"how well the cultures that migrants bring with them adapt to local culture and institutions."
This is an important point, but sometimes misunderstood to apply only to the migrants rather than the structures into which they migrate. Granted that te US has advantage of receiving low income migrants mainly from Mexico, Central and South America, but the expectation of assimilation and economic incentives to do so rather than "multi-culturalism" are more important
“If people are so much more productive in wealthy countries, then the more people move to wealthy countries, the greater the gain in global wealth and income.”
The conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premise. It could be that, while an immigrant becomes more productive by moving to a higher-productivity country, he could make people in his new country less productive by violating and eroding the norms that allow people to peacefully cooperate.
Assuming that people can be redistributed to a wealthy nation without affecting the institutions and processes that make the nation wealthy is akin to believing that wealth can be redistributed without impacting wealth creation.
If the argument for immigration is that the new widgets will flourish with superior institutions, then a more reasonable solution is to export the superior institutions with charter cities. Bring the institutions to them. We still have the problems of them importing their culture and genetics, but at least we don’t have to destroy the societies that actually work.
"Open borders is great for humanity, but nevertheless awful for us."
I really wish Swift were alive to skewer this insane form of theoretical barbarism.
"Great for humanity" means it benefits a vague idealistic abstraction, this thing called "humanity", which is not really humans or peoples and their homes and homelands, but a signifier that only exists on a spreadsheet and in the minds of our academic priesthood.
Not to mention that Bryan Caplan didn't write this decades ago but after the verdict has long been in on mass immigration: We all know and see that all these supposed benefits only really accrue to the top ten percent/ownership class, who privatize the gains and socialize the losses. Are we all really still supposed to believe that it's socially beneficial to make GDP the paramount value, even if it results in massive social disruption and alienation? Even if it makes everyone miserable?
This is Soviet logic, where "humanity" is sacred but actual humans are expendable, especially the disobedient or "unproductive" ones.
Thanks, yes, people get carried away by their theories, most especially those who live and get paid by the theory. The professoriate prioritizes the map over the territory and the visions in their heads over humans and their homes.
I read Thomas Sowell's “Intellectuals and Society” a few years ago. It was an eye-opener. We trust academics to explain the world and leverage their expertise for the good of humankind.
When they abuse this power to feed narratives whose purpose is to underwrite ideologies, they not only create perceptual distortions and confusion, but in many cases, they cause actual harm to human beings — both individuals and groups. With no accountability or oversight, they have no responsibility other than to sell their ideas. If they can convince enough people to achieve critical mass, then they can foment political pressure and undermine institutions.
This is exactly what they have done here. It goes far beyond poor scholarship or fact checking. It is an insidious and underhanded method of doing an end-run around democratic/republican norms to usher in their desired utopias. Said utopias will never work in the real world because they have failed to consider all of the facts and don't appear to grasp fundamental human behavior. But, that doesn't stop them from attempting to coerce these systems into being.
How do you curb such arrogance? Words and logic, debate and argument — but they have cleverly obstructed those paths in many cases. Weaponized empathy has the power to destroy Western Civilization. Watching what is happening in Britain and Germany is terrifying and I can scarcely believe what I am seeing. I can only hope that the US won't cede the field to a bronze-age culture whose quest for purity and dominance obliterates everything in its path. Certitude is not truth.
Anyone can master some small corner of existence, along with various facts, books, areas of knowledge etc and anyone can perform the role of moral scold or prophet, regardless of how many skeletons are stacked in their own closet, but it's wisdom that's hard to come by. Wisdom is always the least-popular item in any salesman's cupboard, as wisdom involves self-restraint and acceptance (looking inward not outward) and involves recognizing the limits of humans and our societies, whereas utopian schemes sell well because they offer a glimpse of some Promised Land (and people are always searching for a Promised Land, ie. an escape from quotidian reality and mortal existence), and of course moral certitude is always very popular, as it allows people to preen as better than their neighbors while attacking and undermining them at the same time.
I think this is my long-winded way of saying that professors are our modern secular priests, and just as Europe was beset by priests for centuries, who often presented themselves as angels while acting like demons, we seem to be stuck with this newer, yet just as imperious and arrogant, priesthood. And I don't think humans will ever be without priests, people are always desperate for spiritual guidance and some myth or ritual that makes them feel holy and divine, and if it's not Jesus etc it will just be Marx or Social Justice, same wine in a different bottle.
When Europeans started to get sick of the reign of hypocritical priests they started mocking them, laughing at their airs and supposed authority, and maybe occasionally giving them a swift kick to the ass, not to injure but to humiliate.
I suggest we do the same with our academic priesthood.
I love this comment so much. It's like you crawled inside my brain and articulated what I'm thinking but filtered through your own erudition. Good stuff.
I have often thought of these academics as a priesthood. And I need no priests to tell me who or how to be (unlike some). I fled small-minded Xtians in Appalachia when I was 19 and embraced the "apparent" freedom of the left at that time. Little did I know the left was simply the secular version of the same type of fundamentalism. We can never just let each other be.
I will have to practice being more acerbic since my preference is to be kind. I do love irreverence, though. And a bit of mocking, as well, as long as it's not too mean. My favorite genres for reading (besides sci fi) are satire and parody. Have you ever read Pratchett?
"We can never just let each other be." !! there it is🎯 Humanity in a nutshell.
I don't know Pratchett, sci-fi really isn't my thing, but feel free to recommend something.
I'm probably a bit older than you (56) and crankier lol, so I mostly read the ancient skeptics and their descendants, everyone from Seneca to Montaigne to Max Stirner, Ortega Y Gasset and Eric Hoffer.
