"This shows what ridiculous nonsense open-border economics is. People are not interchangeable widgets. People from different cultures, faced with the same set of possibilities and payoffs, make different decisions: hence the enormous difficulties exporting political institutions across cultural gaps. More people=more transactions=more gains from trade is a ludicrously simplistic way to look at the complexities of human interactions."
This is the product of two related things from the Enlightenment. First, equality - all people are essentially the same and we are in the grip of a mania for equality (cum "equity", but cited by Nisbet as the "New Equality" some 50 years ago). Second is the presumed universalism of Enlightenment values. From these you get the blind, foolish assumption that all people will behave in accordance with Anglo-American rationalism, whether steeped in such or not. Likewise this the root failure to export the political/economic system of America during our hegemony (and the Wilsonian crusade to redeem/remake the world in our image).
Why the social changes that happened after colonisation historically took hundreds of years (the Romans turning us into monogamous folk who didn't marry our cousins, for example).
I agree that the ideas you cite are a contributing factor, but the strange notion that the USA profits by open borders is based pretty squarely on the racial program of race relations leftists. They are willing stretch to weird and sometimes dishonest extremes to justify their racial program and signal their virtue.
Bloody wonderful I'm sure; but right over the heads of Jane and Joe Bloggs - the folk you need to get your points across to. This is so arcane it may as well be nonsense.
Further to Steven's point, we've had to provide detailed technical analysis so academics understand what most non-economists already know. Consider it the equivalent of your HS maths teacher telling you to "show your working".
"Mass migration—by shifting political dynamics—fractured the American Republic along its fault-line of slavery."
This is an argument over timing, not inevitability. The conflict was inescapable from the time the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence. You might find interesting the Virginia Slave Debate of 1831-32 wherein Virginia's western precincts (of Scotch-Irish heritage, and largely what would become West Virginia) argued against the plantation class, and of course lost. That does follow your "masterless men" thesis, but the debate itself was rather remarkable (particularly with the frontiersmen appealing to Jefferson's rhetoric).
As much as I despise Calhoun, he was actually right about the tariffs forced by Northern interests (and that they were regional/factional - not national).
Tariffs punish exporters. The US imported labour and capital and exported food. Labour and capital, as the scarce factors of production, combined to impose protection on land, the plentiful factor of production. Australia saw the same dynamic.
Trade policy’s role in the Civil War is easy to exaggerate: Australia actually federated while bitterly divided over Free Trade versus Protection, which was the main political, and Party-political, divide at the time. Trade policy just does not matter that much: slavery mattered hugely.
The economic arguments are the weakest in terms of the Civil War - it was the cultural split that had to be resolved. Just as there were unionists in the South, there were the Copperheads in the north - willing to allow the South to secede in order to be rid of that corruption. That is one reason Lincoln did not raise slavery as the reason to fight at the beginning, despite the pleas of abolitionists.
It is also amusing to point out to progressives that the Taney court was the first example of court activism. The Scott decision was as much the final match to the fuse as Lincoln's election.
I'd agree that the migration exacerbated the problem (by tilting the balance), but the problem was inherent. The fight started with the Northwest Ordinance, and the northern state constitutions that outlawed slavery even before 1787. The Missouri Compromise predates the mass migration era (or at least happened in the very early part of it). Goodness, even the 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution itself was how to deal with the intractable issue. Mass migration just sped up the timeframe of what was going to come eventually.
"I'd agree that the migration exacerbated the problem (by tilting the balance), but the problem was inherent."
I believe you are correct, with attention to the exacerbation as Lorenzo is presenting it, an aspect of the history I had not appreciated previously. But there were also the Scots/Irish immigrants coming to the Carolinas in mid/late 1700's (?) and later [= Sowell's European "rednecks"] and as part of the masterless class they could have gone either way on slavery and/or succession, and I gather as individuals they did.] (See Lorenzo's citation of an article discussing the 6 southern locales/counties that were aligned with the North.)
I also just now had the thought that with the Northern states appreciation (or anticipation?) in the 1780's for the coming manufacturing opportunities, this may have helped incentivize Eli Whitney when he invented the cotton gin in 1794* [somewhat earlier than the 1805 to 1820 range* I previously thought was the case]. This of course then led to making cotton and slave labor economically viable (again), plus expanding cotton growing westward as earlier sites' soil was depleted. Thus prior hopes that slavery "would just go away in time" were shattered.
Whitney after giving life to Southern cotton, turned around and gave new impetus to Northern manufacturing. He even established the defense acquisition tradition of over-promising and under-delivering (contracted for 10,000 muskets in two years, he only had delivered 500 after five years and the rest another five years on).
Some economists are very smart and some are very dumb. Just because one looks and acts like a nerd, does NOT mean they are actually intelligent or wise.
There’s plenty of empirical economics research on the economic effects of migration. Economists don’t look as closely at the cultural or sociological impacts, since they are economists, not sociologists. But the fundamental economic view on mass immigration is very simple. You can have a welfare state OR you can have open borders: pick one. The problems we’re seeing now are entirely the result of politicians deciding that, no, we’ll have both!
Thank you, thank you so much for taking the time to painstakingly research and write this pivotal piece of commentary.
MSM and academia has gone dark on so many of these finer details surrounding immigration that we're unable to have genuine and informed discussions about this matter with so many of our fellow citizens across the West.
Your overall thesis on the failure of economists on migration describes something that has been on my mind to a tee.
We live in such an immoral, trepidatious age that is defined by cowardice!
I think it tries to cover too much ground too thinly. My impression is not of one long argument but of several thematically related mini-arguments that blur into each other and are sometimes just overviews of the argument they are trying to make
I think the later section on dilution of working class culture & influence was strongest in terms of nailing down details rather than just a general impression of things not working
I know there is a risk in this sort of cultural commentary of cherry-picking a situation to justify a particular perspective, but this comes across as too much of the opposite - not a lot concrete enough that I could take the arguments and own them but rather an overview of your concerns & considerations
If posts get too long, they are much less likely to be read. But giving concrete examples is, as you say, usually preferable, so it is something of a trade-off problem.
