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Something Like A Sketch of A Rationalist-Adjacent Political Program
The subculture associated with the LessWrong diaspora and forums in its sphere has a distinct political approach worth interrogating. At least since The Californian Ideology was published people have noticed "silicon valley types" tend to engage with governance in a way that puts them in a unique and honestly awkward position relative to the US status quo. A decade ago Scott said the cultural signifiers of this group were:
They might have been less reform-minded at the time, but today there is a loose set of internally coherent policies we can identify with the heirs of that scene. 'Grey Tribe' (I really wish there was a better catch-all term) tends to have three broadly identifiable commitments unified by a vision of politics as an attempt to achieve administrative efficiency, in a way they tend to imagine as post-political. Many of the policies under each category naturally overlap with one another. I have tried to keep the list to things I have seen or heard discussed in these circles. The first is a broad institutionalist critique ("Meta-Politics"), the second is an intolerance for the rent-seeking behavior commonly used as a dealmaking instrument ("Rent-Aversion") and the third includes both a select few object-level concerns - I'm particularly interested in any more of these you could identify - and an inclination to shift status quo functions off the state and on to trusted markets and experts ("Optimizability").
Meta-Politics
Rats tend to be, relative to other smart people, interested in comprehensive reform of, or imagining alternatives within, Constitutional Political Economy. Hacking at the root instead of the branches of inefficiency. Here is what I imagine they are likely to suggest on that front.
Electoral Reform: Widely popular given the perceived inefficiency of FPTP. Often comes as support for Instant-Runoff ("Ranked Choice") Voting, or the Single-Transferable Vote in the case of Proportional Representation advocates, who are ironically overrepresented. The more distinctly Rat position tends to be support for STAR over IRV/RCV, and something like Allocated Score over STV. Occasionally: Quadratic voting, Independently drawn districts, Unitary Primaries, Fusion voting.
Legislative Reform: Relatively more proportionally representative legislatures. Increased House Apportionment, e.g. the Cube Root Law. Occasionally more unique proposals like introducing secret ballots to congressional voting procedures. Paying legislators competitively with top talent, as well as doing the same for their (substantially increased) staff. Codify law on a GitHub clone, and fold the Federal Register/CFR in to the same site.
Pseudo-Futarchy: Utilizing prediction markets to generate more reliable information for agency regulators and legislative deliberation. Low hanging fruit.
Meritocracy: Re-legalize and center the use of g-loaded tests for cognitively demanding public and private employment.
State Capacity: Move towards a legible society through national identification systems, unified federal databases, and modernized technology infrastructure. Nationwide ERIC to replace Crosscheck. Hire, fire, and compensate administrative talent commensurate with their skill.
Private Governance: Of particular interest to Bay Area writers. Why try for voice when you can exit? Charter Cities Institute, Prospera, Seasteading, etc. Replace poorly aligned democratic incentives with the productive clarity of polities competing for workers and firms in a market of policy regimes. Long libertarian history of related visions - Puydt's Panarchy, Nozick's Meta-Utopia, Yarvin's Patchwork, Scott's Atomic Communitarianism all grasp at similar intuitions. Looks more like SEZs in a domestic political context.
Libertarian Paternalism: Well aligned with Grey Tribe instincts even if some specific claims fell to the replication Crisis. Use of choice architecture to encourage but not coerce prosocial action.
Adjacent: e-governance, vTaiwan, sortition assemblies
Rent-Aversion
Deliberative lawmaking between representatives of particular communities with their own interests will on some level always be about managing the distribution of gains and losses of some new condition or proposed change. Rationalist see this and, with a quasi-libertarian read of the situation, see a mess of rent-seeking carve-outs left in the wake of policymaking that is not meaningfully distinct from corruption. A lot of their policy approach concerns the abolition of (non-schumpeterian) artificial rents and the redistribution of natural rents away from private capture.
Occupational Licensing: Lift artificial caps on doctors and residency in the US. Institute licensing reciprocity with peer states like Canada. Broad abandonment of loosening of licensing regimes, especially ones simply serving as a tertiary education filter.
FDA Reform: Reciprocity with peer states for recognition of drugs. Generalize Operation Warp Speed for all applications. Prime target for comprehensive restructuring.
NEPA Abolition: Environmental protection suits have been co-opted and abused to extract rents by incumbent landowners. The more interesting question is how to structure law that can achieve some of the environmentalist goals of the original legislation.
Zoning Reform: Municipal control of land use may be the single most costly norm in US law. Ideally abolish all land use restrictions excepting designated zones for heavy industry, and simply rely on a (clear and independently drafted) building code. Pairs well with privatized governance as a single beneficiary of land policy internalizes all externalities.
Carbon Taxes: Production and consumption that releases carbon in to the atmosphere is a simple underpriced negative externality.
Land Value Taxation: Tax the full annualized market value of land, exempting all improvements and constructions on top of it. As supply is unaffected, this tax incurs no deadweight loss, improving economic efficiency when it substitutes other taxes, and arguably improving allocative efficiency of land.
Destination-based Cash Flow Taxation: Replace Corporate Income Taxation with a tax on firm profits after full expensing of new capital investment via the transfer of an equivalent tradeable tax credit, with border adjustment to simplify compliance and nullify tax haven incentives. Resulting tax falls solely on consumption owed to supernormal profit/capital rents. Lacks deadweight loss. Some capital incomes are earned, some are luck. This targets the latter.
Jones Act/1905 Dredging Act: Domestic shipping requires American ships, which acts as a distortionary subsidy to American industry. Similarly, American ports are under-dredged because a 1905 law required American ships to do the dredging, and ours are now internationally subpar at that task. These policies are something of synecdoche for relic rent-seeking behavior that we all grew up a little poorer for.
Subsidy Abolition: Oil, agriculture, sports - substantial subsidies flow arbitrarily to wielders of political attention. Subsidies have a place in industries of national security importance or industrial policy planning, like semiconductor manufacturing, but not stadiums.
Outlaw Non-competes: Non-compete agreements distort labor markets and should be banned at the federal level.
Open Access Journals: Academic journals only serve to poorly gate-keep scholarship. Make a public sci-hub alternative. Likewise, revive the original Google Books vision of full, readily accessible digitization.
IP Reform: Tax patents proportional to a self-assessed value under an option for public purchase (Harberger taxation), buy them to put them in the public domain at a price determined at public auction (Kremer Buyouts), or some other variation
School Choice: Introduce market competition and consumer preference into schools through education vouchers. Dovetails well with LVT and zoning reform as it decouples municipal property taxation from school quality.
