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I like seeing the most incredibly leftist stereotypes imaginable coming from the nominal right simply by adding "foreign" or "immigrant" with it. The traditional (actual) conservative view of people like Reagan and Thatcher understood that growth is the rising tide that floats the boats for everyone, instead of constant regulation put to "protect" the poor. We oppress our poorest neighbors not by "forcing him to compete" but by sabotaging the market efficiency of our companies and slowing improvements.
It's the exact sort of thinking as an example that had blue states "protecting" taxi cab drivers from rideshare apps, slowing down the spread and hurting all the people who benefited from their use. The tradeoffs of neutered growth is that all the people who would benefit from it don't, and those people are disproportionately the poor who wouldn't have had any access before. A very poor person might have rarely ever taken a taxi long ago, the price being artificially restricted from competition (like taxi medallions) and instead end up stuck on public transit. Now it is so accessible to the poor that they're even ordering private taxis for groceries and restaurant food. It is not restriction, but growth that has allowed even the poorest Americans access.
Take this to almost anything and you see the same story. Whether it be from immigrant work, outsourcing, or automation, it helps the poor when the economy is grown. Factories allow poorer people to own cars. Developments like automated switchboards make phone bills cheaper. Laborers building homes help drive down rent (even if cities insist on restricting new homes and flooding the dam). You don't spend almost 15% of your income on clothing anymore because of growth. You've flown in a plane because of growth. You have a smartphone because of growth. You have cheap lighting in your homes because of growth. I can call a friend of mine all the way over in the UK for pennies because of growth. Do you wish to deny the poor all of this and all future things to come? If not, be pro growth and fight for efficiency in growing the economy, not temporary rent seeking "pro worker" progressiveism.
Frankly, I think the bigger problem is that the immigrants don’t share the same civic value and frequently benefit from government largesse.
So on the one hand they help destroy the fabric that makes growth possible and on the other hand a not insignificant portion take more than they give (eg Somalians)
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In real life, when you restrict the labor supply then quality of life and technology improves: https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-better . And when you saturate the labor pool, wages for the poorest drop: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/wage-impact-marielitos-reappraisal-0
China has genuine technological growth far exceeding ours without saturating their labor pool with new workers. Europe has little technological growth despite saturating their labor pool with new workers.
American Uber drivers would be making a killing if it weren’t for mass migration.
I’m feeling strange deja vu…have we had this argument before?
Both of those articles support the common economic wisdom that, ceteris paribus, competition lowers prices. This is not sufficient to show a quality of life improvement or to demonstrate technological advances. You lose out on specialization of labor. You have to give up coordination problems. There is less economic slack to search for more efficient investments.
China absolutely flooded its labor pool with cheap immigrants. This has been widely regarded as a bad move.
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If you're trying to make an argument for restricting the labor supply, don't pick a country with over a billion people as an example of how to do things, especially if most of those people were poor peasants a generation ago.
China has more innovation than Europe even controlling for their population. Sizably so.
I think Rov's point is that China has such a huge population to start with that even now that they're "controlling" it, they're best analogized to "what if we had a much bigger labor pool here in the US" than "what if we shrunk our labor pool too".
I’m not sure why it would work like this. If we consider it all per capita, shouldn’t China need an even larger pool of laborers given their manufacturing and mining sectors? But they’re getting away with far fewer laborers per capita while sustaining an absolutely dominant domestic industry. And their wages are continually rising across income levels!
https://old.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/142c9t2/manufacturing_wages_in_china_have_risen/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/743509/china-average-yearly-wages-in-manufacturing/?srsltid=AfmBOooSJ4r5rbVOvysJpCOwmvC_KqezPi__XLD0kqBb7HReoqDmUww7
What you're seeing is that China was very poor and the rural areas of china were desperately poor. It's like if the US already had most of south america as states so that almost all of the economic immigration didn't count as immigration.
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Yes labor shortages in the short term can be quite beneficial to workers at the time, but what do labor shortages actually mean for the economy and the world? Things that people want or need to be done, don't get done because there's no one around to do them. People have to shift their labor away from awesome but not strictly necessary things like developing cars, phones, rocket ships, televisions, new medicine, whatever else in favor of the essentials. This means those new things don't happen (or at least happen much later), hurting everyone in the long run including the poor.
"Pro worker" leftist policies have major tradeoffs attached to them, it's not a free lunch.
China has 1.5 billion people. Despite the constant economic sabotage done by communism, the large labor supply simply brute forces through many of their issues. And that's pretty much entirely because Deng Xiaoping was like "come on guys, we can't be this stupid we need to be a little pro growth and pro business" and handicapped the communism part.
Europe is awash with "pro worker" policies that cuck their potential to grow. It's basically impossible to fire bad workers, vacation time is way longer than the US, and they tend to have better benefits. And yet as you say, they don't have growth and they're falling behind. Immigration is not the only factor important to growing out an economy and they've taken a knife to their businesses repeatedly in name of supporting the workers. This is what you're arguing for, sacrificing growth and our long term for the short term concentrated benefits.
