at that time I imagine went into killing people in Iraq because Muslims, amirite? All those bombs cost a bomb.
And then we see 20 good years of economic prosperity where the US predictably got even wealthier than it previously was and there is great political stability and well-loved presidents like Mr Trump who represent the satisfaction US citizens feel for the economic highs they have reached!
What a fantastic deal for the average taxpayer. Let the confetti fall. Well done government, saved the day there.
Where it went was bailing out the automakers. It was a big story at the time and I'm starting to worry people just don't form long-term memories anymore.
> the US predictably got even wealthier than it previously was
If you just look at the economic indicators, then it did. Certainly way better than the "no intervention" counterfactual would have gone. People do not like it when all the ATMs stop working.
There is a lot of discourse to be had as to why people aren't feeling that personally.
> killing people in Iraq because Muslims, amirite? All those bombs cost a bomb.
Sadly there is/was massive bipartisan support for this bullshit. Including from the public. I note from a chronology perspective that most of the money in Iraq was spent/lost/wasted before 2008.
The problem is circular. The risk is that your counterparty goes bust. Therefore nobody wants to make any moves until they can be sure that (mostly) every other player is stable. But because no moves are happening, that in itself is destabilizing.
That is, the big risk is "what if the state doesn't intervene?"
Correspondingly, the state has a special move that only it can play, because "what if the state doesn't intervene" is not a risk to the state itself. The act of intervening makes the risk go away. That's part of the privilege of being the lender of last resort with the option to print currency.
(which is why this was a much more serious problem for Greece and Ireland, which as Eurozone members were constrained in their ability to even contemplate printing their way out of the problem!)
And we've all heard of the linux people, as opposed to whoever is pushing these post-Cassidy OS. Linux isn't where it is because of some imperial decree, it has been winning out in a slow, protracted war for what OS programmers choose when they want to get work done.
Pike is more than entitled to an opinion, but I think there is some cause-effect reversal at work here. The linux circles aren't people driving the UNIX-love. The UNIX-love is effective in practice - especially the blend of principle and pragmatism that the linux community settled on - so the linux circles happen to be bigger than the most similar alternatives. Better alternatives are going to have to fight through the same slog as linux if they want recognition.
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