GBRK
5mo ago
If we are allowing ourselves to 'reason' so far beyond the bounds of data, we can just look at these nations today and see the effect of these sort of economic policies on aggregate. All western countries are in a downswing. The cost of living is prohibitive, and the culture needed to keep the public open to immigration is functionally suicidal. The economic system that drives this is obviously dysfunctional and needs to be dismantled.
"Beyond the bounds of data"!? We have all the data we need! GDP PPP per capita keeps going up! You just don't like the data because it disagrees with you. The western world keeps getting richer-- and immigrant-friendly nations get richer, faster.
You're worried about some sort of cultural decay-- which is probably fair enough. I don't know what culture you're part of, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear about it failing. But there's a reason pluralistic liberal urbanites love immigration, and want it to stay. Our culture is resiliant, and growing, and has the right complex of beliefs and behaviors necessary to benefit economically. I can't blame you for being threatened by us, because you absolutely should be. But I can blame you for pretending like restricting immigration is somehow for our own good. It's the same condescending bullshit as when one of our elites tells a ruralite that all they need to participate in the modern economy is a retraining program. Obviously, the only thing that would help ruralite culture survive is the complete collapse of globalized society-- and since that's impossible because we make it impossible-- all they have left is the ability to rage at the machine.
To that extent no further discussion is needed. If the genetically superior immigrants were who they claim to be, on aggregate, they should be able to make their own societies that far surpass the west. They don't because they can't. Thats the end for the immigration debate.
Did you read nothing I wrote? I'm not saying there are no differences between populations-- I'm saying that immigrants are not a representative sample from their native population.
But in point of fact, yes, forcing immigrants to stay in their home countries would improve them. That's why I'm against it! I don't want other countries to catch up. Just like I wouldn't want to force young people to stay in their rural towns. Let me drain the brains! I want all the backwoods towns and backward states to collapse into the void left by the absence of all their best, most motivated people.
GBRK
5mo ago
it goes into GDP, but doesnt benefit natives.
Okay, I understand your argument about double-counting now but this is still wrong. Am immigrant's wage is the measure of how much good they've done. If I pay you $200 to do something, GDP raises by $200 and I receive at least $200 worth of value. Subtracting the wage you recieved obscures that change in value.
If thats true, then is should already be profitable to urbanise the existing population more. And Im not sure it is all that true - as a city grows bigger, it needs more transport per person to still get everyone everywhere at even just the same velocity.
It is. That's why existing urban centers are trying to undo suburbanization with denser developments, more walkability, and better transit. And "more transport person" is definitely wrong. As you rise up density thresholds, instead of having fifteen people take fifteen cars you can have 30 people take a single bus. Plus, closely-packed goods and services reduce the need for transportation in general. Instead of everyone having to drive fifteen-thirty minutes to the nearest walmart, they can just walk five minutes to the corner store instead.
This is important in the political calculus, where there are non-economic objections to immigration,
I'm not addressing non-economic objections to immigration because they're fundamentally unadressable. I can't make you like immigrants if you don't, no matter how good the economic benefits are, so I'm not going to try. This is just "clash of civilizations" stuff-- I think my beliefs are fundamentally adaptive and yours aren't, I think believing in and executing on xenophilia and liberalism maximizes my own personal power and that of people who share my ideology, and consequently I think we can eventually crush you and yours. I understand that you're going to try and crush me in turn, and don't blame you for that.
Im not sure theyre such a big deal.
They are objectively a huge deal. Centralization effects are the entire reason we have "cities" in the first place instead of being evenly spread across the landscape.
GBRK
5mo ago
Do you agree with my modified formula and if not, why does your formula measure these correctly?
I disagree with your formula but I don't think we have an object-level disagreement... I included the ΔAvg. Wages to capture the anti-immigration argument that immigration lowers wage. If you want to factor out that term because you don't believe they do, then I'm fine with that.
Even the government expenditure that isnt directly welfare still does scale with population - more people need more roads etc
Yes, but not linearly. If for every immigrant we also added an equivalent amount of land that would be true, but densifying population centers means that people increase faster than miles of roads and sewage, and you get to benefit from economies of scale and network effects for providing distribution of food and services.
the benefit doesnt require the immigrant to go to your contry specifically.