My more general take is that the notion that there is this thing, migration, where marginal benefits exceed marginal costs for absolutely everyone can be called many things: ‘economic’ is not one of them. I simply take the view that one should include all the ways people interact in analysis of migration, including feedback effects, while treating polities as just places where transactions happen is neither sensible nor accurate.
I will read the 2nd essay next, but I will suggest that perhaps for some of your longer essays, some form of "table of contents" paragraph up front might help us (or at least me) keep track of things. All part of "tell me what your are going to say, say it, and tell me what you told me." :-)
But besides your great skill at connecting dots, you do sprinkle your work with great phrasings, like finding gold nuggets while panning your prose.
Excellent article, but you make a mistake when you say that “Europe has been experiencing….clashes between supporters of Palestinians and Israel.” What has been happening in Europe, Canada, Australia and the U.S. over the past year and a half are attacks by Muslims against Jews. Not “clashes”: attacks, with a perpetrator and a victim.
Thank you for responding, but I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Do you mean that Jews are trying to dox/shame/silence Muslims to the same degree that Muslims are trying to dox/shame/silence Jews?
Yes, except Jews have lost a lot of cultural power, so the lever is not working nearly as well as it used to: outside the US, in the Anglosphere, not sure it is working much at all.
A lot of folk on the “right” are very angry at Jews because of hate speech laws, for cancellations based on trying to control what folk say of them, for pushing mass migration and multiculturalism, for importing Middle Eastern conflicts into the West, for sabotaging attempts to entrench academic freedom, for regarding themselves as morally “special”: all things prominent Jewish intellectuals and lobby groups pushed. As has been acidly observed, Jews are not in favour of mass migration into Israel so why is the West different?
2) Most mainstream Jewish communal organizations fully embraced woke, alienating millions of people. Consequently, when the pushback against woke finally got momentum, these organizations had squandered so much political capital and erstwhile goodwill among normal people that the result was 1).
However, the accusation that Jews consider themselves “morally special,” however, is sloppy and emotional thinking. Who, exactly, is doing this, and how does this alleged tendency manifest itself?
Everyone who took the Holocaust to be sui generis to start with. Anyone who took as fine for Jewish activists to cancel folk, but it is outrageous if it is done to Jews.
I see the accusation on X continually that we (women especially) vote for mass immigration and I point out when possible that, as you say, we were denied any opportunity to explicitly vote against it in the UK. Even Brexit just resulted in Boris importing low-skilled non-Europeans and their dependents instead of our fellow Europeans and doing bugger all about fake male asylum seekers.
Let's note that venture capital and the 'disruptive' start-ups they fund depend on rootless, often unqualified workers willing to undermine local economies, while providing convenience services to the professional class. Taxi and hot food delivery drivers are obvious examples.
Before that, Polish and other East European builders were imported to the UK to fix up, convert and extend urban properties, in order to make inner-city gentrification by the professional class possible. This type of building work is very labour-intensive in terms of net gains in habitable space.
See also the foreign labourers who built the London 2012 Olympic Park, displacing previously dominant Irish labour which had integrated with the host society to a great extent, and had acquired expectations about pay and conditions as a result.
Regarding civil insurgency risk, have you seen the reporting out of Canada on the RCMP's internal government warnings that falling living standards could lead to civil unrest?
Yet another tour de force! I'd be interested to know what you think the political ramifications of the – until recently, all-conquering – PMC being brought low by some combination of a "Far Right" backlash and technological obsolescence will be.
The article is so well written that I could quote the whole thing tbh, but I'll settle for this:
"The default assumption of mainstream economics is to see folk as rational decision-makers with complete information (or at least more information about their own circumstances than others possess). But not if they are working class folk disagreeing with their cognitively superior masters of economic Theory. Then they are obviously quite ignorant (cognitively inferior) and possibly implicitly or explicitly racist or xenophobic (morally inferior)."
Assume you have two populations with different set of models about reality, which we will call degrees of freedom, or perhaps temperature.
When you have these populations come in contact there is a net flow of information between the two groups in ways proportional to the difference of information in the models between the groups, the inherent complexity of the models, and the sizes of the groups.
Where the differences are minimal, let’s say contact between France and Belgium, the information transfer both slow and minimal. Belgian French, some behaviors and concepts remain definitively Belgian for Walloons and virtually no transfer has moved to France, perhaps Astérix.
By contrast when you drop a group of immigrants into a native population, unless there is insulation, equilibrium approaches swiftly, and is overwhelming to the smaller group.
The equation is simple and involves the masses, specific heat (heat capacity) and the temperature (relative to a baseline) for both.
The process is called assimilation of course, and has real, measurable properties. The formulas also resemble logistic curves, as in Marketing diffusion.
If you drop a small population in the middle of a very large one, without insulation, they assimilate very rapidly or disappear. An ice cube dropped in a warm bathtub doesn’t last.
If you drop a large population near another one, unless mixing is forced they retain individual properties - Spain and France.
If you drop a large population in a small local one, the local one is overwhelmed, you get local reverse assimilation, but the larger entropic or heat bath will always win out.
You can sprinkle a million Syrians across the US and without insulation their distinctness will disappear within a generation. You couls also concentrate them in a region, it will slow down assimilation and their distinctness, but entropy - the change - will always win.
You can drop a million Syrians in Germany, and the assimilation will be radically slower. There are multiple insulting factors, language being one, and social mobility being the second, which prevent equilibrium. Many many more Syrians speak English than German. There are many cheap places to live in the US, Germany not so many.
That’s why comparing the US to any other population doesn’t work. Immigrants in Germany will cause German local issues but in 4 generations they will be gone. I. The US it will be one or two.
The UK is half the population of the US south. A million immigrants into the Uk will take four or five generations to assimilate, in the US south 2 to 3.
The US and Europa as a whole is comparable but not to European States.
Also, evidence is that cultural differences can persist remarkably well because families transmit them relatively stably. Families make information flows a lot “lumpier”.