Adjacent: Strategic litigation reform, Civil Asset Forfeiture, Real Estate/Car Dealership mandates
Optimizability
Arguably where the neoliberalism of rat politics shines through. This is a change in state outputs, as opposed to Meta-Politics' focus on inputs to functionality. The Grey Tribe prefers policy-informed approaches to achieve goals it broadly shares with liberals, as well as speculative approaches to achieve goals it often does not. Many suggestions are just particular instantiations of the guiding anti-regulatory principle of market liberalization.
Market Monetarism: Replace the inflation and unemployment mandate of central banks with NGDP Targeting (sometimes Gross Labor Income Targeting) with innovative instruments of monetary policy when at the ZLB. This has been popular on LW since the recession, and macro has slowly moved closer to that direction.
Permitting Reform: The legal ability to perform large or atypical tasks is significantly harder than it once was. The continual updating of Nuclear Plant regulatory requirements during the construction process made them de facto illegal. Likewise constrains advancements in rail, geothermal, hydrogen airships, autonomous cars, autonomous drones.
Grant Reform: Lead researchers by their own reckoning burn time and money writing individual federal grant applications. Move towards a system of cooperative, directed, institutional research funded by large block grants. Similarly, employ Romer's Self-Organizing Industry Boards for private innovation.
Direct Transfer Benefits: UBI, NIT, whatever you want to call it. Replace the myriad difficult to navigate system of state programs with an income floor ensured through direct cash transfers. Progressive income tax structures (or some substitute) recoup the transfer so it maximally targets those with no alternative income.
Organ Markets: Regulated, compensated sale of spare kidneys as we currently do for blood plasma.
Open Borders: Provided some minimal health/criminality screening, uncap immigration. American institutions and localized production act as a multiplier on labor productivity. Simply increasing available labor grows general production more than linearly with the number of added workers. Some culture transplant and golden goose concerns, but this is very popular.
Free IVF: Polygenic screening during IVF allows health, including likely cognitive performance, to be estimated in fertilized embryos before implantation. The multiplier on this intervention is likely well above costs even at this early stage, and should be free and subsidized.
Pragmatic Criminal Justice Reform: Anti-social violence is concentrated in young men with high risk tolerance, low intelligence, and high time preference. The intentionally slow, abstracted process of criminal prosecution fails to disincentivize this cohort. Consequences can be lower so long as they are swift and expectable.
Factory Farm Ban: Current law forbids the recording of industrial livestock processing. These laws should be lifted and their contents infoblasted to the public until reform is inevitable. Likewise, ban octopus farming and shrimp eyestalk ablation
Adjacent: Free GLP-1 agonists, Drug decriminalization, Geoengineering
Sometimes people say this scene's politics are identifiable in the Progress Studies publications, or in the Neoliberal orgs, or esoterically in Bostrom papers about singletons. I think, while conversant with all of those, it has its own MO. It is now mature and active enough that its originating, 'post-political' self-conception is in tension with its desire to effect change. I kept this in mind particularly with how slow the relevant orgs were to get any serious lobbying presence on the Hill for AI.
Regardless, this seems like a fitting technocratic vision for a group that sees itself as cosmopolitan, longtermist, and high-decoupling. Improve the function of the state as if agnostic to its ends, socialize rent-claims when they must exist and abolish them everywhere else, lean into the innately productive forces of well structured, well priced markets. If anything what stands out in this sketch is what is missing.
I think this broadly captures the political proposals I've seen discussed in those circles, and how they relate. Interested if there's any substantial disagreement, missing pieces or elements of rationalist political thought that should be explained, or policy proposals you think also fit. Also interested in blind spots, or how you imagining something like this list changing in 10, 20 years if the people in question continue to become more organized or active.
Good grief. What a hellscape of a world you paint a picture of. The open borders proposition alone sinks all the rest. What will you do when half of the middle east moves over and votes to repeal all of your pretty policies and install Islamic theocracy? What is the plan for dealing with open ethnic warfare in the streets as immigrant enclaves import their bitter generations-old grudges onto your streets? Spending all this time and energy setting up these expensive policies before throwing wide the gates and inviting all the barbarians in to burn it all down strikes me as far from rational.
Not for the first time, I find myself comforted that these people are confined to their weird Bay Area poly sex cults far away from the levers of power.
You have only grasped half of the reason why open borders are bad. There are deeper problems with open borders. The way you frame it, with "bad guys" crossing the border, suggests that the problems are fixable. Just dial it down a bit and have a semi-open border, closed to "bad guys", porous to "good guys". But open borders is a path to catastrophe, even on a homogeneous clone world, with no races and just one culture.
I've made two lengthy attempts to explain the point, one as a modernized version of Malthusian Immiseration, the other in response to a discussion of Bryan Caplan's ideas.
Did I manage to distill the essence of the issue here? Lightly edited, it reads:
Isn't this argument goes not only against open borders but even modern large countries with no internal barriers in them. How small should your PaCCPs be? And what about effects of scale that historically allowed large countries to dominate smaller ones?
That is a sharp observation. I've written as though the mobility boundary was the whole story. What about the political boundary?
The Canadian fishery that collapsed was on the East coast. Presumably the fishermen could move to the West coast of Canada and pivot to different fish (Perhaps salmon instead of cod?). So Canada, with different fisheries on the East and West coast, lets us ponder what we think of political boundaries.
Imagine that geography and fish biology makes fishery regulation trickier and more expensive on the East coast. Let us fill in the details, first that politics is uniform across Canada, but mobility is restricted. This creates a perverse incentive. Fishermen on the West coast don't want restrictive catch laws and expensive inspections that they don't need. But what if the fishery on the East coast collapses? Won't the fishermen from the East move West, compete for jobs and drive down wages? No. In this hypothetical there is an internal mobility boundary different from the political boundary. Fishermen on the West coast can ruin things for fishermen on the East coast and not have to care.
Second branch of the hypothetical: Canada is a single, big unitary country with full internal mobility. There is a fight on the East coast, within the East coast fishing community, between those seeking catch restrictions so that there will be fish to catch next year and those with bills to pay this year. If stocks are higher on the West coast, the large size of the country dilutes the urgency of local concerns, the catch restrictions don't get imposed, the East coast fishery collapses. Later, an influx of East coast fishermen to the West coast, drives down wages, and drives up catches. The conflict between those looking to the future and those pressed by immediate concerns repeats, with the same outcome. Classic progressive collapse, first East, then West.
Third branch of the hypothetical: Canada is divided. (Perhaps the division is somehow fishing specific. I haven't thought how such a thing would play out in the long term.) Fishermen cannot change coast. But each coast decides its fishing policy independently.
