Shortly before Trump was elected to office, conservative historian Niall Ferguson gave a talk for Google Zeitgeist.
His disdain for Trump was obvious, putting him firmly in the camp of Burkean Conservative, but what he succinctly highlighted, through his exploration of the history of populism in America, was that each of the four times that populism became active in the American polis, the conditions required were both that the rate of foreign-born citizens exceeded 14% of the population and an economic downturn increased fears of economic scarcity. Let me parse that differently- populism has only historically been on the ascendant when blue collar fears of economic displacement and wage dilution become activated.
By contrast, Australia managed to achieve a rate of foreign-born citizens at 30% with their Populate or Perish policy, but populism really was banished to the sidelines for the longest time. The reasons for this were simple. First, Australia has always insisted that people who migrate to their shores become Australians first, with their cultural heritage a secondary consideration. Second, and far more importantly, for a long period of Australia's immigration history, labour interests were protected- simply put, blue collar jobs were enshrined in Priority Migration Skilled Occupation List, to the extent that regardless of the wage pressures employers felt, those seeking full-time blue collar jobs weren't allowed into Australia. Put simply, it is possible for a country to run high levels of immigration without populism becoming prevalent, provided that said migration doesn't hurt blue collar interests.
Since the 2000s, this policy has changed, with the stranglehold which labour once held over barring blue collar occupations from inward migration, being relaxed. Predictably, as blue collar interests have increasingly been trampled upon, we have began to see the first stirrings of populism in Australia- proof positive of the fact that if you want to protect your country from the far right and the politics of racial division, then the only feasible way of doing so is to protect blue collar interests from the destructive force of the unlimited labour supply neoliberalism so desperately needs to turn the blue collar class into powerless serfs, with no negotiating power.
These may seem like strong words, but it's worth noting that of all the demographic recently surveyed by Pew about immigration, African Americans were the most laudable- they were both the most likely to want government to step-in to help migrants in need, and the most likely to fear that their economic interests will be damaged by labour competition from migrants. They are only partially correct on the second point, because the evidence shows that although their economic interests will be significantly damaged, those who suffer most from further migration are the recently arrived.
The best data on The Labour market effects of immigration comes from the UK and the Migration Observatory at Oxford University. It's a somewhat honest appraisal which shows that higher income workers benefit the most and the lowest paid are the most adversely effected, with at least some negative effects on labour participation rates for the native-born population. But contained within this overview needs to be couched the understanding that whilst some lower to medium income workers benefit somewhat from migration, others find their interests harmed drastically.
Simply put, if you fall into the category of having done well at school, and especially if you have attended university, then immigration has been an economic good for you. Not only will you have benefitted through cheaper goods and services produced domestically, especially in areas like restaurant bills and takeaway food, but if you happen to be a valuable employee, whose skills are in demand, then the cheaper wages of lower skilled support staff like cleaners, and even the halved wages of the construction workers who laid the foundations of the offices you work in, will mean that your employer has greater latitude to reward you.
Even if you are a high school leaver with no higher education and a woman, it is somewhat likely that you will have either experienced a small gain, or are treading water. An employment agency servicing industry with a contract worker database of 200 to 500 blue collar, mostly male, blue collar workers, will need admins to man the phones and do the paperwork, as well as recruitment consultants in sales roles to work with professional managers in their customer base. Both types of roles are likely to be predominantly female, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. The blue collar version of the gig economy is big business, it supports roles in Real Estate, for leasing agents, machinery sales, work for lawyers, accountants, stationary suppliers, IT workers and numerous others. But again, opportunities for some come at the expense of the repeated decimation of blue collar interests.
Central to the divided worldview between the Cosmopolitan Educated Class and Blue Collar Interests is the liberal fallacy that anyone can be educated to do anything, given enough time and resources. It's simply not true, even if for some it feels true for some, given the ease with which they've breezed through life. Once a liberal studies the problem they will propose solutions, none of which work. Let's raise the minimum wage, which ignores the fact that the natural labour rates of most of the blue collar work that is being displaced or wage diluted is mostly well above proposed minimum wage hikes. Let's try economic transfers, otherwise known as redistribution. Again, by the time redistribution has been arranged and targeted towards lower income families, the $10 a week is hardly compensation for the $200 a week lost by a line operator, construction worker or driver.
The simple fact is that if you didn't do well at school, and you don't have the polish and appearance to work service or retail, there is only a limited pool of work within the economy which you can do. To be fair, there are other factors, both offshoring and automation have had incredibly harmful effects on blue collar class interests. But any attempt to shift the blame from immigration to these factors, conveniently ignores the fact that whilst automation and offshoring might have been the things which eliminated the *preferred source* of employment, it's highly likely that its the unlimited supply of blue collar labour from inward migration is the factor which wiped out choices number two, three, four and five- particularly given that 50% of all new economic opportunities in America has been confined to 20 or so major American cities where migrant blue collar labour is both abundant and cheap.
What should concern the educated millennial directly, is that migrant labour is the primary reason why they can't buy a home at a price to which their budget can stretch. It's worst in the UK, where an annual undersupply in the building of replacement housing stock dates back to 1992. Here it's by no means uncommon for local councils in major metropolitan centres like London, to find migrant workers living in sheds with space heaters, or 30 migrant workers living in a three bedroom semi-detached house.
It's not the only problem. The New Frontier of Private Equity is Pricing according to [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/pricing-the-next-frontier-of-value-creation-in-private-equity), for which the translation is higher rents and more expensive housing. And for those neoliberals who would argue that Private Equity helps pension and insurance investment, it's worth noting that the biggest inward investment in Private Equity in the West increasingly comes from Sovereign Wealth Funds, particularly from the Middle East. But however much those on the Left might decry the aggressive movements of the likes of Blackrock into the housing sector, we need to acknowledge that they are only taking advantage of the existing market forces that our governments and our politics have unleashed on an unsuspecting West.
Most politicians seem to think that economics forces operate like the consumer economics they know so well- prefaced on the notion that demand creates supply. In areas like housing this simply isn't the case, given that the scarcity cost increases which come from increased demand tend to be higher than the increases in house prices. Put another way, increased demand in housing squeezes the profit margins on housing even tighter, whilst the only true profit to be rendered comes from land asset speculation, which is hardly speculative at all, given that the local central planners grip on new building land means that building land costs rise ever upwards in a boon for financiers chasing mortgage debt as an asset class, and carpet baggers intent upon inflating prices at the expense of ordinary aspiring home owners.
It's the New Gilded Age with the desperation of economic migrants seeking a better life serving as grist for the mill in an inhumane economic system, not only deflating blue collar wages to the point of economic serfdom, but also increasing housing costs to the point that they eat up a larger and larger share of income. And it's process which cosmopolitans are largely blind to because although they are intimately familiar with some of the effects of this process- lower net incomes relative to their parents and grandparents, and higher housing and rent costs, they lack the economic understanding and discipline to investigate the root causes.
Besides, nobody really wants to believe that the inward influx of blue collar labour is the primary driver of growing economic inequality, and that tighter labour markets could be transformative in resurrecting the American Dream. For a start it would put the lie to the notion that higher income workers are worse off than their parents, in any area other than housing opportunities, when one understands that most of the relative income losses by generation have accrued further down the socio-economic ladder. It would also entail admitting that many wasted money spending it on higher education, because a huge portion of real value creation in the economy occurs through the labours of the blue collar class, whilst many of the jobs which occupy the educated middle classes are largely superfluous and of no real value.
But above all, it would dispel the notion that there is a way out of this emerging dystopia through conventional politics. Yes, there are significant things which might help- a more libertarian approach to zoning and planning laws would be a huge boon for house building, blue collar labour and value creation, but it is unlikely to happen because of entrenched interests. Capital loves the huge returns which can be made by artificial scarcity in building land, and finance loves the greatly inflated mortgages which an undersupply of housing creates. Above all, neoliberalism craves cheap blue collar labour more than anything else.
My dad was a ship's captain in the oil business. He always used to say that if anybody could do his job better than him, they were welcome to it. He did, however, take exception to people willing to the work for considerably less money than him. This used to be a part of the blue collar ethos which everyone understood. Now, this perfectly rational position is routinely mischaracterised as racial animus or xenophobia. Race and politics obscures this simple truth. The problem is only exacerbated by the fact that most proud blue collar men are unlikely to admit even to themselves that they feel threatened when younger foreign men are willing to work for less money than them, with ugly hostility often masking the very real reasons why they feel under threat- because of the ever present fear of being thrown on the scrapheap before their time.
This doesn't mean that immigration should stop. Far from it, most American support legal immigration and Australia proves that a migration system can be designed in such a way that aspiring migrants from around the world get the chance to participate in a vibrant, thriving society. But central to any sane immigration system should be the imperative to protect blue collar male employment. To guard it fiercely as the exclusive domain of native-born kids who don't do well as school. Apart from anything else these precious jobs are in decline as automation continues to eat away at previous blue collar staples of employment. Otherwise we are setting our less fortunate teenage boys on the path towards self-destruction, regardless of whether they happen to be African American, White or Latino.
This is the Achilles heel of the progressive-socialist "squad" in the USA. You can't have open borders (i.e. rampant illegal immigration) and better wages and conditions for the working class. But they don't have to talk about the contradictions in their activist ideologies as long as the media refuses to call them on it and lets them spin any opposition into identity politics. Minimum wage laws as a protection are a joke as the exploiters just transform the undocumented workers into 'independent contractors' if they aren't already paying them under the table. When uber-liberal rich white folks in my town pushed 'sanctuary' laws and declarations, one of the explicit justifications they voiced was they'd lose cheap house-cleaning services if the Brazilian and Cape Verdean women were deported. It was breathtaking honesty and stupidity all at the same time. I tend to agree with the view that in the not-so-long-run the only way out of the decimation of labor (and society) from automation and feudal-style bullshit jobs (hat tip to the late David Graeber) is Universal Basic Income. But what chance we'll ever get there if we're unable to control our borders? A sane immigration policy is sorely needed but what incentive do the Democrats have to compromise? It seems like we're on a runaway train to a very dystopian outcome: high energy costs, high food costs, high transport costs, high medical costs, high rent and property costs, crappy education, and a bottomless pool of cheap labor governed by a self-perpetuating elite lecturing us on the importance of trans rights and DEI while Chicago, Baltimore, etc. burn to the ground. Fuck the dream, can we at least avoid the nightmare?
The problem with minimum wages is they do nothing for the Roofer who would have been earning $29 an hour and is now earning $21. I like the old Bernie line- unlimited migration is a Koch Brothers proposal. I looked into UBI, and am a big Andrew Yang fan- other than the fact that he seemed to fall somewhat under the influence of paid party consultancy class in his New York Mayoral bid.
Having looked into it though I found that a Negative Income Tax as a replacement for welfare was a better idea. It's less expensive, but also targets resources towards the poorest, whilst significantly reducing the disincentives of welfare towards work and fatherhood. It's a fallacy that anyone really votes in their own self-interest- wealthy liberals want government to give and the poorer working class don't want their help (other than meals on wheels, which they seem quite fond of).
In the 2000s Gordon Brown got rid of the lower income tax threshold, it was only worth £640, but the reduction was more than paid for by a rise in threshold further up the income spectrum. New Labour thought that because it helped, rather than hurt, the majority of people, people wouldn't care about the abolishment of a tax saving which helped the worst off. Boy, were they wrong- there was a moral outcry. People may be susceptible to arguments about free riders, but they really hate it when poorer people who work get targeted.
With a baseline income for the poorer, it might be possible to quick start a supplemental entrepreneurial economy. People buying cheap shit in bulk off shopping channels and eBay and then reselling it at a profit at car boot sales and garage sales. People selling their DIY and home repair skills to their neighbours, dog walking businesses and others starting pop-up restaurants in their own homes.
Salvation comes through the small, it's the economies of scale which unleashes man's inhumanity to man and sows distrust between worker and employer. If you work for a small business, you know when your boss is struggling and when they can afford to pay you a bonus. Humanity is found in the simple acts of reciprocity which occur when people are able to look each other in the eye, and arrange voluntary trades in labour or goods which are mutually beneficial, whilst it's very easy to casually discard the needs and hopes of others when you only know them as a name and a number on a spreadsheet.
We are not built for distance in human relations. The worker resents the politician or the billionaire when they haven't met them and haven't seen whether they work hard to achieve, or whether their wealth or power is the product of a clever exploit.
I think people are waking to the fact that woke capitalism is only performing lip service to notions of justice. I had some of my best early traction with essays with woke capitalism in the title. With Raytheon and the CIA joining the party, is it any wonder people are becoming more dubious?
UBI proposals run the gamut from negative income taxes to a truly universal equal payments to everyone, even billionaires (no bureaucracy needed). The latter can be implemented via a universal land tax (I've seen this labelled as "Georgist" taxation) that is designed to ameliorate the gulf between descendants of Mayflower colonialists and newcomers, landlords and renters. It could replace most social supports (welfare, housing, food stamps) other than healthcare and education. Other income, and consumption of non-essential items, could still be taxed.