But yes, Australian policy is to go with small lumps for assimilative reasons.
Your first statement is a truism, the same as “the Region has regional culture”
The US is drastically more homogeneous than any region, probably even India or China. simply because of languages, and until recently it has no parallel in mobility in world history. “Convective mixing” is still intensely in operation, while Europe is highly segmented and stratified.
While the idea that there is a single market in Europe / the EU / is repeated quite often, the reality is quite different. By contrast, while there are mildly regional segmented markets in the US, income stratification is quite extreme.
The concept of identical towns shocks people on the US, but it’s true - the Panera store, the higher end Design Within Reach, the inevitable Starbucks, McDonalds, Home Depot and Wal-Mart. Uniform traffic signage, identical hotels, the same gym brands, the same Kumon tutoring, identical drinking age controls, the same sports-obsessed high school, the same local ABC; CBS, PBS NBC , FOX affiliate, the masons, the moose, the lodges, the same car parts, AMC theatres, almost uniform identical banks and branches, the same goodwill at Christmas; the same cellphone store groups, U-HAUL, YMCA, fairgrounds with big truck or country singers, the same national park structure, little league, Girl Scouts, little inspirational messages on roadside signs, men with bill caps and mommy jeans, auto dealership rows, half-empty malls, teen babysitters, the high-school straight-gay alliance. urgent care clinics, brick building downtowns, trailer parks, and newspaper and mail boxes on poles, perhaps a gigantic state or private school nearby with Greek clubs, the bad part of town near railroad tracks, and dams with lakes where you go swimming in summer.
I traveled extensively over 20 years globally when I ran a research company, and later locally to US for more corporate work, and lived long times in US, Netherlands, and France.
There is not even remotely a comparison possible between a village in Spain, Belgium, Switzerland Germany and Netherlands, versus small towns in Arkansas, Idaho, Virginia, California, Texas and Washington, and the effect is intensified in mid- and larger cities. Knoxville TN vs Madison Wis vs Tallahassee vs Corpus Christi TX, and state capitals.
US:
Very Homogenous, light regional differentiation, highly stratified income segments, uniform culture, high mobility.
Europe:
Very segmented by language and history, high cultural differentiation, lower stratified income segments, diverse culture, lower mobility.
I’ve lived or worked in all the sub-regions you referred to in the link and the information attempts to generate cultural distinctions where in reality were you to move between locales they are indistinguishable.
The “superstate” discussion of the us pops up regularly, around once every 20 years since I was around 12, and every iteration becomes less plausible.
The earliest one I recall was Barry Goldwater wanting to saw California, Oregon and Washington off and let them drift off into the Pacific, almost 60 year old partitioning which became fanciful the moment Reagan became president.
Then you drop 100,000 Syrians or Venezuelans in an area of the US it is hopeless for them, adapt or get ejected. There is the pressure of 330,000,000 in the same environment no matter where you look.
I am not denying that the EU and the US are very different. I was just demurring that assimilation is reliably as swiftly complete as you were implying or that the US is quite as culturally unified as you were implying. Memoirs such as Hillbilly Elegy, amongst others, suggest not.
Thanks for that paragraph with the listing of overall commonality elements. I am copying it to a Word file to retain it. Now I just hope i can recall what file where if/when I need it again. :-)
As a boy I moved from MO to NJ and noted no cultural differences. Then pretty much the same when moving to Seattle a few years later, where I did saw they called a carbonated beverage "soda" in one locale and "pop" in the other, but I now forget which was which. A few years later we moved to New Orleans, where much was similar but also more prominence of blacks, etc., plus advice to avoid certain areas of town. Now Mardi Gras was different and fun, even for an under-age no-alcohol-allowed teenager. :-) Three or four subsequent moves also provided only modest regional differences.
But as Lorenzo points out (below?), your suggestions for more rapid generational assimilation in the US is partly a function of the immigration numbers allowed at different periods (plus later availability of mass media and now social media; and perhaps even more focus later on sending all kids to school to promote a common level of literacy, civics, history, etc.). I do endorse the moves Trump is making to legalize English as the official language of the US, with exceptions allowed for transportation hubs and medical facilities.
The US is a giant immigrant sponge; the melting pot metaphor is apt. That’s why I’m mystified about US protest, not mystified at all about Europe. I lived through immigrant problems in Holland and saw the squalor in Paris.
In the US it continually rings of group dislikes. I’ve never seen a peep about illegal immigrant Indians, probably the third largest group behind Latins and Chinese. But they all disappear in the mix within two generations.
The assimilative capacity is not infinite, takes time and is not the only issue. The US “paused” a lot of migration from 1925 to 1965, with integrative effect. The 1830-1925 period saw a lot of political and economic polarisation, most spectacularly, but not only, the US Civil War.
We have different views which is fine. I could be quite wrong but I’ve moved from language and thermodynamics to other self-generative social systems, because they are mathematically so similar. My ability to describe the principles without sounding deranged or esoteric are still limited, you’re a better public writer than I am by far.
I suspect our disagreement is one of emphasis rather than substance. Woodard argues that Presidential voting correlates more strongly with regional culture than, for instance, rural-urban. This suggests he is picking up on something real.
You appear to be mixing metaphors of entropy and of market diffusion vs. immigrant assimilation (cultural and economic), but both frames are a marvelous alternative way of thinking about this. Thanks for that.
As I agree with both you and Lorenzo, per the later comments it does appear the differences between you two are modest and relate to degree rather than form.
That's entirely true. But I wish economists had more training in statistical thermodynamics, and heat transfer - fourier's law is that heat flux is proportional to the temperature gradient and thermal conductivity. Two cultures can be modeled as semi-independent pools of heat, and they will intermix almost perfectly using the temperature gradient model, and modeling thermal conductivity as language difference. Drop an irish group in the middle of america somewhere, or an indian group, and with the extremely low thermal conductivity (language difference), they will reach cultural local cultural equilibrim relatively quickly, but the smaller group will always be wiped out by the larger group very fast.