I've thought of PaCCAP as the question of how big should the PaCCAP be, in the sense of comparing the second case with third. In both cases the mobility boundary and the political boundary coincide. The first hypothetical probes what happens if one has fewer and larger political units than mobility regions. It looks bad. There is obviously much scope to argue about the correct size for a PaCCAP, but the mobility boundary and the political boundary should always coincide.
I've been thinking about why defensive alliances fail to keep collections of small countries safe. We talk about fighting for King and Country. But why did Britain enter the Great War (1914-1918)? The country involved seems to be Serbia, or maybe Belgium, not England. I'm pondering that small countries have historically been unsuccessful in staying safe because the concept of a defensive alliance is ambiguous. Inventing new terminology I ask whether "defensive alliance" means "chaining alliance" or "isolating alliance".
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Comically, this is almost exactly a common argument I see in favor of open borders: that is, that we already have "open borders" for capital and it causes exactly those problems so it's BS that we don't have open borders for labor, too.
Not claiming it's a good argument, but I've definitely seen it pretty often.
If you want to do a le epic handshake, I'm happy to close the borders for capital.
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As perhaps a compliment to this, but phrased in a way that may be less antagonistic, notable proponent of open borders Brian Caplan was recently asked to steelman the "Bordertarian" position. He replied:
I think most people acknowledge that culture and politics is one of, if not the main really significant hurdle to open borders. Beyond that, it gets to be a bit difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. What would the voting blocs end up looking like? What kind of policies would end up being pursued? Damn if it's not hard to know. But it is potentially quite scary, especially as it already feels like core Western principles and freedoms are already hanging at knife's edge.
Probably agreed that it is highly unlikely that the new political alignment, whatever the details, would adopt the rest of the OP's platform.
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Are they, though? Doesn't Effective Altruism have a big 'policy' focus? And how well did assuming weird progressive academic-ish nerds wouldn't have any influence over the levers of power go for the past few centuries?
At any rate, it shouldn't be surprising that a post or ideology with a few dozen big ideas will have a few bad ones. What doesn't? That shouldn't sink the whole concept.
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Good grief, indeed.
You’ve been warned and banned before for low-effort sneering and antagonism. Please dial it down, and try to attack arguments rather than people.
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I should clarify: This is a collection of policies that I believe an abstracted, idealized LW/ACX/EA poster would commit to, and some musing on what I think ties them together in his mind. There are several policies on it I think are bad, many that are undertheorized, and many desirable policies that remain relatively unknown in these spaces. My personal platform has significant overlap but differs in basic attitudes and specific judgements.
Considering how long the original post was, you don't have to go in detail, but can you explain some key ways that your own platform would differ?
Rationalists, as intelligent and agentic cosmopolitans, naturally have a blindspot labelled "social capital deterioration" given their underexposure. Likewise their brand of "mistake-informed high modernism" still privileges more easily priceable values, leaving the more difficult to price vulnerable to apathetic destruction. Compare: man in the mountains would die for his family, his community, his faith, even his country. He possesses at least four things he considers of worth beyond price. I know many people who make more monetary income in a month than he will in his life, but given I don't think any of them possesses something they would die for, it seems to lose significant information to call them objectively "richer" in a well considered sense. Something I think is correct but wouldn't usually say, for how it would typically be interpreted, is that there is probably a (practically unidentifiable) steelman account of degrowth, insofar as there is some material threshold necessary for general human flourishing, but that threshold was reached some time in the 20th century - human contentedness past that threshold is near-exclusively rendered socially, by the thymic desire for interpersonal recognition. This all leads me to thinking there should be a greater place for communitarian institutions, social conservatism, and religiosity. But until someone actually figures out the causes of, answers to, and prices the externalities within Putnam's decline of civic life, making people generally richer should take center stage. I spoke to a few more things upthread.
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What do you happen to consider as desirable yet obscure policy proposals?
There's a lot of ways to answer that question depending on how high the obscurity threshold is, how I should treat relatively unknown and unlikely to be enacted proposals that seem creative and intriguing but I am personally too small-c conservative for, how uncertainty of outcomes plays into meta-political reforms, etc.
In congress there are plenty of reforms that can amount to minor adjustments in procedural rules - roll-over appropriations, default appointee approval, open election for house steering committee positions - but which range from merely major to a potential sea change in functionality, and they have changed before. Hard to judge but underrated either way. A big legislative change I think would be great but will never happen is for them to adopt SCOTUS' ban on any media or deliberative leaks save audio recordings of special hearings/oral args
For huge, can't-hate-it, won't-buy-it proposals: (1) Martin Bailey had a mechanism for baking something like Kaldor-Hicks transfers into the lawmaking process with an "insurance for proposed law" system, as well as "competing" bicameral chambers compensated proportionally to the long run economic benefits of their chamber's legislation. (2) Glen Weyl's Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, which you might have heard of. Not every day an economist figures out how to abolish property efficiently. (3) Replacing subnational government with federally granted charters to private, self-legislating firms collecting (but ultimately not capturing) all land rents in a metropolitan area. Lot to dig into on that, might write it up in full at some point.
One approach I think is very underappreciated is exploiting money illusion and loss aversion in policy structuring: Don't tax people and then pay them in retirement based on (a crude function of) their payments, require an (ideally pseudo-) "mandatory savings account" with the state. Don't give people negative income taxes that they feel bad about getting and worse about losing, give everyone a UBI and subject everyone to progressive payroll taxes (the same ones later filling those savings accounts? At least with expensing of savings to make it consumption based ofc) so it always feels like it's "there" even though these policies are identical in accounting terms.
Things I more or less like off the top of my head, more or less obscure, a few might just be personal preferences:
Perpetually extending daylight savings,
granting special academy-and-service visas to under-15's that score in the global 1% on state department administered tests
congressional apportionment by citizen count instead of population
75 year age ceiling for electoral candidacy
Ceasing legal recognition of dual citizenship
Stagger drinking ages by ABV
German style vocational selection
Euro style law & med training
Repealing the disparate impact language in the '91 CRA
Rollback DoT CAFE regs
Privatize ATCs
Independently maintained, dynamic pattern books for purposes of public beauty
Experimentation and choice in criminal sentencing.