But it does? America is better than europe because we have a culture and government that makes better use of our human resources. If we leave immigrants in their home countries or send them to other sub-american countries they will be less productive than they would have been as americans. There are also services that are difficult to provide non-locally (e.g., healthcare).
And-- centralization effects are a big deal too. I've worked with a lot of indian software engineers in my time. Some of them have been immigrants to america and some have been outsourced labor. The standard anti-immigrant logic is that this should bring wages down-- but instead, America's software engineering wages are some of the highest on the planet. Having all the engineers here brings all the engineering-buyers here. High supply and competition on both ends makes our overall market for software engineering much more efficient, which raises revenues and wages. Meanwhile, if we stopped allowing engineers-- well, the outsourcing companies are still right there. If we banned immigration and therefore lost our quality and efficiency edge companies would just go elsewhere.
GBRK
5mo ago
- net negative tax payers != net negative.
- the original article completely fails to show that immigrants (on average, or from any particular demographic) are net negative tax payers over the long run for the reasons I enumerated in my post.
GBRK
5mo ago
No agreement can make china stop copying american ip because weak IP protections is just the objectively correct economic prescription. All IP laws except trademarks should be destroyed for being bullshit rent seeking.
GBRK
5mo ago
But the US can nationalize those companies and force them to show propaganda-- or they can conscript their programmers out from under them and force them to work on software for autonomous killing machines. American deindustrialization is strategically dangerous... But it's not like the US gets no strategic advantages in return for being the global center for information engineering (inclusive of coding, financial services, and software.)
GBRK
5mo ago
What do you want this term to do?
Perhaps I formulated this terms little awkwardly, but it's intended to capture all of:
- the value of the services immigrants or any specific immigrant provides (captured partially in their wages, but also by the people receiving those services)
- being cheap labor and therefore avoiding inflation
- being an additional source of demand and therefore price pressure
- the effects of immigration on prevailing wages
then that would mean we are paying more to produce an ultimately identical citizen.
As I said,
I can envision an article about how inclusive of the cost of their childhood poverty, the children of immigrants have a greater net cost to the government than the children of natives (and therefore that we should discourage immigration for that reason.) But it would have to contend the fact that 2nd generation immigrants make MORE money than the native population-- and therefore also pay more in taxes.
Regardless, that's a separate discussion from the discussion of whether immigrants are net beneficial. If you loan me and my friend a nickel each, and then a week later I pay you a quarter and he pays you a dime, you've received a net benefit from both of us. It is not my position that immigrants and natural-born citizens provide the same net benefit, only that they both, on average, provide a benefit.
Look, education-- nutritional supplementation-- healthcare-- etc. is typically an investment. At least in america, these programs were justified at the time of passage as not just "services" but as a working toward the common benefit. That's not true for all welfare (disability, elder care), and not all investments are good investments. But study after study shows that the cost of investments into childrearing get more-than-repaid over the lifetime of the child by the difference in tax receipts alone.
And also, all of this fails to capture that working-age immigrants already received a massive amount of societal investment in their home countries, and now america gets to benefit for cheap. America and americans didn't need to put in time and effort to raise those immigrants-- they just get them in the middle of their productive years and go from there. If you compare two american babies versus and immigrant and their child, the american babies might later make more money and pay more taxes than the latter pair-- but you have to pay for two sets of education instead of just one.
As a general argument, if we could put a copy of the USA somewhere into an empty bit of ocean, do you think that would benefit americans? Because once the aging argument is eliminated, thats like immigration by people just like citizens.
Yes, absolutely! I would make as many copies of the USA as our biosphere can support, because network effects and economies of scale would combine to raise the living standards in both americas.
People are power. Stealing immigrants from other nations is basically imperialism and that's awesome.
you'd be looking at numbers very similar to Europe.
Yeah, and europe is worse than america so that's proof that the presence of hispanic and black populations are actually having a multiplicative positive effect on the welfare of the white population. And beyond even the fact that I am the diversity knocking at the door, I don't much fear later waves of immigration because I believe my culture is literally chosen by God to eventually "win." That's the benefit of being roman catholic-- 2000+ years of always winning in the end to be smugly confident about.