It's hard to keep other people's grubby fingers off your brain and soul! Requires daily scrubbing ;)
Or to paraphrase Diderot, "we will have to strangle the corrupt politicians and elites with the entrails of the flawed and overbearing academic 'theorizers' !".
In any case, Diderot's original version was distinctive and unequivocal!
There is no one alive with the brain or pen of Diderot. Also, he is the rare Frenchie who didn't try to build a utopian sandcastle atop a mountain of bullshit (probably bc he lived before the Revolution).
"It goes far beyond poor scholarship or fact checking. It is an insidious and underhanded method of doing an end-run around democratic/republican norms to usher in their desired utopias. ...
How do you curb such arrogance? Words and logic, debate and argument — but they have cleverly obstructed those paths in many cases. Weaponized empathy has the power to destroy Western Civilization."
Great comments!
But many are now reaching the limits of their "give a damn" about other "unfortunates" when such "solicitude" is being corrupted to their detriment.
Disclaimer: I’m a woman but the arc of my life has forced me to become more pragmatic. I’m also a veteran and don’t hate men. In fact, most of the time I enjoy hanging out with men more than I do gals.
I understand the woke phenom to be an extension of mean girl culture into the commons via the amplifier of social media.
It seems that the economists have yet to fully absorb and understand the work of Ronald Coase on "transaction cost", because that's directly relevant here. The shared expectations created by shared culture and shared institutions make it much easier for transactors to find each other in the market, and for each to trust that the others will honor their agreements - which is exactly what Coase meant by "the cost of using the price mechanism" in his paper "The Nature of the Firm". Which means that, beyond the problems created by the Baumol effect, a mass immigration makes it harder to perform transactions by breaking down the local culture and undermining local institutions, and thus does economic damage by throwing sand in the market's gears.
Economics has had tools to analyze social structure for decades, but the physics envy of the mainstream economic schools has left them unused.
That may not be a universal rule. Mass white immigration to North America broke local culture and institutions but did not do economic damage, quite the reverse. Arguably it did ecological damage instead. Which implies that it is not migration itself, but what migrants do, that makes the difference to a society.
By definition that is true, but it could also be the case that effects of migration are so varied and context-specific that very few generalisations can be made about them. For example, the experiences of two Londoners who both have ancestors from the area now called Nigeria could be very different depending on whether their family arrived via a Caribbean slave plantation, or direct from Lagos.
I thought of another example based on level or type of assimilation underway. A newly arrived immigrant might get better (or worse) advice by asking a native "what should I do about X?" than if he asked one of his already established fellow immigrants who had by then learned how to "game the system" to his/their advantage.
Very interesting, thank you. Although slow going dense in the first half, you got around to an easier to digest conclusion, which tends to answer a question I've been wrestling with for about 4 years: why did the Biden team open the US border and the Merkel Germans before that?
These are intelligent and presumably well read people. That Biden openly lied about it rather than explain to the American people why they were doing it, confirms in my mind that they were intentional. And they saw it was the most efficient way to destroy American culture and society here and Germany there.
I can remember thinking in 2016 that Trump and Clinton as presidential candidates demonstrated the dysfunction of the US electoral system.
I mean, how shit do you have to be as a candidate to be beaten by Trump, FFS?
Now I'm not so sure.
Donald Trump is a bizarrely improbable US President, but if he's what it takes to beat off the Satanic Orcs and Goblins of the Democrats who are clearly intent on destroying the United States for reasons that nobody can fathom, well, more power to his sword arm.
I don't approve of everything he does, but I approve of enough of it to continue supporting him.
I don't think the Democrats are that hard to fathom. They pretend to be emotionally attached to a world without borders, in order to keep down labour and commodity costs and thereby enable the further accumulation of wealth by their own class in the United States. Notice how the high-growth start-ups and the big stock market performers are typically based on either casualised domestic labour or overseas exploitation.
I have had my fingers crossed for some time that the checks and balances of our constitution and the cultural consent to that framework will end up providing some level of protections for us and our posterity. With the current responses of the liberal judges/ courts to delaying or halting some of the Trump policies/ EO's, that faith is now being strained once again, but ...
While the founders were prescient enough to know we would not have angels in future governmental positions, I suspect they gave the Unitary Presidency quite a bit more (nearly but still constrained monarchical) power than they might have if they had not been expecting Washington to be the first president.
And because they were all "honorable" men, working as a convention/ committee/ congress, they could not quite fathom that future Congresses really needed more explicit limitations on letting the electorate vote themselves riches from the public treasury. Did no one think to ask about some form of balanced budget provisions?
The immigration fetish is basically an "uncoordinated conspiracy" between left & right elites, as Piketty calls them "Brahmin left" & "Commercial right".
The left desires multiculturalism, diversity and is largely driven by revanchism against what they see as Western culture guilty of colonial exploitation. The right has the older fashioned motive of cheap labour, wage suppression and increased consumer demand.
Both reap reward for their policies, neither group pays the costs - we do instead in the managed decline of Western societies.
Germany has form. There's a reason Auf Wiedersehen Pet got made in the UK during the '80s. Germany repeated the trick with Turkish migrant workers during the '90s (although there may have been, umm, some issues there). Then there was re-unification around the same time. Not so much actual migration, as expanding the borders to include those who might otherwise have migrated, as it were.
Under Merkel, Ze Germans must have assumed (heroically) that it would just work as it had before. Once the British and then Turkish migrants had fulfilled the need, conditions within Germany changed, and they all jacked it in and just went home. So any effects were limited by time, and also, scale. As for re-unification, well, they're all just Germans aren't they? That may not be working out quite as well as hoped.