6 Year single presidential terms
3 or 4 year house terms
Returning carbon tax revenues to everyone in a direct flat transfer (only real solution to how bad they effect low-income household consumption via gas inelasticity)
State assimilation of municipal LEO orgs and the establishment of state police academies modeled after service academies
Elect city councils at-large and through citizen's assemblies hearing from relevant experts (turnout is way to low and wards are functionally a gerrymandering mechanism)
I'm sure there's more. Honestly a transition to a tax/transfer system based in negative externalities, some negative internalities, non-Schumpeterian rents, passive funds, and (whatever remaining) progressive consumption through not-even-thought-about payroll, that ideally flows into provident accounts, with social insurance and automatic public banking for UBI...that would be my contented zone.
I'm not sure if this would work without causing havoc in real property, but I've thought for a long time that this approach should be utilized with intellectual property. Allow the creator a grace period of, say, five years under current rules, then you'll be under this scheme, though with an option to release to public domain at any time.
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How would it work when the supply of land zoned for residences is inelastic? What stops a large investment fund from buying everything in a prime location, doubling the declared price and leasing the properties back to their owners? Yes, theoretically people could coordinate and wait it out, but good luck doing that in practice.
In such a case we are talking about incumbent landholders who did not assess their property as high as it is theoretically worth because they did not wish to pay higher taxes. The purchasing firm will take a relative loss in cash flow by setting it at that higher assessment (and remember, higher land taxes are not passed on to tenants, so even if the old residents move back in their rents will just be their previously unrealized imputed rent) and are presumably willing to do so because they believe they can make more money than the previous incumbents even given higher taxes, which requires some kind of productive change in property use, which entails more efficient allocation, which is largely the point of COST. In any case, it's interesting many of the critiques of Radical Markets take the form of "what if rich people buy out xyz?" when it is not clear what it even means to be a rich person in such an economy, when they don't own anything in the traditional sense of the term.
They didn't want to pay higher taxes because they lived on it and didn't derive any profit from it beyond living close to their workplace.
For a more concrete example, let's say there's a large factory and a town that is mostly settled by people who work for this factory or provide services to the workers. All the land around the factory is zoned for agriculture. Every house is owned by its residents, is worth $100K and everyone pays $1K in property taxes.
Company X buys every piece of residential property in the town for 100K, sets the new valuation at 300K and offers to rent them back to the former owners for $13K a year, with every house paying them $10K a year, 10 years to break even
The owners have three options:
Option 3 sounds like a perfectly rational way to punish Company X for trying to squeeze, but this depends on coordination between the former homeowners. If one third choose option 1, Company X immediately breaks even and can sell the rest at any price. If one quarter chooses option 2, Company X will not be losing money on this venture and can slowly deal with the rest of the homeowners. And if rezoning is hard or impossible, it's not even an option.
And what's worse, none of the options actually improve the productivity of the properties.
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I think the first answer is "zoning reform". If it was as trivially easy to spam new housing as YIMBYs would like it to be, a would-be monopolist would be chasing an ever-moving target.
I think the second answer is that even in the current environment, there is a lot of land. It would take absolutely insane levels of invested capital to build a portfolio that has anything approaching market power. Very localized market power would hopefully be mitigated by (1), as you can just go down the street some number of miles and build more, but the option to move to the next city is a pretty decent escape from monopoly. We've already seen plenty of less-than-super-money-loaded (i.e., not tech) companies flee from the high costs in California locations (just due to NIMBY, not even self-assessed-tax-derived monopoly). It definitely requires them to take a one-time hit, but these are the forces that move the system toward equilibrium.
I think the third answer is that the homeowner should, in theory, assess their property at a value that would actually sufficiently compensate them for the move. That is, it should include their moving costs, the cost of an alternate home in an alternate location, and whatever inconveniences come with that alternative. This is, of course, in theory, and it would be quite difficult to assess in practice. If done appropriately, it would be paired with significant reduction in tax rates, as valuations would be significantly higher than current purchase prices. Of course, Weyl's ilk aren't actually motivated by assessing things properly, so they'll immediately defect and jack rates up to be punitive toward anyone with wealth/assets. This is the real reason why such a scheme is not feasible; there is no likely political commitment to using this tool in a way that would actually be beneficial to a market economy rather than highly detrimental. I'd be much much much more concerned about this than investment company monopoly.
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I think Grey tribe can be summarized as pragmatic, low/limited regulation like FDA, free markets, strong private property laws, optimism about technology, 100% meritocratic hiring and admissions, individual autonomy within a powerful state that only intercedes during crisis like 2008 and otherwise collects minimal taxes needed to enforce order and protect against domestic and foreign threats (solve coordination problems). The strong emphasis on law and order and property rights helps attenuate possible crime from lenient immigration policy.
....And impossibly, preciously naïve about the nature of the actual human beings they expect to live in their system.
Typical-minding. Disbelief in the foreigner.
Basic observation. Disbelief in the unproven.
Since I'm not sure I'm parsing your response correctly, I should perhaps be clear that I was agreeing with you and diagnosing their issues, not describing your stance.
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I'm surprised to see this one in here alongside all the others. On the one hand, I agree that on the first-order a non-compete will distort labor markets, but on the other hand an absence of non-compete distorts incentives for training, trade secrets, and customer sharing. A company doesn't want to hire someone, spend time and resources teach them all the best techniques for doing a job effectively, and then have that person immediately leave and take all that training somewhere else or strike out on their own. Similarly, a company doesn't want to give someone a bunch of infrastructure and marketing and accumulate a bunch of clients and then spin off into a private business, carrying those clients with them.
Now, I don't think we have an obligation to do things just because they make companies happy, not at all. But the incentive structure means that if companies can't curtail these behaviors via non-competes they will curtail them in other ways. Companies will guard their secrets more carefully, will shuffle customers around so they can't get too attached to any one employee, and do other inefficient things that create economic friction.
Simple line to draw: non competes can't be enforced unless the employees total average compensation over two of the preceding 3 years (or the entirety of the employment period if less) is greater than 10x the federal poverty line for a household of two. That puts it for 2024 at 200k. Beyond that simply enforcing existing common law restrictions on geographic and temporal scope will be sufficient.
I don't really have a problem with non competes for executives, managers, major salesmen, top engineers. Make them spend six months or a year on vacation, no big deal.
But I once took what amounted to a retail job and they wanted me to sign an unlimited non compete. For a job where I made $50k! That's awful. No working man should face that kind of restriction on earning a livelihood.
That's a reasonable take. My gut response was "well if the terms are bad just don't sign it", but for working class people that's not really an option, especially if this becomes the norm and people get used to signing it. And this allows companies to have their noncompetes if it's important, but they have to pay for it so won't do it just because they can.