There are pros and cons to each proposal but there is a tendency to over-romanticize the value of "work" for a variety of historical and cultural reasons that aren't as old or as pre-ordained as people think. Not all work is necessary nor worthwhile. Where the Soviet Union created overtly unnecessary or redundant positions for reasons of ideology, there is a class of work in neo-liberal economies that is essentially feudalism redux. We need to try something new in post-industrial, post-automation, post-AI societies.
If a person is able to live while doing the work of raising their family that's a net benefit to society. So is having more artists who aren't literally starving. So is having less people commuting anywhere. We can't speak of giving anyone a choice to work or not work if they have to work bullshit jobs just to eat. What work would they choose to do if they didn't have to work to have a place to live and food to eat? Maybe they'd care for the elderly, maybe they'd be school crossing guards, maybe they'd ref youth sports, maybe they'd study to be vet techs, maybe they would do f-all, but most people would not sit around doing absolutely nothing. Not even prisoners prefer idleness despite being housed, fed and given books and TV.
We have accepted the twisted logic of societies that pay strangers stipends to foster children who are in foster care because their parents can't feed and clothe them. Our economies are full of places where we're spending more to administer "aid" than the aid that is given. Why? As for what's affordable, I've seen some estimates that the cost of a truly universal UBI in the US is about a quarter of the pentagon's budget. And THAT is the true third rail of politics here, there and everywhere.
I agree with most of what you say other than this: 'There are pros and cons to each proposal but there is a tendency to over-romanticize the value of "work" for a variety of historical and cultural reasons that aren't as old or as pre-ordained as people think.' Of course, there are bullshit jobs and the people who do them often know it, with the net result that it results in a loss of personal meaning and relevancy. But at the same time, cosmopolitans in particular seem to think of some forms of dull, repetitive labour as somehow demeaning, when in actuality these jobs can be the lifeline which makes the difference between profound community damage and a healthy community.
The prime example of this tendency to see certain forms of labour as demeaning was Tyson foods, after the FBI raided one of their premises for migrant workers. For years media had perpetrated the narrative that there were many jobs Americans simply wouldn't do for the wages on offer, yet when the time came to test the theory there were ordinary desperate Americans queueing up around the block for $7 an hour jobs. And meat packing isn't a pleasant job by an stretch of the imagination, not that I have any experience of it- although I have had friends who worked poultry farms for short stints.
Labour is basic need, without which men in particular seem to go into a self-destructive cycle. I take your points about artists and foster care, and certainly agree that there are probably ways in which we could generate more productive types of labour. One example of this relates to childcare. Studies show that childhood development suffers when younger children are placed in day facilities which have a ratio of fewer than one adult per three children, yet at the same it is not a net positive for society if a subsidy for childcare involves one woman who cleans toilets for a living for a low minimum wage effectively hands over her children to another woman earning far more.
Broadly speaking I agreed with the recent child tax credit, but would stipulate that the resources were best deployed towards the preschool age range, where the vast majority of improvement in cognitive outcomes (as well as emotional health and wellbeing in latter life) have been proven. But we really need to understand that we might actually achieve more if we simply cut the working week of lower income woman, and simply paid them to act as playschool assistants, rather than playing someone else more to take care of their kids, sundering much of the bond between mother and child.
The other thing we need to with children is establish a right to play. My brothers wife is a Swedish early learning specialist. It's an inbuilt right within their system. I would hazard the wager, that Sweden hasn't seen anywhere near the 17 to 27 point reduction in developmental IQ which has been a feature in childhood development in countries which fundamentally restricted the ability of younger children to engage in unstructured and unsupervised play (although ideally it's not actually unsupervised, but rather non-interventional). Here is the study on the subject of IQ losses through lockdowns and restrictions: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v1.full.pdf .
Some of the media have actually begun to cotton onto this phenomenon, most notably the Guardian, and to a large extent have incorrectly blamed other factors like stresses on parents during the pandemic. But make no mistake it's the withdrawal of peer group play which is the major factor, there is a well established literature on the positive effects of play on IQ.
But back to labour. One of things I've often thought is that there should be a federal grants program for the establishment of cheap community hub facilities modelled around providing a very low rent system of workshops, and facilities for entrepreneurially inclined citizens to get together to set-up there own low cost start-ups. All the evidence from the world of online retail suggests that there is huge potential for growth in areas like artisanal or crafted goods, like furniture, kitchenware or knives, even clothing.
It would appear that there is a large budget market for cheap goods, there is also a substantial market where people tend to prefer to purchase their goods from actual people rather than faceless corporations, with huge underutilised growth potential. The great thing about these new types of businesses, is that tend to sustain a great deal more labour at higher labour rates, than the volume operators. With small, cheap industrial estates available to every community it might be that the West would see a resurgence of entrepreneurial production in many low employment communities.
'Our economies are full of places where we're spending more to administer "aid" than the aid that is given.'- you won't get any argument from me on this front. The creation of pointless and soulless admin jobs in the public sector in the West has been a double tragedy- because it not only wastes precious taxpayer resources which would be better spent elsewhere, but also wastes the labour. At the same time, we have mental health crisis lines here in the UK, which only operate Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, with the predictable result that police and ambulances are asked to take up the slack and stop young people from jumping off multi-storey carparks, at exactly their busiest times- all because the crisis line wasn't available when the young person needed it.
There is a difference between 'shit jobs' and 'bullshit jobs'. The difference turns on how unnecessary the job is perceived to be by the person actually doing it As someone who DOES have family with direct experience in both meat packing and toilet cleaning, I can agree that those may be shit jobs but the people doing them understand their necessity and they aren't examples of bullshit jobs. People think that low wage blue collars are most likely to be engaged in bullshit jobs but in my experience it is more often miserable 'cosmopolitans', as you put it, that look down on physical labor that tend to hold bullshit jobs. Entire buildings, corporations, government departments, non-profits, think tanks, could disappear and nobody would notice the absence (other than families). I can't do David's book on the topic justice but highly recommend it, the title is "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" and most libraries have it. He taught in London and was as familiar with the UK as the US. The point is not that 'labor' is overvalued its the overvaluing of 'labor for labor's sake' and the belief that any job is worth doing that has us twisted in knots. People do like to work, people find many rewards from labor they see as being necessary or that they enjoy, but only by freeing up work from survival can we move to a place where Maslow's hierarchy isn't just for rich kids in b-schools. Freed of the necessity to work at ANY job, the menial shit work will be paid better and the people will be treated better. Why? Because they can walk away. Freed of mindless office jobs in the private, public, academic and non-profit sectors, many more people may well gravitate to caring work in schools, homes, hospitals, community centers etc. because its a fulfilling life. Calling out and dismantling bullshit work isn't a call to idleness and anti-work, its pointing out that pointlessness can only thrive in an economic system that leads to such perverse outcomes. But here's the big question in all of this? How big a problem is this? Is it 1% of occupations? Or is it 40% if the economy? If, as some suggest, its a much bigger problem than we think, why isn't it being addressed?
'Freed of the necessity to work at ANY job, the menial shit work will be paid better and the people will be treated better. Why? Because they can walk away.'- that's a great argument, mate, I really hadn't thought of it that way.
But I do think that labour is a basic need. The argument is less toxic here in the UK, because we've seen a large portion of the white working class 'devolve' into an underclass. What starts with drug-talking and alcohol use derived from a sense of ennui and purposelessness, within a generation manifests into intergenerational violence, terrible educational outcomes (at one point only 9% of working class white boys were attending university) and imbedded criminality.
Have you heard of Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple)? Here he is in a debate for IQ squared. Apologies for the spoiler, but it's probably the best example of a debating style liable to change minds that I've ever seen. He's concessionary, acknowledging the validity of many of the oppositions points, and at times he is so laid back in his debating style that it seems he isn't even trying to win, but the underlying authenticity of his position wins hearts and minds- it's well worth checking out, purely for the knowledge of how to genuinely win people over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UesrrHVLa0&t=7s .
I do take your point about the negotiating power issue. Perhaps an NIT which was sufficiently generous might accomplish the same thing? Specifically, I'm thinking of Europe's experience with drivers. It only took a relatively small shortfall in driver numbers to create the conditions where the political class were willing to push employers to improve pay and working conditions.
I would suggest that the American experience is an aberration in this regard. It's become such an article of faith within the American elite class that the employer should have the whip hand that it verges on the ideological. I've recently been watching coverage from Breaking Points which suggests the judicial class has gradually been exposed to economic theory to sway their decision-making! So I would suggest there is something deeper rooted in the cultural sense which America needs to come to grips with.
America did a few experiments with NIT back in the seventies. They backed off because the evidence showed that women were leaving their husbands in the pilots (probably only the abusive ones). For men, it did lead to a reduction of total hours worked by a couple of hundred hours per year, but further research showed this was mainly men taking longer between jobs and rejecting bad offers in favour of better ones- which would tend to suggest that NIT offers the same benign benefit you were aiming for with UBI. It also led to a reduction in hours worked for women with young children, which all the evidence on cognitive development would tend to suggest is a good thing.
'Is it 1% of occupations? Or is it 40% if the economy? If, as some suggest, its a much bigger problem than we think, why isn't it being addressed?'- this is one of the problems when COMBINED taxes on the upper middle class exceed certain thresholds. Generally, in a global economy trickledown is bullshit. But when total taxation from income tax, property tax and consumption taxes exceeds 50% it can be disastrous. The reason? Because one wants to encourage the benign trade of money for time between the upper middle and the older (debt-free) middle class and younger blue collar labour.
It's interesting, I was looking for reasons why the Scandinavian countries were able to maintain a thriving restaurant sector when there taxes are so high on the upper third of taxpayers. It turns out most of the Nordic Model countries give a tax rebate on 30% of debt interests on loans (particularly useful for students and mortgage holders). It does contribute to high rates of wealth inequality, but also higher rates of private home ownership (reducing pressure upon and costs of public housing).
But the main benefit it the labour. It adds to the vitality of the restaurant sector, and creates great jobs for gardeners and workers able to trade into the home improvements and repair market. It's a far superior system to America, where treating the building as a tax deductible depreciating product, creates additional incentives for corporations and finance to enter the rentals market.
Most of the workmen I know work for themselves or in small businesses for people they trust. My gardener may not earn quite as much, but he still earns roughly $30 an hour, and makes decent money from better rates for tree surgery and longer hours during the summer.
There are better ways to tax- one of the things which Andrew Yang advocated, but was not widely reported was a Tobin tax. Even at half the rate initially suggested, research suggests it could raise £10 billion in the UK- and it would probably raise more in the US, given the somewhat larger financial sector. And this is before we start suggesting things like a planning uplift tax for property developers, which is how many European countries pay for their better infrastructures (it also creates an incentive for local planning authorities to loosen building permit restrictions)- which could create a housing boom in many areas.
Wow. If people in major political parties, world-wide, were perceptive, they'd be all over this. Or maybe they have already realized it, and are busy working out how to come up with a line on it that the majority of voters will fall for. For the poor voters, alas, as this column acutely observes, "they lack the economic understanding and discipline to investigate the root causes". As economies (and societies overall) become more complex, democracy becomes a less effective way to run it; people can't understand the whole thing, and so they pick leaders based on things like 'too many mean Tweets', or the price of gasoline. The chief goal of most politicians, world-wide (perhaps as ever) is the struggle for power (increasingly, as a goal in itself, not just for what they want to do with it - goals that have become increasingly irrational - 'pregnant men'), only that struggle has now become as Byzantine as the original of the term, or the Russian Communist Party in its heyday. The thing is to come up with a line - no matter how irrelevant to the real issues of the day - that the majority of the voters will fall for. (What was that book in the 60's that talked about the increasing use of the technologies of the advertising world in elections?) And let the Devil take the hindmost. And all the time the increasing pace of technological change leaves people, and societies, struggling harder to keep up - which just feeds into the poorly-understood (by the average citizen) angst that these labor market changes are producing.
Some politicians simply don't understand just how mutually incompatible many of their stated goals are- but there is also an extent to which they've surrendered to the inevitability of special interests running the show- most powerful of all, the power base Jerry Pournelle referred to with his 'Iron Law of Bureaucracy', closely followed by finance: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Politicians are interested in winning, and most of the times they do not look for the intersection of improving peoples lives & winning. They prefer to develop partisans sections of people that whatever the case would vote for them, like a hooligan for a football team, and them focus in giving "some peanuts" to the floating districts.
Sure. But my argument would be that is because they've realised if they have nothing constructive to offer, the best way to get people to vote for them is to demonise the other side, and make them seem like an existential threat.
Constructive??, could you list the last 5 constructive things that came out of the UK parliament? (and i mean constructive & productive, that would solve real problems. not just artificial problems generated by politicians), just 5, lets see what the list is.