Drop a group of chinese speakers in an english speaking population in the US, and the thermal conctivity is so low they will take generations to reach cultural equilibrium even with the steep gradient. But always, there is an equilibrium, and it has to do with the relative population sizes, cultural barriers, and so on.
Drop 1000 creole speaking Haitans in the middl of a city of 100,000 you have a steep gradient, and high language barriers, but will work out. Entropy always flows from higher to lower entropy, heat only flows one direction, culture only flows one directon.
The interesting problem is more one of things you shouldn't do which cooks learn very quickly.
Don't drop eggs in a boiling fluid to mix them (a sauce), but rather put driblets of the hot sauce into the large egg pool so they equilibrate, and the sauce diffuses into the eggs rather than vice-versa, or the eggs proteins will denature and you have scrambled eggs.
Dont' pour water into boiling oil - the equilibration process will cause the water to explode and you have a disaster.
Don't pour water into acid, pour acid into water, etc.
So, where you must mix two populations, consider allowing the gradual mixing of the higher-entropy (higher Heat) population in small, very small quantities until they equilibrate, and then the mixing can proceed gradually witout explosion.
Dropping a tiny population with a huge difference from a very large population together will cause explosions in the tiny population. that's the takeaway. Two populations mixing that have a thermal conductivity barrier will cause a very long period of equilibration, enforced cultural and language learning will cause thermal (entropic) equilibrium to be assumed very rapidly, which mitigates the chance of explosion.
All organizations dedicated to "maintaining cultural and linguistic barriers" between newly meeting populations are maintaining chances of explosion longer than necessary.
These are thermodynamic properties of cultural and linguistic elements of populations, irrespective of any ethical or moral judgement, and follow laws of mathematics, not of desire
Good article, but I'm going to challenge you both on one point. Most economists don't understand modern town planning; it's a separate discipline. That system can be used to enable aggressive growth in the number of housing units, as it was originally set up to do by the post World War II Labour government in Britain.
The current limitations in housing supply, failing to keep up with mass migration, are multi-factorial and won't be done away with by gutting the planning system, as many pundits are arguing for. That would be the housing equivalent of open border policy: anyone can build whatever, wherever. Migrants would be needed to not only build that housing, but to buy or rent it, as white populations all over the world have been in accelerating demographic decline since the Sexual Revolution, even in notionally Catholic countries.
NIMBYs are self-interested property owners who use their time and money resources to leverage the town planning system, but they don't operate the system, and are frequently ignored by it. Sometimes, the NIMBYs have valid points aligned with the system's priorities and their views prevail.
Please see my recent articles here on Substack about the role of town planning in the British and Australian housing markets; your comments would be very welcome.
I tend to be sceptical about planning systems because I worry about incentives and information. For instance, apartments are disastrous for fertility: does planning take that into consideration?
Planning requires regulation, regulation tends to increase transaction costs and to be open to being gamed. I am particularly sceptical of planning systems that have a high level of official discretions.
The Anglosphere seems to regularly do such planning badly. Germany and Switzerland seem to do it rather better, but they have set up rather different institutional incentives. Germany, for example, constitutionally restricts official discretions over property.
Thanks for the reply. There are definitely better and worse ways to run a town planning system. The US and Australia both use zoning, which is very crude and doesn't reflect the way many people want to live or work in mixed-use accessible communities, especially now that there is less direct pollution from workplaces in post-industrial towns.
There are smaller-scale apartment designs of two or three stories which can work for families, but the concrete apartment blocks from the Bauhaus onwards are based on socialist theory, which treats humans as identical units. Under this model, industrial productivity was considered more important than families, and childcare was collectivised.
Individual discretion can be beneficial if town planners are skilled and experienced, as the discipline is essentially applied geography, and so there are multi-factorial judgements to be made. Applying rigid rules is unsubtle and can produce absurd results if the rules aren't complex enough to match reality, or neglect vital factors.
One of the problems for the English town planning system is that experienced professionals have tended to move into the private sector, and local authorities haven't maintained the education or skill level for the planners that remain.
This is partly because there are other spending priorities, and partly because political actors don't want a democratic planning system. On the right wing, they don't want any limits to housing growth as they are opposed to state regulation of markets in general, and on the left wing they don't want limits because they demand open borders and cheap housing for all. The result is overcrowding, and settlement designs that we already know don't work well.
A further problem in English town planning is the tendency of bureaucrats to micro-manage the system in order to justify their own jobs, including the application of many stealth taxes on housing to 'nudge' property developers in the directions they want those developers to go. I'll be publishing an article on that topic shortly.
For those who haven't yet discovered Cameron Murray - he is an economics lecturer who covers Aus housing on Substack: https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/
He's recently written a book "The Great Housing Hijack". I'd say the best voice about housing I'm aware of.
Economists can only say so much without being fired. There's a literature on culture and institutions in the academic journals, it just never gets a public airing. Immigrants import their economic institutions when they migrate and it threatens the prosperity of Western countries. These impacts aren't factored into plastic economic models of the economy that describe it using mathematical functions. https://burchellwilson.substack.com/p/literature-review-the-colonial-origins-6c7
"This shows what ridiculous nonsense open-border economics is. People are not interchangeable widgets. People from different cultures, faced with the same set of possibilities and payoffs, make different decisions: hence the enormous difficulties exporting political institutions across cultural gaps. More people=more transactions=more gains from trade is a ludicrously simplistic way to look at the complexities of human interactions."
This is the product of two related things from the Enlightenment. First, equality - all people are essentially the same and we are in the grip of a mania for equality (cum "equity", but cited by Nisbet as the "New Equality" some 50 years ago). Second is the presumed universalism of Enlightenment values. From these you get the blind, foolish assumption that all people will behave in accordance with Anglo-American rationalism, whether steeped in such or not. Likewise this the root failure to export the political/economic system of America during our hegemony (and the Wilsonian crusade to redeem/remake the world in our image).
Why the social changes that happened after colonisation historically took hundreds of years (the Romans turning us into monogamous folk who didn't marry our cousins, for example).