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There’s surely another easier way to prevent the “train an employee at great cost, then they get poached by a competitor for slightly higher pay”, namely very high signing bonuses that only fully vest after several years. So sure, you can jump after your year of training, but then you need to pay back the $100,000 (or whatever amount acts as enough of an incentive) we gave you when you joined.
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I could be wrong, this is just guessing, but I strongly suspect the social benefits of banning noncompetes are much higher than the social benefits of allowing them. Thinking first in the case of high human capital occupations, no noncompetes allows employees to freely move on to better-paying (and thus more productive) occupations, take knowledge with them, and start their own companies. These are the exact things that are critical to the existence of competitive markets - being able to choose a job that pays better and start new companies in niches that would be profitable is exactly what pushes prices down to efficient levels. And 'a new startup' is such a risky thing to do that having a noncompete hanging over your head could disrupt a lot of innovation. California, notably, has banned noncompetes for a long time, and also contains Silicon Valley. Some argue that was important to SV's growth - idk.
"On the other hand - an absence of non-compete distorts incentives for training, trade secrets, and customer sharing". In the specific case of programmers, I don't see noncompetes significantly reducing the extent to which people are trained. In the course of doing your job, you need to learn about what you're doing and what the rest of the company is doing, and you learn by doing. "Trade secrets" - having a high quality team and existing features and customers is more than enough moat to be profitable for a while, and anything more than that (compare to, like, stronger software IP) would, intuitively, reduce surplus by reducing competition. And empirically, tech seem to innovate a ton despite the existing California noncompete bans. "Customer sharing" - for most jobs, this isn't a big issue. It is for some - and for those, you could imagine a noncompete ban that carved those out - but even then, isn't 'an employee taking customers with them' the exact kind of thing that enables those customers to switch to a better product?
At a high level, the issue is that, despite the theory that anything that two parties agree to will be beneficial to both of them and efficient, rational agents and all - in practice employers have tremendous power in negotiations with employees for a whole host of reasons, and can use this power to insert clauses like noncompetes that employees just accept because 'everyone does that'. This is (one of) the reasons why there's a lot of regulation around the employer-employee relationship.
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Then they should pay the workers a wage that keeps them happily working there. Or at the very least non-competes should pay out severance/salaries for the duration they're kept out of the market.
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The market already has solutions to this problem, they're just normally used for highly skilled staff like programmers. One very common structure is to issue stock options that only vesting after a certain period (like 4 years), which strongly incentives workers to stay with the current firm until vesting. Another common structure in the academic market is that university's will purchase a house for a professor with a 0 interest rate loan that gets forgiven over the period of 10-20 years. But if the employee leaves early, then the loan reverts to a standard (or even much higher than standard) interest rate.
The problem with this is that the employee doesn't just get screwed if he leaves for better pay, he also gets screwed if he leaves for reasons such as being mistreated by his employer. Remember owing your life to the company store?
I don't currently have it at hand, but I read something at some point saying that mining towns, etc. were actually not that bad. They couldn't be too exploitative or you have unhappy workers and a bad reputation, and you can't hire people.
That assumes that the worker has options for jobs other than to go to work for the company. Company towns didn't have a lot of competition for jobs
But they can move. And they'd have to attract workers from somewhere to start the company town.
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I mean I think there’s room for reform here. There are jobs where you do have substantial access to proprietary information, client data, and strategic planning. These jobs I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have non-compete clauses for. And along the same time if your job is to be the public facing representative of your company, I think it reasonable to expect that they keep their public profiles business friendly. But in both cases I think it should be on the business to show that the person’s role is one that requires restrictions. If they can’t show that the job has significant reach into proprietary or strategic information that would cause harm if it became widely known, then they shouldn’t get to restrict the employee. If the person isn’t the public face of the company, the company shouldn’t be able to restrict free expression of legal ideas online. To me, the issue is a balancing act between the rights of the employees to live as they please and to seek opportunities in the market against the company’s need to protect its data and strategic interests.
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Doesn't this happen with tech visas when the employee returns to his or her native country where it the NDA cannot even be enforced?
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That argument is fully general. It's also true that if companies can't commit fraud they will do inefficient things that create economic friction. However, it's still worthwhile to make fraud illegal.
Well the possibility arises in all scenarios, but the outcome differs as a matter of weighing the two sides. Which causes more economic harm, the inefficiencies caused by fraud or the inefficiencies caused by behaviors in the absence of fraud? My understanding is that fraud is way worse than the work-arounds, so it should be banned.
Which causes more economic harm, the inefficiencies caused by non-competes, or the inefficiencies caused by the work-arounds? In genuinely don't know, I'm by no means an expert, so maybe it is the case that non-competes are worse than the work-arounds. But I don't think the magnitude of the inefficiencies caused by non-competes are anywhere near the inefficiences caused by fraud, so I don't think it tips the balance away from the default of legality.
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Like @FarNearEverywhere, I couldn't care less about shrimp, or even factory farming in general.
But the bulk of this? You absolute criminal, giving me hope that we might see intelligent governance in our lifetimes. If there was a party out there that advocated for even 50% of the items you've mentioned, I'd vote for them and then have 200 kids with the free IVF so they could go vote too.
More expensive meat is a very low price to pay for civilizational competence at scale, and I don't even like seafood.
Even adopting like 20% of the suggestions here would elevate them an order of magnitude or two above any political party that holds a seat in any country I know of.
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Today I learned about shrimp eyestalk ablation and guess what? I don't care. I don't think shrimp feel pain in any meaningful sense, because I don't think shrimps have minds, consciousness, or the ability to recognise above the transient physical sensation. This is like worrying about the pain a plant feels when you cut its stalk. I don't even eat shrimp, so this is not "but I love shrimp, I don't want to give up eating them!" It's "this is not a creature that has any level of brain that I care about".
So "blasting" imagery of what factory farming entails ties in, oddly enough, with the discussion we've been having about capital punishment and why aren't executions public. Enough people are "hell yeah, I want the bastards to suffer, lemme watch them writhe in agony as they die" that I wonder if your proposal would work as you think it would. EDIT: Or if this is not your own opinion, as those proposing such things hope they would work.
EDIT EDIT: As for "oh the cute cuddly octopuses which are just as intelligent as we are, don't farm them!", I think a few videos of the intelligent cute octupuses hunting and eating their own fellows would counter all that. If octopuses think their own species make delicious meals, why object to a totally different species eating them?
Perhaps seeing factory farming and public executions would move the public to call for reform and abolition. Or perhaps we'd get a new Roman public who are hardened by seeing real! time! real! life! suffering and there is nothing "inevitable" about reform.