Geary you live in UK, just consider a politician supporting applying the NHS of UK to USA, that person would find a lot of barriers due to the interests of different lobbies, they will invest money to distort the message and doing that would be "steeping on many toes" that could impair donations to win the election.
However, fostering partisanship and rivalry/hooliganism (and the circus) that "does not step in any toes" and would be funded by any lobby willing to get the favour back.
That's exactly what I mean about politicians not being constructive- modern politicians are severely limited in the positive impacts they can have, because anything over 50% taxation of total GDP results in economic disruption and stagnation. There predecessors have already nabbed and allocated all of the available money!
This is why I suggest that the only way to meet the needs of the 21st century is to massively reform the administrative state to reduce the huge waste in government, to reallocate public sector labour and the funding in entails. Think about it, they've done universal healthcare, modest redistributions downwards so the most needy have a bare minimum amount to live. They done public pensions for the retired. By the time one adds 2% for defence, education, the courts and prisons, and growing costs like social care for the elderly, the only thing left is the reform of the administrative state.
But they know they are outclassed in this respect. They are the amateurs playing the professional civil service class, who will always be more adept at stopping the politicians from dismantling their personal fiefdoms and power. the only way to change it is to actually change the incentives within the civil service itself, so that only the hatchetmen willing to find efficiencies are able to gain seniority.
The Tories have done OK. They haven't tried to expand public sector employment like their predecessor Gordon Brown. I wasn't particularly fond of austerity at the time, but without it they probably wouldn't have had the latitude to run a furlough scheme which was a carbon copy of the very generous Danish system during Covid. The managed to keep most non-retail businesses from going under during the pandemic, which certainly wasn't true of America or many European countries, which meant workers had jobs to go back to once the pandemic was over.
Above all, the one thing which I will praise the Tories for is that they were able to hold back much of the craziness which so many countries have fallen to in relation to trans kids. Don't get me wrong, trans people exist and they should be shown compassion, but the fact is many societies like Canada or America have been treating simply gender noncomforming kids as though they had gender dysphoria. And this is before we even consider that 6 to 9 out of 10 kids with gender dysphoria normally grow out of it through the process of puberty, going on to live happy lives as gays or lesbians.
Again, don't get me wrong, I don't like the Tories, but then I don't like the singular lack of vision of the political class in general. As a group they tend to fall into the category of giving the people what they think they want, rather than just asking them. It's my view that most would simply want a fundamentally fairer system in which government simply stepped back from trying to run peoples lives, and instead acted as a far more effective referee.
There are also the only political force pushing back against the denigration of Britain's past. Yes, we have our own share of historical horrors just like the Americans, but we were principally responsible for showing that the scientific method could be used to transform the human condition, we were pioneers in ending slavery, introducing universal public education, giving women the vote, ending child labour and a host of other social reforms. Those countries which are democratic, have fair court systems and private property rights owe much to the British example.
Plus, for all of their venality and tendency towards self-advancement the Tories are relative neophytes when it comes to the Culture War. They certainly haven't weaponised it in the same way that the American Right has, instead choosing to emote what they stand for (like the flag, for example) rather than returning hate in kind.
Sure, in some ways it's a weak strategy and doesn't push back enough on harmful things the Left introduces, but at the same it mainly forestalls the climate of hate. So trans kids, furlough, not biting on the Culture War. Defending the more positive aspects of British History and our gentle patriotism. That's four.
The final part would be their role in education, funnily enough (which most wouldn't even consider). Boris Johnson was Mayor of London from 2008 to 2016. And Michael Gove was pivotal in introducing Free Schools and Academies. Both were pivotal in transforming the educational situation in London for the better, and more generally these reforms will have a positive impact in the future nationally.
Distinct from progressive politics, progressive education can be an absolute disaster, although its probably the case that education should be more prevalent from around 13 year old and onwards. But earlier than that the emphasis should be on trying to instil core elements of useable knowledge to long-term memory, because the Cognitive Science proves that working memory is puny, and people simply aren't capable of performing cognitively complex tasks unless they are able to draw upon useable knowledge stored in memory to aid them in their task. It's called Cognitive Load Theory, and the progressive approach operates at the polar opposite to what we know about how the brain learns, dismissing highly beneficial systems like drill as killing creativity.
It shows in the PISA scores. Scotland and Northern Ireland were historically more traditional but have shifted progressive in the past decade. England and Wales were historically more progressive and have shifted more traditional. The former's scores have fallen off a cliff, the latter have shown gradual improvement recently, or a less sharp decline depending upon which subject one looks at.
But London education is the really impressive drastic change. To be fair Labour deserves at least some share of the credit, but the Tories were the main ones which drove the significant improvements in London's educational outcomes.
That's five! My main criticism of all politicians is that they are such cowards. They won't admit for the most part it's all fine tuning and incrementalism for here on in, and they endemically prefer government intervention to effective rule changes, which offer a government-lite approach which effects real change without the major disruption and damage usually caused by government.
But the main problem remains the need to reform government and government systems. We still have legions of civil servants sitting around in offices managing bureaucratic minutiae and checking huge forms they've forced citizens to fill out, when there are massive emerging needs in social care, mental health and illness and plethora of other societal problems. Meanwhile, in the private sector office work has become increasingly obsolete.
Geary you live in UK, just consider a politician supporting applying the NHS of UK to USA. Well, I wouldn't adopt the UK approach for a start, although we were the first, the Swedish probably have the best system at the moment. They managed to find huge efficiencies by tendering areas of their health service out to private suppliers, freeing up substantial sums of money back into their health system for patient treatment.
I imagine an effective American universal healthcare system would probably be run somewhere along the lines of the Australian system which is also incredibly good, where the private sector runs the system in the main, but the public sector commissions it. As you say, the main problem Americans need to confront is the crony capitalism which pervades there healthcare system. It's the worst of both worlds, really.
At least in the UK we have NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) which most countries use to determine which drugs they will use and at what price (although most have their own similar institutions, they lean heavily on the British for what effectively amounts to a global public service).
The single biggest American flaw is that their pharma controls the scientific literature produced which filters down to doctors. It means they routinely commission overpriced third generation drugs of limited improved efficacy which are really just patent renewals. The irony is America pharma's profit margins really aren't that high. They've simply fallen into a hugely expensive process heavy trap, because it's a far less risky bet to renew patent than it is to research new drugs.
It's a hugely wasteful system which is real tragedy for the world, given the might and research power of the American industry. They could be a real positive force the world, if they simply looked at a method of funding which allowed research companies to recoup substantial portions of their capital for research of genuine scientific merit. It doesn't help that most scientists now have to sign what effectively amounts to ideological loyalty pledges with DEI statements. All of Americas institutions are in the process of aligning around the Corporate Left establishment, serving the highly educated class, rather than more compassionately aligned class progressives who want economic justice.
Just systems are really about effective opposition. Sane and sceptical conservatives on the Right, and blue collar labour orientated progressives on the Left. It worked well for decades, but broke down in the aftermath of the Reagan/Thatcher revolution where the Left faced a political wilderness for 20 years if they didn't shift to neoliberalism. Every system needs to be critiqued, even if only from the sidelines, and the absence of decent criticism allowed huge flaws to persist and grow- most notably in the way that the blue collar class, of all races, became increasingly more like economic serfs.
You seem to engage in excess reductionism when analyzing complexity. Contrarily your solutions to complex problems seem weightily nuanced and prone to collapse from ambiguity. Sometimes extreme and harsh measures are taken by nature and physics itself to correct asymmetric misalignments. You dismiss the march to civil war with reflections on "populisms" two main causative factors of historical reference, finance and immigration. I think, in my opinion you are confusing a vast forest with a grove of trees a hundred feet ahead. It's not about left, right, Trump or Biden. It is about intolerable stresses to systems that have structural limits, created by corruption from top to bottom.
The only way to sustain the system now is more corruption. An old system is dying and a new system is already in place. The only lasting source of power is truth. On this earth global air-sea superiority is demonstrated daily, soon the Americans shall be forced to capitulate . Nuclear genocide is not a healable scar. The patient is in morbid self collapse. Psychologically trapped in a past omnipotence.
Maybe that was the point of inculcating the secrets of physics. To get the target to hit itself in the head with a hammer. The Americans bought Manhattan for 25$. The American's opponent bought their Manhattan Project from them for two bombs.
With thirty trillion in debt, sixty million decapitated and dismembered in the womb, and a nation defeated in every war for a hundred years, it translates to, the American experiment failed. They seek to relitigate the loss of half of Europe in WW2, but the enemy was ready, waiting, clinging to truth.
The forces of nature and physics can not be corrupted. Better to return this experiment to nothing than allow the creation of a barbaric abomination. The hierarchy of predation is an infinite progression. When a system grows weak its predators arrive. A termite mound loses a wall to heat decay, the warrior ants receive the chemical signal and formations of attack are assembled. Truth is the only cure and the humility of understanding that ALMIGHTY GOD CREATOR is here with trillions of warships. Each being processed out according to their allegiance to truth as cause and effect management.
I've seen this sequence many times, termites and warrior ants are more interesting match-ups.
In closing I think your a sincere striver for truth trying to fashion well rounded solutions. My point is that we are beyond that point and the opponent has the earth and populace locked in zugzwang.
Every move leads to defeat . I appreciate your opinions and reasoning, but we differ on estimates of the orders of magnitude of malfunctions and decay.
"To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence. Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." So said General Sun Tzu around 500 BC.
109. Jesus said, "The (Father's) kingdom is like a person who had a treasure hidden in his field but did not know it. And [when] he died he left it to his [son]. The son [did] not know about it either. He took over the field and sold it. The buyer went plowing, [discovered] the treasure, and began to lend money
I share some of your pessimism, but not all of it- I agree that globally we stand on the precipice, and find ourselves in a time where the supply of strong and wise men is at its lowest ebb, but I don't necessarily agree that the delusional decay of nihilism will prevail. I believe that we are fast approaching a dark time in the next six months to a year, where people will starve in the developing world and chaos shall reign for the poor- with even the richer countries in Europe forced to eat the humility of their most vulnerable citizens and elderly exposed to the fallout caused by arrogant leaders, learning to their cost that so many of their most precious beliefs were mistaken and ill-considered.
They say God Moves in a Mysterious Way- perhaps this is his way of delivering signs to those who can see them, a warning to proud and vain men to reconsider their hubris. I doubt they will listen or learn from their mistakes, but I doubt that it will be his last lesson. My God is filled with infinite patience and mercy, like a father who only wants the best for his children, but is also willing to deliver the occasional stern lesson.
What could be more basic in the modern age than delivering cheap and abundant energy, or creating cheap food aplenty for the world? But our leaders don't count the cost of raising prices for their citizens in pursuit of their ideological beliefs. Here's a secret meaning for those with the will to see it- what better example is there of beating swords to ploughshares than focusing nuclear into supplying the world with energy instead of creating near biblical weapons of destruction? And whilst we have courted war in Ukraine, our own pride has caused us to interfere with basic farming practices used to feed the world's poor- in the Netherlands, Ireland and now Canada- it seems as though having unleashed War, we what to tempt Famine from his man-made jail, inviting his brother Pestilence along for the ride.
Troubles are already brewing in North Africa again, and its sure to spread to the Middle East. But consider optimism. For all the likelihood that our deranged leaders will never accept responsibility for what is about to happen, their sickening desire to save their own political sins will surely make them work behind the scenes to quietly erase the evidence and make sure it doesn't happen again- slowly retracting the folly of their ignorant ideas about farming, energy, ordinary people and everything else.
Do you want to know the really astounding thing? I believe they've drunk their ow Kool Aid, through the selection bias of being able to choose their own experts which cater to their own illusions. Had they bothered to read the economics section of the IPCC summaries (by far the most rational and accounting for human adaptability) for themselves they would know that by 2100 the world only needs to spend 4.3% of global GDP a year, in a world which was going to be 600% to 1200% wealthier. I say was- because it's become increasingly apparent that although climate change has only an astronomical chance of ending our current civilization, the 'solution' might bring all our material progress crashing down around our ears. As clear a case of the medicine being worse than the disease as I've ever seen.
On Russia, I predict there will be negotiated settlement hoped for by February 24th (the politicians won't be able to ignore the symbolism), but given general government ineptitude won't be delivered until around a month later. The West will tell itself that it is doing it because of the suffering unleashed on the world's poor, but really it will be because they won't like the taste of losing their creature comforts. For America, perhaps a little less worse off than the disaster in Europe (Germany, Italy and the Southern European countries in particular), pride will be salved in the notion that it's all about preserving the strength and integrity of NATO.