Thanks for a great piece as always. I'm continuously disillusioned by how disconnected economics seems to be from what it's supposed to study! I remember being so interested in it at the start of uni, where it felt like a way to approach and explain how the world works. But taking further subjects and even going into work, it became less and less coherent and more dominated by theory and maths that even I felt like I could poke holes in...wonder what it would take to recenter the field somewhat
A key takeaway for me: Nationalism opposes Empire.
It is the nature of strongly “nationalist” societies to oppose external assimilation. This interferes with imperial goals of homogenising their commoners
There are caveats of course. The colonial era mercantile empires tended to have a highly nationalist core that was somewhat dismissive of their subject nations, but that was also because the “empire” was primarily a political entity with vassal states rather than having significant social interfacing between the nations
Aside: it would be fascinating to see a genuinely detailed investigation of the benefits AND costs of vassal status of a primitive culture from an advanced culture. Most accounts I’ve seen start by putting one or the other on a moral high ground which immediately adds a strong filter to the investigation.
I can't follow this logic. Nationalism can unite people around the goal of invading other countries to create an empire ruled by that nation. I think it would be more accurate to say that nationalism opposes colonisation by other empires.
If the advanced culture simply established trading outposts and clearly indicated their limited interest in mutually win-win transactions with the natives, that might have worked. Even adding a few "scholarships" for natives to get educated in the home country might have been appealing to the natives so that they could learn just how the "advanced" nation made their desired trade items and/or to gain some "anthropological" insight into the relative nature of the "advanced" institutions. I gather it started that way with the Dutch, but later more aggressive postures were promoted by all of the colonizers.
You’ve started with an imperative, instead of a survey
Note that this behaviour has been in play for many Millenia: the Romans & Greeks did it, the Babylonians & Persians did it, the Chinese did it on & off. The colonial era is somewhat exaggerated because advanced transport & exploration technology meant encounters between people who had been building cities for Millenia and semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers who had never encountered anything else (and everywhere in between)
"The GLOBE study found that societal culture had a far greater impact on leadership, management, and organizational behavior than market forces and industry effects (i.e., industry-wide practices across societies)."
This is obvious to anyone who's worked in a multinational corporation. Workers and managers in North America, Europe, and Asia do not behave in the same way.
If you're old enough to remember the height of Japanese influence during the 1980s you'll also probably be familiar with how different their work culture was presented in TV and movies.
I'm an engineer. While reading this I kept thinking about the calculations involving (non-existent) frictionless surfaces and perfect vacuums that one starts off with in elementary physics.
Such ideal systems allow one to start thinking and performing calculations about the world, but always with the understanding that they are completely unrealistic and never to be used in reality. For example, calculating the trajectory of a ball thrown into the air without considering factors such as atmospheric drag will produce an incorrect result. It will be grossly wrong, and that will *always* be the case.
Our economists are doing all these wonderful calculations about immigration using elaborate models that don't take account of the real world. Their answers are grossly wrong, and that will always be the case. How can supposedly intelligent people be so stupid? I now think it is malevolence and undisclosed agendas that propel their nonsense rather than stupidity.
Well done in writing with such clarity about the bullshit thinking behind all this.
This is actually a really good point (HS physics A-level here; partner is an engineer). I remember being taught friction at 16 or whenever it was and having my teacher explicitly stating “this isn’t real, but you need to see how the method works”.
Like doing set theory & logic in first year law—something that used to be quite common, and which I did in 1L. It obviously wasn’t based on anything real, but it made you really good at spotting the holes in other people’s arguments.
I believe this is an important essay, but I would challenge two points:
1. NIMBY attitudes aren't always driven by external migration, as they are in evidence in communities of the UK which are almost entirely white and native. These attitudes can be driven by white flight from cities to rural areas, a counter-trend to the long-existing drift of the young towards those cities.
Some NIMBY campaigns are justified because development proposals can be really inappropriate. I've recently advised a group of residents fighting the extraction of 900,000 tonnes of sand and gravel from a residential area, uphill from an internationally designated nature reserve (Ramsar Convention) and with inadequate road infrastructure.
Other NIMBY campaigns are resentful of any incomer regardless of race, and are often run by recent incomers who wish to maintain property prices by preserving the outlook from their homes. Actual locals usually understand that most towns and villages need to grow to survive, and are more likely to be related to someone who needs housing in the area.
The relationship between housing supply and immigration is complex, and in my opinion has more to do with the strategic release of land and the availability of development and property finance than the net number of arrivals each year. Please see my recent essays on UK and Australian housing here on Substack for more details.
2. I think the second generation migrant productivity question is more complex than the Dutch example cited suggests. Using the example of my old neighbourhood of Tottenham, north London, multiple migrations from very different areas of the world have manifested differently in the second or third generation depending on the historical and economic context, and I don't think parents' contribution to the host society is the most relevant factor.
The first generation Windrush migrants arrived from the Caribbean at a time when Britain was desperate for labour and those migrants wanted to work. They were often treated badly, with overt racism and poor housing conditions, but generally worked in socially useful roles including public transport and nursing.
The second generation grew up at a time when Britain's economy was shrinking after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, and the hard left was amplifying resentment with the goal of recruiting young black people for the Revolution. Horace Ove's rare film 'A Hole in Babylon', available on YouTube, provides an insight into the Spaghetti House Siege carried out by black revolutionaries.
