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A rare return from the field of economics is the fact known for >200 years that increasing the supply of labor literally only ever benefits the ownership class. The idea of foreign laborers as beneficial because they make goods cheap is somewhat reversing causality. Goods have to be cheap because we have so many foreign laborers. If people couldn't afford the staples, they wouldn't buy them. The outcomes from there are: goods cost less, or workers are paid more, or revolution.
"Cheap goods" are an illusory benefit. You shouldn't be thankful big ag can bring in >100,000 H-2A workers so your strawberries are only $5 a pound. You should be furious that your compensation hasn't scaled proportionally so you can afford strawberries at $10 or $15 or $20 a pound; you should be furious at the greed of banks and corporations, at the incompetence and corruption in government, that has allowed the rampant inflation from the probably $0.50 a pound strawberries cost in 1970. Or the $0.25 for bread and the $1.25 for milk.
Your stresses over cost of living are the direct consequence of these three events:
Also bankers being bankers, amidst all that.
This should be an entire post. In brief, the wealthy have too much to lose by the ACA being repealed, and the #1 way to improve healthcare in this country is to deport >50 million people.
Set aside the immigrant/native question for a minute. Is it your belief that killing half the workers in the US would make the other half materially better off? Because that is the implication of your claim.
(A: it won't, of course, because, broadly, more labor => more production => more Stuff That People Want)
It doesn't matter if you make $10 an hour and strawberries cost $5 or you make $100 an hour and strawberries cost $50. The way you bring down the price of strawberries is by producing more strawberries. Repeat x1b across literally everything.
In the spherical cow hypothetical of half the supply of labor vanishing with literally no other negative effects, yes, quality of life for the remaining would improve profoundly. This isn't a matter of "belief," it's history and biology. Wherever civilized and sufficiently stable nations have recovered from sudden and large declines in population, golden ages have followed. It's ecological succession as applied to humans.
Not to be taken as personally misanthropic--I'm quite pro humans, quite pro there being many, many more. The US is simply not presently equipped for its number of inhabitants, and this is not a problem that can be solved without first deporting 50 million people.
You describe the mechanism. Yes, flooding supply is how you decrease prices. I'm not denying the mechanism, I'm saying its benefit is illusory. Abundant cheap offshore labor is how you produce abundant cheap plastic garbage. We wouldn't need abundant cheap plastic garbage if bankers hadn't destroyed the value of the dollar, if the owners hadn't outsourced so much labor, and if those same owners hadn't stalled out worker compensation.
That's all the economy is, now. The ongoing attempt to outrun the consequences of those decisions.
I'm going to have to ask for a citation, because this seems like an extraordinary claim and contrary to basically every historical example I'm aware of. What's the mechanism here? It is true that the recovery that follows an apocalyptic event will seem like a golden age compared to the apocalypse. However, the fact that hitting rock bottom leaves nowhere to go but up does not mean hitting rock bottom is welfare enhancing.
(I have a weird feeling you're going to pick the Black Death, but maybe you'll surprise me).
What are you actually trying to say? Like, what is the counterfactual scenario you are proposing? You say the benefit of material abundance is illusory, but also seem to expect that things would be better if instead of having more stuff workers were paid better. Is your position "actually, things would be better if we had less stuff"? If so, you should say that. If not, there's a basic problem where higher worker compensation and lower prices are isomorphic. If worker compensation rises but the amount of goods remain the same (per your stipulation) the result is the inflation that seems to incense you.
I guess “golden ages” are just the dead-cat bounces of civilizational history.
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All your objections are empirically wrong. HDI has risen over time, coinciding with the greatest increase in labor supply in the history of the planet. And in general, GDP is correlated with population growth
The more laborers you have, the greater the economies of scale, the more innovations you can sustain, the more surplus you generate.
GDP as an idea is like a belief that doesn't pay rent. It doesn't tell you whether a country is good, a benefit in raising it is not found in evidence. Given otherwise equal choices among westerners, >95% would rather spend their lives in #39 Switzerland or #105 Iceland over #1 China or #3 India.