Americans in particular are impatient - just an unfortunate aspect of our national character.
I agree that the ideas you cite are a contributing factor, but the strange notion that the USA profits by open borders is based pretty squarely on the racial program of race relations leftists. They are willing stretch to weird and sometimes dishonest extremes to justify their racial program and signal their virtue.
Bloody wonderful I'm sure; but right over the heads of Jane and Joe Bloggs - the folk you need to get your points across to. This is so arcane it may as well be nonsense.
To the contrary, Jane and Joe understand this without any academic trappings. It is the educated that need to be taught.
Further to Steven's point, we've had to provide detailed technical analysis so academics understand what most non-economists already know. Consider it the equivalent of your HS maths teacher telling you to "show your working".
I learnt that I am a civic nationalist
"Mass migration—by shifting political dynamics—fractured the American Republic along its fault-line of slavery."
This is an argument over timing, not inevitability. The conflict was inescapable from the time the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence. You might find interesting the Virginia Slave Debate of 1831-32 wherein Virginia's western precincts (of Scotch-Irish heritage, and largely what would become West Virginia) argued against the plantation class, and of course lost. That does follow your "masterless men" thesis, but the debate itself was rather remarkable (particularly with the frontiersmen appealing to Jefferson's rhetoric).
As much as I despise Calhoun, he was actually right about the tariffs forced by Northern interests (and that they were regional/factional - not national).
Tariffs punish exporters. The US imported labour and capital and exported food. Labour and capital, as the scarce factors of production, combined to impose protection on land, the plentiful factor of production. Australia saw the same dynamic.
Trade policy’s role in the Civil War is easy to exaggerate: Australia actually federated while bitterly divided over Free Trade versus Protection, which was the main political, and Party-political, divide at the time. Trade policy just does not matter that much: slavery mattered hugely.
The economic arguments are the weakest in terms of the Civil War - it was the cultural split that had to be resolved. Just as there were unionists in the South, there were the Copperheads in the north - willing to allow the South to secede in order to be rid of that corruption. That is one reason Lincoln did not raise slavery as the reason to fight at the beginning, despite the pleas of abolitionists.
It is also amusing to point out to progressives that the Taney court was the first example of court activism. The Scott decision was as much the final match to the fuse as Lincoln's election.
I am certainly not arguing Free/Slave States was a stable split. But the split happened when and how due to mass migration.
I'd agree that the migration exacerbated the problem (by tilting the balance), but the problem was inherent. The fight started with the Northwest Ordinance, and the northern state constitutions that outlawed slavery even before 1787. The Missouri Compromise predates the mass migration era (or at least happened in the very early part of it). Goodness, even the 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution itself was how to deal with the intractable issue. Mass migration just sped up the timeframe of what was going to come eventually.
"I'd agree that the migration exacerbated the problem (by tilting the balance), but the problem was inherent."
I believe you are correct, with attention to the exacerbation as Lorenzo is presenting it, an aspect of the history I had not appreciated previously. But there were also the Scots/Irish immigrants coming to the Carolinas in mid/late 1700's (?) and later [= Sowell's European "rednecks"] and as part of the masterless class they could have gone either way on slavery and/or succession, and I gather as individuals they did.] (See Lorenzo's citation of an article discussing the 6 southern locales/counties that were aligned with the North.)
I also just now had the thought that with the Northern states appreciation (or anticipation?) in the 1780's for the coming manufacturing opportunities, this may have helped incentivize Eli Whitney when he invented the cotton gin in 1794* [somewhat earlier than the 1805 to 1820 range* I previously thought was the case]. This of course then led to making cotton and slave labor economically viable (again), plus expanding cotton growing westward as earlier sites' soil was depleted. Thus prior hopes that slavery "would just go away in time" were shattered.
*originally I mistyped this date as 1974 :-) !!!
Whitney after giving life to Southern cotton, turned around and gave new impetus to Northern manufacturing. He even established the defense acquisition tradition of over-promising and under-delivering (contracted for 10,000 muskets in two years, he only had delivered 500 after five years and the rest another five years on).
Some economists are very smart and some are very dumb. Just because one looks and acts like a nerd, does NOT mean they are actually intelligent or wise.
There’s plenty of empirical economics research on the economic effects of migration. Economists don’t look as closely at the cultural or sociological impacts, since they are economists, not sociologists. But the fundamental economic view on mass immigration is very simple. You can have a welfare state OR you can have open borders: pick one. The problems we’re seeing now are entirely the result of politicians deciding that, no, we’ll have both!
Thank you, thank you so much for taking the time to painstakingly research and write this pivotal piece of commentary.
MSM and academia has gone dark on so many of these finer details surrounding immigration that we're unable to have genuine and informed discussions about this matter with so many of our fellow citizens across the West.
Your overall thesis on the failure of economists on migration describes something that has been on my mind to a tee.
We live in such an immoral, trepidatious age that is defined by cowardice!
We know it’s long and fairly dense, but we wanted to put all the arguments and sources—to the extent we could—in one place.
I think it tries to cover too much ground too thinly. My impression is not of one long argument but of several thematically related mini-arguments that blur into each other and are sometimes just overviews of the argument they are trying to make
I think the later section on dilution of working class culture & influence was strongest in terms of nailing down details rather than just a general impression of things not working
I know there is a risk in this sort of cultural commentary of cherry-picking a situation to justify a particular perspective, but this comes across as too much of the opposite - not a lot concrete enough that I could take the arguments and own them but rather an overview of your concerns & considerations
If posts get too long, they are much less likely to be read. But giving concrete examples is, as you say, usually preferable, so it is something of a trade-off problem.
Also, writing is how I think through things. The subsequent post ends with more a specific argument. https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/theory-as-a-barrier-to-understanding.
My more general take is that the notion that there is this thing, migration, where marginal benefits exceed marginal costs for absolutely everyone can be called many things: ‘economic’ is not one of them. I simply take the view that one should include all the ways people interact in analysis of migration, including feedback effects, while treating polities as just places where transactions happen is neither sensible nor accurate.