I don't begrudge you your fear, mind. In fact, I think it's perfectly sensible for you to be afraid. Amero-catholic culture is superior to all other cultures and it is therefore inevitable that your beliefs and practices will eventually be supplanted by my own. Despite being exposed to the benefits of literally thousands of other cultures, protestants/atheists were unable to pry my faith from me and my Brazilian/French relatives failed to convince me to stay proficient at their languages or become well-versed in their cultures. So I'm confident that I sit at global maximum of culture, because if any other culture was superior I would have already been converted.
I'm going to speak on this mostly from the American perspective because I think the calculus for Europeans is legitimately different. Anyways--
It's interesting that immigrants have only a marginal effect on population aging. That part of the article is well supported, contradicts my priors, and has forced me to update my beliefs.
Everything aside from that core point is worthless. The arguments about cultural and genetic threats are just silly-- but I won't harp on them too much. I think my culture is the best and my genetics are pretty darn good so I'm confident that through the graces of God and Darwin I'll prevail. I can see why people with inferior cultures and genetics would be afraid of immigration but that's not my problem, and anyways over the long run your doom is overdetermined.
But the economic argument is just ridiculous.
Let me start with the calculation that would actually convince me that that any specific immigrant is a net drain:
[Net Tax Income] + [Integral of (ΔGDP PPP + ΔAvg. Wages) over immigrant length of stay] - [Net Welfare Spending] - [Net Harm from Crime] < 0
... generalizing over any group of immigrants.
It's obvious and uncontroversial that that [Net Tax Income (immigrant)] < [Net Tax Income (natural-born citizens)]. And while I've never actually seen it proven, I wouldn't be too surprised if "Net Tax Income" (immigrant)/years in country < "Net Tax Income" (natural-born citizens)/years in country.
I understand that anti-immigrant activists believe that [ΔAvg. Wages] is negative. I disagree but respect that there are consistent a priori arguments in the other direction, and that the a posteriori argument I find convincing is founded on fuzzy, difficult to interpret data.
I understand that anti-immigrant activists believe that [Net Harm from Crime] is very large. I think they've been fooled by media sensationalism, they think I've been fooled by media censorship, we're just never going to agree on this.
I don't blame the article for not convincingly addressing the above points-- those arguments have been rehashed over and over again. But its failures are twofold:
First, it claims to show that [Net Welfare Spending (immigrant)] > [Net Welfare Spending (citizen)], but to do this it uses *blatant accounting chicanery. It treats, "percentage of households receiving welfare" as a proxy for "welfare spending," but that's an obviously terrible idea when not all welfare is created equal. SNAP is cheap, Medicaid paying for a nursing home is definitely not. And-- it treats the benefits received by the citizen children of immigrants as benefits received by immigrants. That's poor-faith sleight of hand. I don't just mean that in the philosophical sense that citizen children of immigrants aren't actually immigrants-- I mean that it double-counts welfare provided to immigrants, but then is careful to treat the results of that welfare-- the economic gains due to education, good childhood nutrition, etc. as being the result of citizens. That's completely unfair. It would be like me trying to argue that this CIS report showing how naturalized citizens receiving welfare at lower rates than American-born citizens is proof that we should naturalize every immigrant immediately-- when of course that report also reflects the fact that naturalization is a long process and by the time you've been in the US for over a decade you've probably become reached a prosperous middle age and become economically established.
(By the way, I got that CIS link from the article itself-- and it was including its numbers as more proof that citizens take less welfare than immigrants. Can you see the logical error here?)
I can envision an article about how inclusive of the cost of their childhood poverty, the children of immigrants have a greater net cost to the government than the children of natives (and therefore that we should discourage immigration for that reason.) But it would have to contend the fact that 2nd generation immigrants make MORE money than the native population-- and therefore also pay more in taxes.
And finally even more egregious than the accounting mistakes, the article doesn't even try to argue that ΔGDP PPP is negative, even though for pro-immigration activists it is our entire raison d'être. I like goods and services. Immigrants make goods and deliver services. Q.E.D. Yes, immigrants receive welfare-- but they also work in the hospitals that supply Medicaid-funded treatments and in the fields that supply SNAP-eligible foodstuffs. Immigrants contribute to the American project not just by paying taxes, but by giving us the things our taxes pay for. In a contrafactual world without immigrants or their children either the economy or inflation or both would have been much worse.