To quote St. Augustine from years back talking about his friend Alypius:
"Other tribs of humans naturally hunt and kill each other in war, why object to my tribe doing it to them for fun"?
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Those gruesome scenes with the pregnant women at the end of Bone Tomahawk make a lot more sense now.
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What…do you think pain is, exactly?
I’m asking this as someone who also does not really care about shrimp. It seems obvious to me that transient, physical sensations can be Bad in an abstract sense. I would understand if a human would like to avoid them. Same for a dog or a bird or a weird little sea bug. We’re all capable of identifying Bad Things and preferring to avoid them.
Note that I say “capable,” because we higher beings are also capable of accepting Bad Things to get more Good Things. Even a dog can learn to restrain itself for long enough to get the treat. The shrimp cannot choose. This is…fine. Or, at the least, it’s the natural order of things, and we don’t have any obligation to fix it. But it’s perfectly reasonable to prefer less of the Bad Thing, and to ask ourselves how much of it we want to create.
Which brings me to the octopus.
Frankly, I’m disappointed in your proposed solution. Either you’re assuming empathy for these things is driven by cuteness, and may thus be dispelled by the unvarnished truth; if so, you are failing to take your opponents seriously. Or you know that their support comes from other reasons, in which case you’re engaging in the age-old atheist pursuit. Aha, if those darn Papists see one news segment about a deviant priest, they will surely cast away all belief in the Church!
We are responsible for our own choices. Augustine was quite clear on this, too.
You're expecting me to worry about a shrimp feeling pain as though it feels it the way a human does: that it has the concept of pain, remembers past pain, can anticipate future pain, and feels it on more levels than the mere physical.
Once the immediate physical sensation passes, and I have no idea how acutely a shrimp may feel pain which is another question entirely, I don't think the shrimp suffers at all. It's humans who are going around fretting over shrimp, while shrimp in the wild probably have a lot more limbs torn off or damaged than an eyestalk.
Like I said, a plant having its stalk cut also suffers physical damage, but I don't think anyone (as yet) would claim that you are inflicting 'pain' on your rose bushes when you prune them.
This is less obvious from first-principles than you think, and like all such interesting questions, there is a LessWrong sequence post on it.
Damn, looks like Chesterton was right all along:
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Momentary sensation. The problem is that people say "pain" when they mean "suffering", and whether shrimp suffer is the question at hand, no?
Maybe I'm missing some brilliant research out there, but my impression is we scientifically understand what "pain" actually is about as well as we understand what "consciousness" actually is. If you run a client app and it tries and fails to contact a server, is that "pain"? If you give an LLM some text that makes very little sense so it outputs gibberish, is it feeling "pain"? Seems like you could potentially draw out a spectrum of frustrated complex systems that includes silly examples like those all the way up to mosquitos, shrimp, octopuses, cattle, pigs, and humans.
It'd be nice if we could figure out a reasonable compromise for how "complex" a brain needs to be before its pain matters. It really seems like shrimp or insects should fall below that line. But it's like abortion limits - you should pick SOME value in the middle somewhere (it's ridiculous to go all the way to the extremes), but that doesn't mean it's the only correct moral choice.
But I don't care about abolishing pain. Pain is part of the normal range of feelings that animals, including humans, all experience. It is often necessary and arguably, a full life lived, includes pain.
Feeling pain does not equal suffering, which is something that you seem to be unable to understand. Plenty of pain doesn't rank as suffering in my book, and suffering can exist without physical pain.
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Most people would draw a contrast between executing a violent criminal, a fight to the death between able bodied men, and brutally slaughtering a pig in disgusting industrial conditions.
"Brutally" slaughtering a pig in "disgusting" "industrial" conditions? Those are very subjective words. The pig doesn't care that it's not being given a dignified sendoff by its loving family at the end of a fulfilled life in a beautiful grassy glade with dandelions wafting in the breeze. Humans fear death; animals don't even understand the concept. As long as we kill them quickly, I really don't give a shit how it's done.
Which isn't to say I don't have concerns about factory farming. The rest of the pig's life may be filled with suffering, and (IMO) we're rich enough, as a society, to do better. My morality-o-meter is ok with sacrificing, say, 0.01% of value to humans to improve the life of pigs by 500%.
The pig in fact does care about this, you don't need to be a human or even understand the concept of death to feel stressed in an industrial slaughterhouse.
Citation needed...? It's a little hard to ask the pig. And even if true, should I care overmuch that the pig "feels stressed" for the last hour of its life? Humans go through worse (to say nothing of how animals die in nature!). If you want me to care about animal welfare, you should focus on the part that really matters - the life the pig lived - rather than the lurid, but ultimately unimportant, details of its death.
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We have the Saw movies and other lovely examples of splatterpunk and torture porn. I don't think there's as much of a contrast as we'd all hope would prevail. The gory death of a pig and the gory death of a criminal that society has declared to be less than human, what's the major difference?
The difference is that Saw is fiction and the pig is innocent of any crime.
Yes, but, extremely guilty of being full of pork.
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People will certainly distinguish between the three in some ways. I agree with @FarNearEverywhere that it's far from certain whether "blasting" imagery of any of them would result in more or less support.
True, but there is already potentially broad support for limiting factory farming.
I do not believe there is broad support for the effects of significantly limiting factory farming: less meat available and far higher prices.
Most Americans aren't political, don't care about broader issues, and just want to hang out with their friends and "watch the game". They care about social signaling, so they'll say they're against factory farming when that seems like what they're supposed to say. I would not count on them to maintain that stance once the effects of significantly limiting factory farming become apparent.
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Seems mostly reasonable, until:
Bunch of quokkas.
This comment was an antagonistic and low effort reply.
You have been warned and banned for this type of thing before:
3 day ban.
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The reason why Open Borders is controversial in the existing system is that migrants (or their children) are given an equal share in governance - a scarce resource currently owned by the existing population. It's not clear why the existing population should give equal shares in governance to the children of new arrivals. I expect free movement of people across borders would be more popular if this were not the case.
Unstable.
Much like congress cannot bind a future congress, a country cannot credibly precommit itself to never grant political rights to a population of immigrants; once they are in the country they are a hundred dollar bill laying on the ground waiting to be picked up. It may take a generation or two, but eventually somebody is going to realize that they can gain political power by expanding the franchise in exchange for the implicit promise that the new citizens will vote for their faction, and act accordingly.
Case study: African-Americans. Explicitly imported as slaves without rights, remained so right up until Lincoln and his allies saw an opportunity to own the South by emancipating them, then cemented victory by making them citizens. Now America has to deal with a racial underclass whose primary concern at the voting booth is who will offer them the most gibs. As the saying goes, the colonists should have picked their own damn cotton. And if current year Americans were wise, they would clean their own toilets.