An actual labor shortage means that every business owner who owns two mansions and three cars has to sell one of their mansions and one of their cars unless they want to lose their entire income and become homeless. No one in America has ever experienced an actual labor short. There are only labor shortages in very narrow subspecialties. If Amazon for some reason needed an experienced Lisp or COBOL engineer, then Amazon needs to spend money to recruit one. Then the sub-occupation of Lisp programmers have a better QoL, and Bezos’ QoL stays exactly the same because he has so much money that it can no longer increase his QoL. We have more than enough wealth wasted (genuinely wasted) at the top, that we can artfully redistribute it to the poor by simply preventing the addition of more low-wage workers.
Nope. It means that the people who want or need something done need to pay more to have it done, otherwise the employee will stop working and find somewhere else to work. You only need a very small amount of “temporarily can’t do it” or “need to do it suboptimally” to accomplish this, only 1 out of 1000 projects, a civilizationally-irrelevant amount. When the QoL and wages of the lower class increase, then they can actually afford to quit their job for months to find a better one, and can actually afford to move to other parts of the country to find a better position. It’s a race to the top in terms of QoL and wellbeing. It’s only bad for the rich who hate the poor. Consider landscaping. A rich person always wants pristine landscaping. In the wealthy areas of the east coast I am familiar with, they universally spend exorbitantly on landscaping and nearly all the employees are illegals who don’t speak English. (The oversees of more sophisticated projects speak English). They are worked to exhaustion and have to eat outside under the shade of trees. What happens when we restrict the labor pool here? If the landscaper doesn’t want to be worked to exhaustion or piss in a bottle, he can quit to find a firm with better QoL; the firms have to compete over QoL in order to retain workers; everything improves for everyone, except the ~0.1% of wealthy properties which did not want to pay more to secure the QoL of the poor. That person may have to hire a local kid to do spotty landscaping, which is also good for the poor. Or maybe the grass grows a little taller (the horror!).
I think what you’re getting at is, “I want to trade the suffering of the poor for greater tech development”. If we compel them to keep working really hard, while their life may be miserable, it’s worth it for the rest because they get more goodies, like 4k VR porn and even more addictive algorithms. But this doesn’t even apply in America, because if you wanted more tech development you would want to restrict the supply of tech employees, whereas we are saturating the field with Indians and Asians. Now all the creative techies do not have the stress-free working conditions or the income affordance necesssary to really dive into passion projects. I mean some do, but only the most conscientious and industrious, ie not the most creative. So you actually have the worst of both worlds here. Not only do we trade the stress and tears of the poor for more waste at the top, but we even trade the stress and tears of our technologically-interested creatives for more waste at the top. If you wanted more tech development, you would want to restrict tech jobs, particularly in regions known for less creativity and less start-up potential. We have done the opposite. We have guaranteed less innovation, and instead we have Mark Zuckerberg 80 billion dollars on the MetaVerse, and Bezos space vanity projects. I will admit that Musk buying x was a good thing though.
What are some of these examples of huge amounts of wealth being genuinely wasted? That'd have to happen in the form of huge amounts of consumption. Most of the wealth at the top is sitting in the form of stocks, at most you get some yachts, which just aren't much of a blip on any measure of consumption.
Too many houses, houses that are too large, too many private pools and other unnecessary amenities, expensive overseas luxury good purchases, too many cars, too many vacations, too many private jets (15k), etc etc etc
Just extraordinary waste which we know, scientifically, does not measurably influence happiness. It is entirely reasonable to design an immigration policy which forces the rich to depart from the resources they waste, so that the resources are necessarily transferred into the lower and middle classes.
Whats your cut off for rich here? Unless you're including like the broad middle class then these forms of consumption are just such a tiny percent of total wealth/consumption that it's hard to take seriously as anything but resentment that they have nice things.
These things comprise a large part of the consumption of the rich in America. Is it possible you resent the poor for having a genuine moral claim to the resources that the wealthy waste?
They comprise a large part of the consumption of the rich of course, what else would they consume? But a very small amount of total consumption. If you redistributed all the pools and big houses we'd all have a 5 minute time share a year in mansion and get to enter a one in a thousand lottery to have one of flights be private instead of commercial jet. And yeah, I think it's basically fine that the system works out that people who get into a bunch of voluntary, everyone wins and grows the pie contracts get to consume some of that newly created pie. It's not a big deal to me. I think redistribution to a degree is good to a point, we should have some baseline level of consumption that even the least fortunate have access to, good shelter, good food, free time and plentiful entertainment options, but it's just not a big deal to me if the guy who built up a company to provides valuable goods and services gets to debauch it up in a nice big house by his private pool, good for him.
All that even said, your position doesn't even really work out to redistribution, it just shrinks the pie for everyone. The poor get even less in actual terms although maybe a bigger slice in relative terms.
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Weren't you just arguing that labor shortages were good and made people better off? Now you're saying that it means business owners have to sell homes and cars and are at risk of homelessness.
