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Americas Bad Cities are costing you
This is where Cremieux goes through the loss of agglomeration effects due to American cities being awful low density places. The loss of the American City he largely blames on the Great Migration and the associated crime waves. He then goes thru how white flight has mostly only occurred with black populations especially ADOS and occurs less with immigrants from Africa.
One of the things with woke is it made people think about ways to refute their ideas. One of them is that white people just hate black people so they did white flight. Turns out the data and original source material people started to look rediscover showed a rise in crime before white flight. People accepted those narratives for decades because we had already mitigated the costs and it was just easy to go with the old narratives. We also accepted a narrative that Americans just liked to live in the suburbs. The actual answer for the preference is crime was too high in cities.
The costs of mitigation Cremieux lists is likely not the full costs. It’s likely everything about city design has been done to allow for unofficial segregation. Often this has been done thru zoning to keep prices high. High home prices means high prices for everything in safe cities as your working class either needs to be able to buy housing in the community or compensated for a long community.
Not being able to do official segregation has basically made the American urban lifestyle very expensive and even more expensive if you have kids. You can’t just buy a cheap house and send your kids to public schools because of the demographics. Which forces you to either live in an expensive suburb or use private schools. This also means you largely can’t be poor in your nice community because your community refuses to have low costs of living options because that would allow the more criminally inclined people to move in.
Today we talk about foreign migration and not domestic internal migration. Once you do mass migration you can’t unring tbe bell. You are now stuck with new demographics. In the case of the great migration I think it basically destroyed Americans urban environments. And now American cities suck. And we had to convince ourselves that we loved living in the suburbs instead of the suburbs being a mitigation for good schools/safety.
I am also open minded that the Great Migration led to increased American wealth because people opposed sharing economic resources and it had a macro effect of limiting socialism in the US and the political paths Canada/Europe went down.
I think it’s quite possible the Great Migration ‘inoculated’ Americans against socialism in a way Europe avoided. Here’s an interesting fellow example - since Sweden’s 1990-2016 mass migration experiment, governments of all political persuasions have become more economically capitalist/liberal, even in areas that aren’t directly immigration policy, for example some of the most liberal policy on private/charter school subsidies in Europe.
Thats a nice idea but the timeline here is basically backwards.
Sweden started liberalising its economy well before the period of mass immigration you’re talking about. A lot of it came out of the broader liberalising trend of the late 80s and 90s, and the Swedish 90s financial crisis accelerated it significantly. This was the period when Sweden deregulated, reformed taxes, cut spending, balanced the state budget, reformed pensions and introduced things like the school voucher system.
At roughly the same time, migration policy was actually being tightened, despite migration still being comparatively low.
The next major wave of economic liberalisation came under Reinfeldt’s centre-right government, which won in 2006. That government pushed further labour market and tax reforms, and then also liberalised immigration, including the major labour migration reform in 2008 and further liberalisation later on.
That, combined with wars and chaos in the Middle East, helped drive immigration much higher in the following years. So again, the economic liberalisation being pointed to here had already happened before the large migration wave.
And after immigration peaked, the political direction changed again. The centre-left returned to power in 2014, the pace of economic liberalisation slowed considerably, and after 2015 migration policy itself became much more restrictive.
So I don’t really see how the Swedish case supports this argument. The sequence is wrong. Economic liberalisation largely came first, with its ideological baggage arguably even enabling the large wave of immigration that came later.
If anything, the actual chronology points causality the other way.
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America’s social spending is not an outlier compared to European countries:
European countries are a very diverse basket but countries like France and Belgium have figures of ~30% of GDP on public social spending, 50% more than the US. The OECD fakes the difference with a ‘private social spending’ metric but this is very questionable.
The US’ far higher absolute wealth, far higher growth rate and much higher disposable incomes (compared to fixed costs for many imports that, for example, both the US and Western European countries and consumers rely on) also distort spending; the French don’t cut because they’re structurally incapable of it without the end of the fifth republic; Californian cities can spend $100k a year per homeless person because they’re so rich that they don’t really even have to care.
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American conservatives have an allergy to having the state give money to the poor which they know is going to disproportionately go to blacks. But it certainly didn't stop America's penchant for shoveling money to the Olds through SS + Medicare. It might have even supercharged that to some degree as a replacement for typical socialism. America isn't that much less socialist than the rest of Europe.
Blacks die earlier too. So funneling money to old people would disproportionately favor whites over blacks. If this was not true and SS benefited blacks more then potentially we would have killed SS in the ‘90s and gone to a 401k for all system.
Though Europe does a lot of old people stuff too so I don’t think that’s the driving force.
As a percentage of taxes paid, who gets more from social security, white people or black people?
Social security is screwing over one group in particular, but its not blacks. The group that loses out the most is men in blue collar jobs earning wages near the cap. Low earning women are the greatest beneficiaries.
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