The best the article does is vaguely gesturing toward the direction that national IQs are correlated with GDP per capita, as if this should prove anything. Well to use a term mottists really enjoy, "One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens." I believe that immigration has raised and continues to raise America's GDP PPP per capita. Therefore, I must logically conclude that immigrants are on average smarter than the native-born population. And that's not much of a stretch! Even if I believed that differences in national IQs accurately measured differences in genetic predispositions toward intelligence (I don't, I think they're measuring differences in nutrition, disease rates, and stress-linked epigenetic expression) those differences are actually fairly small, in the grand scheme of things. If you compare the general population to groups self-selected for competence (think engineers, doctors, scientists, etcetera) you see a much larger, much more persistent difference. Immigrants are the ultimate self-selected group. Hell, that article I linked about 2nd generation immigrants making more money than they native population also includes that 2nd generation immigrants end up better educated than the native population. And education is correlated with IQ...
Yes, the article provides a study about national IQ changes... but its trivial to sketch out an argument for ignoring that study. A difference of <=2 points could be noise, could be due to flaws in the design in the PISA test, could be due to a non=representative sampling of students, could be due to differences in language proficiency, could be due to stress-linked epigenetic factors, could be due to any number of things besides an actual genetic difference pre-dispositioning immigrants to have lower IQ. I'm not making an actual counterargument, at this point-- but only because it would be a waste of time to discuss IQ when what actually matters is ΔGDP PPP and you can just measure that directly.
Now, that all ignores the admittedly rather compelling argument that aggregate economic benefit is not the same as personal economic benefit, and that specific individuals may suffer net losses from immigration for whatever reason. I wouldn't want to tell one of the people in the new years New Orleans Muslim terrorist attack that they net-benefited from immigration. But the article doesn't make that argument so I won't bother addressing it.
There is one concession I have to make to the anti-immigration argument, and that it is that asylum applicants/refugees are-- if not necessarily a net loss-- than less economically beneficial than either illegal immigrants or high-skilled immigrants. And that's a problem for Europe, because there are a lot of legitimate asylum applicants they are mandated by morality and international law to accept. But the fact that it's also a problem for America is completely ridiculous! Even if you accept (like I do) that we have a moral imperative to accept economic migrants... there's zero need to give them the support we give to actual refugees. They would happily take long-term work visas instead, with no obligation for America to let them stay here into retirement and pay for their expensive old-age healthcare (unless they upgrade to permanent residency through excellence and hard work.) If I got everything I wanted, we would have a LOT more immigration-- but immigrants would receive less welfare. Legal immigration is good but illegal immigration is WAY better. So the more illegal we can make our immigration-- the fewer responsibilities we require and the fewer the rights we extend-- the better.
GBRK
5mo ago
in which case the argument against immigration is a very clear and resounding 'not very good'.
Maybe in europe, but american immigration is still net economically positive by most quantifiable metrics. People on this forum make some combination of the "but it's not good for absolutely everyone" and the "but cultural diversity makes me feel bad" arguments. In response to the first argument, lazy rent-seekers can work harder instead of trying to interfere with my ability to do commerce with whoever I want. In response to the second argument-- shrug. Reducing immigration makes me feel bad and I don't see why they should get their way.
GBRK
5mo ago
I'm not coming at this from an anti-russian angle, I'm coming at this from a pro-american angle. I'd like ukraine to be free-- but the most important thing is for america to be prosperous and safe. To that end, it's in our interest to contain our enemies with the least expenditure of american lives possible.
GBRK
5mo ago
but most historians seem to think that Containment wasn't super effective.
It continually baffles me that historians say this because... where is the soviet union now? I think the domino theory was probably bullshit, but forcing your enemies to expend resources at an unfavorable rate forever just works™. The mistakes america made was with picking the wrong enemies-- we could have easily had that one vietnamese dude as an ally, and later Iraq proved to be a lesser evil than hardcore islamists like ISIS.