I will read the 2nd essay next, but I will suggest that perhaps for some of your longer essays, some form of "table of contents" paragraph up front might help us (or at least me) keep track of things. All part of "tell me what your are going to say, say it, and tell me what you told me." :-)
But besides your great skill at connecting dots, you do sprinkle your work with great phrasings, like finding gold nuggets while panning your prose.
Both elements keep me coming back for more!
Excellent article, but you make a mistake when you say that “Europe has been experiencing….clashes between supporters of Palestinians and Israel.” What has been happening in Europe, Canada, Australia and the U.S. over the past year and a half are attacks by Muslims against Jews. Not “clashes”: attacks, with a perpetrator and a victim.
On the streets, that is the basic pattern. When it comes to attempted cancellations, it is not one-sided.
Thank you for responding, but I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Do you mean that Jews are trying to dox/shame/silence Muslims to the same degree that Muslims are trying to dox/shame/silence Jews?
Yes, except Jews have lost a lot of cultural power, so the lever is not working nearly as well as it used to: outside the US, in the Anglosphere, not sure it is working much at all.
A lot of folk on the “right” are very angry at Jews because of hate speech laws, for cancellations based on trying to control what folk say of them, for pushing mass migration and multiculturalism, for importing Middle Eastern conflicts into the West, for sabotaging attempts to entrench academic freedom, for regarding themselves as morally “special”: all things prominent Jewish intellectuals and lobby groups pushed. As has been acidly observed, Jews are not in favour of mass migration into Israel so why is the West different?
I’d agree on a couple of things:
1) Jews have lost cultural power since 10/7;
2) Most mainstream Jewish communal organizations fully embraced woke, alienating millions of people. Consequently, when the pushback against woke finally got momentum, these organizations had squandered so much political capital and erstwhile goodwill among normal people that the result was 1).
However, the accusation that Jews consider themselves “morally special,” however, is sloppy and emotional thinking. Who, exactly, is doing this, and how does this alleged tendency manifest itself?
Everyone who took the Holocaust to be sui generis to start with. Anyone who took as fine for Jewish activists to cancel folk, but it is outrageous if it is done to Jews.
An interesting read!
I see the accusation on X continually that we (women especially) vote for mass immigration and I point out when possible that, as you say, we were denied any opportunity to explicitly vote against it in the UK. Even Brexit just resulted in Boris importing low-skilled non-Europeans and their dependents instead of our fellow Europeans and doing bugger all about fake male asylum seekers.
Let's note that venture capital and the 'disruptive' start-ups they fund depend on rootless, often unqualified workers willing to undermine local economies, while providing convenience services to the professional class. Taxi and hot food delivery drivers are obvious examples.
Before that, Polish and other East European builders were imported to the UK to fix up, convert and extend urban properties, in order to make inner-city gentrification by the professional class possible. This type of building work is very labour-intensive in terms of net gains in habitable space.
See also the foreign labourers who built the London 2012 Olympic Park, displacing previously dominant Irish labour which had integrated with the host society to a great extent, and had acquired expectations about pay and conditions as a result.
Regarding civil insurgency risk, have you seen the reporting out of Canada on the RCMP's internal government warnings that falling living standards could lead to civil unrest?
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/secret-rcmp-report-warns-canadians-may-revolt-once-they-realize-how-broke-they-are
They are of course looking to come down on those complaining (like the truckers) rather than deal with the causative end of these policies.
Trudeau the lesser really has been a disaster for Canada.
Yet another tour de force! I'd be interested to know what you think the political ramifications of the – until recently, all-conquering – PMC being brought low by some combination of a "Far Right" backlash and technological obsolescence will be.
The article is so well written that I could quote the whole thing tbh, but I'll settle for this:
"The default assumption of mainstream economics is to see folk as rational decision-makers with complete information (or at least more information about their own circumstances than others possess). But not if they are working class folk disagreeing with their cognitively superior masters of economic Theory. Then they are obviously quite ignorant (cognitively inferior) and possibly implicitly or explicitly racist or xenophobic (morally inferior)."
The thesis is partially entropically infeasible.
Assume you have two populations with different set of models about reality, which we will call degrees of freedom, or perhaps temperature.
When you have these populations come in contact there is a net flow of information between the two groups in ways proportional to the difference of information in the models between the groups, the inherent complexity of the models, and the sizes of the groups.
Where the differences are minimal, let’s say contact between France and Belgium, the information transfer both slow and minimal. Belgian French, some behaviors and concepts remain definitively Belgian for Walloons and virtually no transfer has moved to France, perhaps Astérix.
By contrast when you drop a group of immigrants into a native population, unless there is insulation, equilibrium approaches swiftly, and is overwhelming to the smaller group.
The equation is simple and involves the masses, specific heat (heat capacity) and the temperature (relative to a baseline) for both.
The process is called assimilation of course, and has real, measurable properties. The formulas also resemble logistic curves, as in Marketing diffusion.
If you drop a small population in the middle of a very large one, without insulation, they assimilate very rapidly or disappear. An ice cube dropped in a warm bathtub doesn’t last.
If you drop a large population near another one, unless mixing is forced they retain individual properties - Spain and France.
If you drop a large population in a small local one, the local one is overwhelmed, you get local reverse assimilation, but the larger entropic or heat bath will always win out.
You can sprinkle a million Syrians across the US and without insulation their distinctness will disappear within a generation. You couls also concentrate them in a region, it will slow down assimilation and their distinctness, but entropy - the change - will always win.
You can drop a million Syrians in Germany, and the assimilation will be radically slower. There are multiple insulting factors, language being one, and social mobility being the second, which prevent equilibrium. Many many more Syrians speak English than German. There are many cheap places to live in the US, Germany not so many.
That’s why comparing the US to any other population doesn’t work. Immigrants in Germany will cause German local issues but in 4 generations they will be gone. I. The US it will be one or two.