Russia will make major gains in the East of the Ukraine- some, but not all of the Russian majority areas. Ukraine will remain independent in the West, but prevented by treaty from joining NATO and the EU. Putin will have accomplished his goal of humbling the West. Meanwhile, although tensions will continue to escalate in the run-up to the midterms, after the elections, the situation will deescalate afterwards. There will be backroom deals aimed at pushing Taiwan into the long grass for the next decade, beyond the opportunity window (the 421 problem in China, plus their financial woes) will mean that America will agree to stop the diversification of manufacturing into the rest of SE Asia, whilst simultaneously pursuing a strategy of reshoring- with perhaps as many as 200,000 jobs reshored in strategically important areas.
This may seem a mad prediction, but one has to consider how bad it will be in the coming months. I don't know whether Jordan Peterson is to your tastes, but this particular interview caught my attention. The guest echoes a lot of my own research on the subject:
I share your concerns about the corruption and general health of the West. But where I do have hope is in the growth of independent media and the people's ability to demand change. There has been a literal press blackout in Europe about the Dutch farmers, but I have been much heartened to discover that amongst workmen, gardeners, shopkeepers and even office workers, most have discovered for themselves exactly what is going and are not happy. Most of the insidious culture wars crap about decolonising our museums, libraries, art galleries and historic estates sails right over people's heads- but when ordinary people are harmed by mad government policies, even if it is in another country, other ordinary people sit-up and take notice. I'm just a little annoyed that most prefer to watch a podcast about it, rather than read an article or essay!
Zugzwang- great word! I didn't know it- I'm mostly self-taught with chess.
Very good essay and i fully agree with your points
however
ummmmmmm, lets look at it from a different angle and not just looking to UK,
which you have described very well and how it affects all the workers (not the elites but yes all the workers, if you think it only affects the unskilled or the medium skilled, then i would ask you "what is the barrier of entry not to be affected" (spoiler: having enough resources to send your children to the elite colleges)
coming to my question
from where it comes that quantity of people??
I mean, see the birth rate in Europe, and see the birth rate in the countries "exporting people", Europeans adapted the number of children to the ones they can support and/or are compatible with their life style/means.
OK that adapting takes time, but we have been seeing this for decades. If it was to change it had time to do so, and has no expectations to finish, who is supporting "people overproduction" in certain countries that then are "exported to Europe", and helped "by these non-for-profit organizations ......".
So first there was a health revolution, then an agricultural revolution, people moved to the city followed by industrial revolution, then war then here we are. See that from my very rough summary initial the children were "the retirement scheme of the parents" and today that we have other retirement schemes we "produce less children". What about the countries currently producing? why they continue doing so at these rates?
At the risk of being described as conspiracy theorist
Can it be that we want to replace Europeans with other people? people that is ready to "postpone consumption" (aka saving) with people used to "live by the day" (aka not saving just make by) because eventually that makes them more dependent?
Same as some theories attribute to evolution the female behavior on mate selection, maybe the different approach between saving Vs live-by-day can be applied. On a book that i recommended you "Tragedy and hope" there is a paragraph about the replacement of Europeans with Africans, and it is based in that analysis without being offensive to any, just a matter of human evolution and human adaptation to the environment.
I have to say that "tragedy & hope" was published in 1966, so it cannot be linked to any current narrative of hate speech, racism, or anything of the sort. By the way, the book can be downloaded for free on http://www.carrollquigley.net/books.htm, it is over 1000 pages if i have the time i would try to find the paragraph for you.
There are three necessary factors which radically reduce population growth to the point that population replacement within a country collapses. The first is family planning and birth control. The second is education. But the third factor, which most liberals neglect, is the ability to generate saleable surpluses through labour, and the economic opportunity it brings.
This last bit is the crux. There are many reasons why Africa failed to develop as quickly as the rest of the world. In the immediate post-colonial period they fluctuated between Socialism and Keynesianism, which amounted to zero economic growth. Where they kept their colonial institutions and enjoyed better economic growth as a result, they copied the West's government systems with economic lethargy being the result, suggesting that many of the problems with 'late-stage' capitalism are actually a problem of 'late-stage' government, with its regulatory ability to stifle small and medium enterprise in favour of large corporate monoliths.
Agricultural protectionism and subsidy both in Europe and the US, prevented them from competing fully in the vital agricultural sector, which is hugely important for the initial stages of transition to wealthy post-industrial society, but there was also an extent to which the hugely transformational green revolution technology which greatly aided the West's rising affluence is less applicable in Africa, due to issues like regional and local soil differences.
Things are changing in Africa, as more countries are participating more in the global economy and generating economic surpluses, but it is a slow process and not happening quickly enough for all to escape the Malthusian trap which locks in poverty. But there is a final factor. Religion, regardless of which particular one, one looks at. Religion equals more kids per family, to the extent that American religious conservatives are outbreeding secular liberals by a degree of 0.6 children per family.
Religion is big in Africa, and as such it's a cultural factor which is slowing to speed at which population growth is reducing. Ironically, it's also about optimism. Africa contains some of the highest optimism countries in the world, whilst the West tops the charts for pessimism, which in many ways is a luxury belief. We actually have a growing number of young people who are convinced it's a good idea to sterilise themselves, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Most have been fed a diet of lies about the seriousness of climate change. Don't get me wrong- it's a serious problem- but in no IPCC scenario is climate change an existential threat or something which could collapse civilisation. The only thing which could achieve the latter is the response to climate change- if it creates an appetite for self-inflicted damage. The IPCC's own figures show that by 2100 climate change will require 4.3% of the global economies resources allocated towards mitigation, but this is set against a backdrop where most economists agree the global economic will be 600% to 1200% wealthier- provided we don't do something catastrophic to fuck it all up!
Yes, some of the effects of climate change will be tragic- habitat loss of endangered species representing a crime against future generation, in the legacy of wonder we've robbed them of, but it's worth noting that since the beginning of the agricultural age we have wiped out 250,00 major species which we know of, many in the large vertebrate class- not the obscure rare beetles and minor variants of butterflies touted in fictions of mass extinctions.
As I said it's tragic, and in many ways a crime- but in many ways it's also business as usual and hopefully something we will grow out as the world grows wealthier (which is a proven phenomenon).
Ironically, we may finally have the answer to Fermi's Paradox. If we are the standard model and the systems I have mentioned are rooted in biology, it may be the case that as species develops technologically, the lack of an existential struggle to survive and procreate robs them of their fertility. Maybe there are plenty of advanced civilisations out there, but they have no need to expand and colonise worlds because their own planets are now mostly empty, because of the lack of teeming hordes of people caused by the absence of the struggle to survive...
Regarding climate change and other stuff about "green energy", i would recommend a book called "Physics for future presidents", it is very interesting. The only chapter i do not agree with is the identifying as buckling the collapse of the WTC towers, as an engineer I know that the models of buckling collapse are substantially different, but the rest of the book is OK and from a technical perspective it makes sense.
I read a Twitter comment recently which stated that New Zealand's green energy sector was at 80% of peak capacity, but two-thirds of their energy still comes from fossil fuels. We need more base load energy, and barring big hydro and geothermal, nuclear is the only option. I like the Michael Shellenberger quote- by 2025 Germany will have spent $580 billion on green energy to make their energy twice as expensive and ten times more polluting.
You will laugh. I recently got pulled down the rabbit hole of believing the press releases from First Light Fusion in Oxford. They've developed a novel approach based upon the pistol shrimp. I have an energy expert in one of the forums I frequent, and he joked and told me that commercial fusion has been ten years away for as long as he can remember, which is to say decades. It does still look a little promising, even if I have no idea whether the 'lithium shower' they propose has any realistic chance of working to handle the substantial amounts of energy produced...
By the way Geary, the radio said today that some Islamic groups have protested in UK for a film and they managed that the film would not be shown due to the fear and the lack of action from authorities. That is bad, very bad, the state has "the monopoly of the force", by allowing this to happen we are opening the door to have any activity censored/banned by an aggressive minority.
In an environment without enforcement of the law, the group the gains the power is the more aggressive ruthless minority. In UK, in France, in Germany and in nearly all Europe for instance we are seeing that "weak" appeasing "kind hearted" governments prefer to silence and appease than apply/enforce the laws, in fact they only apply the law to the people that would accept it without an aggressive protests (aka the citizens of that country that have been educated in that culture).
Hopefully we solve this situations because the next one would be compulsory burkini to swim in Torquay beach
Yep, completely agree. The film is called 'Lady of Heaven' and there are trailers on YouTube. It's basically a story from the Shia, rather than Sunni, perspective. They've basically decided to copy the woke, in weaponising 'offense' as a political tool. I think it was Nassim Nicholas Taleb who first highlighted the problem. There is an article on Medium (I think) which details the Dictatorship of the Small Minority, but I don't want to link it because I don't want to burn one of my free articles for the month:) It's easy to find a nice concise article.
bem colocado e sintetiza a situação de muitas sociedades essa frase é a mestra "Além de qualquer outra coisa, esses empregos preciosos estão em declínio, pois a automação continua a corroer os grampos de emprego anteriores. Caso contrário, estamos colocando nossos adolescentes menos afortunados no caminho da autodestruição, independentemente de serem afro-americanos, brancos ou latinos".
Yep, we need to get used to the concept that our better paid blue collar work is our most precious economic resource, and should be restricted to the Native-born. Otherwise, we are dooming the 50% of kids who don't do well at school to an economic system where they can almost never succeed (barring the occasional lucky and incredibly hardworking entrepreneur). One can still run high rates of immigration, as the more successful Australian period shows- but the immigration system needs to put protecting blue collar labour from unlimited labour supply at its heart.
Populism is caused by fears of economic scarcity within the blue collar class, especially blue collar men. There are other reasons- most notably the fact that cosmopolitans tend to think that there lack of cultural ingroup is a matter of education and experience, when its actually the by-product of an incredibly fortunate and privileged (in the economic sense) childhood, and is largely indelibly ingrained.
But the economic scarcity caused by neoliberalism (and similar systems in the past) is what causes populism. What the neoliberal planners of the nineties didn't realise is that they were entering into a Faustian bargain, and the Devil is calling the debt due. They sowed the seeds of chaos without even realising it.
A critical question for countries with relatively high wages: In a world with global and highly-efficient transportation and communications…and billions of people who are accustomed to low wages…is it possible for a country such as the United States to maintain its accustomed high standards of living for the large majority of its people?…and, if so, what are the key policy elements required to do this?
Good essay. The only thing I would quibble with is the perceived lack of productivity increases. It's something which economists deliberately don't look at that much, although I have in the past managed to find a few source materials from the likes of the Department of Labor. Productivity increases have continued to accrue in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, but this is offset by the shift from tradeables to service sector.
As you will no doubt know, service sector jobs are quite resistant to productivity increases and scalability, with a large part of reason being that many involve human contact. Of course, this is changing somewhat with improvements in technology. The reason why most economists don't want to study it is because they know that most service sector work is inherently lower value than even medium value tradeables- so in effect, the West is swapping out work which has higher value for lower value work, and this puts the lie to neoliberalism and globalisation. Indeed, the only place where I could find an economist who flat out stated it, was in an Opinion piece for the Japan Times.
It's worth noting now that China is in the process of offshoring itself, copying the West by making Africa China's China, they have learned from our mistakes. They are swapping out all the lower value manufacturing, whilst keeping the medium and high valuable tradeables for themselves. It seems that they understand the multiplier effect, and the self-feeding ecosystem of capitalism which comes from well-paid labour far better than we did, and are a lot more dubious of the blank slatist promise that they can simply educate their workforce into high paid work in marketing and finance, when such activities surely have an upper sustainable limit relative to the real economy.
One of the things to be wary of when looking at the more disingenuous sources (like FRED) on manufacturing output vs. hours worked is that they automatically adjust real value against inflation, not taking into account the fact that until quite recently most inflation accrued in very particular areas, all of which were most heavily influenced by the hand of government intervention- most notably higher education, housing and medical costs.
Here is one of the better sources on American manufacturing output and employment:
There are two factors which make America productivity look sluggish for those who wish to make it appear as though there have been no gains. The first, as previously mentioned, is the depreciation downwards for inflation- when most inflation until recently has come from purely government influenced areas of the economy. The second is the inherent sluggishness of the service sector in terms of productivity.
To give you a good ideas of just how profound the latter effect can be, one only has to look at the UKs productivity figures. At face value it would appear that we are one day a week less productive than many European countries. It's a criticism which is not without merit in many ways. For one thing we are far more likely to adhere to pointless EU regulations, whilst others simply ignore them. For another, the cheap labour from Europe was an argument against capital expenditure to eliminate labour for the longest time, but since Brexit this has been changing somewhat.
But for the most part, the main reason for our apparently slothful productivity figures- one day a week less productive than many other European countries- is the sheer size of our service sector. For a long time, the UK was by far the largest source of new jobs in the EU. Indeed this was one of the reasons why EU migration into the UK was so high for so long. It's just a pity that most of the jobs were crap jobs in the service sector. The French were entirely correct when they christened the UK economy a 'Strange Paradise'.