GBRK
5mo ago
Option A - Stalemate and Attrition
I don't understand why people think this is a bad thing (for the united states of America). "Defending Ukraine" is just a useful fig leaf for what's actually important: degrading the ability of the Russian state to interfere with America's interests. Sure, a decisive victory for Ukraine would be good... but an indefinite war is even better. The war in Ukraine is essentially a pinning action for Russian state capacity. The longer we fix their attention on Ukraine, the better. Paying a few hundred billion dollars for the privilege is cheap. American lives are worth millions of dollars apiece-- getting to spend Ukrainian lives instead is an amazing deal. In the absolute best case, we turn ukraine into Russia's Vietnam-- a forever war that permanently saps their will to fight completely out of proportion with the actual military consequences of defeat. (And yes, Vietnam did that for America. Sure, we fought wars after, but with the major caveat of no longer having the draft.)
Morally, of course, I'm repulsed by the idea of intentionally extending the war... But that's my honest assessment when I take my "moralism" hat off and put my "realism" hat on.
GBRK
5mo ago
Flopping is pretty silly. The women's league is known for having much less of it so it's probably possible to mitigate it just by telling the refs to behave differently. That being said, it's worth noting that some of the players notorious for flopping (ex. Brazil's Neymar) are also notorious for getting injured because the opposing team's offense hard-focuses them. So on net I'd want ref enforcement to encourage less flopping, but there's probably no good way to have zero flopping. Maybe some incidental change like automatic VAR review for big matches would help at the margins, but it's not something I think is particularly important to optimize for. The kinds of americans who love football and dislike soccer will continue to like football and not really like soccer even if flopping is removed-- and that's perfectly fine, people are allowed to have different values and therefore different preferences. But soccer is beloved for being the beautiful sport, not the most action-packed one. It appeals to a wide range of ages and demographics. It's the sort of thing a mother encourages their sons to play together without worrying that they'll get hurt. Football can't really say the same.
GBRK
5mo ago
Congress still has the power to refuse confirmation with 51% majorities.
Nah, "interim" appointments just last forever now.
The president still faces the threat of legal action after their term if they violated the law.
Everything is an official act if the president wants it to be. Everything else gets done by underlings and receives pardons. The idea that presidents were liable to state law provided a check on that-- but now it's gone. I won't pretend like republicans are fully to blame for that-- I'm not a fan of biden's blanket pardons. But this is one more, massive, crack in the dam.
GBRK
5mo ago
Do you have evidence for this?
Beyond gut instinct fermi estimates, no. But I should clarify that I'm speaking of the net effect of voting for politicians that promote particular anti-abortion policies. If I had to choose between two buttons labeled "end climate change" and "prevent abortions in the US for a hundred years" I would pick the second, but I don't think any sort of federal ban is actually enforceable. I'm suprised and impressed that republicans actually managed to overturn roe-v-wade, but most estimates of that claim that it only saves about ~30,000 lives a year. Compared to the marginal effect of preventing ISIS-style wars I'm unimpressed. I'm aware that the comparison is a little unfair because I'm imagining an intervention that could singlehandedly halt climate change at some degree thresholds-- but at the same time, I think it's likely that the most deleterious effects of climate change are liable to happen at the margins, where it might be possible to just hold the breaks long enough to get to a tipping point.
(Also, as a Catholic you should know it's not about the effect of paying for an abortion, it's about the remote material cooperation with evil. Being made complicit in the murder of a baby is the thing that really upsets us and Congress explicitly tried to protect us from.)
I'm concerned primarily with the net loss of life. But if we're speaking in terms of remote material cooperation with evil without considering numbers, preventing immigrants from making better lives for themselves also qualified.
GBRK
5mo ago
What mechanism do you want? I vote in accordance with my conscience, and my conscious tells me I'm going to save more lives by voting for climate action than by voting for anti-abortion measures. I wish I could just concentrate my beliefs in a single party but unfortunately we don't live in a parliamentarian democracy.
GBRK
5mo ago
The democrats are definitely the progressive party. Their policy is progressive. The mechanism they arrive at their progressivism doesn't really concern my argument. But if we agree then I don't care to dispute it.
I know we're arguing about definitions, which is the lowest form of argument, but I still think it's worth trying to get you to see my side. When you say, "the democrats are... the progressive party," you're taking a descriptive view of the ways the democrats behave. And it's accurate! But it's also missing the point. It's like calling a motorcycle gang a "motorcycle helmet wearing gang". Democrats adopt progressivism because it is useful to them-- because they have particular common needs the ideology serves. They would still be (mostly) bound together if they found a different way of addressing the same needs. That's why I call democrats the urban party-- because their needs and desires are fundamentally a result of what urbanites need and want. Yes, there are non-urbanist democrats, just like there are urbanist republicans, because not all urbanites share the same needs. But serving urban environments is still fundamentally the core of what the party is and wants.