The third generation grew up at a time of less overt general racism and greater financial opportunity in London, but are mired in gang culture and knife crime, not least because of middle-class white demand for drugs. 'Systemic racism' is a self-fulfilling prophecy because it discourages social and legitimate market participation in favour of the hustle. Generational rioting, with Tottenham burning in 1985 and again in 2011, actively prevents economic opportunities for the neighbourhood and the people that live there. Please see my recent essay on reparations for more context.
So, based on this example, net social contribution from migrants can decline generation after generation if political conditions are unfavourable, even if the first generation were strong net positive contributors to the host society.
Your comment reminds me of a statistic I read somewhere in the Substack labyrinth. It stated that the population of Turks in Germany is 4x higher today than in the FRG days, but the employed number has stayed the same, so the gain is entirely composed of dependents and welfare recipients.
Thanks for the comment. The Gastarbeiter (guest worker) scheme which I observed as an exchange student in Frankfurt am Main in the 1980s was by definition not for permanent settlement. British construction workers also used the scheme.
I would not be surprised if converting these earlier economic migrants to full citizens has significantly increased the number of children, wives and grandparents of Turkish and Yugoslavian origin in Germany. Nevertheless, they are all growing the German economy via consumption. The children are compensating for declining native birth rates and will be the German workers of the future. And the kebab is now a German delicacy.
See also Berlin's Vietnamese community who were welcomed by the GDR as fellow communists. In general, these earlier generations of migrants seem to have integrated in Germany fairly well, while retaining distinct identities.
The post 1997 generation of migrants in the UK appear to be of a different character, as many were admitted on asylum grounds rather than as workers. I don't know how that played out in Germany during Merkel's era, but I have heard the emphasis changed there also. The Blair/Bush 'War on Terror' and subsequent regime changes seem to have displaced a lot of people.
Different waves of migrants do indeed show quite different patterns. “Contributing by consumption” is not as impressive if they are drawing on payments from the German state and the anti-aging impact of migration is very easily exaggerated—migrants age too.
Family dependents aren't necessarily state dependents. Migrants are filling the demographic hole which coincided with over fifty years of abortion liberalisation. It's a short-term fix.
A very worthwhile article as it exposes an often overlooked matter - that the industries the guest workers/immigrants were recruited for were declining.
I almost ended up becoming West German sometime in the early 80s! Luckily I was later transported to the antipodes instead.
Thanks for the link. I think the general thrust of that article is correct, but I have some nitpicks.
The 1948 Act was introduced in the context of the Commonwealth, which had already sent many soldiers to fight for Britain. It isn't true that this law wasn't meant to attract non-white migrants, even if that's what people believed at the time.
I am sceptical that there would have been a net positive balance in white immigrants versus British colonists going to Africa or the Antipodes in the era of the Ten Pound Pom. Active recruitment was taking place in the Caribbean at least. Then we had the chaos of the partition of India in response to Muslim demands for their own state, which displaced millions of people and killed many others.
Also, in post-war Britain, the goal of immigration was not so much economic growth as having a functional socialist society, with bus drivers and nurses available for example. Repaying the huge debt incurred to the USA was the priority, with making cars for export a particular focus. Not just factory workers but highly skilled professional migrants were sought. Alec Issigonis, who designed the iconically British Morris Minor and the Mini, was Greek.
The linked article points out the shortage of doctors in origin countries but then claims that migrants are a net drain, which is inconsistent. As for the number of years of net contribution, that may be skewed by the age of arrival in the country, and the type of work being done. There aren't so many building site labourers in their 60's because the work is physically demanding.
As usual for articles on immigration, the role of abortion liberalisation in white demographic decline is skipped over. If immigrant communities don't support abortion for religious reasons, they will inevitably overtake the native population over time. This was also a factor among Unionist anxieties in Northern Ireland, of course.
In the current debate about tariffs, we could reflect on the fact that it wasn't always possible to have frictionless trade, and it was more feasible to bring Turkish workers to Germany than it was to build German cars in Turkey.
I visited the Opel factory on a school trip in the 1980's, and by then the skilled metalwork had already been automated. The Turkish workers simply fed sheet steel into the presses and collected the finished parts at the other end of these huge machines. The work was very boring, and so the workers were rotated onto a different machine every 15 minutes to prevent them losing their minds. If we are to re-shore industrial production in a new era of protectionism, it will be unskilled migrants doing those jobs, because low-skilled whites simply refuse to.
One needs to be careful about attributing patterns to external treatment. Some groups have done well despite quite strong headwinds from the wider society.
On NIMBY, internal migration can absolutely be a factor, there is an entire literature on this in the US. Of course, it being the US, internal migration of particular groups was a motivator.
I agree, the example of white flight I gave is one form of internal migration.
There was organised resistance to urban sprawl in Britain long before mass non-white immigration. See "England and the Octopus' (1928).
Some NIMBYs act out of rational self-interest and some simply hate change. A common error is to assume NIMBYs actually direct the town planning process, because they claim victory when they get their way, but just as often they don't. A well-organised NIMBY group leverages the existing law; they don't prevail just by being noisy.
"how well the cultures that migrants bring with them adapt to local culture and institutions."
This is an important point, but sometimes misunderstood to apply only to the migrants rather than the structures into which they migrate. Granted that te US has advantage of receiving low income migrants mainly from Mexico, Central and South America, but the expectation of assimilation and economic incentives to do so rather than "multi-culturalism" are more important
👏People👏 are👏 not 👏interchangeable 👏widgets 👏
Correct.
"then any migration that generates serious divergence in relevant expectations, lowering trust, will impose significant costs on local residents."
Absolutely, but that points to the importance of creating and maintaining expectations and shoring up trust.
“If people are so much more productive in wealthy countries, then the more people move to wealthy countries, the greater the gain in global wealth and income.”
The conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premise. It could be that, while an immigrant becomes more productive by moving to a higher-productivity country, he could make people in his new country less productive by violating and eroding the norms that allow people to peacefully cooperate.
Assuming that people can be redistributed to a wealthy nation without affecting the institutions and processes that make the nation wealthy is akin to believing that wealth can be redistributed without impacting wealth creation.
If the argument for immigration is that the new widgets will flourish with superior institutions, then a more reasonable solution is to export the superior institutions with charter cities. Bring the institutions to them. We still have the problems of them importing their culture and genetics, but at least we don’t have to destroy the societies that actually work.
"Open borders is great for humanity, but nevertheless awful for us."
I really wish Swift were alive to skewer this insane form of theoretical barbarism.
"Great for humanity" means it benefits a vague idealistic abstraction, this thing called "humanity", which is not really humans or peoples and their homes and homelands, but a signifier that only exists on a spreadsheet and in the minds of our academic priesthood.
Not to mention that Bryan Caplan didn't write this decades ago but after the verdict has long been in on mass immigration: We all know and see that all these supposed benefits only really accrue to the top ten percent/ownership class, who privatize the gains and socialize the losses. Are we all really still supposed to believe that it's socially beneficial to make GDP the paramount value, even if it results in massive social disruption and alienation? Even if it makes everyone miserable?
This is Soviet logic, where "humanity" is sacred but actual humans are expendable, especially the disobedient or "unproductive" ones.
Perfectly stated. It’s almost as if they are justifying the world as they want it to be, not the world as it actually is.
Not "almost as if", as I think you know!
😉
Thanks, yes, people get carried away by their theories, most especially those who live and get paid by the theory. The professoriate prioritizes the map over the territory and the visions in their heads over humans and their homes.
Caplan is a particularly odious example.
I read Thomas Sowell's “Intellectuals and Society” a few years ago. It was an eye-opener. We trust academics to explain the world and leverage their expertise for the good of humankind.
When they abuse this power to feed narratives whose purpose is to underwrite ideologies, they not only create perceptual distortions and confusion, but in many cases, they cause actual harm to human beings — both individuals and groups. With no accountability or oversight, they have no responsibility other than to sell their ideas. If they can convince enough people to achieve critical mass, then they can foment political pressure and undermine institutions.
This is exactly what they have done here. It goes far beyond poor scholarship or fact checking. It is an insidious and underhanded method of doing an end-run around democratic/republican norms to usher in their desired utopias. Said utopias will never work in the real world because they have failed to consider all of the facts and don't appear to grasp fundamental human behavior. But, that doesn't stop them from attempting to coerce these systems into being.
How do you curb such arrogance? Words and logic, debate and argument — but they have cleverly obstructed those paths in many cases. Weaponized empathy has the power to destroy Western Civilization. Watching what is happening in Britain and Germany is terrifying and I can scarcely believe what I am seeing. I can only hope that the US won't cede the field to a bronze-age culture whose quest for purity and dominance obliterates everything in its path. Certitude is not truth.
Anyone can master some small corner of existence, along with various facts, books, areas of knowledge etc and anyone can perform the role of moral scold or prophet, regardless of how many skeletons are stacked in their own closet, but it's wisdom that's hard to come by. Wisdom is always the least-popular item in any salesman's cupboard, as wisdom involves self-restraint and acceptance (looking inward not outward) and involves recognizing the limits of humans and our societies, whereas utopian schemes sell well because they offer a glimpse of some Promised Land (and people are always searching for a Promised Land, ie. an escape from quotidian reality and mortal existence), and of course moral certitude is always very popular, as it allows people to preen as better than their neighbors while attacking and undermining them at the same time.
I think this is my long-winded way of saying that professors are our modern secular priests, and just as Europe was beset by priests for centuries, who often presented themselves as angels while acting like demons, we seem to be stuck with this newer, yet just as imperious and arrogant, priesthood. And I don't think humans will ever be without priests, people are always desperate for spiritual guidance and some myth or ritual that makes them feel holy and divine, and if it's not Jesus etc it will just be Marx or Social Justice, same wine in a different bottle.
When Europeans started to get sick of the reign of hypocritical priests they started mocking them, laughing at their airs and supposed authority, and maybe occasionally giving them a swift kick to the ass, not to injure but to humiliate.
I suggest we do the same with our academic priesthood.
I love this comment so much. It's like you crawled inside my brain and articulated what I'm thinking but filtered through your own erudition. Good stuff.
I have often thought of these academics as a priesthood. And I need no priests to tell me who or how to be (unlike some). I fled small-minded Xtians in Appalachia when I was 19 and embraced the "apparent" freedom of the left at that time. Little did I know the left was simply the secular version of the same type of fundamentalism. We can never just let each other be.
I will have to practice being more acerbic since my preference is to be kind. I do love irreverence, though. And a bit of mocking, as well, as long as it's not too mean. My favorite genres for reading (besides sci fi) are satire and parody. Have you ever read Pratchett?
"We can never just let each other be." !! there it is🎯 Humanity in a nutshell.
I don't know Pratchett, sci-fi really isn't my thing, but feel free to recommend something.
I'm probably a bit older than you (56) and crankier lol, so I mostly read the ancient skeptics and their descendants, everyone from Seneca to Montaigne to Max Stirner, Ortega Y Gasset and Eric Hoffer.
It's hard to keep other people's grubby fingers off your brain and soul! Requires daily scrubbing ;)
Cheers
Or to paraphrase Diderot, "we will have to strangle the corrupt politicians and elites with the entrails of the flawed and overbearing academic 'theorizers' !".