The answer, as I've stated many times before, is more libertarian values in planning laws and zoning. In the medium to late period of China's Economic Miracle a large part of their growth figures and economic enrichment was due to creating value through housing growth. To be sure, they built cities where nobody wanted to live and their government dangerously overextended itself in terms of an insane level of infrastructure spend, but they managed to build enough housing where people wanted it, long after their growth figures should have shrunk to more stagnant levels.
The UK and America in particular have a huge amount of pent-up demand for housing, with the income levels to sustain housing growth for twenty years- although admittedly in America this would probably entail inserting a new, more modest rung in the housing ladder for first-time buyers, in order to protect the house values of existing homeowners. Housing is a great way to create value- it's just a shame that at the moment it is so under-utilised.
“ Yes, there are significant things which might help- a more libertarian approach to zoning and planning laws would be a huge boon for house building, blue collar labour and value creation, but it is unlikely to happen because of entrenched interests. Capital loves the huge returns which can be made by artificial scarcity in building land, and finance loves the greatly inflated mortgages which an undersupply of housing creates.”
You anticipated my thoughts entirely!
I think the populist revolt is more about the perception that “the immigrants are taking our jobs” than the reality. I’d point out that immigration also increases the number of consumers and the size of the market in which you can trade your labor/time/goods/services etc.
But obviously, we need to fix our immigration system. We have a hiring gap/shortage right now and falling fertility rates so if anything, we should be increasing immigration not decreasing. But I have no problem targeting the system at people who have the skills to fill the gaps in our workforce rather than those who don’t. I used to work with a bunch of PhD students on visas from India and China. Those are the guys I wish could stay in America because they were smart and they worked harder than most kids I knew (including me) and they would have been exactly the kinds of citizens who would add value to the American workforce.
The Australian system was 'market dominant' for the longest time- this meant that it was specifically focused upon recruiting people from around the world, that the country desperately needed. Unfortunately, no advanced economy has managed to produce enough people in the highly cognitive band, with the technical skills to match, for the simple reason that many of the highly cognitive are drawn to things like culture, the Arts, media, and professions for which one doesn't really need to be highly cognitive- like the Law.
At the same time there are plenty of other jobs for migrants, but the whole point of blue collar protections is to prevent certain sectors of the economy getting labour cheap. Part of societal procedural fairness is ensuring that around 90% of the workforce has a chance of enjoying a modestly good life, provided they are willing to work hard and choose the right occupations which society needs. Many would argue that this policy would be inflationary, but if you've even worked in a business which produced physical goods, then you will know that a larger portion of total unit cost comes from useless bureaucracy and the response to regulatory frameworks than direct fabrications labour costs and materials.
We've created a system which still churns out superfluous jobs for the reasonably well-educated kids of the middle classes (most of which are now long since obsolete), whilst simultaneously creating a culture where the professional management class gets offended if blue collar workers earn good money on piece rates, or on a construction site.
“ if you've even worked in a business which produced physical goods, then you will know that a larger portion of total unit cost comes from useless bureaucracy and the response to regulatory frameworks than direct fabrications labour costs and materials.”
Haha. Sounds about right. I also point out that some of the trade jobs are very difficult to automate. A lot of bankers and secretaries will be out of business before plumbers. We’d have to have independent robots capable of going house to house to replace plumbers - and they earn very good money usually. I think one of the plumbers in my hometown had multiple homes that he’d paid off completely and maybe a boat.
The same thing holds true of most construction jobs. Yes, there are nailguns. Yes, plasterboards make it far easier to construct interior walls, but ultimately there are only so many efficiencies to be found on a building site. That being said, I have heard that it is possible to buy a 3D printed house which is £60K, including the labour...
A good friend of mine got a college degree but went back to work for his dad who’s a contractor and he’s done that ever since. He makes decent money and will probably keep it up until his dad retires. Another guy I know from high school didn’t go to college, but worked construction for a while, got his contractors license and at 24 was running a profitable one-man contracting firm. It can be good work and there’s always a need for it.
This is the Achilles heel of the progressive-socialist "squad" in the USA. You can't have open borders (i.e. rampant illegal immigration) and better wages and conditions for the working class. But they don't have to talk about the contradictions in their activist ideologies as long as the media refuses to call them on it and lets them spin any opposition into identity politics. Minimum wage laws as a protection are a joke as the exploiters just transform the undocumented workers into 'independent contractors' if they aren't already paying them under the table. When uber-liberal rich white folks in my town pushed 'sanctuary' laws and declarations, one of the explicit justifications they voiced was they'd lose cheap house-cleaning services if the Brazilian and Cape Verdean women were deported. It was breathtaking honesty and stupidity all at the same time. I tend to agree with the view that in the not-so-long-run the only way out of the decimation of labor (and society) from automation and feudal-style bullshit jobs (hat tip to the late David Graeber) is Universal Basic Income. But what chance we'll ever get there if we're unable to control our borders? A sane immigration policy is sorely needed but what incentive do the Democrats have to compromise? It seems like we're on a runaway train to a very dystopian outcome: high energy costs, high food costs, high transport costs, high medical costs, high rent and property costs, crappy education, and a bottomless pool of cheap labor governed by a self-perpetuating elite lecturing us on the importance of trans rights and DEI while Chicago, Baltimore, etc. burn to the ground. Fuck the dream, can we at least avoid the nightmare?
The problem with minimum wages is they do nothing for the Roofer who would have been earning $29 an hour and is now earning $21. I like the old Bernie line- unlimited migration is a Koch Brothers proposal. I looked into UBI, and am a big Andrew Yang fan- other than the fact that he seemed to fall somewhat under the influence of paid party consultancy class in his New York Mayoral bid.
Having looked into it though I found that a Negative Income Tax as a replacement for welfare was a better idea. It's less expensive, but also targets resources towards the poorest, whilst significantly reducing the disincentives of welfare towards work and fatherhood. It's a fallacy that anyone really votes in their own self-interest- wealthy liberals want government to give and the poorer working class don't want their help (other than meals on wheels, which they seem quite fond of).
In the 2000s Gordon Brown got rid of the lower income tax threshold, it was only worth £640, but the reduction was more than paid for by a rise in threshold further up the income spectrum. New Labour thought that because it helped, rather than hurt, the majority of people, people wouldn't care about the abolishment of a tax saving which helped the worst off. Boy, were they wrong- there was a moral outcry. People may be susceptible to arguments about free riders, but they really hate it when poorer people who work get targeted.
With a baseline income for the poorer, it might be possible to quick start a supplemental entrepreneurial economy. People buying cheap shit in bulk off shopping channels and eBay and then reselling it at a profit at car boot sales and garage sales. People selling their DIY and home repair skills to their neighbours, dog walking businesses and others starting pop-up restaurants in their own homes.
Salvation comes through the small, it's the economies of scale which unleashes man's inhumanity to man and sows distrust between worker and employer. If you work for a small business, you know when your boss is struggling and when they can afford to pay you a bonus. Humanity is found in the simple acts of reciprocity which occur when people are able to look each other in the eye, and arrange voluntary trades in labour or goods which are mutually beneficial, whilst it's very easy to casually discard the needs and hopes of others when you only know them as a name and a number on a spreadsheet.
We are not built for distance in human relations. The worker resents the politician or the billionaire when they haven't met them and haven't seen whether they work hard to achieve, or whether their wealth or power is the product of a clever exploit.
I think people are waking to the fact that woke capitalism is only performing lip service to notions of justice. I had some of my best early traction with essays with woke capitalism in the title. With Raytheon and the CIA joining the party, is it any wonder people are becoming more dubious?
UBI proposals run the gamut from negative income taxes to a truly universal equal payments to everyone, even billionaires (no bureaucracy needed). The latter can be implemented via a universal land tax (I've seen this labelled as "Georgist" taxation) that is designed to ameliorate the gulf between descendants of Mayflower colonialists and newcomers, landlords and renters. It could replace most social supports (welfare, housing, food stamps) other than healthcare and education. Other income, and consumption of non-essential items, could still be taxed.
There are pros and cons to each proposal but there is a tendency to over-romanticize the value of "work" for a variety of historical and cultural reasons that aren't as old or as pre-ordained as people think. Not all work is necessary nor worthwhile. Where the Soviet Union created overtly unnecessary or redundant positions for reasons of ideology, there is a class of work in neo-liberal economies that is essentially feudalism redux. We need to try something new in post-industrial, post-automation, post-AI societies.
If a person is able to live while doing the work of raising their family that's a net benefit to society. So is having more artists who aren't literally starving. So is having less people commuting anywhere. We can't speak of giving anyone a choice to work or not work if they have to work bullshit jobs just to eat. What work would they choose to do if they didn't have to work to have a place to live and food to eat? Maybe they'd care for the elderly, maybe they'd be school crossing guards, maybe they'd ref youth sports, maybe they'd study to be vet techs, maybe they would do f-all, but most people would not sit around doing absolutely nothing. Not even prisoners prefer idleness despite being housed, fed and given books and TV.
We have accepted the twisted logic of societies that pay strangers stipends to foster children who are in foster care because their parents can't feed and clothe them. Our economies are full of places where we're spending more to administer "aid" than the aid that is given. Why? As for what's affordable, I've seen some estimates that the cost of a truly universal UBI in the US is about a quarter of the pentagon's budget. And THAT is the true third rail of politics here, there and everywhere.
I agree with most of what you say other than this: 'There are pros and cons to each proposal but there is a tendency to over-romanticize the value of "work" for a variety of historical and cultural reasons that aren't as old or as pre-ordained as people think.' Of course, there are bullshit jobs and the people who do them often know it, with the net result that it results in a loss of personal meaning and relevancy. But at the same time, cosmopolitans in particular seem to think of some forms of dull, repetitive labour as somehow demeaning, when in actuality these jobs can be the lifeline which makes the difference between profound community damage and a healthy community.
The prime example of this tendency to see certain forms of labour as demeaning was Tyson foods, after the FBI raided one of their premises for migrant workers. For years media had perpetrated the narrative that there were many jobs Americans simply wouldn't do for the wages on offer, yet when the time came to test the theory there were ordinary desperate Americans queueing up around the block for $7 an hour jobs. And meat packing isn't a pleasant job by an stretch of the imagination, not that I have any experience of it- although I have had friends who worked poultry farms for short stints.
Labour is basic need, without which men in particular seem to go into a self-destructive cycle. I take your points about artists and foster care, and certainly agree that there are probably ways in which we could generate more productive types of labour. One example of this relates to childcare. Studies show that childhood development suffers when younger children are placed in day facilities which have a ratio of fewer than one adult per three children, yet at the same it is not a net positive for society if a subsidy for childcare involves one woman who cleans toilets for a living for a low minimum wage effectively hands over her children to another woman earning far more.
Broadly speaking I agreed with the recent child tax credit, but would stipulate that the resources were best deployed towards the preschool age range, where the vast majority of improvement in cognitive outcomes (as well as emotional health and wellbeing in latter life) have been proven. But we really need to understand that we might actually achieve more if we simply cut the working week of lower income woman, and simply paid them to act as playschool assistants, rather than playing someone else more to take care of their kids, sundering much of the bond between mother and child.
The other thing we need to with children is establish a right to play. My brothers wife is a Swedish early learning specialist. It's an inbuilt right within their system. I would hazard the wager, that Sweden hasn't seen anywhere near the 17 to 27 point reduction in developmental IQ which has been a feature in childhood development in countries which fundamentally restricted the ability of younger children to engage in unstructured and unsupervised play (although ideally it's not actually unsupervised, but rather non-interventional). Here is the study on the subject of IQ losses through lockdowns and restrictions: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v1.full.pdf .
Some of the media have actually begun to cotton onto this phenomenon, most notably the Guardian, and to a large extent have incorrectly blamed other factors like stresses on parents during the pandemic. But make no mistake it's the withdrawal of peer group play which is the major factor, there is a well established literature on the positive effects of play on IQ.
But back to labour. One of things I've often thought is that there should be a federal grants program for the establishment of cheap community hub facilities modelled around providing a very low rent system of workshops, and facilities for entrepreneurially inclined citizens to get together to set-up there own low cost start-ups. All the evidence from the world of online retail suggests that there is huge potential for growth in areas like artisanal or crafted goods, like furniture, kitchenware or knives, even clothing.
It would appear that there is a large budget market for cheap goods, there is also a substantial market where people tend to prefer to purchase their goods from actual people rather than faceless corporations, with huge underutilised growth potential. The great thing about these new types of businesses, is that tend to sustain a great deal more labour at higher labour rates, than the volume operators. With small, cheap industrial estates available to every community it might be that the West would see a resurgence of entrepreneurial production in many low employment communities.
'Our economies are full of places where we're spending more to administer "aid" than the aid that is given.'- you won't get any argument from me on this front. The creation of pointless and soulless admin jobs in the public sector in the West has been a double tragedy- because it not only wastes precious taxpayer resources which would be better spent elsewhere, but also wastes the labour. At the same time, we have mental health crisis lines here in the UK, which only operate Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, with the predictable result that police and ambulances are asked to take up the slack and stop young people from jumping off multi-storey carparks, at exactly their busiest times- all because the crisis line wasn't available when the young person needed it.