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Because democracy isn't just an arbitrary principle, it's a political technology for nonviolent resolution of unrest. People who live in your country but don't vote can still riot, can still strike, and can still join insurgent groups. There are ways to suppress the majority, but they are much more difficult and costly to the country than simply having them continue to live far away outside your borders where they can't readily do those things.
In democracies those tactics are mainly relegated to groups with minority political views that can't win at the ballot box, and sometimes they get their way by caring more than the majority or having elite sympathizers, but most of the time it is advantageous to just participate in the democratic system instead. This has made democracies remarkably stable compared to other political systems. Your proposal, on the other hand, seems like it would fall to a Ghandi-style resistance campaign or violent revolution the first time there was a serious dispute between the natives and the disenfranchised descendants of immigrants.
Which is why the Gulf States are a hotbed of insurrection?
The Gulf States keep their non-citizen migrant worker populations under control with strong repression, I don't see how this could be accomplished in a techno-progressive-libertarian-gayspacecommunism system like OP suggests.
It’s not just violent repression happening in those gulf states.
Saudi Arabia’s legitimacy rested on two key things:
I was thinking more about the large migrant worker populations that are only a few steps removed from slavery, due to the discussion of open borders above.
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So then admit that allowing such unrest is a choice, and not a choice we need to make.
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Yes, in comparison to established democracies they seem less stable and unlikely to survive as long.
Like most authoritarian governments, they pay the cost to the functioning of the country I mentioned, because they are less responsive to feedback and have to keep things under control in other ways. What democratic countries would actually prefer to live under a government like Saudi Arabia in exchange for some supposed economic benefit from open borders?
Remember we are talking not just about formal democracy but a "share in governance", in particular in the context of open borders. Non-democracies can still do things to keep the support of the majority of residents, both by controlling who enters (and how long they stay) and by being responsive to the desires of residents. But he was talking about a country that both let in anyone and then disregarded their opinions in favor of democratic rule by the minority of natives.
They do. But I'm not inclined to blame that on immigration policy first. Resource-driven monarchies are probably less stable than an old democracy like the UK. But that doesn't mean their level of ethnic tension for their population is well below "simmering on its way to insurrection"
By "feedback" I assume you mean they're ignoring some economic benefit here, because I doubt the public is calling for more foreign citizenship?
Yeah, I suppose it would get tense across generations if people are allowed to stay (though in some edge cases I think migrants would be happy to avoid things like conscription). But, if they aren't citizens, the welcoming nation has options if it wants them. Which is why OP is right that it'd probably be vastly more popular. That is the first demographic you have to please after all.
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The Pirate Parties, which had a brief flowering in various parts of Europe, effectively evolved more or less into attempts to establish this sort of a political party, though with the focus heavily (naturally) on IP reform and the adjacent topics. However, the Finnish Pirate Party, at least, which didn't encounter much success beyond a few places in city councils and is now a nonentity, picked up many of these topics, like UBI, electoral reform, subsidy abolition etc.
AFAIK the only pirate parties that still continue to be any sort of a political force are the ones in Iceland and Czech Republic, and I don't really know what they're doing. The one in Czech Republic seems to have evolved into being some sort of a vague progressive force for the lack of other similar alternatives on that arena. That probably reflects the chief problem; the "grey tribe" (such as it exists - I've always argued that it's actually just a subset of the "blue tribe", which is about as much as Scott said in the post that popularized the concepts) is an insignificant political force, and any successful attempt to expand the reach would mean implicitly or explicitly catering to more mainstream blues.
(Of course, the Pirate parties were also hampered by the fact that their initial appeal was basically just "legalize warez" (as the name says!) just at the time when streaming and Steam were making warez less popular...)
Which is why the strategy the greys seem to be using is less "create a political party and get votes" and more "push their ideas within existing political institutions". Things like EA's policy work in global health and development, animal welfare, and AI risk. Or things like zvi's balsa research, which is explicitly targeting some of OP's bullet points.
It's analogous to the YIMBY strategy, and YIMBYism is much bigger than most of the other ideas in the OP.
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Well yeah, greys aren’t a majority. But a lot of that stuff looks like they could get it in a coalition if they were willing to drop ridiculosities like shrimp welfare.
Forget the extreme positions; this is America. We barely have a mechanism for coalition-building at all!
The Reform Party garnered 8% of the vote in ‘96. Thirty years later, how many of its planks have been adopted by either party?
I don’t have the timeline for adoption, either. My suspicion is that immigration solidified in the mid 2000s rather than as a response to Nader or Perot, for example.
Point is—our most prestigious and well-funded third party couldn’t get seats in Congress. It certainly couldn’t get a President or a an amendment. The policies which got any traction weren’t implemented by coalition; they were picked up by one of the big boys as a weapon in the culture war.
Could a modern third party expect anything better?
Yeah, there's a reason "electoral reform" followed closely by "legislative reform" are at the top of that list and others like it. As far as I can see, the available levers to actually effect political change of this kind (i.e. movement on an issue other than what appears in the major party platform) are:
Apparently, voting for a third party in a presidential election doesn't make the list. Sure, make your protest votes if you want, but as you say, the major parties will just ignore them unless they got a lot of the vote.
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This is true to some degree on the electoral level but less so on the legislative. Coalitions in the contemporary party system are relatively visible (more so than they were a 15 years ago) and primarily function in congress by getting courtesy approval rights over language in bills of particular interest before party leadership takes them to the floor, weighed against their desire to fight alternative language and likelihood of success if they do. Because of the nature of the Speakership under current rules this most strongly effects House majorities, but organized minorities in either party's delegations actually have relatively actionable autonomy compared to the centralized parties of other democracies— just this session a junior coalition faction successfully rerolled leadership selection.
Sure, there was the manchin/sinema bloc. I also heard recently that one Alabama senator managed some grandstanding by blocking all military promotions for a period. It’s not impossible to get an issue to the floor. But it is damn tedious, and the odds of actual implementation are pitiful.
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I don't mean that they're a majority, I mean so insignificant that purely by numbers they can't make up a political force that would offer something to the coalition table. (Of course they might have money beyond their numbers, and that's something too.)
In the US they could get a bunch of regulatory reforms through the republicans if they’d drop the green stuff and open borders. A willingness to actually look for coalition partners and work with them can get you far, especially when your demands are oddball enough not to have a lobby against.