In any case, Diderot's original version was distinctive and unequivocal!
There is no one alive with the brain or pen of Diderot. Also, he is the rare Frenchie who didn't try to build a utopian sandcastle atop a mountain of bullshit (probably bc he lived before the Revolution).
"It goes far beyond poor scholarship or fact checking. It is an insidious and underhanded method of doing an end-run around democratic/republican norms to usher in their desired utopias. ...
How do you curb such arrogance? Words and logic, debate and argument — but they have cleverly obstructed those paths in many cases. Weaponized empathy has the power to destroy Western Civilization."
Great comments!
But many are now reaching the limits of their "give a damn" about other "unfortunates" when such "solicitude" is being corrupted to their detriment.
I lay some of the blame for this at the feet of women: https://open.substack.com/pub/radicallypragmatic/p/women-power-and-the-collapse-of-reason
Disclaimer: I’m a woman but the arc of my life has forced me to become more pragmatic. I’m also a veteran and don’t hate men. In fact, most of the time I enjoy hanging out with men more than I do gals.
I understand the woke phenom to be an extension of mean girl culture into the commons via the amplifier of social media.
It seems that the economists have yet to fully absorb and understand the work of Ronald Coase on "transaction cost", because that's directly relevant here. The shared expectations created by shared culture and shared institutions make it much easier for transactors to find each other in the market, and for each to trust that the others will honor their agreements - which is exactly what Coase meant by "the cost of using the price mechanism" in his paper "The Nature of the Firm". Which means that, beyond the problems created by the Baumol effect, a mass immigration makes it harder to perform transactions by breaking down the local culture and undermining local institutions, and thus does economic damage by throwing sand in the market's gears.
Economics has had tools to analyze social structure for decades, but the physics envy of the mainstream economic schools has left them unused.
That may not be a universal rule. Mass white immigration to North America broke local culture and institutions but did not do economic damage, quite the reverse. Arguably it did ecological damage instead. Which implies that it is not migration itself, but what migrants do, that makes the difference to a society.
There are no "universal rules" - possibly apart from "don't pretend externalities don't exist".
Migration is not a thing that one can separate from migrants.
By definition that is true, but it could also be the case that effects of migration are so varied and context-specific that very few generalisations can be made about them. For example, the experiences of two Londoners who both have ancestors from the area now called Nigeria could be very different depending on whether their family arrived via a Caribbean slave plantation, or direct from Lagos.
I thought of another example based on level or type of assimilation underway. A newly arrived immigrant might get better (or worse) advice by asking a native "what should I do about X?" than if he asked one of his already established fellow immigrants who had by then learned how to "game the system" to his/their advantage.
In the second graph Latin America is not considered an offshoot of Western Europe. Why?
The countries listed as "Western Offshoots" would be better described as offshoots of Great Britain (Canada's Quebec a possible exception).
It is a convention of the literature, but you are correct, ‘Anglo offshoots’ is a more accurate term.
The Anglos, French and Germans brought their wives and girlfriends. The Iberians didnt.
Sort of the difference between a soldier and a mercenary?
Or an investor and a speculator?
Very interesting, thank you. Although slow going dense in the first half, you got around to an easier to digest conclusion, which tends to answer a question I've been wrestling with for about 4 years: why did the Biden team open the US border and the Merkel Germans before that?
These are intelligent and presumably well read people. That Biden openly lied about it rather than explain to the American people why they were doing it, confirms in my mind that they were intentional. And they saw it was the most efficient way to destroy American culture and society here and Germany there.
I can remember thinking in 2016 that Trump and Clinton as presidential candidates demonstrated the dysfunction of the US electoral system.
I mean, how shit do you have to be as a candidate to be beaten by Trump, FFS?
Now I'm not so sure.
Donald Trump is a bizarrely improbable US President, but if he's what it takes to beat off the Satanic Orcs and Goblins of the Democrats who are clearly intent on destroying the United States for reasons that nobody can fathom, well, more power to his sword arm.
I don't approve of everything he does, but I approve of enough of it to continue supporting him.
I don't think the Democrats are that hard to fathom. They pretend to be emotionally attached to a world without borders, in order to keep down labour and commodity costs and thereby enable the further accumulation of wealth by their own class in the United States. Notice how the high-growth start-ups and the big stock market performers are typically based on either casualised domestic labour or overseas exploitation.
I have had my fingers crossed for some time that the checks and balances of our constitution and the cultural consent to that framework will end up providing some level of protections for us and our posterity. With the current responses of the liberal judges/ courts to delaying or halting some of the Trump policies/ EO's, that faith is now being strained once again, but ...
While the founders were prescient enough to know we would not have angels in future governmental positions, I suspect they gave the Unitary Presidency quite a bit more (nearly but still constrained monarchical) power than they might have if they had not been expecting Washington to be the first president.
And because they were all "honorable" men, working as a convention/ committee/ congress, they could not quite fathom that future Congresses really needed more explicit limitations on letting the electorate vote themselves riches from the public treasury. Did no one think to ask about some form of balanced budget provisions?
The immigration fetish is basically an "uncoordinated conspiracy" between left & right elites, as Piketty calls them "Brahmin left" & "Commercial right".
The left desires multiculturalism, diversity and is largely driven by revanchism against what they see as Western culture guilty of colonial exploitation. The right has the older fashioned motive of cheap labour, wage suppression and increased consumer demand.
Both reap reward for their policies, neither group pays the costs - we do instead in the managed decline of Western societies.