Here is an analysis of UBI versus a negative income tax. It's a bit stingy to my mind, and doesn't take account of the fact that the West could afford to be substantially more generous, given that a shift to NIT would remove huge admin costs and remove the disincentive to work, that most people in the welfare trap find themselves- and perhaps as many as two-third of people who are currently purely welfare-based would probably adopt of model of partial work, partial subsidy. https://www.niskanencenter.org/universal-basic-income-is-just-a-negative-income-tax-with-a-leaky-bucket/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CUniversal%20Basic%20Income%E2%80%9D%20is%20Just,Tax%20with%20a%20Leaky%20Bucket&text=The%20idea%20of%20Universal%20Basic,they%20earn%20on%20their%20own.
There is a difference between 'shit jobs' and 'bullshit jobs'. The difference turns on how unnecessary the job is perceived to be by the person actually doing it As someone who DOES have family with direct experience in both meat packing and toilet cleaning, I can agree that those may be shit jobs but the people doing them understand their necessity and they aren't examples of bullshit jobs. People think that low wage blue collars are most likely to be engaged in bullshit jobs but in my experience it is more often miserable 'cosmopolitans', as you put it, that look down on physical labor that tend to hold bullshit jobs. Entire buildings, corporations, government departments, non-profits, think tanks, could disappear and nobody would notice the absence (other than families). I can't do David's book on the topic justice but highly recommend it, the title is "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" and most libraries have it. He taught in London and was as familiar with the UK as the US. The point is not that 'labor' is overvalued its the overvaluing of 'labor for labor's sake' and the belief that any job is worth doing that has us twisted in knots. People do like to work, people find many rewards from labor they see as being necessary or that they enjoy, but only by freeing up work from survival can we move to a place where Maslow's hierarchy isn't just for rich kids in b-schools. Freed of the necessity to work at ANY job, the menial shit work will be paid better and the people will be treated better. Why? Because they can walk away. Freed of mindless office jobs in the private, public, academic and non-profit sectors, many more people may well gravitate to caring work in schools, homes, hospitals, community centers etc. because its a fulfilling life. Calling out and dismantling bullshit work isn't a call to idleness and anti-work, its pointing out that pointlessness can only thrive in an economic system that leads to such perverse outcomes. But here's the big question in all of this? How big a problem is this? Is it 1% of occupations? Or is it 40% if the economy? If, as some suggest, its a much bigger problem than we think, why isn't it being addressed?
'Freed of the necessity to work at ANY job, the menial shit work will be paid better and the people will be treated better. Why? Because they can walk away.'- that's a great argument, mate, I really hadn't thought of it that way.
But I do think that labour is a basic need. The argument is less toxic here in the UK, because we've seen a large portion of the white working class 'devolve' into an underclass. What starts with drug-talking and alcohol use derived from a sense of ennui and purposelessness, within a generation manifests into intergenerational violence, terrible educational outcomes (at one point only 9% of working class white boys were attending university) and imbedded criminality.
Have you heard of Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple)? Here he is in a debate for IQ squared. Apologies for the spoiler, but it's probably the best example of a debating style liable to change minds that I've ever seen. He's concessionary, acknowledging the validity of many of the oppositions points, and at times he is so laid back in his debating style that it seems he isn't even trying to win, but the underlying authenticity of his position wins hearts and minds- it's well worth checking out, purely for the knowledge of how to genuinely win people over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UesrrHVLa0&t=7s .
I do take your point about the negotiating power issue. Perhaps an NIT which was sufficiently generous might accomplish the same thing? Specifically, I'm thinking of Europe's experience with drivers. It only took a relatively small shortfall in driver numbers to create the conditions where the political class were willing to push employers to improve pay and working conditions.
I would suggest that the American experience is an aberration in this regard. It's become such an article of faith within the American elite class that the employer should have the whip hand that it verges on the ideological. I've recently been watching coverage from Breaking Points which suggests the judicial class has gradually been exposed to economic theory to sway their decision-making! So I would suggest there is something deeper rooted in the cultural sense which America needs to come to grips with.
America did a few experiments with NIT back in the seventies. They backed off because the evidence showed that women were leaving their husbands in the pilots (probably only the abusive ones). For men, it did lead to a reduction of total hours worked by a couple of hundred hours per year, but further research showed this was mainly men taking longer between jobs and rejecting bad offers in favour of better ones- which would tend to suggest that NIT offers the same benign benefit you were aiming for with UBI. It also led to a reduction in hours worked for women with young children, which all the evidence on cognitive development would tend to suggest is a good thing.
'Is it 1% of occupations? Or is it 40% if the economy? If, as some suggest, its a much bigger problem than we think, why isn't it being addressed?'- this is one of the problems when COMBINED taxes on the upper middle class exceed certain thresholds. Generally, in a global economy trickledown is bullshit. But when total taxation from income tax, property tax and consumption taxes exceeds 50% it can be disastrous. The reason? Because one wants to encourage the benign trade of money for time between the upper middle and the older (debt-free) middle class and younger blue collar labour.
It's interesting, I was looking for reasons why the Scandinavian countries were able to maintain a thriving restaurant sector when there taxes are so high on the upper third of taxpayers. It turns out most of the Nordic Model countries give a tax rebate on 30% of debt interests on loans (particularly useful for students and mortgage holders). It does contribute to high rates of wealth inequality, but also higher rates of private home ownership (reducing pressure upon and costs of public housing).
But the main benefit it the labour. It adds to the vitality of the restaurant sector, and creates great jobs for gardeners and workers able to trade into the home improvements and repair market. It's a far superior system to America, where treating the building as a tax deductible depreciating product, creates additional incentives for corporations and finance to enter the rentals market.
Most of the workmen I know work for themselves or in small businesses for people they trust. My gardener may not earn quite as much, but he still earns roughly $30 an hour, and makes decent money from better rates for tree surgery and longer hours during the summer.
There are better ways to tax- one of the things which Andrew Yang advocated, but was not widely reported was a Tobin tax. Even at half the rate initially suggested, research suggests it could raise £10 billion in the UK- and it would probably raise more in the US, given the somewhat larger financial sector. And this is before we start suggesting things like a planning uplift tax for property developers, which is how many European countries pay for their better infrastructures (it also creates an incentive for local planning authorities to loosen building permit restrictions)- which could create a housing boom in many areas.
Wow. If people in major political parties, world-wide, were perceptive, they'd be all over this. Or maybe they have already realized it, and are busy working out how to come up with a line on it that the majority of voters will fall for. For the poor voters, alas, as this column acutely observes, "they lack the economic understanding and discipline to investigate the root causes". As economies (and societies overall) become more complex, democracy becomes a less effective way to run it; people can't understand the whole thing, and so they pick leaders based on things like 'too many mean Tweets', or the price of gasoline. The chief goal of most politicians, world-wide (perhaps as ever) is the struggle for power (increasingly, as a goal in itself, not just for what they want to do with it - goals that have become increasingly irrational - 'pregnant men'), only that struggle has now become as Byzantine as the original of the term, or the Russian Communist Party in its heyday. The thing is to come up with a line - no matter how irrelevant to the real issues of the day - that the majority of the voters will fall for. (What was that book in the 60's that talked about the increasing use of the technologies of the advertising world in elections?) And let the Devil take the hindmost. And all the time the increasing pace of technological change leaves people, and societies, struggling harder to keep up - which just feeds into the poorly-understood (by the average citizen) angst that these labor market changes are producing.
Noel
Some politicians simply don't understand just how mutually incompatible many of their stated goals are- but there is also an extent to which they've surrendered to the inevitability of special interests running the show- most powerful of all, the power base Jerry Pournelle referred to with his 'Iron Law of Bureaucracy', closely followed by finance: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
In theory yes,
but
Politicians are interested in winning, and most of the times they do not look for the intersection of improving peoples lives & winning. They prefer to develop partisans sections of people that whatever the case would vote for them, like a hooligan for a football team, and them focus in giving "some peanuts" to the floating districts.
Sure. But my argument would be that is because they've realised if they have nothing constructive to offer, the best way to get people to vote for them is to demonise the other side, and make them seem like an existential threat.
Constructive??, could you list the last 5 constructive things that came out of the UK parliament? (and i mean constructive & productive, that would solve real problems. not just artificial problems generated by politicians), just 5, lets see what the list is.
Geary you live in UK, just consider a politician supporting applying the NHS of UK to USA, that person would find a lot of barriers due to the interests of different lobbies, they will invest money to distort the message and doing that would be "steeping on many toes" that could impair donations to win the election.
However, fostering partisanship and rivalry/hooliganism (and the circus) that "does not step in any toes" and would be funded by any lobby willing to get the favour back.
That's exactly what I mean about politicians not being constructive- modern politicians are severely limited in the positive impacts they can have, because anything over 50% taxation of total GDP results in economic disruption and stagnation. There predecessors have already nabbed and allocated all of the available money!
This is why I suggest that the only way to meet the needs of the 21st century is to massively reform the administrative state to reduce the huge waste in government, to reallocate public sector labour and the funding in entails. Think about it, they've done universal healthcare, modest redistributions downwards so the most needy have a bare minimum amount to live. They done public pensions for the retired. By the time one adds 2% for defence, education, the courts and prisons, and growing costs like social care for the elderly, the only thing left is the reform of the administrative state.
But they know they are outclassed in this respect. They are the amateurs playing the professional civil service class, who will always be more adept at stopping the politicians from dismantling their personal fiefdoms and power. the only way to change it is to actually change the incentives within the civil service itself, so that only the hatchetmen willing to find efficiencies are able to gain seniority.
The Tories have done OK. They haven't tried to expand public sector employment like their predecessor Gordon Brown. I wasn't particularly fond of austerity at the time, but without it they probably wouldn't have had the latitude to run a furlough scheme which was a carbon copy of the very generous Danish system during Covid. The managed to keep most non-retail businesses from going under during the pandemic, which certainly wasn't true of America or many European countries, which meant workers had jobs to go back to once the pandemic was over.
Above all, the one thing which I will praise the Tories for is that they were able to hold back much of the craziness which so many countries have fallen to in relation to trans kids. Don't get me wrong, trans people exist and they should be shown compassion, but the fact is many societies like Canada or America have been treating simply gender noncomforming kids as though they had gender dysphoria. And this is before we even consider that 6 to 9 out of 10 kids with gender dysphoria normally grow out of it through the process of puberty, going on to live happy lives as gays or lesbians.
Again, don't get me wrong, I don't like the Tories, but then I don't like the singular lack of vision of the political class in general. As a group they tend to fall into the category of giving the people what they think they want, rather than just asking them. It's my view that most would simply want a fundamentally fairer system in which government simply stepped back from trying to run peoples lives, and instead acted as a far more effective referee.
There are also the only political force pushing back against the denigration of Britain's past. Yes, we have our own share of historical horrors just like the Americans, but we were principally responsible for showing that the scientific method could be used to transform the human condition, we were pioneers in ending slavery, introducing universal public education, giving women the vote, ending child labour and a host of other social reforms. Those countries which are democratic, have fair court systems and private property rights owe much to the British example.
Plus, for all of their venality and tendency towards self-advancement the Tories are relative neophytes when it comes to the Culture War. They certainly haven't weaponised it in the same way that the American Right has, instead choosing to emote what they stand for (like the flag, for example) rather than returning hate in kind.
Sure, in some ways it's a weak strategy and doesn't push back enough on harmful things the Left introduces, but at the same it mainly forestalls the climate of hate. So trans kids, furlough, not biting on the Culture War. Defending the more positive aspects of British History and our gentle patriotism. That's four.
The final part would be their role in education, funnily enough (which most wouldn't even consider). Boris Johnson was Mayor of London from 2008 to 2016. And Michael Gove was pivotal in introducing Free Schools and Academies. Both were pivotal in transforming the educational situation in London for the better, and more generally these reforms will have a positive impact in the future nationally.
Distinct from progressive politics, progressive education can be an absolute disaster, although its probably the case that education should be more prevalent from around 13 year old and onwards. But earlier than that the emphasis should be on trying to instil core elements of useable knowledge to long-term memory, because the Cognitive Science proves that working memory is puny, and people simply aren't capable of performing cognitively complex tasks unless they are able to draw upon useable knowledge stored in memory to aid them in their task. It's called Cognitive Load Theory, and the progressive approach operates at the polar opposite to what we know about how the brain learns, dismissing highly beneficial systems like drill as killing creativity.
It shows in the PISA scores. Scotland and Northern Ireland were historically more traditional but have shifted progressive in the past decade. England and Wales were historically more progressive and have shifted more traditional. The former's scores have fallen off a cliff, the latter have shown gradual improvement recently, or a less sharp decline depending upon which subject one looks at.