The UK is half the population of the US south. A million immigrants into the Uk will take four or five generations to assimilate, in the US south 2 to 3.
The US and Europa as a whole is comparable but not to European States.
The US is a series of regional cultures.
https://mapstack.substack.com/p/the-eleven-nations-of-the-united
Also, evidence is that cultural differences can persist remarkably well because families transmit them relatively stably. Families make information flows a lot “lumpier”.
But yes, Australian policy is to go with small lumps for assimilative reasons.
Your first statement is a truism, the same as “the Region has regional culture”
The US is drastically more homogeneous than any region, probably even India or China. simply because of languages, and until recently it has no parallel in mobility in world history. “Convective mixing” is still intensely in operation, while Europe is highly segmented and stratified.
While the idea that there is a single market in Europe / the EU / is repeated quite often, the reality is quite different. By contrast, while there are mildly regional segmented markets in the US, income stratification is quite extreme.
The concept of identical towns shocks people on the US, but it’s true - the Panera store, the higher end Design Within Reach, the inevitable Starbucks, McDonalds, Home Depot and Wal-Mart. Uniform traffic signage, identical hotels, the same gym brands, the same Kumon tutoring, identical drinking age controls, the same sports-obsessed high school, the same local ABC; CBS, PBS NBC , FOX affiliate, the masons, the moose, the lodges, the same car parts, AMC theatres, almost uniform identical banks and branches, the same goodwill at Christmas; the same cellphone store groups, U-HAUL, YMCA, fairgrounds with big truck or country singers, the same national park structure, little league, Girl Scouts, little inspirational messages on roadside signs, men with bill caps and mommy jeans, auto dealership rows, half-empty malls, teen babysitters, the high-school straight-gay alliance. urgent care clinics, brick building downtowns, trailer parks, and newspaper and mail boxes on poles, perhaps a gigantic state or private school nearby with Greek clubs, the bad part of town near railroad tracks, and dams with lakes where you go swimming in summer.
I traveled extensively over 20 years globally when I ran a research company, and later locally to US for more corporate work, and lived long times in US, Netherlands, and France.
There is not even remotely a comparison possible between a village in Spain, Belgium, Switzerland Germany and Netherlands, versus small towns in Arkansas, Idaho, Virginia, California, Texas and Washington, and the effect is intensified in mid- and larger cities. Knoxville TN vs Madison Wis vs Tallahassee vs Corpus Christi TX, and state capitals.
US:
Very Homogenous, light regional differentiation, highly stratified income segments, uniform culture, high mobility.
Europe:
Very segmented by language and history, high cultural differentiation, lower stratified income segments, diverse culture, lower mobility.
I’ve lived or worked in all the sub-regions you referred to in the link and the information attempts to generate cultural distinctions where in reality were you to move between locales they are indistinguishable.
The “superstate” discussion of the us pops up regularly, around once every 20 years since I was around 12, and every iteration becomes less plausible.
The earliest one I recall was Barry Goldwater wanting to saw California, Oregon and Washington off and let them drift off into the Pacific, almost 60 year old partitioning which became fanciful the moment Reagan became president.
Then you drop 100,000 Syrians or Venezuelans in an area of the US it is hopeless for them, adapt or get ejected. There is the pressure of 330,000,000 in the same environment no matter where you look.
Just not the case in EU. Different beasts
I am not denying that the EU and the US are very different. I was just demurring that assimilation is reliably as swiftly complete as you were implying or that the US is quite as culturally unified as you were implying. Memoirs such as Hillbilly Elegy, amongst others, suggest not.
Thanks for that paragraph with the listing of overall commonality elements. I am copying it to a Word file to retain it. Now I just hope i can recall what file where if/when I need it again. :-)
As a boy I moved from MO to NJ and noted no cultural differences. Then pretty much the same when moving to Seattle a few years later, where I did saw they called a carbonated beverage "soda" in one locale and "pop" in the other, but I now forget which was which. A few years later we moved to New Orleans, where much was similar but also more prominence of blacks, etc., plus advice to avoid certain areas of town. Now Mardi Gras was different and fun, even for an under-age no-alcohol-allowed teenager. :-) Three or four subsequent moves also provided only modest regional differences.
But as Lorenzo points out (below?), your suggestions for more rapid generational assimilation in the US is partly a function of the immigration numbers allowed at different periods (plus later availability of mass media and now social media; and perhaps even more focus later on sending all kids to school to promote a common level of literacy, civics, history, etc.). I do endorse the moves Trump is making to legalize English as the official language of the US, with exceptions allowed for transportation hubs and medical facilities.
The US is a giant immigrant sponge; the melting pot metaphor is apt. That’s why I’m mystified about US protest, not mystified at all about Europe. I lived through immigrant problems in Holland and saw the squalor in Paris.
In the US it continually rings of group dislikes. I’ve never seen a peep about illegal immigrant Indians, probably the third largest group behind Latins and Chinese. But they all disappear in the mix within two generations.
The assimilative capacity is not infinite, takes time and is not the only issue. The US “paused” a lot of migration from 1925 to 1965, with integrative effect. The 1830-1925 period saw a lot of political and economic polarisation, most spectacularly, but not only, the US Civil War.
We have different views which is fine. I could be quite wrong but I’ve moved from language and thermodynamics to other self-generative social systems, because they are mathematically so similar. My ability to describe the principles without sounding deranged or esoteric are still limited, you’re a better public writer than I am by far.
I suspect our disagreement is one of emphasis rather than substance. Woodard argues that Presidential voting correlates more strongly with regional culture than, for instance, rural-urban. This suggests he is picking up on something real.
https://medium.com/@colin_woodard/the-american-nations-and-the-2022-midterms-regions-trump-rural-urban-divide-5e2d71f544d5
You appear to be mixing metaphors of entropy and of market diffusion vs. immigrant assimilation (cultural and economic), but both frames are a marvelous alternative way of thinking about this. Thanks for that.
As I agree with both you and Lorenzo, per the later comments it does appear the differences between you two are modest and relate to degree rather than form.