Germany has form. There's a reason Auf Wiedersehen Pet got made in the UK during the '80s. Germany repeated the trick with Turkish migrant workers during the '90s (although there may have been, umm, some issues there). Then there was re-unification around the same time. Not so much actual migration, as expanding the borders to include those who might otherwise have migrated, as it were.
Under Merkel, Ze Germans must have assumed (heroically) that it would just work as it had before. Once the British and then Turkish migrants had fulfilled the need, conditions within Germany changed, and they all jacked it in and just went home. So any effects were limited by time, and also, scale. As for re-unification, well, they're all just Germans aren't they? That may not be working out quite as well as hoped.
Brilliant.
Thanks for a great piece as always. I'm continuously disillusioned by how disconnected economics seems to be from what it's supposed to study! I remember being so interested in it at the start of uni, where it felt like a way to approach and explain how the world works. But taking further subjects and even going into work, it became less and less coherent and more dominated by theory and maths that even I felt like I could poke holes in...wonder what it would take to recenter the field somewhat
A key takeaway for me: Nationalism opposes Empire.
It is the nature of strongly “nationalist” societies to oppose external assimilation. This interferes with imperial goals of homogenising their commoners
There are caveats of course. The colonial era mercantile empires tended to have a highly nationalist core that was somewhat dismissive of their subject nations, but that was also because the “empire” was primarily a political entity with vassal states rather than having significant social interfacing between the nations
Aside: it would be fascinating to see a genuinely detailed investigation of the benefits AND costs of vassal status of a primitive culture from an advanced culture. Most accounts I’ve seen start by putting one or the other on a moral high ground which immediately adds a strong filter to the investigation.
I can't follow this logic. Nationalism can unite people around the goal of invading other countries to create an empire ruled by that nation. I think it would be more accurate to say that nationalism opposes colonisation by other empires.
If the advanced culture simply established trading outposts and clearly indicated their limited interest in mutually win-win transactions with the natives, that might have worked. Even adding a few "scholarships" for natives to get educated in the home country might have been appealing to the natives so that they could learn just how the "advanced" nation made their desired trade items and/or to gain some "anthropological" insight into the relative nature of the "advanced" institutions. I gather it started that way with the Dutch, but later more aggressive postures were promoted by all of the colonizers.
You’ve started with an imperative, instead of a survey
Note that this behaviour has been in play for many Millenia: the Romans & Greeks did it, the Babylonians & Persians did it, the Chinese did it on & off. The colonial era is somewhat exaggerated because advanced transport & exploration technology meant encounters between people who had been building cities for Millenia and semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers who had never encountered anything else (and everywhere in between)
"The GLOBE study found that societal culture had a far greater impact on leadership, management, and organizational behavior than market forces and industry effects (i.e., industry-wide practices across societies)."
This is obvious to anyone who's worked in a multinational corporation. Workers and managers in North America, Europe, and Asia do not behave in the same way.
If you're old enough to remember the height of Japanese influence during the 1980s you'll also probably be familiar with how different their work culture was presented in TV and movies.
Another splendid piece!
I'm an engineer. While reading this I kept thinking about the calculations involving (non-existent) frictionless surfaces and perfect vacuums that one starts off with in elementary physics.
Such ideal systems allow one to start thinking and performing calculations about the world, but always with the understanding that they are completely unrealistic and never to be used in reality. For example, calculating the trajectory of a ball thrown into the air without considering factors such as atmospheric drag will produce an incorrect result. It will be grossly wrong, and that will *always* be the case.
Our economists are doing all these wonderful calculations about immigration using elaborate models that don't take account of the real world. Their answers are grossly wrong, and that will always be the case. How can supposedly intelligent people be so stupid? I now think it is malevolence and undisclosed agendas that propel their nonsense rather than stupidity.
Well done in writing with such clarity about the bullshit thinking behind all this.
This is actually a really good point (HS physics A-level here; partner is an engineer). I remember being taught friction at 16 or whenever it was and having my teacher explicitly stating “this isn’t real, but you need to see how the method works”.
Like doing set theory & logic in first year law—something that used to be quite common, and which I did in 1L. It obviously wasn’t based on anything real, but it made you really good at spotting the holes in other people’s arguments.
Yes, they had me until "assuming there are no externalities..."
I believe this is an important essay, but I would challenge two points:
1. NIMBY attitudes aren't always driven by external migration, as they are in evidence in communities of the UK which are almost entirely white and native. These attitudes can be driven by white flight from cities to rural areas, a counter-trend to the long-existing drift of the young towards those cities.
Some NIMBY campaigns are justified because development proposals can be really inappropriate. I've recently advised a group of residents fighting the extraction of 900,000 tonnes of sand and gravel from a residential area, uphill from an internationally designated nature reserve (Ramsar Convention) and with inadequate road infrastructure.
Other NIMBY campaigns are resentful of any incomer regardless of race, and are often run by recent incomers who wish to maintain property prices by preserving the outlook from their homes. Actual locals usually understand that most towns and villages need to grow to survive, and are more likely to be related to someone who needs housing in the area.
The relationship between housing supply and immigration is complex, and in my opinion has more to do with the strategic release of land and the availability of development and property finance than the net number of arrivals each year. Please see my recent essays on UK and Australian housing here on Substack for more details.
2. I think the second generation migrant productivity question is more complex than the Dutch example cited suggests. Using the example of my old neighbourhood of Tottenham, north London, multiple migrations from very different areas of the world have manifested differently in the second or third generation depending on the historical and economic context, and I don't think parents' contribution to the host society is the most relevant factor.
The first generation Windrush migrants arrived from the Caribbean at a time when Britain was desperate for labour and those migrants wanted to work. They were often treated badly, with overt racism and poor housing conditions, but generally worked in socially useful roles including public transport and nursing.