But London education is the really impressive drastic change. To be fair Labour deserves at least some share of the credit, but the Tories were the main ones which drove the significant improvements in London's educational outcomes.
That's five! My main criticism of all politicians is that they are such cowards. They won't admit for the most part it's all fine tuning and incrementalism for here on in, and they endemically prefer government intervention to effective rule changes, which offer a government-lite approach which effects real change without the major disruption and damage usually caused by government.
But the main problem remains the need to reform government and government systems. We still have legions of civil servants sitting around in offices managing bureaucratic minutiae and checking huge forms they've forced citizens to fill out, when there are massive emerging needs in social care, mental health and illness and plethora of other societal problems. Meanwhile, in the private sector office work has become increasingly obsolete.
Geary you live in UK, just consider a politician supporting applying the NHS of UK to USA. Well, I wouldn't adopt the UK approach for a start, although we were the first, the Swedish probably have the best system at the moment. They managed to find huge efficiencies by tendering areas of their health service out to private suppliers, freeing up substantial sums of money back into their health system for patient treatment.
I imagine an effective American universal healthcare system would probably be run somewhere along the lines of the Australian system which is also incredibly good, where the private sector runs the system in the main, but the public sector commissions it. As you say, the main problem Americans need to confront is the crony capitalism which pervades there healthcare system. It's the worst of both worlds, really.
At least in the UK we have NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) which most countries use to determine which drugs they will use and at what price (although most have their own similar institutions, they lean heavily on the British for what effectively amounts to a global public service).
The single biggest American flaw is that their pharma controls the scientific literature produced which filters down to doctors. It means they routinely commission overpriced third generation drugs of limited improved efficacy which are really just patent renewals. The irony is America pharma's profit margins really aren't that high. They've simply fallen into a hugely expensive process heavy trap, because it's a far less risky bet to renew patent than it is to research new drugs.
It's a hugely wasteful system which is real tragedy for the world, given the might and research power of the American industry. They could be a real positive force the world, if they simply looked at a method of funding which allowed research companies to recoup substantial portions of their capital for research of genuine scientific merit. It doesn't help that most scientists now have to sign what effectively amounts to ideological loyalty pledges with DEI statements. All of Americas institutions are in the process of aligning around the Corporate Left establishment, serving the highly educated class, rather than more compassionately aligned class progressives who want economic justice.
Just systems are really about effective opposition. Sane and sceptical conservatives on the Right, and blue collar labour orientated progressives on the Left. It worked well for decades, but broke down in the aftermath of the Reagan/Thatcher revolution where the Left faced a political wilderness for 20 years if they didn't shift to neoliberalism. Every system needs to be critiqued, even if only from the sidelines, and the absence of decent criticism allowed huge flaws to persist and grow- most notably in the way that the blue collar class, of all races, became increasingly more like economic serfs.
You seem to engage in excess reductionism when analyzing complexity. Contrarily your solutions to complex problems seem weightily nuanced and prone to collapse from ambiguity. Sometimes extreme and harsh measures are taken by nature and physics itself to correct asymmetric misalignments. You dismiss the march to civil war with reflections on "populisms" two main causative factors of historical reference, finance and immigration. I think, in my opinion you are confusing a vast forest with a grove of trees a hundred feet ahead. It's not about left, right, Trump or Biden. It is about intolerable stresses to systems that have structural limits, created by corruption from top to bottom.
The only way to sustain the system now is more corruption. An old system is dying and a new system is already in place. The only lasting source of power is truth. On this earth global air-sea superiority is demonstrated daily, soon the Americans shall be forced to capitulate . Nuclear genocide is not a healable scar. The patient is in morbid self collapse. Psychologically trapped in a past omnipotence.
Maybe that was the point of inculcating the secrets of physics. To get the target to hit itself in the head with a hammer. The Americans bought Manhattan for 25$. The American's opponent bought their Manhattan Project from them for two bombs.
With thirty trillion in debt, sixty million decapitated and dismembered in the womb, and a nation defeated in every war for a hundred years, it translates to, the American experiment failed. They seek to relitigate the loss of half of Europe in WW2, but the enemy was ready, waiting, clinging to truth.
The forces of nature and physics can not be corrupted. Better to return this experiment to nothing than allow the creation of a barbaric abomination. The hierarchy of predation is an infinite progression. When a system grows weak its predators arrive. A termite mound loses a wall to heat decay, the warrior ants receive the chemical signal and formations of attack are assembled. Truth is the only cure and the humility of understanding that ALMIGHTY GOD CREATOR is here with trillions of warships. Each being processed out according to their allegiance to truth as cause and effect management.
I've seen this sequence many times, termites and warrior ants are more interesting match-ups.
In closing I think your a sincere striver for truth trying to fashion well rounded solutions. My point is that we are beyond that point and the opponent has the earth and populace locked in zugzwang.
Every move leads to defeat . I appreciate your opinions and reasoning, but we differ on estimates of the orders of magnitude of malfunctions and decay.
"To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence. Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." So said General Sun Tzu around 500 BC.
109. Jesus said, "The (Father's) kingdom is like a person who had a treasure hidden in his field but did not know it. And [when] he died he left it to his [son]. The son [did] not know about it either. He took over the field and sold it. The buyer went plowing, [discovered] the treasure, and began to lend money
at interest to whomever he wished."
Chevelle - Self Destructor
https://youtu.be/QhPn5EPGN4c
https://youtu.be/QhPn5EPGN4c
I share some of your pessimism, but not all of it- I agree that globally we stand on the precipice, and find ourselves in a time where the supply of strong and wise men is at its lowest ebb, but I don't necessarily agree that the delusional decay of nihilism will prevail. I believe that we are fast approaching a dark time in the next six months to a year, where people will starve in the developing world and chaos shall reign for the poor- with even the richer countries in Europe forced to eat the humility of their most vulnerable citizens and elderly exposed to the fallout caused by arrogant leaders, learning to their cost that so many of their most precious beliefs were mistaken and ill-considered.
They say God Moves in a Mysterious Way- perhaps this is his way of delivering signs to those who can see them, a warning to proud and vain men to reconsider their hubris. I doubt they will listen or learn from their mistakes, but I doubt that it will be his last lesson. My God is filled with infinite patience and mercy, like a father who only wants the best for his children, but is also willing to deliver the occasional stern lesson.
What could be more basic in the modern age than delivering cheap and abundant energy, or creating cheap food aplenty for the world? But our leaders don't count the cost of raising prices for their citizens in pursuit of their ideological beliefs. Here's a secret meaning for those with the will to see it- what better example is there of beating swords to ploughshares than focusing nuclear into supplying the world with energy instead of creating near biblical weapons of destruction? And whilst we have courted war in Ukraine, our own pride has caused us to interfere with basic farming practices used to feed the world's poor- in the Netherlands, Ireland and now Canada- it seems as though having unleashed War, we what to tempt Famine from his man-made jail, inviting his brother Pestilence along for the ride.
Troubles are already brewing in North Africa again, and its sure to spread to the Middle East. But consider optimism. For all the likelihood that our deranged leaders will never accept responsibility for what is about to happen, their sickening desire to save their own political sins will surely make them work behind the scenes to quietly erase the evidence and make sure it doesn't happen again- slowly retracting the folly of their ignorant ideas about farming, energy, ordinary people and everything else.
Do you want to know the really astounding thing? I believe they've drunk their ow Kool Aid, through the selection bias of being able to choose their own experts which cater to their own illusions. Had they bothered to read the economics section of the IPCC summaries (by far the most rational and accounting for human adaptability) for themselves they would know that by 2100 the world only needs to spend 4.3% of global GDP a year, in a world which was going to be 600% to 1200% wealthier. I say was- because it's become increasingly apparent that although climate change has only an astronomical chance of ending our current civilization, the 'solution' might bring all our material progress crashing down around our ears. As clear a case of the medicine being worse than the disease as I've ever seen.
On Russia, I predict there will be negotiated settlement hoped for by February 24th (the politicians won't be able to ignore the symbolism), but given general government ineptitude won't be delivered until around a month later. The West will tell itself that it is doing it because of the suffering unleashed on the world's poor, but really it will be because they won't like the taste of losing their creature comforts. For America, perhaps a little less worse off than the disaster in Europe (Germany, Italy and the Southern European countries in particular), pride will be salved in the notion that it's all about preserving the strength and integrity of NATO.
Russia will make major gains in the East of the Ukraine- some, but not all of the Russian majority areas. Ukraine will remain independent in the West, but prevented by treaty from joining NATO and the EU. Putin will have accomplished his goal of humbling the West. Meanwhile, although tensions will continue to escalate in the run-up to the midterms, after the elections, the situation will deescalate afterwards. There will be backroom deals aimed at pushing Taiwan into the long grass for the next decade, beyond the opportunity window (the 421 problem in China, plus their financial woes) will mean that America will agree to stop the diversification of manufacturing into the rest of SE Asia, whilst simultaneously pursuing a strategy of reshoring- with perhaps as many as 200,000 jobs reshored in strategically important areas.
This may seem a mad prediction, but one has to consider how bad it will be in the coming months. I don't know whether Jordan Peterson is to your tastes, but this particular interview caught my attention. The guest echoes a lot of my own research on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7gAEkzIgvw
And here is short interview with a Dutch farmer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuZCLAYqSEE
I share your concerns about the corruption and general health of the West. But where I do have hope is in the growth of independent media and the people's ability to demand change. There has been a literal press blackout in Europe about the Dutch farmers, but I have been much heartened to discover that amongst workmen, gardeners, shopkeepers and even office workers, most have discovered for themselves exactly what is going and are not happy. Most of the insidious culture wars crap about decolonising our museums, libraries, art galleries and historic estates sails right over people's heads- but when ordinary people are harmed by mad government policies, even if it is in another country, other ordinary people sit-up and take notice. I'm just a little annoyed that most prefer to watch a podcast about it, rather than read an article or essay!
Zugzwang- great word! I didn't know it- I'm mostly self-taught with chess.
Hi Geary,
Very good essay and i fully agree with your points
however
ummmmmmm, lets look at it from a different angle and not just looking to UK,
which you have described very well and how it affects all the workers (not the elites but yes all the workers, if you think it only affects the unskilled or the medium skilled, then i would ask you "what is the barrier of entry not to be affected" (spoiler: having enough resources to send your children to the elite colleges)
coming to my question
from where it comes that quantity of people??
I mean, see the birth rate in Europe, and see the birth rate in the countries "exporting people", Europeans adapted the number of children to the ones they can support and/or are compatible with their life style/means.
OK that adapting takes time, but we have been seeing this for decades. If it was to change it had time to do so, and has no expectations to finish, who is supporting "people overproduction" in certain countries that then are "exported to Europe", and helped "by these non-for-profit organizations ......".
So first there was a health revolution, then an agricultural revolution, people moved to the city followed by industrial revolution, then war then here we are. See that from my very rough summary initial the children were "the retirement scheme of the parents" and today that we have other retirement schemes we "produce less children". What about the countries currently producing? why they continue doing so at these rates?
At the risk of being described as conspiracy theorist
Can it be that we want to replace Europeans with other people? people that is ready to "postpone consumption" (aka saving) with people used to "live by the day" (aka not saving just make by) because eventually that makes them more dependent?
Same as some theories attribute to evolution the female behavior on mate selection, maybe the different approach between saving Vs live-by-day can be applied. On a book that i recommended you "Tragedy and hope" there is a paragraph about the replacement of Europeans with Africans, and it is based in that analysis without being offensive to any, just a matter of human evolution and human adaptation to the environment.
I have to say that "tragedy & hope" was published in 1966, so it cannot be linked to any current narrative of hate speech, racism, or anything of the sort. By the way, the book can be downloaded for free on http://www.carrollquigley.net/books.htm, it is over 1000 pages if i have the time i would try to find the paragraph for you.
have a nice weekend
There are three necessary factors which radically reduce population growth to the point that population replacement within a country collapses. The first is family planning and birth control. The second is education. But the third factor, which most liberals neglect, is the ability to generate saleable surpluses through labour, and the economic opportunity it brings.
This last bit is the crux. There are many reasons why Africa failed to develop as quickly as the rest of the world. In the immediate post-colonial period they fluctuated between Socialism and Keynesianism, which amounted to zero economic growth. Where they kept their colonial institutions and enjoyed better economic growth as a result, they copied the West's government systems with economic lethargy being the result, suggesting that many of the problems with 'late-stage' capitalism are actually a problem of 'late-stage' government, with its regulatory ability to stifle small and medium enterprise in favour of large corporate monoliths.
Agricultural protectionism and subsidy both in Europe and the US, prevented them from competing fully in the vital agricultural sector, which is hugely important for the initial stages of transition to wealthy post-industrial society, but there was also an extent to which the hugely transformational green revolution technology which greatly aided the West's rising affluence is less applicable in Africa, due to issues like regional and local soil differences.