What evidence is there that indicates that the US is headed towards organized political violence?
Uh, the fact that we're already here? Two trump assasins and luigi. Unless the economy skyrockets and things start getting immediately better now we're already going through what later historians will probably call "the american troubles" or something alike.
GBRK
5mo ago
Progressivism is unpopular; a very tiny percentage of voters thought democrats were too far to the right.
I had this same mental model of the world, and then harris lost. Without changing how I personally feel about progressivism, I now have to concede that the left-populists were right about the electorate.
It's worth remembering that the last democrat with any sort of popular movement was Yang, and he's also strongly populist-progressive (though not so much left-progressive.)
GBRK
5mo ago
I don't mind if we eat the rich too, I just think it's infeasible. Slave revolutions basically never work-- you have to have some sort of elite buy-in.
That was a typo lol. I mean, "easier to destroy than to create." Actually that plays into why I believe trump is stupid-- it's really easy to see how the bulk of his success is just the short-term gains from looting complex systems he lacks the intelligence to create. I won't dispute calling him "canny" because he really does have an exceptionally refined sort of animal cunning where he understands what people want on an emotional level... but I would define intelligence as either the general intelligence score or the capacity for abstract thought, and trump's mode of speech alone disproves him possessing those.
GBRK
5mo ago
Then if you believe in election fraud anyways there's no point making the defense of "each state runs their own elections." In fact, you should probably accept that all elections are totally rigged, and take the sequence of events from 2016-2024 as evidence that the deep state was secretly on your side as part of a long-term plan to get trump in office.
GBRK
5mo ago
In any case, the cumulative effect of this back-and-forth wrenching will not, I think, be a net increase in state capacity and control.
I think you're dramatically underestimating the bully power of a president with full regulatory authority over the corporations and therefore culture of the united states.
But oh well, at this point we're still discussing counterfactual. I wish I could just remindme! 8 years.
Unless-- do you have a manifold account? We could make some prediction markets to resolve this.
GBRK
5mo ago
Maybe we can agree at this point to not delegate so much to the executive?
I agree on this point, and that's exactly why I liked that these agencies were independent. The senate could have killed the filibuster instead and started passing laws to deal with the administrative state if they wanted to-- but they didn't because presumably the ability to loot the government and install bureacrats via a patronage system is more convenient. Oh well.
What do you think it's been like to be a Conservative this whole time? Do you think we like not having the Comstock Act enforced and have our taxes go to killing babies in their mother's womb? What are you worried about that tops that?
Climate change. I'm a catholic, and therefore anti-abortion, but the net effect of stuff like "not funding abortions" is dramatically outweighed by the net increase in deaths caused by droughts, floods, famines, and famine-related-instability.
But oh well, at least this power is symmetric. I hope the next democratic president just straight-up regulates carbon intensive industries out of existence.
That's fair. As I said-- I understood your point about the double counting, but I don't think we have an object-level disagreement. Let's replace the [ΔGDP PPP + ΔAvg. Wages] with a [value of services directly provided by immigrants to natives + inflation avoided - compensation native workers fail to receive because immigrants did their jobs for them] term. It's harder to quantify that exactly-- but I think we can both agree that it's almost certainly highly correlated with ΔGDP PPP. We might have to disagree on the last term if you think it's negative though. I think "avoided compensation" rounds out to ~0 after taking into account the increased demand for services immigrants require and the fact that in an immigrant-heavy economy native workers are still advantaged when it comes to management and high-skill roles even if skills are exactly the same.
There are political decisions that intentionally restrict density-- nimby zoning laws, for example, but they're ineffective at totally preventing density. My city has recently been growing, and as a result I'm seeing empty lots get built up into 4-over-1 apartment buildings. That doesn't just mean more residents, and more traffic-- it means more businesses being supported in the same amount of space.
Look-- do you actually live in a city? Not a suburb-- and actual city? Because it sounds like your experience is just completely at odds with mine.
Not really. There's no fundamental difference between types of immigration, whether the borders being crosses are municipal, state, or national. People aggregate into similar spots for all the same reasons the world over.
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