HDI is a lagging indicator for what could be called civilization development factor C. C associates totally with homogeneity except in Singapore (75% Chinese anyway) and the US, whose C increased following predominantly European immigration and has consistently declined over the last 5 decades. Those countries with high C reached their peak before accepting significant numbers of non-European immigrants, now their C is in uniform decline.
Economics is a pseudoscience whose total positive contributions to humanity are counted on one hand. It endures because it is useful to power, laundering corrupt motive under the veneer of something scientific. "The GDP is high," they say. They mean "Don't believe your lying eyes."
Only pharmaceuticals stand as a market sector where surplus drives innovation, and there it is intramarket surplus from the profits of optional and less-critical therapies funding research in critical therapies. Abundant plastic garbage has resulted in no innovations, improving the delivery of said plastic garbage is not innovation. Millions of foreigners originating in H-class visas either stifle innovation, in itinerant farmhands preventing automation, or cheap tech roles for workers who, as H-class visa holders, are by definition not innovators. No innovation has resulted from the proliferation of Indian hotel, gas station/C-Store owners and low-class tech workers; among the behemoths, the rise of Indians in Alphabet and Microsoft, among many other corporations, preceded not innovation but enshittification. Amazon may be credited for leading to AWS, but Prime is now the lamprey on the whale of their hosting services. The billions who owe cheap computers for their access to the internet will stand in history as evidence directly disproving the utility of cheap goods.
We reached the moon in the 60s. Beyond medicine, the idea we have become more innovative is laughable. We do have better medicine, we do have better entertainment. Day-to-day life today versus the 60s remains worse. It's no coincidence video games, television, and cinema declined, and now the previous bastion of culture in the left is on the verge of collapse. In the absence of such distractions, we would have already seen revolutionary violence.
I didn't cite GDP, I cited GDP per capita. Critical difference. And while I wouldn't use GDP per capita to prove that any particular country is good, but I can use it to make statements about the general trend of increased goodness because it's very strongly correlated with a lot of measure of goodness like e.g. life expectancy that everyone agrees on.
Not well defined. Give me empirical data or give me death.
You're using no science whatsoever. I'll take "psuedoscience" over that.
You're trying to make an a priori argument but I reject this comparison on it's face and also empirically. Go look at a graph of utility patents granted in the united states: https://patentlyo.com/patent/2023/08/utility-patents-granted-calendar.html . It doesn't anti-correlate with graphs of "immigrants as a share of US residents." so I'm pretty damn confident that if you want to track down a graph of "noneuropean immigrants as a share of US residents" it's not going to anticorrelate with that either. It just correlates to graphs of US population growth. More people means more innovation.
Your argument is entirely based on vibes. That's cool, but I've got statistics.
Your modus ponens is my modus tollens, though: if the vibes don't match the stats, then either the vibes are wrong or the stats are wrong/irrelevant.
For example, looking specifically at that patent page, do you really believe that innovation from 2010 to 2020 was 2x or 3x the innovation between 1870 and 1990?
Plausibly yes. The impact of innovation might be on a logistic curve as we vacuum up all the low-hanging fruit, but the patent numbers are sufficient to demonstrate that immigration rates don't have an effect on people having ideas. I can anticipate your objections, but before making them first remember that the most important word in my argument was "anti-correlate". Even if patents granted becomes an increasingly-bad measure of what you would consider important about innovation, there should still be some identifiable correlation not lost in confounding because immigration rate isn't asymptotically increasing over the span of America's existence. Also, if you doubt America's numbers specifically, you can look elsewhere for confirmation-- we're both proposing general rules that should hold cross-culturally. You should be able to eyeball patent rates and immigration figures in any given country to see if rate of innovation (or rate of growth in innovation) falls after immigration spikes.
Skill issue. Overcome your cognitive biases and find some better vibes. Or don't, I guess. I'm pretty convinced that relying on statistical techniques over faulty human wiring as a general principle overperforms in the aggregate, but maybe I'm wrong. If we're lucky we can compare life trajectories 50 years from now and hash it all out.
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Temporarily.
And now here sit we, these modern countries so proud of their female workforce, and wonder where the babies have gone that should have been the next generation of labor.
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