Things are changing in Africa, as more countries are participating more in the global economy and generating economic surpluses, but it is a slow process and not happening quickly enough for all to escape the Malthusian trap which locks in poverty. But there is a final factor. Religion, regardless of which particular one, one looks at. Religion equals more kids per family, to the extent that American religious conservatives are outbreeding secular liberals by a degree of 0.6 children per family.
Religion is big in Africa, and as such it's a cultural factor which is slowing to speed at which population growth is reducing. Ironically, it's also about optimism. Africa contains some of the highest optimism countries in the world, whilst the West tops the charts for pessimism, which in many ways is a luxury belief. We actually have a growing number of young people who are convinced it's a good idea to sterilise themselves, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Most have been fed a diet of lies about the seriousness of climate change. Don't get me wrong- it's a serious problem- but in no IPCC scenario is climate change an existential threat or something which could collapse civilisation. The only thing which could achieve the latter is the response to climate change- if it creates an appetite for self-inflicted damage. The IPCC's own figures show that by 2100 climate change will require 4.3% of the global economies resources allocated towards mitigation, but this is set against a backdrop where most economists agree the global economic will be 600% to 1200% wealthier- provided we don't do something catastrophic to fuck it all up!
Yes, some of the effects of climate change will be tragic- habitat loss of endangered species representing a crime against future generation, in the legacy of wonder we've robbed them of, but it's worth noting that since the beginning of the agricultural age we have wiped out 250,00 major species which we know of, many in the large vertebrate class- not the obscure rare beetles and minor variants of butterflies touted in fictions of mass extinctions.
As I said it's tragic, and in many ways a crime- but in many ways it's also business as usual and hopefully something we will grow out as the world grows wealthier (which is a proven phenomenon).
Ironically, we may finally have the answer to Fermi's Paradox. If we are the standard model and the systems I have mentioned are rooted in biology, it may be the case that as species develops technologically, the lack of an existential struggle to survive and procreate robs them of their fertility. Maybe there are plenty of advanced civilisations out there, but they have no need to expand and colonise worlds because their own planets are now mostly empty, because of the lack of teeming hordes of people caused by the absence of the struggle to survive...
Regarding climate change and other stuff about "green energy", i would recommend a book called "Physics for future presidents", it is very interesting. The only chapter i do not agree with is the identifying as buckling the collapse of the WTC towers, as an engineer I know that the models of buckling collapse are substantially different, but the rest of the book is OK and from a technical perspective it makes sense.
I read a Twitter comment recently which stated that New Zealand's green energy sector was at 80% of peak capacity, but two-thirds of their energy still comes from fossil fuels. We need more base load energy, and barring big hydro and geothermal, nuclear is the only option. I like the Michael Shellenberger quote- by 2025 Germany will have spent $580 billion on green energy to make their energy twice as expensive and ten times more polluting.
You will laugh. I recently got pulled down the rabbit hole of believing the press releases from First Light Fusion in Oxford. They've developed a novel approach based upon the pistol shrimp. I have an energy expert in one of the forums I frequent, and he joked and told me that commercial fusion has been ten years away for as long as he can remember, which is to say decades. It does still look a little promising, even if I have no idea whether the 'lithium shower' they propose has any realistic chance of working to handle the substantial amounts of energy produced...
By the way Geary, the radio said today that some Islamic groups have protested in UK for a film and they managed that the film would not be shown due to the fear and the lack of action from authorities. That is bad, very bad, the state has "the monopoly of the force", by allowing this to happen we are opening the door to have any activity censored/banned by an aggressive minority.
In an environment without enforcement of the law, the group the gains the power is the more aggressive ruthless minority. In UK, in France, in Germany and in nearly all Europe for instance we are seeing that "weak" appeasing "kind hearted" governments prefer to silence and appease than apply/enforce the laws, in fact they only apply the law to the people that would accept it without an aggressive protests (aka the citizens of that country that have been educated in that culture).
Hopefully we solve this situations because the next one would be compulsory burkini to swim in Torquay beach
Yep, completely agree. The film is called 'Lady of Heaven' and there are trailers on YouTube. It's basically a story from the Shia, rather than Sunni, perspective. They've basically decided to copy the woke, in weaponising 'offense' as a political tool. I think it was Nassim Nicholas Taleb who first highlighted the problem. There is an article on Medium (I think) which details the Dictatorship of the Small Minority, but I don't want to link it because I don't want to burn one of my free articles for the month:) It's easy to find a nice concise article.
*AND* a nice concise article.
bem colocado e sintetiza a situação de muitas sociedades essa frase é a mestra "Além de qualquer outra coisa, esses empregos preciosos estão em declínio, pois a automação continua a corroer os grampos de emprego anteriores. Caso contrário, estamos colocando nossos adolescentes menos afortunados no caminho da autodestruição, independentemente de serem afro-americanos, brancos ou latinos".
Yep, we need to get used to the concept that our better paid blue collar work is our most precious economic resource, and should be restricted to the Native-born. Otherwise, we are dooming the 50% of kids who don't do well at school to an economic system where they can almost never succeed (barring the occasional lucky and incredibly hardworking entrepreneur). One can still run high rates of immigration, as the more successful Australian period shows- but the immigration system needs to put protecting blue collar labour from unlimited labour supply at its heart.
Populism is caused by fears of economic scarcity within the blue collar class, especially blue collar men. There are other reasons- most notably the fact that cosmopolitans tend to think that there lack of cultural ingroup is a matter of education and experience, when its actually the by-product of an incredibly fortunate and privileged (in the economic sense) childhood, and is largely indelibly ingrained.
But the economic scarcity caused by neoliberalism (and similar systems in the past) is what causes populism. What the neoliberal planners of the nineties didn't realise is that they were entering into a Faustian bargain, and the Devil is calling the debt due. They sowed the seeds of chaos without even realising it.
A critical question for countries with relatively high wages: In a world with global and highly-efficient transportation and communications…and billions of people who are accustomed to low wages…is it possible for a country such as the United States to maintain its accustomed high standards of living for the large majority of its people?…and, if so, what are the key policy elements required to do this?
See my post Labor Day Thoughts:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/66613.html
Good essay. The only thing I would quibble with is the perceived lack of productivity increases. It's something which economists deliberately don't look at that much, although I have in the past managed to find a few source materials from the likes of the Department of Labor. Productivity increases have continued to accrue in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, but this is offset by the shift from tradeables to service sector.
As you will no doubt know, service sector jobs are quite resistant to productivity increases and scalability, with a large part of reason being that many involve human contact. Of course, this is changing somewhat with improvements in technology. The reason why most economists don't want to study it is because they know that most service sector work is inherently lower value than even medium value tradeables- so in effect, the West is swapping out work which has higher value for lower value work, and this puts the lie to neoliberalism and globalisation. Indeed, the only place where I could find an economist who flat out stated it, was in an Opinion piece for the Japan Times.
It's worth noting now that China is in the process of offshoring itself, copying the West by making Africa China's China, they have learned from our mistakes. They are swapping out all the lower value manufacturing, whilst keeping the medium and high valuable tradeables for themselves. It seems that they understand the multiplier effect, and the self-feeding ecosystem of capitalism which comes from well-paid labour far better than we did, and are a lot more dubious of the blank slatist promise that they can simply educate their workforce into high paid work in marketing and finance, when such activities surely have an upper sustainable limit relative to the real economy.
One of the things to be wary of when looking at the more disingenuous sources (like FRED) on manufacturing output vs. hours worked is that they automatically adjust real value against inflation, not taking into account the fact that until quite recently most inflation accrued in very particular areas, all of which were most heavily influenced by the hand of government intervention- most notably higher education, housing and medical costs.
Here is one of the better sources on American manufacturing output and employment:
https://www.businessinsider.com/manufacturing-output-versus-employment-chart-2016-12?r=US&IR=T
And here is another one: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/phenomenal-gains-in-manufacturing-productivity/
There are two factors which make America productivity look sluggish for those who wish to make it appear as though there have been no gains. The first, as previously mentioned, is the depreciation downwards for inflation- when most inflation until recently has come from purely government influenced areas of the economy. The second is the inherent sluggishness of the service sector in terms of productivity.
To give you a good ideas of just how profound the latter effect can be, one only has to look at the UKs productivity figures. At face value it would appear that we are one day a week less productive than many European countries. It's a criticism which is not without merit in many ways. For one thing we are far more likely to adhere to pointless EU regulations, whilst others simply ignore them. For another, the cheap labour from Europe was an argument against capital expenditure to eliminate labour for the longest time, but since Brexit this has been changing somewhat.
But for the most part, the main reason for our apparently slothful productivity figures- one day a week less productive than many other European countries- is the sheer size of our service sector. For a long time, the UK was by far the largest source of new jobs in the EU. Indeed this was one of the reasons why EU migration into the UK was so high for so long. It's just a pity that most of the jobs were crap jobs in the service sector. The French were entirely correct when they christened the UK economy a 'Strange Paradise'.
The answer, as I've stated many times before, is more libertarian values in planning laws and zoning. In the medium to late period of China's Economic Miracle a large part of their growth figures and economic enrichment was due to creating value through housing growth. To be sure, they built cities where nobody wanted to live and their government dangerously overextended itself in terms of an insane level of infrastructure spend, but they managed to build enough housing where people wanted it, long after their growth figures should have shrunk to more stagnant levels.
The UK and America in particular have a huge amount of pent-up demand for housing, with the income levels to sustain housing growth for twenty years- although admittedly in America this would probably entail inserting a new, more modest rung in the housing ladder for first-time buyers, in order to protect the house values of existing homeowners. Housing is a great way to create value- it's just a shame that at the moment it is so under-utilised.
“ Yes, there are significant things which might help- a more libertarian approach to zoning and planning laws would be a huge boon for house building, blue collar labour and value creation, but it is unlikely to happen because of entrenched interests. Capital loves the huge returns which can be made by artificial scarcity in building land, and finance loves the greatly inflated mortgages which an undersupply of housing creates.”
You anticipated my thoughts entirely!
I think the populist revolt is more about the perception that “the immigrants are taking our jobs” than the reality. I’d point out that immigration also increases the number of consumers and the size of the market in which you can trade your labor/time/goods/services etc.
But obviously, we need to fix our immigration system. We have a hiring gap/shortage right now and falling fertility rates so if anything, we should be increasing immigration not decreasing. But I have no problem targeting the system at people who have the skills to fill the gaps in our workforce rather than those who don’t. I used to work with a bunch of PhD students on visas from India and China. Those are the guys I wish could stay in America because they were smart and they worked harder than most kids I knew (including me) and they would have been exactly the kinds of citizens who would add value to the American workforce.
The Australian system was 'market dominant' for the longest time- this meant that it was specifically focused upon recruiting people from around the world, that the country desperately needed. Unfortunately, no advanced economy has managed to produce enough people in the highly cognitive band, with the technical skills to match, for the simple reason that many of the highly cognitive are drawn to things like culture, the Arts, media, and professions for which one doesn't really need to be highly cognitive- like the Law.
At the same time there are plenty of other jobs for migrants, but the whole point of blue collar protections is to prevent certain sectors of the economy getting labour cheap. Part of societal procedural fairness is ensuring that around 90% of the workforce has a chance of enjoying a modestly good life, provided they are willing to work hard and choose the right occupations which society needs. Many would argue that this policy would be inflationary, but if you've even worked in a business which produced physical goods, then you will know that a larger portion of total unit cost comes from useless bureaucracy and the response to regulatory frameworks than direct fabrications labour costs and materials.
We've created a system which still churns out superfluous jobs for the reasonably well-educated kids of the middle classes (most of which are now long since obsolete), whilst simultaneously creating a culture where the professional management class gets offended if blue collar workers earn good money on piece rates, or on a construction site.
“ if you've even worked in a business which produced physical goods, then you will know that a larger portion of total unit cost comes from useless bureaucracy and the response to regulatory frameworks than direct fabrications labour costs and materials.”
Haha. Sounds about right. I also point out that some of the trade jobs are very difficult to automate. A lot of bankers and secretaries will be out of business before plumbers. We’d have to have independent robots capable of going house to house to replace plumbers - and they earn very good money usually. I think one of the plumbers in my hometown had multiple homes that he’d paid off completely and maybe a boat.
The same thing holds true of most construction jobs. Yes, there are nailguns. Yes, plasterboards make it far easier to construct interior walls, but ultimately there are only so many efficiencies to be found on a building site. That being said, I have heard that it is possible to buy a 3D printed house which is £60K, including the labour...
A 3D printed house? Wow.
A good friend of mine got a college degree but went back to work for his dad who’s a contractor and he’s done that ever since. He makes decent money and will probably keep it up until his dad retires. Another guy I know from high school didn’t go to college, but worked construction for a while, got his contractors license and at 24 was running a profitable one-man contracting firm. It can be good work and there’s always a need for it.
Brilliant essay, will definitely reread!
Thanks!