The second generation grew up at a time when Britain's economy was shrinking after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, and the hard left was amplifying resentment with the goal of recruiting young black people for the Revolution. Horace Ove's rare film 'A Hole in Babylon', available on YouTube, provides an insight into the Spaghetti House Siege carried out by black revolutionaries.
The third generation grew up at a time of less overt general racism and greater financial opportunity in London, but are mired in gang culture and knife crime, not least because of middle-class white demand for drugs. 'Systemic racism' is a self-fulfilling prophecy because it discourages social and legitimate market participation in favour of the hustle. Generational rioting, with Tottenham burning in 1985 and again in 2011, actively prevents economic opportunities for the neighbourhood and the people that live there. Please see my recent essay on reparations for more context.
So, based on this example, net social contribution from migrants can decline generation after generation if political conditions are unfavourable, even if the first generation were strong net positive contributors to the host society.
Your comment reminds me of a statistic I read somewhere in the Substack labyrinth. It stated that the population of Turks in Germany is 4x higher today than in the FRG days, but the employed number has stayed the same, so the gain is entirely composed of dependents and welfare recipients.
Thanks for the comment. The Gastarbeiter (guest worker) scheme which I observed as an exchange student in Frankfurt am Main in the 1980s was by definition not for permanent settlement. British construction workers also used the scheme.
I would not be surprised if converting these earlier economic migrants to full citizens has significantly increased the number of children, wives and grandparents of Turkish and Yugoslavian origin in Germany. Nevertheless, they are all growing the German economy via consumption. The children are compensating for declining native birth rates and will be the German workers of the future. And the kebab is now a German delicacy.
See also Berlin's Vietnamese community who were welcomed by the GDR as fellow communists. In general, these earlier generations of migrants seem to have integrated in Germany fairly well, while retaining distinct identities.
The post 1997 generation of migrants in the UK appear to be of a different character, as many were admitted on asylum grounds rather than as workers. I don't know how that played out in Germany during Merkel's era, but I have heard the emphasis changed there also. The Blair/Bush 'War on Terror' and subsequent regime changes seem to have displaced a lot of people.
Different waves of migrants do indeed show quite different patterns. “Contributing by consumption” is not as impressive if they are drawing on payments from the German state and the anti-aging impact of migration is very easily exaggerated—migrants age too.
Family dependents aren't necessarily state dependents. Migrants are filling the demographic hole which coincided with over fifty years of abortion liberalisation. It's a short-term fix.
Here's the link: https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/europes-absent-minded-revolution
A very worthwhile article as it exposes an often overlooked matter - that the industries the guest workers/immigrants were recruited for were declining.
I almost ended up becoming West German sometime in the early 80s! Luckily I was later transported to the antipodes instead.
Thanks for the link. I think the general thrust of that article is correct, but I have some nitpicks.
The 1948 Act was introduced in the context of the Commonwealth, which had already sent many soldiers to fight for Britain. It isn't true that this law wasn't meant to attract non-white migrants, even if that's what people believed at the time.
I am sceptical that there would have been a net positive balance in white immigrants versus British colonists going to Africa or the Antipodes in the era of the Ten Pound Pom. Active recruitment was taking place in the Caribbean at least. Then we had the chaos of the partition of India in response to Muslim demands for their own state, which displaced millions of people and killed many others.
Also, in post-war Britain, the goal of immigration was not so much economic growth as having a functional socialist society, with bus drivers and nurses available for example. Repaying the huge debt incurred to the USA was the priority, with making cars for export a particular focus. Not just factory workers but highly skilled professional migrants were sought. Alec Issigonis, who designed the iconically British Morris Minor and the Mini, was Greek.
The linked article points out the shortage of doctors in origin countries but then claims that migrants are a net drain, which is inconsistent. As for the number of years of net contribution, that may be skewed by the age of arrival in the country, and the type of work being done. There aren't so many building site labourers in their 60's because the work is physically demanding.
As usual for articles on immigration, the role of abortion liberalisation in white demographic decline is skipped over. If immigrant communities don't support abortion for religious reasons, they will inevitably overtake the native population over time. This was also a factor among Unionist anxieties in Northern Ireland, of course.
In the current debate about tariffs, we could reflect on the fact that it wasn't always possible to have frictionless trade, and it was more feasible to bring Turkish workers to Germany than it was to build German cars in Turkey.
I visited the Opel factory on a school trip in the 1980's, and by then the skilled metalwork had already been automated. The Turkish workers simply fed sheet steel into the presses and collected the finished parts at the other end of these huge machines. The work was very boring, and so the workers were rotated onto a different machine every 15 minutes to prevent them losing their minds. If we are to re-shore industrial production in a new era of protectionism, it will be unskilled migrants doing those jobs, because low-skilled whites simply refuse to.
One needs to be careful about attributing patterns to external treatment. Some groups have done well despite quite strong headwinds from the wider society.
On NIMBY, internal migration can absolutely be a factor, there is an entire literature on this in the US. Of course, it being the US, internal migration of particular groups was a motivator.
I agree, the example of white flight I gave is one form of internal migration.
There was organised resistance to urban sprawl in Britain long before mass non-white immigration. See "England and the Octopus' (1928).
Some NIMBYs act out of rational self-interest and some simply hate change. A common error is to assume NIMBYs actually direct the town planning process, because they claim victory when they get their way, but just as often they don't. A well-organised NIMBY group leverages the existing law; they don't prevail just by being noisy.
Bravo! Masterful work - going back to read it again.