That's entirely true. But I wish economists had more training in statistical thermodynamics, and heat transfer - fourier's law is that heat flux is proportional to the temperature gradient and thermal conductivity. Two cultures can be modeled as semi-independent pools of heat, and they will intermix almost perfectly using the temperature gradient model, and modeling thermal conductivity as language difference. Drop an irish group in the middle of america somewhere, or an indian group, and with the extremely low thermal conductivity (language difference), they will reach cultural local cultural equilibrim relatively quickly, but the smaller group will always be wiped out by the larger group very fast.
Drop a group of chinese speakers in an english speaking population in the US, and the thermal conctivity is so low they will take generations to reach cultural equilibrium even with the steep gradient. But always, there is an equilibrium, and it has to do with the relative population sizes, cultural barriers, and so on.
Drop 1000 creole speaking Haitans in the middl of a city of 100,000 you have a steep gradient, and high language barriers, but will work out. Entropy always flows from higher to lower entropy, heat only flows one direction, culture only flows one directon.
The interesting problem is more one of things you shouldn't do which cooks learn very quickly.
Don't drop eggs in a boiling fluid to mix them (a sauce), but rather put driblets of the hot sauce into the large egg pool so they equilibrate, and the sauce diffuses into the eggs rather than vice-versa, or the eggs proteins will denature and you have scrambled eggs.
Dont' pour water into boiling oil - the equilibration process will cause the water to explode and you have a disaster.
Don't pour water into acid, pour acid into water, etc.
So, where you must mix two populations, consider allowing the gradual mixing of the higher-entropy (higher Heat) population in small, very small quantities until they equilibrate, and then the mixing can proceed gradually witout explosion.
Dropping a tiny population with a huge difference from a very large population together will cause explosions in the tiny population. that's the takeaway. Two populations mixing that have a thermal conductivity barrier will cause a very long period of equilibration, enforced cultural and language learning will cause thermal (entropic) equilibrium to be assumed very rapidly, which mitigates the chance of explosion.
All organizations dedicated to "maintaining cultural and linguistic barriers" between newly meeting populations are maintaining chances of explosion longer than necessary.
These are thermodynamic properties of cultural and linguistic elements of populations, irrespective of any ethical or moral judgement, and follow laws of mathematics, not of desire
Good article, but I'm going to challenge you both on one point. Most economists don't understand modern town planning; it's a separate discipline. That system can be used to enable aggressive growth in the number of housing units, as it was originally set up to do by the post World War II Labour government in Britain.
The current limitations in housing supply, failing to keep up with mass migration, are multi-factorial and won't be done away with by gutting the planning system, as many pundits are arguing for. That would be the housing equivalent of open border policy: anyone can build whatever, wherever. Migrants would be needed to not only build that housing, but to buy or rent it, as white populations all over the world have been in accelerating demographic decline since the Sexual Revolution, even in notionally Catholic countries.
NIMBYs are self-interested property owners who use their time and money resources to leverage the town planning system, but they don't operate the system, and are frequently ignored by it. Sometimes, the NIMBYs have valid points aligned with the system's priorities and their views prevail.
Please see my recent articles here on Substack about the role of town planning in the British and Australian housing markets; your comments would be very welcome.
I tend to be sceptical about planning systems because I worry about incentives and information. For instance, apartments are disastrous for fertility: does planning take that into consideration?
Planning requires regulation, regulation tends to increase transaction costs and to be open to being gamed. I am particularly sceptical of planning systems that have a high level of official discretions.
The Anglosphere seems to regularly do such planning badly. Germany and Switzerland seem to do it rather better, but they have set up rather different institutional incentives. Germany, for example, constitutionally restricts official discretions over property.
Thanks for the reply. There are definitely better and worse ways to run a town planning system. The US and Australia both use zoning, which is very crude and doesn't reflect the way many people want to live or work in mixed-use accessible communities, especially now that there is less direct pollution from workplaces in post-industrial towns.
There are smaller-scale apartment designs of two or three stories which can work for families, but the concrete apartment blocks from the Bauhaus onwards are based on socialist theory, which treats humans as identical units. Under this model, industrial productivity was considered more important than families, and childcare was collectivised.
Individual discretion can be beneficial if town planners are skilled and experienced, as the discipline is essentially applied geography, and so there are multi-factorial judgements to be made. Applying rigid rules is unsubtle and can produce absurd results if the rules aren't complex enough to match reality, or neglect vital factors.
One of the problems for the English town planning system is that experienced professionals have tended to move into the private sector, and local authorities haven't maintained the education or skill level for the planners that remain.
This is partly because there are other spending priorities, and partly because political actors don't want a democratic planning system. On the right wing, they don't want any limits to housing growth as they are opposed to state regulation of markets in general, and on the left wing they don't want limits because they demand open borders and cheap housing for all. The result is overcrowding, and settlement designs that we already know don't work well.
A further problem in English town planning is the tendency of bureaucrats to micro-manage the system in order to justify their own jobs, including the application of many stealth taxes on housing to 'nudge' property developers in the directions they want those developers to go. I'll be publishing an article on that topic shortly.
Article now published at https://danielhowardjames.substack.com/p/stealth-taxes-on-housing-are-for
For those who haven't yet discovered Cameron Murray - he is an economics lecturer who covers Aus housing on Substack: https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/
He's recently written a book "The Great Housing Hijack". I'd say the best voice about housing I'm aware of.
Bysheer chance an article today on the very subject: https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/australian-immigration-rule-by-bureaucrat
Thanks for the link! Here's my article on Australian housing, comments welcome:
https://danielhowardjames.substack.com/p/town-planning-isnt-causing-australias
A brilliant essay and shows the best of what Substack can offer.
Economists can only say so much without being fired. There's a literature on culture and institutions in the academic journals, it just never gets a public airing. Immigrants import their economic institutions when they migrate and it threatens the prosperity of Western countries. These impacts aren't factored into plastic economic models of the economy that describe it using mathematical functions. https://burchellwilson.substack.com/p/literature-review-the-colonial-origins-6c7