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What about the biggest rent-seeking behavior of all, the accumulation of capital? There's "Destination-based Cash Flow Taxation" on the list, but will it really prevent literal rent-seeking?
Capital is useful so accumulation of capital isn't rent seeking in the sense economists use the term. Huge part of rise of the standard of living is due to availability of capital increasing labor productivity.
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The pirate parties were split between two online communities, the far right and the tumblr crowd. The piratebay was financed by Carl Lundström, who was the main financier of the national democrats, the Swedish equivalent to the British national party. Much of the support for the pirate party came from gamer gate and 4chan types. The founding group had a mix of anti-establishment libertarians and nationalists combined with far left types. The pirate parties were doomed since there was fundamental disagreement on every issue except not wanting to pay for movies.
I grew up in the pirate movement and my after action review is that the issues lost momentum with streaming services. The media became a lot more pro establishment. Julian Assange went from a hero in the media to a villain. 20 years ago the patriot act was seen as immoral by a lot of journalists. Today people who aren't pro military industrial complex are seen as Putin shills.
The pirate party ended up as a dumping ground for progressives that couldn't make it in the green party.
Did you mean to post this reply to the above comment? I think you meant it for Stefferi's post instead.
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The financial future of streaming services may bring some negative surprises though, I guess.
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Everything in the Rent-Aversion section prevents "literal rent-seeking" - if you mean abolishing improvement-based contract rents through some kind of decommodification of housing, no, but those aren't rents in the technical sense of the term. DBCFT is strange and radical despite its origins, but if you want private capital accumulation to take an increasingly marginal position in the economy while being practical and pro-growth about it, you want an SWF system. I didn't include that because I don't think I've ever heard rats discuss them. Regardless, it's not clear we could optimally hold a significant majority of all capital in passive funds (though we clearly can with a majority of publicly traded capital - we already do).
What is an SWF system?
Sovereign Wealth Funds. Picture Vanguard or Blackrock as independent agencies subsidiary to the treasury department. Distinct from traditional, dubiously reliable state trusts that notoriously ruined places like Nauru by being, essentially, market tracking index funds innately resistant to public choice pressures. They're a relatively novel public finance utility very popular among policy wonks with a lot of international experimentation and exploration. Ireland is establishing one now. Singapore and Norway each have SWF systems holding massive proportions of domestic capital and large stocks of foreign capital. There is however an ongoing question, coterminous with the debate over the effect of passive investing generally, as to how much of the economy can be in such funds before you (conceivably) take a productivity hit.
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I agree with most of these, and I think most rationalists would as well. However, some of the super libertarian ones go way too far. The shining example would be open borders, which practically anyone would tell you is a disaster waiting to happen. At the very least you simply can't have open borders with a welfare state, but even if a society instituted welfare chauvinism there would still be the looming specter of nationalist backlash. Nobody would be willing to die for the North American Economic Zone, and natives really, really don't like feeling like they're being replaced, intentionally or otherwise.
The UAE has something close enough for government work.
The Gulf states do not have open borders. You can't work there without a visa, and they aggressively deport visa overstayers and foreign criminals.
Plus they are not democracies, don't give citizenship to foreigners (or make it extremely difficult to get) and don't give welfare to non-citizen residents.
The Western countries that we're talking about are democracies that rarely deport illegal immigrants or foreign criminals, give welfare freely to both legal and illegal immigrants and give out passports like candy.
If I wanted to agree with him - it's not that a welfare state and having open borders to labor and capital are incompatible, it's that having those two and a political attitude among a majority of your elite and/or voters that 'if there are poor people physically here, we need to give them welfare and doing otherwise is unjust and racist'. You could absolutely have a welfare state for citizens, allow noncitizens to work here without receiving welfare, and then have an enforced and selective path to citizenship if people wanted that.
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I know from experience that it sucks making a long comment with many points only for people to pick at one tiny facet... But I'll do it anyway.
How does this make sense? I know this is Caplan's whole thing but still, what labour-intensive industries does the US have? If it was for high-tech stuff, OK, sure... There was that incident where a migrant got rejected and took his critical 5G patent to China instead. But this seems to be talking about low-tech labour as an input to the economy. I just don't understand how adding more labour is hugely beneficial. US participation rate has been shrinking over time, there's plenty of labour already there that could be tapped. High immigration rates of low-skill migrants haven't clearly done much good for Australia, Germany, Sweden or Canada.
IMO mass immigration threatens to slow mechanization of labour-intensive work, which is how real growth is obtained. Why invest in robots if you can hire cheaper workers? Even if nominal GDP grows, per capita GDP is what needs to be rising. How does mass immigration increase national prosperity in that way?
To compare apples to apples, you should think about the per capita GDP of the country excluding the new worker (roughly the average income of everyone else in the country). If it is profitable to hire a foreign worker, then that worker increases GDP by more then their wage, so the average income of everyone else actually still increases. Hiring new people doesn't generally cost a lot of up-front capital, so whatever you would have invested in automating that job can then be invested in the next-most-profitable enterprise, making for a total economic increase that generally increases the newbie-excluded per-capita GDP by more than if you hadn't hired them, so long as the next-best-investment is close to as profitable as the automation investment the new worker replaces. (With the caveat here that investment in real estate is often profitable, but land speculation does not grow the economy the way investing in production does.)
Germany and Sweden are among the richest states in Europe, and Australia and Canada have similar per capita GDPs (roughly 60,000 and 50,000 USD respectively, according to a quick google search). That's still behind America (~70,000 GDP per capita) by a fair amount, but by global standards they're doing very well for themselves. (It should also be noted that the 'next-most-profitable-investment' is often to invest in American businesses rather than in your own country. This increases global economic growth, but also increases the lead of America over other western countries)
Agriculture, mostly. Service industries and some blue-collar trades as well, I suppose, (construction particularly is what comes to mind), but the largest employers of migrant workers in the US are agricultural businesses that grow crops that aren't easily machine-harvested.
Low-skill workers are tax recipients not contributors, the income of everyone else will fall since they'll have to pay for the migrants. Furthermore, low-skill migrants are often unemployed. Better to employ domestic workers who already know language and culture, who are less likely to send their money overseas.
They already had high GDPs before mass immigration. Germany had advanced, high-skill manufacturing, as did Sweden (they produce their own jet fighters). Australia and Canada have agriculture and natural resource extraction. Because they're doing well, they're attractive for migrants but it's not clear that low-skill migration has made these countries more prosperous than they'd otherwise be.
Stockholm is certainly much less safe than it used to be: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11731157/Teenager-machineguns-family-home-Stockholm-suburb-gun-crime-spirals-drug-gangs.html
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