So your argument here that things people value and want done will be less affordable?
I know a poor rural family with a smartphone for every member, clean drinking water available when they want, healthcare from Medicaid, a PS5 with a virtual reality headset (seriously, think of how insane it is that even a rather poor family has personal virtual reality now) , nice tasty food from all around the world with spices many in the past would have never tasted. Their life has luxuries that even the richest and most powerful people a few hundred years ago could only dream of, and that was only possible because of tech development. Even the Rothschild's can not compare to what a fast food worker today can access.
Like hunger in the US is basically non-existent! People don't starve to death except by choice, whereas just a few centuries ago famines were common across the world. In fact today's poor are so well off that having too many calories is significantly more common than getting too little calories. The idea that the poor are suffering from economic growth is complete and obvious hogwash. How bad is it for the poor that they and their kids survive, instead of up to 30% of them dying before their first birthdays?
We saved ~471,955 infants in just one year, many of them to poor families.
Really the only thing that is worse than the past is housing, and not by quality or size (like even the poor have indoor plumbing! The richest a few hundred years ago were still shitting in outhouses or dumping it out on the streets) mind you but by price. And that is a deliberate choice by cities and states around the country to artificially restrict the new supply of homes because even the limited resources of land is used more efficiently than ever.
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There is no denying that growth raises the ceiling. The left-wing view is that raising the ceiling is morally worthless if you do not raise the floor first.
And since the floor never changes, this means the left-wing view results in everyone in poverty forever.
“The real minimum wage is always zero.”
At age 18 when I read that it became instantly obvious to me how few people understand this. This hasn’t changed much in the interim.
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I don't think we're using "the floor" in the same sense - I mean "the floor" in the sense of how badly off the least fortunate members of society can get, and that can clearly be altered. The life of the man who has nothing could be improved considerably if we ended homelessness or gave everyone a UBI; it could be considerably worsened if we outlawed all charity or legalized selling oneself into slavery. You may think that raising the floor from its current position would have negative externalities, you may even think we should lower the floor from said current position, but it's trivially false that it "never changes".
It can be altered in that it can be made worse that the natural floor by instituting torture camps or something similar. But as many cities have demonstrated, some people are bottomless pits of need, and cannot be raised above that natural floor.
Perhaps some, but not all of them. Even if you believe that no significant percentage of modern America's homeless could be meaningfully helped, it's surely undeniable that other places and eras have had much more prevalent homelessness than just that fringe of irrecoverables. The situation of the average unemployable pauper in 2026 America is vastly superior to that of the average unemployable pauper in Dickensian London, and I'm willing to call that raising the floor.
But I think even that is a stretch. Certainly a lot of modern homeless people are wretches who are not realistically going to live decently on their own again. But how did they get this way? Widespread access to hard drugs seems to be a massive slice of the pie. Succeed in massively curtailing access to such drugs (via whichever policy you think is most likely to succeed) and you've already "raised the floor" in a very significant way - however unemployable and disadvantaged you are, you'll be massively less likely to end up as a shambling brain-rotted junkie. It's not a natural inevitability that if you're homeless you'll become a debilitated addict. That's by no means the only way I can think of to help those extreme cases, but I wanted something stark and obvious and not redistributive in nature, or requiring any level of cooperation from the homeless themselves.
If we can't raise the floor for some people, that still means that we can't raise the floor, because that's what it means to be a floor--it's the lowest person.
I get where you're coming from, but to overextend the floor metaphor, I feel like over-focusing on uniquely disturbed individuals who are not simply unproductive, but will actively ruin anything that is given to them - the "bottomless pits of need" - is like saying that you can't raise the floor because there's this crazy bastard with a shovel who will dig his way down to the basement however high the floor is. Like. Okay. But we can still talk about how low a randomly-chosen individual can expect to get if they wind up penniless and friendless.
This is what I was trying to get at with the the "average unemployed pauper" stuff at the end of that same paragraph. If, while otherwise under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, you are told that you are going to be penniless and unemployable in a given society - i.e. on the lowest rung there is, if not personally the single lowest person - how bad should you expect your lot to be? Maybe there's a fixed probability (corresponding to a fixed percentage of the population) that you're going to turn out to be one of the irrecoverable wretches. But that's not the only term in that calculation, and I think it's fair to talk colloquially about improving your expected outcome in that situation in terms of "raising the floor".
The more you improve the lot of the people at the bottom, the more the people who remain at the bottom are going to be the truly hopeless. If society is good enough at helping people, the ones at the bottom will all be hopeless because nobody else stays at the bottom for any length of time. You end up with a floor that just can't be raised any more.
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We can talk about it, but not in any meaningful way. The metric isn't available. And it wouldn't be a floor.
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Unfortunately, while absolutely true, this is a tough message for politicians to sell. (There's a reason we haven't had another Reagan or Thatcher.) People take it for granted that they have all this stuff that barely even existed 50 years ago, as if this is just the way the arrow of time works. It's a lot easier to promise gibs to people who see that their neighbour has something they don't.
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